Indeed, this is just so. And you can't copyright "functionality"; that's akin to copyrighting a concept, which is not what copyright is about. Copyright is about protecting implementations of concepts, and those are still protected. But a programming language requires a rigid codification of the concept itself.

Oracle's response made me chuckle a little...

That's really immaterial to the reasoning for why an APIs aren't protected under the Copyright Act in the first place. It would be relevant if "interoperability" were a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not, since the item in question wasn't protected in the first place.

Just because my implementation of fopen() breaks programs that depended on your implementation of fopen() that doesn't suddenly mean that your declaration of a function called fopen() is protected and my identical declaration is infringing. This would imply that copyright infringement claims based on APIs would suddenly be dependent on some kind of compatibility test.

And on that note, it was that last line that made me chuckle. Brings to mind something about ships and sailing, or barn doors and horses.

The mean human IQ at a particular time and place (IQs for given test results have been adjusted downward several times because people are in general becoming more educated [which some people assume means smarter for some reason but hey]).

Point being -- relative to a universal scale incorporating all possible intelligence values (not just those attainable by living humans) 100 IQ is probably pretty stupid... but so is 180 IQ. :)

Sorry most of us are not on board with just letting people fucking die on the steps of a hospital because they failed an insurance/credit check, and never will be.

That's what you meant, right? Obamacare is a long sight from actual socialized medicine, but our system of treating people in emergency rooms results in de facto socialized medicine, just excessively expensive.

Normally this is where I say "may you be subject to the world you wish for", and wonder aloud if your last words before dying of a heart attack after being laid off and not being able to afford COBRA would be "at least I got to drink soda in large containers". But you know what? Even despite this sociopathic bent contrary to the nature of human beings as social animals, I would still want the ambulance to come for you, and would gladly pay my portion of the bill.

Yeah, he was only buzzed.

I hope to hell they do -- by doing all the useful work in LEO that will enable it, like orbital refueling depots or even shipyards. Getting to LEO is what needs to be handed off.

If we can make access to LEO routine and cheap (relatively speaking), and allow NASA to develop LEO capabilities instead of wasting all their money on pork launchers so they can start their missions from components launched to LEO on commodity rockets, then we can make getting to the Moon trivial, and Mars easy enough that it's conceivable to do without stopping all other NASA work.

This is my dream, and it could happen. Crazy.

Perhaps if they're painted like a police box, nobody will even notice they're present?

Why wouldn't I? Just to pile on the "My anger about manned exploration causes me to not understand what's going on today" theme? If nonsense and angry tangents is a "good moment', then what's "bad"?

While that's sort of a flamebait topic, there is at least some truth to the concept. I saw an interview with some subsistence farmers once for whom Bono had been campaigning to "save their indigenous lifestyle" or something like that. And their take on it was, what you call a lifestyle, we call poverty.

It should be up to each culture to decide what elements of modern life they want to incorporate and which elements of their traditional life they want to preserve. Now, as for what the Aboriginees think of the changes in their society, I have no idea; I don't know any.

That's what you were trying to say? You don't need to slow down you just need to say things in a way that makes sense. Yes, the sensors were functioning when it entered orbit and nearly continuously since.

No, it only means that the craft has provided data of unprecedented detail, and that it's about the lunar structure. These aren't Star Trek sensors that just "scan" the moon and somehow directly spit out all the salient details about its composition. Actually going from the raw gravity sensor data to the 3D density map you desire takes a lot of work.

The implication being that they're recording the same data over and over and should have been done after the first 'pass'. Which is hilarious; thank you for clearly explaining. These are gravity probes, not cameras looking at large regions of the surface. Every unique position over the moon is a unique data point.

I think it's perfect that you'd trot out this analogy in an instance where an army of geology majors spending their whole lives with buckets and shovels couldn't get us the data this probe has. It really does put everything you said in perspective.

So you're upset at the lack of progress in manned exploration. Understandable. What's less understandable is how this has turned your thinking on anything related to the subject of space exploration to mush.

No, the article only makes it sound like the data collection is done. And it is. Data of unprecedented detail, and about the structure of the moon. That doesn't mean you just run the data through a plotter and get a picture of what the data means about the structure of the moon. That will take time.

Sorry you're disappointed that this article is only about the successful end of the main mission, and not about the conclusions from that mission's data, but that's what it is.