I switched because I got sick of waiting on glibc. Once Slack 7 came out, Debian's package management had me hooked. Something about Slack 7 just never felt right to me - I was too used to 3.x.
(Of course, back then I was downloading and compiling the X and GNOME source about once a month, but at least I didn't have to worry about the main system).
Cane sugar isn't the same thing as what you get in the bag. It has to be refined first. Raw sugar cane wouldn't have any advantage over other biomass for making pure carbon.
Concerning energy production, sugar cane is one of the few places where ethanol fuel makes sense. In Brazil they estimate they get 1.3 times the energy from ethanol than they put into producing it. That's a much better figure than corn ethanol, which is an energy loss.
As far as growing sugarcane not being taxing - I've seen sugarcane farmers at work in Okinawa. It made me glad to have a desk job:) (It's also the only time I saw any Japanese people wearing the conical reed hats that Americans stereotype asians with.)
Coal probably wouldn't work. It contains impurities that would need to be removed. That's why steel was traditionally smelted with charcoal.
Also, bear in mind that this is a university project, not a factory. They can just send an undergrad to the market to pick up sugar. I'm not sure what the price there is (I never bought sugar when I lived there, since I ate at the chow hall and can't drink coffee), but they grow sugar cane in Okinawa and probably don't have the price fixing that sugar has in America.
As a guess, I'd say it was because grass clippings and other vegetable matter aren't very consistant and would require refining to attain the purity of carbon needed.
Sugar (sucrose, anyway) is a refined product. I know, I pick up truckloads of it in Louisiana from the Domino refinery every now and again:) A fellow truck driver got a bag of raw sugar off a dump truck that was being delivered there, but he couldn't use it because it had sand in it.
We're using corn, soybeans, etc. as fuel. They're the energy source, so a lot of the market goes into fuel instead of food. Run out of fuel, you need more corn.
These guys are using sugar to make a component on the battery. The energy comes from somewhere else. No matter how many times you recharge the battery, you won't use any more sugar.
Even if we went into full scale production of these and replaced Li-Ion batteries altogether, it wouldn't make an appreciable difference on the sugar market.
As an aside, you also have to consider that by removing the requirement of lithium, you're moving from a scarce resource to a common one. We could make those batteries in the U.S. (or whatever country you happen to be in) and not require buying lithium from China. Lithium is used for several drugs, and by removing the demand for lithium, those drugs may drop in price to the point they'll be more accessible to people in poorer countries.
His message will be why people should hate Democrats, and why they should vote Republican. That message works for both the people who hate Democrats already (to keep them excited about voting) and the independants who haven't decided. As far as the content of the message, the independants are key, since he really just needs the political equivalent of pep rallies to keep the Republicans voting for him.
I suppose I could have phrased that differently. Historically, the president tends to be a focal point for policy matters in a party. It's not written in stone, and of course there's plenty of examples of unpopular presidents who lost the confidence of their party, but for the most part the president can steer party policy to a greater degree than any other individual in the party.
I've viewed it as one of Obama's failings that he hasn't taken advantage of this to push his agenda. A progressive party needs leadership, since there's so many different ways to define progress. Then again, just like he never said he wanted to end the PATRIOT ACT, he also said he felt legislation should come from the legislature, not the executive, so it's not really a surprise.
The legislative branch does repeal laws, but Obama is the head of the Democratic party which had control of both houses. They could have repealed the PATRIOT ACT; they chose not to.
And while the president is not the "prosecutor-in-chief", he does appoint and direct the Attorney General, which is basically the same thing. The Justice Department would act as the plaintiff (in the name of the U. S. government) in a war crimes case against Bush and his cronies. No sane president would do so, of course, because it would be political suicide. We can wish, though:)
No, I'm sure there's many like me who don't fly because of the TSA.
Showing up three hours early for my flight? Be treated like some bomb-carrying nutjob because I (gasp!) only bring a carry-on and have my shampoo and conditioner with me? No thanks. I've got a '65 Galaxie that rides like a dream and has a trunk you could fit Rhode Island in, I've got the money to keep the tank full, and I've got the time to take the scenic route. Screw the TSA.
I used some trig yesterday for the first time in years. I had a piece of wood I needed to cut at an angle, and I didn't have a protractor.
It was sad - I had to look up which of the basic trig functions was opposite/adjacent (tangent, of course). And it's been less than a decade since I took college trig.
(It was pointless, though. My dumb ass used 6" as the opposite side rather than 5 1/2" for a 1x6 plank, so the angle came out wrong. It was my derp for the week.)
Considering that (at the time I'm posting this) there's 640 comments, I'd wager to guess that nerds like this kind of question. I find it interesting to see what other Linux users have used in the past, and I would probably qualify as a nerd (although after you hit 20 or 25 the label doesn't fit well).
Your question sounds like an invitation for a massive flame fest. Perhaps that's why it wasn't selected.
There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.
As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.
I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.
I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.
I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.
I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.
I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.
Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.
Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.
So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.
He's not really talking to people who hate Democrats anymore. He did that during the primary.
Now he's talking to independent voters who don't vote straight party ticket. People who hate Democrats are going to vote for him no matter what he says.
And why pick on Mormons, who've never, as far as I can tell, been known to blow up people they disagree with?
Every* religion has its fanatics, but they don't all blow people up. They might kill you (Christian fanatics vs. abortion doctors), wage a war on you (catholic vs. protestant in Northern Ireland, Shia-Sunni conflicts), take away your rights (Christian fanatics with blue laws, countries with Islamic law), or force their ideas onto you and your children (Intelligent Design, Hamas' anti-Jewish children's shows). Mormon fanatics are the ones that still practice polygamy and force young girls into marriage.
Normal Mormons of course are just regular people with some strange beliefs, but really, most of the strangeness was already in Christianity anyway (God created a huge, vast universe with uncountable stars and planets, with relativistic and quantum effects, and he really gives a shit who you like to poke your dick into?). I find it easier to believe that some guy found some gold plates and transcribed them than to believe that the word of God has passed down thousands of years without anyone tampering with it for their own benefit.
*OK, I've never met a pastafarian fanatic, but it's possible. I am curious what a Buddhist fanatic would be like.
I agree that it's a terrible example, but for different reasons.
The post office loses money, true. But it's more like roads that people realize. The post is the one way that is (supposed to be) sure to communicate with someone.
You are notified of jury duty by mail. You're notified of property taxes via mail (at least in Oklahoma, I never owned property anywhere else). Pretty much any time the government needs to tell you something, it's via the mail. Mail has special legal status (certified and registered mail) that other forms of communication do not.
The byproduct is that it's useful for people to mail each other or businesses to mail customers or potential customers, which is good for the economy as a whole.
It's pretty much the same argument as the roads - they're good for the economy and the government needs them anyway.
ISPs, on the other hand, are probably not best deal with by the government. They'd pull another pre-split AT&T and we'd be stuck with crap service. I wouldn't mind seeing them operate the cables, though - government owned last mile and backbone, private reselling and packaging.
Depends if you're wanting to make a statement or stop the program.
If you just want to make a statement, then a paintball to the lens is good enough (bear in mind though that paintballs aren't exactly sniper ammo - they're pretty inaccurate). If you want to make the program too costly to operate, you destroy the camera.
No it's not. You can photograph military property in the United States.
You can't photograph certain objects or certain areas, but in general you wouldn't be allowed inside those areas or near those objects to begin with unless you had clearance to do so.
I've got a photograph of what was the Network Control Center at Kadena Air Base hanging on the wall (it's a group shot of my coworkers when I was stationed there, presented to me by our shop superintendant, a Senior Master Sergeant). I've got several more I took around the base in a scrapbook somewhere. Just outside the base there are small platforms that camera crews can climb to film jets taking off.
Windows isn't like Linux in that respect, since the Linux kernel is developed seperately from the rest of the system. A Windows release is worked on and tested as one object (not counting media center, premium, etc.).
There's advantages and disadvantages to both methodologies. The BSDs are similar to Windows in this reguard; OpenBSD 5.1 refers to the entire system, not just the kernel.
The Linux distributions use their own version numbers that are independent of the kernel, but since the utilities in the distributions are generally not distribution specific, not to mention the fact that a single distro version can use more than one kernel, the kernel version becomes more important than it would be otherwise. In Windows, you'd never run a Vista kernel with a 7 userland, so the point is moot.
Methinks the problem with Windows is the complete lack of coherency within versions. Think a bit:
DOS codebase: Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 3.11 for Workgroups, 95, 98, 98SE, ME NT codebase: OS/2 1.x*, NT 3.x, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (with server versions sprinkled in somewhat randomly)
If that's not a sure sign of corporate lack of attention span, I don't know what is.
MacOS X is kind of like X11 - it's been X11 for ages, but the R version keeps going up.
*OS/2 1.x is not Windows, but there was a lot of shared code before Microsoft pulled out and created NT 3.x.
True, but they're the most obvious. It might take quite a bit of study to identify signs of an ancient civilization based on land shaping and rock distribution. The pyramids are obviously artificial.
While an advanced macroscopic surface biosphere would indeed be easily detectable, these [sciencemag.org] types of organisms would not.
Those types of organisms wouldn't support a civilization, either. Mars has obviously never had a diverse biosphere that could support advanced forms of life (at least as we understand it), so there's little point to searching for Martian artifacts. I'm all for searching for the Martian equivalent of bacteria and archea.
I'm not sure we know enough about Venus to say one way or the other, but I'll readily admit my ignorance on the subject. I've always found Venus to be dull and haven't spent much time reading about it.
Seriously, you think an iPad is a "magic object" and a CPU chip isn't?
That's a "turtles all the way down" argument. Do you know how an abacus works? Down to the quark level?
A CPU chip does the math and logic. No one outside of electrical engineering really needs to understand how it works, but any tech needs to know what it does, how to install one, and how to evaluate which chip is appropriate for a particular use.
He's wanting something where he can point at a component and say, "that's the memory," or "that's the soundcard." If the kid wants to break out the oscilloscope when he's older, more power to him.
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I switched because I got sick of waiting on glibc. Once Slack 7 came out, Debian's package management had me hooked. Something about Slack 7 just never felt right to me - I was too used to 3.x.
(Of course, back then I was downloading and compiling the X and GNOME source about once a month, but at least I didn't have to worry about the main system).
Cane sugar isn't the same thing as what you get in the bag. It has to be refined first. Raw sugar cane wouldn't have any advantage over other biomass for making pure carbon.
Concerning energy production, sugar cane is one of the few places where ethanol fuel makes sense. In Brazil they estimate they get 1.3 times the energy from ethanol than they put into producing it. That's a much better figure than corn ethanol, which is an energy loss.
As far as growing sugarcane not being taxing - I've seen sugarcane farmers at work in Okinawa. It made me glad to have a desk job :) (It's also the only time I saw any Japanese people wearing the conical reed hats that Americans stereotype asians with.)
Coal probably wouldn't work. It contains impurities that would need to be removed. That's why steel was traditionally smelted with charcoal.
Also, bear in mind that this is a university project, not a factory. They can just send an undergrad to the market to pick up sugar. I'm not sure what the price there is (I never bought sugar when I lived there, since I ate at the chow hall and can't drink coffee), but they grow sugar cane in Okinawa and probably don't have the price fixing that sugar has in America.
As a guess, I'd say it was because grass clippings and other vegetable matter aren't very consistant and would require refining to attain the purity of carbon needed.
Sugar (sucrose, anyway) is a refined product. I know, I pick up truckloads of it in Louisiana from the Domino refinery every now and again :) A fellow truck driver got a bag of raw sugar off a dump truck that was being delivered there, but he couldn't use it because it had sand in it.
The price would go up, which defeats the point of using sugar in the first place.
No idea from the scientific point of view. The article wasn't aimed at a technical audience.
It's a sugar battery because journalists think it'll generate interest in their stories.
You're missing a huge factor of scale here.
We're using corn, soybeans, etc. as fuel. They're the energy source, so a lot of the market goes into fuel instead of food. Run out of fuel, you need more corn.
These guys are using sugar to make a component on the battery. The energy comes from somewhere else. No matter how many times you recharge the battery, you won't use any more sugar.
Even if we went into full scale production of these and replaced Li-Ion batteries altogether, it wouldn't make an appreciable difference on the sugar market.
As an aside, you also have to consider that by removing the requirement of lithium, you're moving from a scarce resource to a common one. We could make those batteries in the U.S. (or whatever country you happen to be in) and not require buying lithium from China. Lithium is used for several drugs, and by removing the demand for lithium, those drugs may drop in price to the point they'll be more accessible to people in poorer countries.
His message will be why people should hate Democrats, and why they should vote Republican. That message works for both the people who hate Democrats already (to keep them excited about voting) and the independants who haven't decided. As far as the content of the message, the independants are key, since he really just needs the political equivalent of pep rallies to keep the Republicans voting for him.
I suppose I could have phrased that differently. Historically, the president tends to be a focal point for policy matters in a party. It's not written in stone, and of course there's plenty of examples of unpopular presidents who lost the confidence of their party, but for the most part the president can steer party policy to a greater degree than any other individual in the party.
I've viewed it as one of Obama's failings that he hasn't taken advantage of this to push his agenda. A progressive party needs leadership, since there's so many different ways to define progress. Then again, just like he never said he wanted to end the PATRIOT ACT, he also said he felt legislation should come from the legislature, not the executive, so it's not really a surprise.
The legislative branch does repeal laws, but Obama is the head of the Democratic party which had control of both houses. They could have repealed the PATRIOT ACT; they chose not to.
And while the president is not the "prosecutor-in-chief", he does appoint and direct the Attorney General, which is basically the same thing. The Justice Department would act as the plaintiff (in the name of the U. S. government) in a war crimes case against Bush and his cronies. No sane president would do so, of course, because it would be political suicide. We can wish, though :)
No, I'm sure there's many like me who don't fly because of the TSA.
Showing up three hours early for my flight? Be treated like some bomb-carrying nutjob because I (gasp!) only bring a carry-on and have my shampoo and conditioner with me? No thanks. I've got a '65 Galaxie that rides like a dream and has a trunk you could fit Rhode Island in, I've got the money to keep the tank full, and I've got the time to take the scenic route. Screw the TSA.
I used some trig yesterday for the first time in years. I had a piece of wood I needed to cut at an angle, and I didn't have a protractor.
It was sad - I had to look up which of the basic trig functions was opposite/adjacent (tangent, of course). And it's been less than a decade since I took college trig.
(It was pointless, though. My dumb ass used 6" as the opposite side rather than 5 1/2" for a 1x6 plank, so the angle came out wrong. It was my derp for the week.)
Considering that (at the time I'm posting this) there's 640 comments, I'd wager to guess that nerds like this kind of question. I find it interesting to see what other Linux users have used in the past, and I would probably qualify as a nerd (although after you hit 20 or 25 the label doesn't fit well).
Your question sounds like an invitation for a massive flame fest. Perhaps that's why it wasn't selected.
There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.
As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.
I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.
I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.
I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.
I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.
I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.
Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.
Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.
So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.
He's not really talking to people who hate Democrats anymore. He did that during the primary.
Now he's talking to independent voters who don't vote straight party ticket. People who hate Democrats are going to vote for him no matter what he says.
And why pick on Mormons, who've never, as far as I can tell, been known to blow up people they disagree with?
Every* religion has its fanatics, but they don't all blow people up. They might kill you (Christian fanatics vs. abortion doctors), wage a war on you (catholic vs. protestant in Northern Ireland, Shia-Sunni conflicts), take away your rights (Christian fanatics with blue laws, countries with Islamic law), or force their ideas onto you and your children (Intelligent Design, Hamas' anti-Jewish children's shows). Mormon fanatics are the ones that still practice polygamy and force young girls into marriage.
Normal Mormons of course are just regular people with some strange beliefs, but really, most of the strangeness was already in Christianity anyway (God created a huge, vast universe with uncountable stars and planets, with relativistic and quantum effects, and he really gives a shit who you like to poke your dick into?). I find it easier to believe that some guy found some gold plates and transcribed them than to believe that the word of God has passed down thousands of years without anyone tampering with it for their own benefit.
*OK, I've never met a pastafarian fanatic, but it's possible. I am curious what a Buddhist fanatic would be like.
You're thinking amish. Mormons can use technology just fine, they just can't wear miniskirts.
I agree that it's a terrible example, but for different reasons.
The post office loses money, true. But it's more like roads that people realize. The post is the one way that is (supposed to be) sure to communicate with someone.
You are notified of jury duty by mail. You're notified of property taxes via mail (at least in Oklahoma, I never owned property anywhere else). Pretty much any time the government needs to tell you something, it's via the mail. Mail has special legal status (certified and registered mail) that other forms of communication do not.
The byproduct is that it's useful for people to mail each other or businesses to mail customers or potential customers, which is good for the economy as a whole.
It's pretty much the same argument as the roads - they're good for the economy and the government needs them anyway.
ISPs, on the other hand, are probably not best deal with by the government. They'd pull another pre-split AT&T and we'd be stuck with crap service. I wouldn't mind seeing them operate the cables, though - government owned last mile and backbone, private reselling and packaging.
According to TFA they can't use the speed camera for anything except photographing speeders (Maryland law), so A wouldn't catch you vandalizing B.
Of course, they could always set up C to watch B, I suppose.
Depends if you're wanting to make a statement or stop the program.
If you just want to make a statement, then a paintball to the lens is good enough (bear in mind though that paintballs aren't exactly sniper ammo - they're pretty inaccurate). If you want to make the program too costly to operate, you destroy the camera.
I'm not advocating that, btw.
No it's not. You can photograph military property in the United States.
You can't photograph certain objects or certain areas, but in general you wouldn't be allowed inside those areas or near those objects to begin with unless you had clearance to do so.
I've got a photograph of what was the Network Control Center at Kadena Air Base hanging on the wall (it's a group shot of my coworkers when I was stationed there, presented to me by our shop superintendant, a Senior Master Sergeant). I've got several more I took around the base in a scrapbook somewhere. Just outside the base there are small platforms that camera crews can climb to film jets taking off.
I find it funny someone from the party that voted Dan Quale as vice president makes a big deal about an obvious verbal slip.
Windows isn't like Linux in that respect, since the Linux kernel is developed seperately from the rest of the system. A Windows release is worked on and tested as one object (not counting media center, premium, etc.).
There's advantages and disadvantages to both methodologies. The BSDs are similar to Windows in this reguard; OpenBSD 5.1 refers to the entire system, not just the kernel.
The Linux distributions use their own version numbers that are independent of the kernel, but since the utilities in the distributions are generally not distribution specific, not to mention the fact that a single distro version can use more than one kernel, the kernel version becomes more important than it would be otherwise. In Windows, you'd never run a Vista kernel with a 7 userland, so the point is moot.
Methinks the problem with Windows is the complete lack of coherency within versions. Think a bit:
DOS codebase: Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 3.11 for Workgroups, 95, 98, 98SE, ME
NT codebase: OS/2 1.x*, NT 3.x, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (with server versions sprinkled in somewhat randomly)
If that's not a sure sign of corporate lack of attention span, I don't know what is.
MacOS X is kind of like X11 - it's been X11 for ages, but the R version keeps going up.
*OS/2 1.x is not Windows, but there was a lot of shared code before Microsoft pulled out and created NT 3.x.
Monuments are the wrong clue to look for.
True, but they're the most obvious. It might take quite a bit of study to identify signs of an ancient civilization based on land shaping and rock distribution. The pyramids are obviously artificial.
While an advanced macroscopic surface biosphere would indeed be easily detectable, these [sciencemag.org] types of organisms would not.
Those types of organisms wouldn't support a civilization, either. Mars has obviously never had a diverse biosphere that could support advanced forms of life (at least as we understand it), so there's little point to searching for Martian artifacts. I'm all for searching for the Martian equivalent of bacteria and archea.
I'm not sure we know enough about Venus to say one way or the other, but I'll readily admit my ignorance on the subject. I've always found Venus to be dull and haven't spent much time reading about it.
Seriously, you think an iPad is a "magic object" and a CPU chip isn't?
That's a "turtles all the way down" argument. Do you know how an abacus works? Down to the quark level?
A CPU chip does the math and logic. No one outside of electrical engineering really needs to understand how it works, but any tech needs to know what it does, how to install one, and how to evaluate which chip is appropriate for a particular use.
He's wanting something where he can point at a component and say, "that's the memory," or "that's the soundcard." If the kid wants to break out the oscilloscope when he's older, more power to him.