come on.. different types of compare operators that work on regular variables (one for numbers, one for strings)? Can't the interpreter just say "Oh, one of these is a string, internally.
This duality is already a feature of Perl and it actually is a necessity. The reason is that string compare and numeric compare are different desired operations.
Let us say that perl used == for both string and numeric compare. Now let us say that someone wrote the following statement in a perl program: "3.0" == "3". Does this return true or not? If we perform a numeric compare, then yes. If we perform a string compare, then no. Now, you can point at my example and say that since 3 and 3.0 were both quoted here, clearly the programmer intended for 3 and 3.0 to be treated as strings. However, if rather than literals those had been variables-- maybe taken from user input-- that would have been no such indicators. The language has no way to tell what to do.
This really so much isn't about types as it is about the fact perl will autobox numbers in and out of strings for you. I'll give you Perl has many features that just make one's head hurt, but this isn't one of them.
Tabulated on page XX are all the characters used in INTERCAL, excepting letters and digits, along with their names and interpretations. Also included are several characters not used in INTERCAL, which are presented for completeness and to allow for future expansion.
Character Name Use (if any)
. spot identify 16-bit variable : two-spot identify 32-bit variable , tail identify 16-bit array ; hybrid identify 32-bit array # mesh identify constant = half-mesh ' spark grouper ` backspark ! wow equivalent to spark-spot ? what unary exlusive OR (ASCII) " rabbit-ears grouper ". rabbit equivalent to ears-spot | spike % double-oh-seven percentage qualifier - worm used with angles < angle used with worms > right angle ( wax precedes line label ) wane follows line label [ U turn ] U turn back { embrace } bracelet * splat flags invalid statements & ampersand[5] unary logical AND V V unary logical OR (or book) V- bookworm unary exclusive OR (or universal qualifier) $ big money unary exclusive OR (ASCII) c| change binary mingle ~ sqiggle binary select _ flat worm overline indicates "times 1000" + intersection separates list items / slat \ backslat @ whirlpool -' hookworm ^ shark (or simply sharkfin) #|[] blotch
Table 2 (top view). INTERCAL character set.
(1) Since all other reference manuals have Appendices, it was decided that the INTERCAL manual should contain some other type of removable organ.
Like with PCs, Microsoft will allow other companies to engage in the cutthroat and unprofitable business (making and selling mp3 players and operating online music stores), then sit in the background and collect licensing fees.
Certainly makes more sense than the previous story.
They can still scan it realtime and give ads based on keywords, but they can't store it in a database or share that information with other people.
And wouldn't that also mean that they couldn't store characteristics of your emails-- for example say Baynesian statistics-- in order to help identify and flag spam in future? Right now tools like Apple Mail store "training data" characteristics about spam and non-spam in a database on your hard drive. Will GMail be banned from doing this?
One possible argument being made by the ADTI is that Linus intentionally reverse-engineered the source code to some other Unix, tidied it up, and published it as his own Linux... possibly re-obfuscating it himself afterwards to make the deed difficult to discover.
Uh..
What would be the point of "reverse engineering" when Linus could just, you know, read Tanenbaum's textbook on operating system design and use that as a basis for how to design a UNIX operating system? Since that would be (1) easier (2) legal (3) and Linus already had a copy of said textbook, whereas he doesn't appear to have had access to the source of any commercial Unices?
When the "Linux infringes on the UNIX ABI" thing was briefly floated by SCO, Linus responded with a long complaint explaining that even if that were a valid legal complaint it wouldn't matter, because Linux didn't follow those ABIs-- Linux doesn't follow the POSIX standard in a number of ways because at the time he first wrote it Linus had no access to a copy of the POSIX standard! The POSIX standard was rather costly to buy a copy of at that point, so Linus had to just make stuff up. One example he gave was that the values of signals in Linux are not the same as they are in UNIX, and this became a big pain later. In short, had Linus been copying from a UNIX, he would have gotten the UNIX parts right because he wouldn't have been forced into so much guesswork.
Is there any upside for Apple at all to allow other music players (iPod being the Profit portion of the Apple Music store) access to its music? So, Apple can make, what, $1? $2? on licensing per player unit?
It encourages people to use the iTunes Music Store, thus encouraging them to buy iPods. Apple can still defeat the commodity music player market on the strength of the iPod, and use its tight and elegant iTMS integration as a selling point even if other players have iTMS purchase capability as well.
The alternative is that in a year, Microsoft is going to start running attack ads reminding people that if they buy music from the iTunes Music Store, they can only use them on iPods, whereas if they buy them from Napster2 or one of another of stores, they can use them on a variety of devices, many of them cheaper, and furthermore the iPod can't listen to music from any music store other than the iTMS (which is not true but MS will claim it anyway). This will discourage people from buying music from iTunes. If WMA-based music stores gather a foothold, it will discourage people from buying an iPod. The benefit apple gets from licensing the iTMS to cheap music players is it gets to protect the iTMS and continue to build on what the iPod has right now.
Look at it this way: If you're a person who's interested in the iT/iP combo because of the iPod, you're going to buy an iPod anyway. And if you're a person who's interested in the iTMS side of things, then your interest in the iPod will go away if Microsoft's marketing machine, however briefly, manages to make WMA-based stores more attractive than the iTMS, it will serverely dampen your interest in the iPod.
Yes, Apple loses out here to some extent. But it unfortunately may just be necessary. And Microsoft probably is trying to force Apple into a choice like this-- by dumping all this money into designed-to-fail vaporware products, they may not gain the market, but they may force Apple to give up some of its advantages, like iTMS exclusivity. But Microsoft is answerable to no one, and that may be just unavoidable.
I think Apple has demonstrated that it knows its business better than slashdot pundits.
Since we don't know whether Apple is going to take the action I describe or not, and the time to do it would likely be in six months, not now, what does that have to do with anything?
Apple really, really needs-- not now, but sometime before the Microsoft "We can set rediculously low prices becuase we don't care if we make a profit on anything except Windows and Office Music Player" hits-- aggressively start licensing the FairPlay DRM and some kind of fancy "iTunes Music Store Compatibility" logo to other music player creators. I think if they do not attempt to do this they are in big trouble.
Microsoft has been really, really harping on this "choice" thing, by which they mean "iTMS purchases can only be played on the iPod". Meanwhile they're trying to push music player carriers to support WMA. At the moment WMA is still just an also-ran in this space but if this keeps happening that could change. Apple needs to get FairPlay support into everyone's hands in order to make AAC the new standard so that WMA doesn't grab that spot...
I would suspect that with a $50 pricetag, Micro$oft is losing some amount of money per unit. They want to make the money on the music sales. Like razors or cameras - make money on the blades/film.
I disagree. I think that if the pricetag is $50, then Microsoft intends to lose money on the units AND the music sales (similar to how the XBox, a current venture loses money overall).
Microsoft more likely than not intends to lose gobs of money overall on the entire music venture, with only two goals in mind:
Prevent Apple from making money.
Try to force WMA to take over the online music market and prevent an MPEG-4 based solution from doing so.
I presume it's because they argue that they make money through the software.
They don't. Look at Microsoft's SEC filings sometime. The H&E division has been consistently losing about a quarter of a billion dollars every single quarter since this XBox "strategy" has been going on.
So there's this professor at my college (Purdue) who his big research thing is trying to take large numbers of periodically spaced panoramic images within a certain area and stitch together 3D models of a sort out of them that you can move around within freely. Like Quicktime VR, but taken one step further. (His way of approaching the problem is taking the photos really densely over a small area and attempt to reduce things to a database problem, so I don't know how well his specific approach would work with a bunch of more-loosely spaced photos over a large area, but there's a lot of possible approaches to this same problem and the general idea is the same.)
I'd love to get hold of a copy of this van's database. You could do some great things with this. It sounds like it takes pictures in all directions every 15 feet, and then specially saves later the ones that are of the front of a building? If so, that's perfect. Take all the street photos of downtown Seattle from each of the 15 digital cameras every 15 feet, carefully stitch them all together and do some extrapolation, do some manual editing to fill in things like the uncaptured backsides of lightposts and other objects, and bam, you've got a breathtakingly detailed map for use in, say, Half Life 3, or the next Project Gotham racing...
So they're going to be letting law enforcement have this database? I wonder if the Freedom of Information Act still counts for anything...
The FCC is required to serve the public interest, right?
Then why can't we just, like, launch a lawsuit demanding the FCC is bound by their own rules to prohibhit "DRM" from being broadcast on public airwaves?
Also, that said, we have really got to come up with a way to get the public to realize that "digital rights management" means that CORPORATIONS get to digitally manage YOUR rights.
Some open source projects, for example all GNU projects, already require you to sign over your copyright to the code.
I cannot imagine that signing these DCOs would open you up to any sort of liability that a formal copyright transfer would not, since obviously when doing the latter you imply you own the code you are transferring.
While projects that require copyright transfer do tend to grow slower, liability does not seem to be a significant reason why.
And if there actually is some kind of legal difference from a liability standpoint between the DCO process and a copyright transfer, then I'm sure some kind of system would be set up whereby the legally skittish could, for example, sign their copyright to the code over to the FSF, who then submits it to the Linux with the DCO filled out in such a way the FSF is the liable party.
I don't say it currently is, but in future it *may* be a step towards elitarian class establishment, as well as political control tool for technology. How well-defined should be an identity of a GPL project contributor?
The thing is, these DCOs or whatever only apply to submissions to the main kernel tree. Thanks to the GPL, you can still fork the Linux kernel and distribute it on your own website and legally do what you like with your own copy of the code without ever actually having to talk directly to the lkml people.
Seems to me that this kind of "paper trail" will only be useful against a hypothetical litigator that points to a piece of code in Linux and said: "this code here, this infringes on my IP". It's not so useful against a SCO-like "we own it all, so pay up" FUD blitzkrieg.
Yes, but the thing is, the former is an actual, real legal threat, and the latter is legally harmless and only a threat in the PR sense.
The former is definitely worth protecting against. Yeah, so it's never happened before, that's OK, all the more reason to get prepared for this sort of thing now BEFORE a problem arises. And maybe there will be some small PR benefit side-effects as a result anyway.
If you don't mind me asking / don't have NDA, if it was strong enough to muck with the CRTs, wouldn't it have played havoc with the magnetic media in the room? Did the hard drives and processors have to be hardened against strong magnetic fields or anything?
1. Guh... it's possible, as happened 40 years ago, we are being overly pessimistic about advances in oil extraction technology. However, regardless of whether we can find ways to stretch the remaining oil reserves, and whether we can find ways to supllant our current fuel useage with biodiesel-like technologies, it seems quite certain that, at least in the short term, changing the way we get oil in order to extend our current reserves is going to be expensive. Moreover, being optimistic about our oil reserves based on the possibility of everything we know about the physical and natural processes of the world being wrong in some way we haven't even noticed the evidence for yet does not make a lot of sense. One might as well be pessimistic, as after all it may well be that our theories on astronomy are wrong and the sun will be going supernova tomorrow.
2. This appears to be variable depending on the exact contextual definition of "we".
3. Yes, but before the Oil Age began we were very much able to just ignore them. Now suddenly we find ourselves as these despots' customers, and furthermore find that we are funding them, and furthermore learn that we are dependent on them. That leads to unpleasantries.
4. Chernobyl was not blown out of proportion. Unfortunately the wrong lesson was learned from it. The lesson people generally learned was "nuclear power is dangerous". The lesson that should have been learned is "Nuclear power requires strict and carefully measured regulation, and should never ever under any circumstances be used by corrupt, bankrupt kleptocracies."
Silly rabbit, Peter Jackson's working on King Kong and won't commence shooting The Hobbit for some time.
Oh, and that's supposed to make me feel better?? The man couldn't keep control of an orc herd in rural New Zealand, and you're expecting him to be able to rein in a giant god-like ape creature representing the untamable and unfathomable strength of nature while shooting in New York?? Oh yeah, I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
Just you wait, one of the junior rigging people is going to mess up with the lighting or something while shooting one of Kong's scenes, the handler won't be able to calm him down, and before you know it the property damage will be in the millions, the ASCPA rep will be in tears and the liability lawsuits will be pouring in...
That's not a dinosaur, it's Smaug! He's escaped from the set of Peter Jackon's The Hobbit and is trying to nest!
If they don't do something quickly, this could be even worse than the incident when all those orcs got loose during the Battle of Helm's Deep filming and slaughtered that busload of Japanese tourists!
Now what if you amortize the cost of building a fusion reactor over the energy-producing life of the reactor? That is almost certain to be significantly higher than the cost of a combustion engine and it deserves to be taken into account
(Of course, since we only have prototypes ATM, it may be difficult to estimate the cost of a production reactor...)
So I was looking through this old stack of technical books last week, and I came across a fascinating little book called "Methodology of Window Management" or some such. What it basically was was the minutes of a symposium in the UK collecting international academics to discuss the subject of window management systems for UNIX. They discussed existing systems, and how they might be improved upon in future systems. This predates X, and in fact the only UNIX system they even described in the book I had heard of was Andrew (although there was one chapter in which a young man named James Gosling gave a presentation on his project, something called SunDew which as far as I could tell was a predecessor to NeWS.
Anyone who read this book would find it immediately obvious that all of these people considered "window" an absolutely generic term, and MS-Windows featured on the periphery of their knowlege, if at all. In fact MS-Windows was only even mentioned twice in the book that I saw. One was in a sentence like "as compared to non-UNIX GUI systems, such as Macintosh or MS-Windows..".
The other was a particularly damning to MS's case little chapter called "10 years of window systems", which was a transcript of a talk given describing something like 8 different window systems developed in the previous 10 years and tracking their evolution, starting with the early smalltalk-based systems at PARC. MS-Windows was mentioned only in passing when a tiling-based window manager was used, prompting the presenter to say "this system is basically the exact same one used by MS Windows".
Reading this book it could not help but be excruciatingly obvious that everyone involved in this book considered "window" an absolutely generic term, "window system" the generic term for the thing they were describing, and that Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with this. And this was not just some peripheral geeky thing like Linux to some extent is today. This was before the PC truly caught hold. The persons represented in this book were the people responsible for the heavy lifting in the computer industry at the time, both on the academic side of things and in terms of corporate representatives of the UNIX systems discussed.
This book was from 1986 but I'm certain finding something similar from 1984 would be effortless.
Slashdot Mirror
come on.. different types of compare operators that work on regular variables (one for numbers, one for strings)? Can't the interpreter just say "Oh, one of these is a string, internally.
This duality is already a feature of Perl and it actually is a necessity. The reason is that string compare and numeric compare are different desired operations.
Let us say that perl used == for both string and numeric compare. Now let us say that someone wrote the following statement in a perl program: "3.0" == "3". Does this return true or not? If we perform a numeric compare, then yes. If we perform a string compare, then no. Now, you can point at my example and say that since 3 and 3.0 were both quoted here, clearly the programmer intended for 3 and 3.0 to be treated as strings. However, if rather than literals those had been variables-- maybe taken from user input-- that would have been no such indicators. The language has no way to tell what to do.
This really so much isn't about types as it is about the fact perl will autobox numbers in and out of strings for you. I'll give you Perl has many features that just make one's head hurt, but this isn't one of them.
TONSIL A (1)
The Official INTERCAL Character Set
Tabulated on page XX are all the characters used in INTERCAL, excepting
letters and digits, along with their names and interpretations. Also
included are several characters not used in INTERCAL, which are presented
for completeness and to allow for future expansion.
Character Name Use (if any)
. spot identify 16-bit variable
: two-spot identify 32-bit variable
, tail identify 16-bit array
; hybrid identify 32-bit array
# mesh identify constant
= half-mesh
' spark grouper
` backspark
! wow equivalent to spark-spot
? what unary exlusive OR (ASCII)
" rabbit-ears grouper
". rabbit equivalent to ears-spot
| spike
% double-oh-seven percentage qualifier
- worm used with angles
< angle used with worms
> right angle
( wax precedes line label
) wane follows line label
[ U turn
] U turn back
{ embrace
} bracelet
* splat flags invalid statements
& ampersand[5] unary logical AND
V V unary logical OR
(or book)
V- bookworm unary exclusive OR
(or universal qualifier)
$ big money unary exclusive OR (ASCII)
c| change binary mingle
~ sqiggle binary select
_ flat worm
overline indicates "times 1000"
+ intersection separates list items
/ slat
\ backslat
@ whirlpool
-' hookworm
^ shark
(or simply sharkfin)
#|[] blotch
Table 2 (top view). INTERCAL character set.
(1) Since all other reference manuals have Appendices, it was decided that
the INTERCAL manual should contain some other type of removable organ.
(2) This footnote intentionally unreferenced.
Like with PCs, Microsoft will allow other companies to engage in the cutthroat and unprofitable business (making and selling mp3 players and operating online music stores), then sit in the background and collect licensing fees.
Certainly makes more sense than the previous story.
It happens.
1 is not prime.
They can still scan it realtime and give ads based on keywords, but they can't store it in a database or share that information with other people.
And wouldn't that also mean that they couldn't store characteristics of your emails-- for example say Baynesian statistics-- in order to help identify and flag spam in future? Right now tools like Apple Mail store "training data" characteristics about spam and non-spam in a database on your hard drive. Will GMail be banned from doing this?
This seems to me to be horribly ill-considered.
One possible argument being made by the ADTI is that Linus intentionally reverse-engineered the source code to some other Unix, tidied it up, and published it as his own Linux... possibly re-obfuscating it himself afterwards to make the deed difficult to discover.
Uh..
What would be the point of "reverse engineering" when Linus could just, you know, read Tanenbaum's textbook on operating system design and use that as a basis for how to design a UNIX operating system? Since that would be (1) easier (2) legal (3) and Linus already had a copy of said textbook, whereas he doesn't appear to have had access to the source of any commercial Unices?
When the "Linux infringes on the UNIX ABI" thing was briefly floated by SCO, Linus responded with a long complaint explaining that even if that were a valid legal complaint it wouldn't matter, because Linux didn't follow those ABIs-- Linux doesn't follow the POSIX standard in a number of ways because at the time he first wrote it Linus had no access to a copy of the POSIX standard! The POSIX standard was rather costly to buy a copy of at that point, so Linus had to just make stuff up. One example he gave was that the values of signals in Linux are not the same as they are in UNIX, and this became a big pain later. In short, had Linus been copying from a UNIX, he would have gotten the UNIX parts right because he wouldn't have been forced into so much guesswork.
Is there any upside for Apple at all to allow other music players (iPod being the Profit portion of the Apple Music store) access to its music? So, Apple can make, what, $1? $2? on licensing per player unit?
It encourages people to use the iTunes Music Store, thus encouraging them to buy iPods. Apple can still defeat the commodity music player market on the strength of the iPod, and use its tight and elegant iTMS integration as a selling point even if other players have iTMS purchase capability as well.
The alternative is that in a year, Microsoft is going to start running attack ads reminding people that if they buy music from the iTunes Music Store, they can only use them on iPods, whereas if they buy them from Napster2 or one of another of stores, they can use them on a variety of devices, many of them cheaper, and furthermore the iPod can't listen to music from any music store other than the iTMS (which is not true but MS will claim it anyway). This will discourage people from buying music from iTunes. If WMA-based music stores gather a foothold, it will discourage people from buying an iPod. The benefit apple gets from licensing the iTMS to cheap music players is it gets to protect the iTMS and continue to build on what the iPod has right now.
Look at it this way: If you're a person who's interested in the iT/iP combo because of the iPod, you're going to buy an iPod anyway. And if you're a person who's interested in the iTMS side of things, then your interest in the iPod will go away if Microsoft's marketing machine, however briefly, manages to make WMA-based stores more attractive than the iTMS, it will serverely dampen your interest in the iPod.
Yes, Apple loses out here to some extent. But it unfortunately may just be necessary. And Microsoft probably is trying to force Apple into a choice like this-- by dumping all this money into designed-to-fail vaporware products, they may not gain the market, but they may force Apple to give up some of its advantages, like iTMS exclusivity. But Microsoft is answerable to no one, and that may be just unavoidable.
I think Apple has demonstrated that it knows its business better than slashdot pundits.
Since we don't know whether Apple is going to take the action I describe or not, and the time to do it would likely be in six months, not now, what does that have to do with anything?
Apple really, really needs-- not now, but sometime before the Microsoft "We can set rediculously low prices becuase we don't care if we make a profit on anything except Windows and Office Music Player" hits-- aggressively start licensing the FairPlay DRM and some kind of fancy "iTunes Music Store Compatibility" logo to other music player creators. I think if they do not attempt to do this they are in big trouble.
Microsoft has been really, really harping on this "choice" thing, by which they mean "iTMS purchases can only be played on the iPod". Meanwhile they're trying to push music player carriers to support WMA. At the moment WMA is still just an also-ran in this space but if this keeps happening that could change. Apple needs to get FairPlay support into everyone's hands in order to make AAC the new standard so that WMA doesn't grab that spot...
I disagree. I think that if the pricetag is $50, then Microsoft intends to lose money on the units AND the music sales (similar to how the XBox, a current venture loses money overall).
Microsoft more likely than not intends to lose gobs of money overall on the entire music venture, with only two goals in mind:
I presume it's because they argue that they make money through the software.
They don't. Look at Microsoft's SEC filings sometime. The H&E division has been consistently losing about a quarter of a billion dollars every single quarter since this XBox "strategy" has been going on.
Does Italian law have any equivalent of what we in America would call the doctrine of jury nullification?
So there's this professor at my college (Purdue) who his big research thing is trying to take large numbers of periodically spaced panoramic images within a certain area and stitch together 3D models of a sort out of them that you can move around within freely. Like Quicktime VR, but taken one step further. (His way of approaching the problem is taking the photos really densely over a small area and attempt to reduce things to a database problem, so I don't know how well his specific approach would work with a bunch of more-loosely spaced photos over a large area, but there's a lot of possible approaches to this same problem and the general idea is the same.)
I'd love to get hold of a copy of this van's database. You could do some great things with this. It sounds like it takes pictures in all directions every 15 feet, and then specially saves later the ones that are of the front of a building? If so, that's perfect. Take all the street photos of downtown Seattle from each of the 15 digital cameras every 15 feet, carefully stitch them all together and do some extrapolation, do some manual editing to fill in things like the uncaptured backsides of lightposts and other objects, and bam, you've got a breathtakingly detailed map for use in, say, Half Life 3, or the next Project Gotham racing...
So they're going to be letting law enforcement have this database? I wonder if the Freedom of Information Act still counts for anything...
The FCC is required to serve the public interest, right?
Then why can't we just, like, launch a lawsuit demanding the FCC is bound by their own rules to prohibhit "DRM" from being broadcast on public airwaves?
Also, that said, we have really got to come up with a way to get the public to realize that "digital rights management" means that CORPORATIONS get to digitally manage YOUR rights.
Some open source projects, for example all GNU projects, already require you to sign over your copyright to the code.
I cannot imagine that signing these DCOs would open you up to any sort of liability that a formal copyright transfer would not, since obviously when doing the latter you imply you own the code you are transferring.
While projects that require copyright transfer do tend to grow slower, liability does not seem to be a significant reason why.
And if there actually is some kind of legal difference from a liability standpoint between the DCO process and a copyright transfer, then I'm sure some kind of system would be set up whereby the legally skittish could, for example, sign their copyright to the code over to the FSF, who then submits it to the Linux with the DCO filled out in such a way the FSF is the liable party.
I don't say it currently is, but in future it *may* be a step towards elitarian class establishment, as well as political control tool for technology. How well-defined should be an identity of a GPL project contributor?
The thing is, these DCOs or whatever only apply to submissions to the main kernel tree. Thanks to the GPL, you can still fork the Linux kernel and distribute it on your own website and legally do what you like with your own copy of the code without ever actually having to talk directly to the lkml people.
Seems to me that this kind of "paper trail" will only be useful against a hypothetical litigator that points to a piece of code in Linux and said: "this code here, this infringes on my IP". It's not so useful against a SCO-like "we own it all, so pay up" FUD blitzkrieg.
Yes, but the thing is, the former is an actual, real legal threat, and the latter is legally harmless and only a threat in the PR sense.
The former is definitely worth protecting against. Yeah, so it's never happened before, that's OK, all the more reason to get prepared for this sort of thing now BEFORE a problem arises. And maybe there will be some small PR benefit side-effects as a result anyway.
:blinks: interesting.
If you don't mind me asking / don't have NDA, if it was strong enough to muck with the CRTs, wouldn't it have played havoc with the magnetic media in the room? Did the hard drives and processors have to be hardened against strong magnetic fields or anything?
1. Guh... it's possible, as happened 40 years ago, we are being overly pessimistic about advances in oil extraction technology. However, regardless of whether we can find ways to stretch the remaining oil reserves, and whether we can find ways to supllant our current fuel useage with biodiesel-like technologies, it seems quite certain that, at least in the short term, changing the way we get oil in order to extend our current reserves is going to be expensive. Moreover, being optimistic about our oil reserves based on the possibility of everything we know about the physical and natural processes of the world being wrong in some way we haven't even noticed the evidence for yet does not make a lot of sense. One might as well be pessimistic, as after all it may well be that our theories on astronomy are wrong and the sun will be going supernova tomorrow.
2. This appears to be variable depending on the exact contextual definition of "we".
3. Yes, but before the Oil Age began we were very much able to just ignore them. Now suddenly we find ourselves as these despots' customers, and furthermore find that we are funding them, and furthermore learn that we are dependent on them. That leads to unpleasantries.
4. Chernobyl was not blown out of proportion. Unfortunately the wrong lesson was learned from it. The lesson people generally learned was "nuclear power is dangerous". The lesson that should have been learned is "Nuclear power requires strict and carefully measured regulation, and should never ever under any circumstances be used by corrupt, bankrupt kleptocracies."
Silly rabbit, Peter Jackson's working on King Kong and won't commence shooting The Hobbit for some time.
Oh, and that's supposed to make me feel better?? The man couldn't keep control of an orc herd in rural New Zealand, and you're expecting him to be able to rein in a giant god-like ape creature representing the untamable and unfathomable strength of nature while shooting in New York?? Oh yeah, I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
Just you wait, one of the junior rigging people is going to mess up with the lighting or something while shooting one of Kong's scenes, the handler won't be able to calm him down, and before you know it the property damage will be in the millions, the ASCPA rep will be in tears and the liability lawsuits will be pouring in...
That's not a dinosaur, it's Smaug! He's escaped from the set of Peter Jackon's The Hobbit and is trying to nest!
If they don't do something quickly, this could be even worse than the incident when all those orcs got loose during the Battle of Helm's Deep filming and slaughtered that busload of Japanese tourists!
Now what if you amortize the cost of building a fusion reactor over the energy-producing life of the reactor? That is almost certain to be significantly higher than the cost of a combustion engine and it deserves to be taken into account
(Of course, since we only have prototypes ATM, it may be difficult to estimate the cost of a production reactor...)
So I was looking through this old stack of technical books last week, and I came across a fascinating little book called "Methodology of Window Management" or some such. What it basically was was the minutes of a symposium in the UK collecting international academics to discuss the subject of window management systems for UNIX. They discussed existing systems, and how they might be improved upon in future systems. This predates X, and in fact the only UNIX system they even described in the book I had heard of was Andrew (although there was one chapter in which a young man named James Gosling gave a presentation on his project, something called SunDew which as far as I could tell was a predecessor to NeWS.
Anyone who read this book would find it immediately obvious that all of these people considered "window" an absolutely generic term, and MS-Windows featured on the periphery of their knowlege, if at all. In fact MS-Windows was only even mentioned twice in the book that I saw. One was in a sentence like "as compared to non-UNIX GUI systems, such as Macintosh or MS-Windows..".
The other was a particularly damning to MS's case little chapter called "10 years of window systems", which was a transcript of a talk given describing something like 8 different window systems developed in the previous 10 years and tracking their evolution, starting with the early smalltalk-based systems at PARC. MS-Windows was mentioned only in passing when a tiling-based window manager was used, prompting the presenter to say "this system is basically the exact same one used by MS Windows".
Reading this book it could not help but be excruciatingly obvious that everyone involved in this book considered "window" an absolutely generic term, "window system" the generic term for the thing they were describing, and that Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with this. And this was not just some peripheral geeky thing like Linux to some extent is today. This was before the PC truly caught hold. The persons represented in this book were the people responsible for the heavy lifting in the computer industry at the time, both on the academic side of things and in terms of corporate representatives of the UNIX systems discussed.
This book was from 1986 but I'm certain finding something similar from 1984 would be effortless.
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