Well, it's been awhile since I tried to use EMACS, but at the time I quit before learning it well because the three finger key commands were actively painful. Since then my hands have become a bit less flexible, and now even things like control commands cause me to need to use both hands. (The shift key is typically much more favorably placed.) So I think EMACS is not an option.
The big thing on your list is point 5. Back when long distance cost extra spam calls were trivial in number. When it became essentially free, they fairly quickly went through the roof. (That it's kept increasing is just because it hasn't [hadn't?] yet reached saturation.)
It's really the same thing as email spam. If email cost to send, then the spam would really decrease. As it essentially doesn't, we get lots of it to deal with.
But before you get too enamored with this solution, consider multiple consequences. If phone lines are expensive, phone calls get routed through the internet. Do you want to make that expensive, too?
FWIW, I would prefer a hard drive over an SSD. Hard drives are more resistant to losing the data in storage. I'd hardly call them archival quality, but they're a lot closer. And generally I don't depend on I/O to be fast...I depend on RAM for that.
The problem is the authority worshiping administrators who just the quality of the faculty without any knowledge of the areas they are judging. It's important to not lest Springer-Verlag get established as an authority in a field...because less bad certainly doesn't mean good.
Well, China has been a supporter of North Korea since at least the early 1950's. so that connection is reasonable.
OTOH, the way I would react to the dealings (as I have heard them) so far is "You can't trust any deal you make with the US.". Admittedly, this isn't original with Trump, but he's been more blatant about it than most administrations. And at least so far he *appears* to be adhering to the letter of the agreement.... I.e., ZTE is back in business. (This, of course, depends on the details of the proposed tariff.)
Yes. I'm rather sure that you could make good straws out of bamboo. What I suspect, however, would be that the additional processing required would be sufficient that it would have no advantage over plastic. OTOH, I'm no expert in this field.
Well, you've denigrated the main mass use of straws, but there are other uses. E.g. my wife used them to make single use musical instruments to demonstrate acoustic principles. For some instruments she only used paper straws, and for others she only used plastic. It had to do with the different characteristics of the reed she created within the straw by selective cuts.
If you check around you will find that there are a large number of specialty straws designed for special purposes. My wife checked carefully, because she was always re-purposing them to make, e.g., a miniature carousel (which takes 4 different kinds of straws with precisely related widths).
Bamboo might be a reasonable alternative, but the problem with these blanket condemnations of plastic is that often the alternatives are worse. That wouldn't be true of bamboo knives or forks, but I'm not sure about bamboo straws. Paper straws (possibly made from bamboo) are good, but tend to be too flimsy for many purposes. A straw as good as a plastic straw would be likely to require a lot of extra processing.
OTOH, there are various biodegradable plastics that would be reasonable for straws. They don't recycle with other plastics, but they compost.
Probably the best answer is to develop some pelagic bacteria to eat common plastics. Unfortunately, the easier processes would result in a release of carbon dioxide, so you'd want to use a photo-synthesizing bacterium as your base type, to build carbohydrates out of it...but they are less inclined to go in for things like plastics.
N.B.: Current biodegradable plastics also release CO2 when being degraded, but they are built from modern plants, and so there is (nearly) zero net CO2.
Apple has historically been much more a proponent of proprietary file formats than IBM has been. It may well be true that not many files use EBCDIC encoding, but they *could*.
Well, I realize I found their database terrible, the sales tactics abominable, and decided to never do business with them again. I never bothered to consider whether they did anything beside the database, because the quality of the database was only a part of my reason for avoiding them.
I suspect the donation is by Microsoft or Apple, given the way Gnome3 has developed from Gnome2. There's also the increasing monolithic spread of systemd, and various other trends that I find "equally encouraging". Such as adaptations to facilitate running Linux as a subsystem under MSWindows.
In the US at least, nearly anybody can sue nearly anybody over nearly anything. This doesn't, of course, mean they can win. And I expect that Chevron has a lot more lawyers with a lot more talent and experience than does Richmond, CA.
As to their grounds...sorry, I'm no lawyer. There are reasonable grounds, but whether there are reasonable legal grounds is a separate question. So is whether the reasonable grounds can be proven.
Serialization is quite important, however. My preference is that it contain some "signing bytes" to identify what it is, including version number, and a checksum. This still doesn't protect against hostile action, of course, but is more for detecting that you can handle the version and you know what it is you're deserializing. It might also identify the word-length and byte order, to make it more portable, but in my typical use case having it match my native processor is more important than portability. (Still, it would be useful to, once a file, specify what the word length and byte order were. This would allow recovery onto some other machine at some future date.)
But what's important to *you* is going to depend on *your* use case.
Sorry, but look at the words. A weed killer is a specific variety of pesticide. Unfortunately, probably, it isn't as targeted as would be most desirable. But it's important to remember that they aren't all the same. Salt can be a weed killer...but for some weeds it can benefit them by killing off the competition. (At one point a neighbor got mad at my mother's pampas grass, and poured salt on it. The pampas grass flourished.)
Goats are useful for clearing underbrush out of a woods. Geese are useful for clearing weeds out of cotton. But those are both special cases.
And goats will eat the seedling trees, so you've got to be careful there. If you know your Bible, you'll remember the famous cedars of Lebanon. They aren't there anymore, because the next generation was eaten by goats.
That's not strictly true. Many insects have quite specific desires for a host plant. But how do you get rid of the ones that prefer your crop without getting rid of the others?
Back in the day people growing cherries used to kill birds because they would eat the cherries, even though the birds also ate enough of the insects that also ate the cherries that this was a bad move. But they could *see* the birds eating the cherries.
Ecologic systems are complex, and not constructed primarily to benefit humans. Feedback loops don't get any more complicated.
I really don't like the idea of using even targeted weed-killer, because *something* has had really disastrous effects on the nation's ecology with changes easily visible during my lifetime, but targeted is probably better than widespread. And as suggested above the same robots, only slightly improved and modified, could deliver live steam or microwaves in a targeted manner...but that's probably better saved for a later improved model.
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Well, it's been awhile since I tried to use EMACS, but at the time I quit before learning it well because the three finger key commands were actively painful. Since then my hands have become a bit less flexible, and now even things like control commands cause me to need to use both hands. (The shift key is typically much more favorably placed.) So I think EMACS is not an option.
Between that pair I'd choose EMACS.
The big thing on your list is point 5. Back when long distance cost extra spam calls were trivial in number. When it became essentially free, they fairly quickly went through the roof. (That it's kept increasing is just because it hasn't [hadn't?] yet reached saturation.)
It's really the same thing as email spam. If email cost to send, then the spam would really decrease. As it essentially doesn't, we get lots of it to deal with.
But before you get too enamored with this solution, consider multiple consequences. If phone lines are expensive, phone calls get routed through the internet. Do you want to make that expensive, too?
FWIW, I would prefer a hard drive over an SSD. Hard drives are more resistant to losing the data in storage. I'd hardly call them archival quality, but they're a lot closer. And generally I don't depend on I/O to be fast...I depend on RAM for that.
They are less bad than you indicate. Slightly.
The problem is the authority worshiping administrators who just the quality of the faculty without any knowledge of the areas they are judging. It's important to not lest Springer-Verlag get established as an authority in a field...because less bad certainly doesn't mean good.
Sure you can also make coffee in a teapot. You can either use instant, or add a raw egg to the grounds.
You make an interesting commentary on rust.
Well, China has been a supporter of North Korea since at least the early 1950's. so that connection is reasonable.
OTOH, the way I would react to the dealings (as I have heard them) so far is "You can't trust any deal you make with the US.". Admittedly, this isn't original with Trump, but he's been more blatant about it than most administrations. And at least so far he *appears* to be adhering to the letter of the agreement. ... I.e., ZTE is back in business. (This, of course, depends on the details of the proposed tariff.)
Yes. I'm rather sure that you could make good straws out of bamboo. What I suspect, however, would be that the additional processing required would be sufficient that it would have no advantage over plastic. OTOH, I'm no expert in this field.
Well, you've denigrated the main mass use of straws, but there are other uses. E.g. my wife used them to make single use musical instruments to demonstrate acoustic principles. For some instruments she only used paper straws, and for others she only used plastic. It had to do with the different characteristics of the reed she created within the straw by selective cuts.
If you check around you will find that there are a large number of specialty straws designed for special purposes. My wife checked carefully, because she was always re-purposing them to make, e.g., a miniature carousel (which takes 4 different kinds of straws with precisely related widths).
Bamboo might be a reasonable alternative, but the problem with these blanket condemnations of plastic is that often the alternatives are worse. That wouldn't be true of bamboo knives or forks, but I'm not sure about bamboo straws. Paper straws (possibly made from bamboo) are good, but tend to be too flimsy for many purposes. A straw as good as a plastic straw would be likely to require a lot of extra processing.
OTOH, there are various biodegradable plastics that would be reasonable for straws. They don't recycle with other plastics, but they compost.
Probably the best answer is to develop some pelagic bacteria to eat common plastics. Unfortunately, the easier processes would result in a release of carbon dioxide, so you'd want to use a photo-synthesizing bacterium as your base type, to build carbohydrates out of it...but they are less inclined to go in for things like plastics.
N.B.: Current biodegradable plastics also release CO2 when being degraded, but they are built from modern plants, and so there is (nearly) zero net CO2.
I wasn't impressed when the government told me to avoid them, but now Huawei itself is telling me to avoid them.
Apple has historically been much more a proponent of proprietary file formats than IBM has been. It may well be true that not many files use EBCDIC encoding, but they *could*.
In Oracle's case it was already legal. (I don't know which of Trump's actions you think applies to this case.)
Being legal is not the same as tolerable.
Well, I realize I found their database terrible, the sales tactics abominable, and decided to never do business with them again. I never bothered to consider whether they did anything beside the database, because the quality of the database was only a part of my reason for avoiding them.
I suspect the donation is by Microsoft or Apple, given the way Gnome3 has developed from Gnome2. There's also the increasing monolithic spread of systemd, and various other trends that I find "equally encouraging". Such as adaptations to facilitate running Linux as a subsystem under MSWindows.
In the US at least, nearly anybody can sue nearly anybody over nearly anything. This doesn't, of course, mean they can win. And I expect that Chevron has a lot more lawyers with a lot more talent and experience than does Richmond, CA.
As to their grounds...sorry, I'm no lawyer. There are reasonable grounds, but whether there are reasonable legal grounds is a separate question. So is whether the reasonable grounds can be proven.
Serialization is quite important, however. My preference is that it contain some "signing bytes" to identify what it is, including version number, and a checksum. This still doesn't protect against hostile action, of course, but is more for detecting that you can handle the version and you know what it is you're deserializing. It might also identify the word-length and byte order, to make it more portable, but in my typical use case having it match my native processor is more important than portability. (Still, it would be useful to, once a file, specify what the word length and byte order were. This would allow recovery onto some other machine at some future date.)
But what's important to *you* is going to depend on *your* use case.
Ah, the "I was only following orders" defense. I believe that's been found invalid in an international court.
I don't think logic works for legal precedents.
Doesn't work if you're having the robot spray weed killer. Your fields then don't qualify as "organic". (Steam or microwaves would work, though.)
Too late. There are weeds in India (at least) that have started imitating the look of rice plants to prevent people from pulling them out.
Sorry, but look at the words. A weed killer is a specific variety of pesticide. Unfortunately, probably, it isn't as targeted as would be most desirable. But it's important to remember that they aren't all the same. Salt can be a weed killer...but for some weeds it can benefit them by killing off the competition. (At one point a neighbor got mad at my mother's pampas grass, and poured salt on it. The pampas grass flourished.)
Goats are useful for clearing underbrush out of a woods. Geese are useful for clearing weeds out of cotton. But those are both special cases.
And goats will eat the seedling trees, so you've got to be careful there. If you know your Bible, you'll remember the famous cedars of Lebanon. They aren't there anymore, because the next generation was eaten by goats.
That's not strictly true. Many insects have quite specific desires for a host plant. But how do you get rid of the ones that prefer your crop without getting rid of the others?
Back in the day people growing cherries used to kill birds because they would eat the cherries, even though the birds also ate enough of the insects that also ate the cherries that this was a bad move. But they could *see* the birds eating the cherries.
Ecologic systems are complex, and not constructed primarily to benefit humans. Feedback loops don't get any more complicated.
I really don't like the idea of using even targeted weed-killer, because *something* has had really disastrous effects on the nation's ecology with changes easily visible during my lifetime, but targeted is probably better than widespread. And as suggested above the same robots, only slightly improved and modified, could deliver live steam or microwaves in a targeted manner...but that's probably better saved for a later improved model.