That's not reputable, that's "peer reviewed". Reputatable means that people who have enough power and influence to affect what large numbers of people hear approve of what you say. Sometimes they come to the same answer, but by far not always.
E.g., the New York Times generally supports a particular flavor of conservative political action. Things that it favors because of this get better treatment than things that it disapproves of. This is not an objective reporting, despite what their slogan suggests. ("fit to print" is not objective, but subjective.)
OTOH, I will admit that I've never been at the scene of a news event covered by the New York Times, and compared their coverage to what I observed. Perhaps they are more accurate than the "reputable" papers that I've seen coverage of stories where I knew what I saw. But in the times that I've been able to check, NONE of the major news media gave an even approximately fair writeup. Pictures were taken from carefully chosen angles, e.g., to get the most emotionally intense reaction. Sometimes several pictures of the same event were taken at slightly different angles and then presentes as if (not explicitly stated!) they were separate occurances. Etc. The news was highly processed to make it "more interesting". Other times they just refuse to cover a story, presumably for political reasons. And sometimes they give a story much more coverage than it "deserves" for political reasons. Most of the time, though it means processessing events to make them more "interesting" (which usually means more shocking).
N.B.: I cannot even imagine a way of avoiding the kinds of biases I've been mentioning. Not if you want to stay in business. But this doesn't make them trustworthy.
If there weren't anything but the earth and the sun, you would have a point. But you've left out not only the rest of the solar system, but even the moon. This doesn't work.
N.B.: You can't ignore both Jupiter and Saturn and have a prediction that's even good for a few decades.
Do you really think the New York Times or the BBC are unbiased?
Sorry. There *is* no unbiased source for news of any description. All you can do is check with multiple sources, and try to figure out what's most likely to be really going on. All you *know* is what you directly perceive, and even that's a bit dubious. (Consider the man in the Gorilla suit that walked across the basketball game. Or the demonstration where someone is stabbed with a banana.)
Actually, I stopped watching TV. (I'm not the original poster, but...)
I don't have Flash installed on my system. I don't have Java enabled in the browser. Whan a site gets too annoying I either stop visiting it or turn off Javascript. (But turning off Javascript is annoying, since many sites that I visit use it reasonably, like Slashdot. So I generally just stop visiting.)
I once used Ad-blocker. For about a week I think. I decided it wasn't worth the aggravation.
I'm not sure that you can express the initial conditions as a finite series. If you can, then it looks as if you might be right. (Which doesn't say it would be possible to solve it in any feasible time on any feasible equipment.)
So, OK, MAYBE there is an analytic solution. But I doubt it, because I don't think the initial conditions can be satisfied. (OTOH, it's been decades since I even *looked* an a differential equation, so my opinions aren't worth weighing heavily.)
Even then, though, as we agree, the chaos in the system makes it so sensitive to initial conditions and perturbations (passing stars, e.g., even at multiple light years) that accurate prediction in detail isn't possible, which at a later time becomes much more general.
SDL is also System Description Language, and probably several other things. I suspect that XBMC may really be unique, at least within the field of computers, and Wayland also, but a tiny bit of description for each (perhaps with a link) would not have been amiss.
Yes it is. We can't show which side of the sun the Earth will be on exactly 10,000,000 years from now (measured in standard seconds, etc.) And we can't show that it will still be orbiting the sun some number of years after that. The errors increase without limit, but slowly.
Note that some, but only a small part, of the error is due to unknowns, say astroids we haven't mapped the orbit of. Most of it is due to chaos. The calculations are EXTREMELY sensitive to initial conditions AND to errors in calculation at each step. We don't have analytical solutions, only recursive approximation solutions.
But do note that we can't measure the error in our predictions of where the Earth will be exactly one year from now. The errors are both cumulative and unnoticably small in each step.
Not really. There are many GUI applications that delegate the actual performance of the functions to other parts of the code. Sometimes libraries, and sometimes separate application. No *real* difference here, except for packaging.
OTOH, that's a "slippery slope", as libraries tend to be integrated into code in ways that separate applications can't be. But still, it's basically the same thing.
That said, I will admit that MOST GUI applications are of the more tightly integrated variety. There are good performance reasons for that. But it's not clear that as computers develop an increasing number of cores that the advantage will remain with the integrated applications.
FWIW, every distro has its drawbacks Debian has a couple. 1) Stable tends to be too stale. I always seem to need some feature that won't install with that set of libraries. (Well, not right after release time, but not long, either.) 2) Testing usually breaks badly at least once during a development cycle.
The way I deal with that is to have two different install partitions. Occasionally I'll swtich off of testing for a week while they sort out a bad problem.
OTOH, many distros have too much magic smoke and mirrors for me. (I'll grant that even Debian has gone that way a bit, but not like, say, Mandrake or SUSE.) Some distros still use lilo. I may prefer grub to grub2, but lilo is a pain. Fedora locks partitions so if you boot from another system, you can't read them. (Actually, I suspect it could be configured to NOT to that, but since Red Hat dropped the "Professional Edition" without warning, I'm not willing to invest that much time in configuring them. I'm pretty sure it's intended as a "security feature", but it doesn't protect against the kinds of circumstances I encounter. It just barfs them up.) Most of the others I can't remember the exact reason I didn't stick with them. Frequently it was something I *could* have dealt with, but didn't choose to bother.
Currently I have my wife on Mint+KDE. Up until a recent upgrade I had her on Ubuntu LTS, but when gnome2 went away, she wanted something else. (*Her* reason is to have the electric-sheep screensaver. Silly to me, but important to her.) KDE is a lot heavier than the desktop I would prefer to have on her laptop, gnome2 was better. But gnome3 was just rediculous *AND* didn't have her required feature.
I use testing also, but I've heard that unstable is safer because testing doesn't get bug fixes applied the way that stable does, and is slower to get them applied than unstable.
Not sure if that's true, of if it was true still current. And, as I said, I use testing myself. But I'd be careful about that "always".
It would need to be something that affected large numbers of people in most states violently. Even that might not be enough. Some legislators would favor big companies (or even just companies) even if a majority of their voters had written in objecting. (I've got at least one Senator that I feel that describes.)
While you are correct, you are too limited. It's not just the patent system, it's the entire legal system that is broken. The patent system and the copyright system are currently the most broken parts, but they are far from the only broken parts.
Principles: 1) Justice should be fast. Justice delayed is justice denied. 2) Justice shoule not depend on the relative wealth of the two parties EXCEPT that the accused party should be allowed to offer injured party sufficient wealth to "make them whole". There should be NO requirement that any offer be accepted. 3) Justice should not encourage the continued commission of the offenses. 4) Legally imposed penalties should be proportional to the damages caused.
To me these principles seem uncontroversial, though some of the conclusions I draw from them, especially the third, are relatively controversial.
P.S.: Despite the 4th principle, I am not in favor of the death penalty. Or of extremely long sentences. Or sentences that cause physical pain.
*IF* the description given is an accurate statement of the details of what the law says, then you are correct. However, as someone else pointed out, this is the preamble, and thus not an effective part of the law, only of the propaganda about the law.
OTOH, we don't know what will be proposed as the body (and if we did, we aren't lawyers, or not most of us), so we don't know what the law actually says, only what it claims are it's intentions.
For that matter, after it's introduced on the floor it will be subject to ammendments. So even if it were currently ideal, we wouldn't know what it would mean by the time it was passed.
That said, this looks like the kind of law that would benefit many large corporations, who dislike paying the patent trolls as much as anyone else does. So the real question is "How will it benefit those without deep pockets?" If the bar to getting your legal expenses covered is too high, then it will only benefit the wealthy...just how wealthy depends on where the bar is set.
OTOH, if the trolls can't get enough money to cover their expenses, they'll go into another line of work. So protecting the moderately wealthy might be all that's required to protect everybody.
I'm assuming that you're new in the countryside, so:
Do remember that corn is nortorious for destroying the soil, and alternate it with, say, beans. My grandfather used a four field system, where one field was cotton, on field was alfalfa, one field vegetables (usually boysenberries, but it varied), and one field was pasture. (Alfalfa counts as a bean. So does vetch. But if you don't have a grazing animal it gets more difficult. Beans would work, though, but that's a lot of beans. For his cotton you could use corn.)
OTOH, I don't know how much land you're talking about, so this may be overkill. For small plots you can plant corn and beans together. But you still need to let things lie fallow (or pasture) occasionally. (Artificial fertilizers don't solve this problem. If you depend on them, you'll destroy your land in a decade or so.)
For that matter, you can raise chickens on the fallow land. That works well, especially for small holdings. But move them around, as chickens will eat every plant they can reach. One good plan is to design your chicken pen to be easily moved, and move it once a week. Chickens aren't too picky, and are quite willing to live on wheels, so an old trailer is good. Particularly if you have one where you can replace the floor with chickenwire. It's hard to beat chicken shit as fertilizer, but it's a bit concentrated. So you move the pen to sit over the area that was just used as a chicken yard, and the chicken yard into an adjoining area that has too many weeds.
OTOH, listen to your neighbors. It's been decades since I lived out in the country. I told you about my grandfather, because *I* didn't do it or want to do it. Still, many people like the countryside. I disliked the continual work. I've got enough ideas of my own to keep me busy, and in the city is closer to bookstores and libraries. These days it's also closer to medical services (we all get older, unless we're unlucky).
Cheaper refining processes don't automatically deal well with lower grade ores. Some do, most don't.
One promissing approach is bioextraction. This is currently in use, I believe, in gold mining. Whether something analogous could be developed for other minerals is the question...but certainly doesn't seem implausible.
Warning: Bioextraction is not a particularly environmentally friendly process. IIUC the extraction of gold involves soaking mine tailings in a pit of acidic water. It's also not fast. These extremeophiles aren't noted for their rapid rate of growth, and they need to eat the rocks to get at the gold (which they excrete because they don't want it). But even though they are extremeophiles, that doesn't mean that they aren't touchy about just what conditions are suitable for them to grow in. Just because they can grow where other bacteria can't doesn't mean they can grow anywhere, they have their own special requirements (which I don't know, but it apparently includes a very acidic environment).
Note that after the bioextraction has run to completion, you are still left with something that you need to extract from the resultant mess. Only now it's in a form that may be more amenable to extraction by normal methods. Maybe it will dissolve in some particular regeant. With gold (IIUC) you end up with particles of metalic gold that are big enough to see. So now you use agitation to let the heavier particles settle to the bottom. Titanium, etc. would obviously need to be handled differently. Perhaps you could get them to excrete Titanium Acetate. That would be nice, if a bit implausible. It would depend on what bacteria would do the job, and how you could tailor it.
I think you may be a bit optomistic. Titanium may actually be common, but how common are high quality ores? This benefits one step of the production process, but I really doubt that it would drop the price by a factor of 10. Perhaps 5, perhaps less. Unless I'm misunderstanding, and this allows one to use rather low quality ores as the basis of extraction.
FWIW, the space shuttle was originally going to be made from Titanium, but it got switched to that ceramic tile system largely because the sources of Titanium ores were in a politically unstable part of the world. I believe that at the time it was called Rhodesia, but I don't know what it's called now, as I believe the country boundaries, as well as the names, have changed. (I think *THE* other source was the USSR. And what that translates into now I have even less idea, since I don't even know if it was in Sibera or the Caucasus mountains. Or elsewhere.)
To me this implies that suitable metalic ores are not common, not even at a moderately increased price. So reducing the costs of extraction may have a limited effect.
I've got one portable with Mate on it. It works. It's better than Gnome3. And I've just spent an entire day (well I was interrupted by other jobs, so say 2-3 hours) trying to figure out how to configure a printer. (I finally did it from a terminal, but the GUI tools just don't seem to be there.)
It's better than Gnome3, but that's a low bar.
I installed Cinnamon a few months ago, but it was too slow to stick with. Probably things that will be worked out with development, so I'll look at it again in another few months, unless I'm better satisfied with the desktop I have installed. (Truthfully, my only real problem with KDE3 is the stupid popup panels that there appears to be no way to turn off.... But it's a severe enough disfeature that I'm willing to conside alternatives. Unfortunately, one requirement imposed by my wife is that it MUST run the electric-sheep screensaver. This lets out lots of contenders....like xfce. (You were right, that was the desktop I was trying to remember.)
N.B.: There are lots of instructions for running electric-sheep around that depend on it running in the xscreen-saver. The current version fails when you try to do that. Those instructions are for an old version whose servers have been disconnected.
Actually fusion is a bit worse than problematical. Most current designs for fusion reactors will generate more radioactive waste/watt-hour than do current fission reactors, even if they work out as the most optomistic proponents claim.
One reason that "cold-fusion" attracted so much attention, even with the scanty evidence provided and lack of decent theory, was that it DIDN'T have that kind of a waste problem.
The really wierd thing is that this hasn't resulted in backing for fast-breeders, which can "burn up" the waste that they produce until there is almost no resulting radioactive waste. It's true that they appear more complex than current reactors, but that can't be the whole explanation. (I've heard that it's because they couldn't be used to make bombs, but I don't believe that one. If I understand the design correctly that's just wrong...which is unfortunate. I've heard the same thing about Thorium reactors, and I don't believe that either...though I don't believe that the Thorium reactors solve the radioactive waste problem.)
There are good long-term reasons for developing fusion reactors. Without them we won't be building starships or mining the Oort cloud. I'm much less impressed by the short-term reasons, or the reasoning that is frequently used to justify them.
Well developed fusion reactors shoudl be able to give us the solar system out to about Saturn. Perhaps Neptune. But note that I don't expect these engines to be small. Or fast. Think outrigger canoes, not airplanes if you want a good cultural model. Melanesian/Polynesian conquest of the Pacific. It's not a really good model, though, because communications are realtively fast and cheap, even if you get latencies of several days.
But note that this causes a problem. The polynesian colonists could build their own outrigger canoes. They didn't need to pay someone else to, so they didn't need to pay anyone back. Probably what will happen is that corporations will build these things for their own uses, and sell them off when they get old, or perhaps the corporation will BE the colonists, and will buy a ship that someone else makes. In which case it had damn well better be open source. Fixing it when you're at a remote location will be a significant problem.
Lots of possibilities here that I've never encountered a story about...well, except MacroLife by George Zebrowski. Because the problems aren't those typically considered interesting, and the pacing is SLOW!!. But it's one that I think could work. (For some other ideas see the "Rosinante" series. Forget the author. Lots of politics that I didn't find too plausible, but interesting. The real question is "What changes would need to be made in that social system for it to be viable?" I never decided. I've been re-reading it perhaps once a decade, trying to figure out what parts are plausible. I *like* the idea of a robot prophet.)
FWIW, I believe that they are more destructive of bats than of birds. This could probably be fixed with appropriately designed noisemakers, but nobody seems to have done that yet.
Sorry, the escape velocity of Mars is too low for that to work. This may create a short-term denser atmosphere, but it won't stick around long enough for life to evolve to multicellular level...unless it's already present.
OTOH, it could shield the surface from UV for a few million years, and might be enough for people to find useful. (You'd still need a pressure suit, but with less pressure differential, it could be a lot more flexible. And it might make extracting Oxygen from the Martian atmosphere a lot more feasible.)
Still, at the pressure that would result after the collision, and the temperature, water would freeze into ice at the equator, and the ice would sublime directly into vapor with no liquid phase. (At least that's my rough estimate.)
What you really need to do is shield the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere from UV. A really tricky proposition. But if you could do that, then the water and other gasses could stick around. (UV splits off the Hydrogen, with escapes almost immediately, and raises the speed to the other molecules, so that some of them also escape.) IIRC, by no means guaranteed, O2 won't escape from Mars, but O will. So you REALLY need to keep the UV out of the atmosphere if you want to keep said atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not reputable, that's "peer reviewed". Reputatable means that people who have enough power and influence to affect what large numbers of people hear approve of what you say. Sometimes they come to the same answer, but by far not always.
E.g., the New York Times generally supports a particular flavor of conservative political action. Things that it favors because of this get better treatment than things that it disapproves of. This is not an objective reporting, despite what their slogan suggests. ("fit to print" is not objective, but subjective.)
OTOH, I will admit that I've never been at the scene of a news event covered by the New York Times, and compared their coverage to what I observed. Perhaps they are more accurate than the "reputable" papers that I've seen coverage of stories where I knew what I saw. But in the times that I've been able to check, NONE of the major news media gave an even approximately fair writeup. Pictures were taken from carefully chosen angles, e.g., to get the most emotionally intense reaction. Sometimes several pictures of the same event were taken at slightly different angles and then presentes as if (not explicitly stated!) they were separate occurances. Etc. The news was highly processed to make it "more interesting". Other times they just refuse to cover a story, presumably for political reasons. And sometimes they give a story much more coverage than it "deserves" for political reasons. Most of the time, though it means processessing events to make them more "interesting" (which usually means more shocking).
N.B.: I cannot even imagine a way of avoiding the kinds of biases I've been mentioning. Not if you want to stay in business. But this doesn't make them trustworthy.
If there weren't anything but the earth and the sun, you would have a point. But you've left out not only the rest of the solar system, but even the moon. This doesn't work.
N.B.: You can't ignore both Jupiter and Saturn and have a prediction that's even good for a few decades.
But adapting them to trustworthy transactions over the web is not straightforwards.
Do you really think the New York Times or the BBC are unbiased?
Sorry. There *is* no unbiased source for news of any description. All you can do is check with multiple sources, and try to figure out what's most likely to be really going on. All you *know* is what you directly perceive, and even that's a bit dubious. (Consider the man in the Gorilla suit that walked across the basketball game. Or the demonstration where someone is stabbed with a banana.)
Actually, I stopped watching TV. (I'm not the original poster, but...)
I don't have Flash installed on my system. I don't have Java enabled in the browser. Whan a site gets too annoying I either stop visiting it or turn off Javascript. (But turning off Javascript is annoying, since many sites that I visit use it reasonably, like Slashdot. So I generally just stop visiting.)
I once used Ad-blocker. For about a week I think. I decided it wasn't worth the aggravation.
I'm not sure that you can express the initial conditions as a finite series. If you can, then it looks as if you might be right. (Which doesn't say it would be possible to solve it in any feasible time on any feasible equipment.)
So, OK, MAYBE there is an analytic solution. But I doubt it, because I don't think the initial conditions can be satisfied. (OTOH, it's been decades since I even *looked* an a differential equation, so my opinions aren't worth weighing heavily.)
Even then, though, as we agree, the chaos in the system makes it so sensitive to initial conditions and perturbations (passing stars, e.g., even at multiple light years) that accurate prediction in detail isn't possible, which at a later time becomes much more general.
SDL is also System Description Language, and probably several other things. I suspect that XBMC may really be unique, at least within the field of computers, and Wayland also, but a tiny bit of description for each (perhaps with a link) would not have been amiss.
Yes it is. We can't show which side of the sun the Earth will be on exactly 10,000,000 years from now (measured in standard seconds, etc.) And we can't show that it will still be orbiting the sun some number of years after that. The errors increase without limit, but slowly.
Note that some, but only a small part, of the error is due to unknowns, say astroids we haven't mapped the orbit of. Most of it is due to chaos. The calculations are EXTREMELY sensitive to initial conditions AND to errors in calculation at each step. We don't have analytical solutions, only recursive approximation solutions.
But do note that we can't measure the error in our predictions of where the Earth will be exactly one year from now. The errors are both cumulative and unnoticably small in each step.
Not really. There are many GUI applications that delegate the actual performance of the functions to other parts of the code. Sometimes libraries, and sometimes separate application. No *real* difference here, except for packaging.
OTOH, that's a "slippery slope", as libraries tend to be integrated into code in ways that separate applications can't be. But still, it's basically the same thing.
That said, I will admit that MOST GUI applications are of the more tightly integrated variety. There are good performance reasons for that. But it's not clear that as computers develop an increasing number of cores that the advantage will remain with the integrated applications.
FWIW, every distro has its drawbacks Debian has a couple.
1) Stable tends to be too stale. I always seem to need some feature that won't install with that set of libraries. (Well, not right after release time, but not long, either.)
2) Testing usually breaks badly at least once during a development cycle.
The way I deal with that is to have two different install partitions. Occasionally I'll swtich off of testing for a week while they sort out a bad problem.
OTOH, many distros have too much magic smoke and mirrors for me. (I'll grant that even Debian has gone that way a bit, but not like, say, Mandrake or SUSE.) Some distros still use lilo. I may prefer grub to grub2, but lilo is a pain. Fedora locks partitions so if you boot from another system, you can't read them. (Actually, I suspect it could be configured to NOT to that, but since Red Hat dropped the "Professional Edition" without warning, I'm not willing to invest that much time in configuring them. I'm pretty sure it's intended as a "security feature", but it doesn't protect against the kinds of circumstances I encounter. It just barfs them up.) Most of the others I can't remember the exact reason I didn't stick with them. Frequently it was something I *could* have dealt with, but didn't choose to bother.
Currently I have my wife on Mint+KDE. Up until a recent upgrade I had her on Ubuntu LTS, but when gnome2 went away, she wanted something else. (*Her* reason is to have the electric-sheep screensaver. Silly to me, but important to her.) KDE is a lot heavier than the desktop I would prefer to have on her laptop, gnome2 was better. But gnome3 was just rediculous *AND* didn't have her required feature.
I use testing also, but I've heard that unstable is safer because testing doesn't get bug fixes applied the way that stable does, and is slower to get them applied than unstable.
Not sure if that's true, of if it was true still current. And, as I said, I use testing myself. But I'd be careful about that "always".
It would need to be something that affected large numbers of people in most states violently. Even that might not be enough. Some legislators would favor big companies (or even just companies) even if a majority of their voters had written in objecting. (I've got at least one Senator that I feel that describes.)
I'm not thrilled witht he manufacturers controlling the keys either, but I will agree it makes *more* sense. Just not much.
I doubt that he's clueless, and I suspect that astroturfer is more precise than troll.
Please remember that not all anonymous cowards are the same person, or represent the same entity.
While you are correct, you are too limited. It's not just the patent system, it's the entire legal system that is broken. The patent system and the copyright system are currently the most broken parts, but they are far from the only broken parts.
Principles:
1) Justice should be fast. Justice delayed is justice denied.
2) Justice shoule not depend on the relative wealth of the two parties EXCEPT that the accused party should be allowed to offer injured party sufficient wealth to "make them whole". There should be NO requirement that any offer be accepted.
3) Justice should not encourage the continued commission of the offenses.
4) Legally imposed penalties should be proportional to the damages caused.
To me these principles seem uncontroversial, though some of the conclusions I draw from them, especially the third, are relatively controversial.
P.S.: Despite the 4th principle, I am not in favor of the death penalty. Or of extremely long sentences. Or sentences that cause physical pain.
*IF* the description given is an accurate statement of the details of what the law says, then you are correct. However, as someone else pointed out, this is the preamble, and thus not an effective part of the law, only of the propaganda about the law.
OTOH, we don't know what will be proposed as the body (and if we did, we aren't lawyers, or not most of us), so we don't know what the law actually says, only what it claims are it's intentions.
For that matter, after it's introduced on the floor it will be subject to ammendments. So even if it were currently ideal, we wouldn't know what it would mean by the time it was passed.
That said, this looks like the kind of law that would benefit many large corporations, who dislike paying the patent trolls as much as anyone else does. So the real question is "How will it benefit those without deep pockets?" If the bar to getting your legal expenses covered is too high, then it will only benefit the wealthy...just how wealthy depends on where the bar is set.
OTOH, if the trolls can't get enough money to cover their expenses, they'll go into another line of work. So protecting the moderately wealthy might be all that's required to protect everybody.
You can guess that, but frequently the details specified don't do anything reasonably described by the preamble.
We'll have to wait and see, but I'm pessimistic.
Nice. That sounds closer to the bookstores, etc. than I am.
I'm assuming that you're new in the countryside, so:
Do remember that corn is nortorious for destroying the soil, and alternate it with, say, beans. My grandfather used a four field system, where one field was cotton, on field was alfalfa, one field vegetables (usually boysenberries, but it varied), and one field was pasture. (Alfalfa counts as a bean. So does vetch. But if you don't have a grazing animal it gets more difficult. Beans would work, though, but that's a lot of beans. For his cotton you could use corn.)
OTOH, I don't know how much land you're talking about, so this may be overkill. For small plots you can plant corn and beans together. But you still need to let things lie fallow (or pasture) occasionally. (Artificial fertilizers don't solve this problem. If you depend on them, you'll destroy your land in a decade or so.)
For that matter, you can raise chickens on the fallow land. That works well, especially for small holdings. But move them around, as chickens will eat every plant they can reach. One good plan is to design your chicken pen to be easily moved, and move it once a week. Chickens aren't too picky, and are quite willing to live on wheels, so an old trailer is good. Particularly if you have one where you can replace the floor with chickenwire. It's hard to beat chicken shit as fertilizer, but it's a bit concentrated. So you move the pen to sit over the area that was just used as a chicken yard, and the chicken yard into an adjoining area that has too many weeds.
OTOH, listen to your neighbors. It's been decades since I lived out in the country. I told you about my grandfather, because *I* didn't do it or want to do it. Still, many people like the countryside. I disliked the continual work. I've got enough ideas of my own to keep me busy, and in the city is closer to bookstores and libraries. These days it's also closer to medical services (we all get older, unless we're unlucky).
Cheaper refining processes don't automatically deal well with lower grade ores. Some do, most don't.
One promissing approach is bioextraction. This is currently in use, I believe, in gold mining. Whether something analogous could be developed for other minerals is the question...but certainly doesn't seem implausible.
Warning: Bioextraction is not a particularly environmentally friendly process. IIUC the extraction of gold involves soaking mine tailings in a pit of acidic water. It's also not fast. These extremeophiles aren't noted for their rapid rate of growth, and they need to eat the rocks to get at the gold (which they excrete because they don't want it). But even though they are extremeophiles, that doesn't mean that they aren't touchy about just what conditions are suitable for them to grow in. Just because they can grow where other bacteria can't doesn't mean they can grow anywhere, they have their own special requirements (which I don't know, but it apparently includes a very acidic environment).
Note that after the bioextraction has run to completion, you are still left with something that you need to extract from the resultant mess. Only now it's in a form that may be more amenable to extraction by normal methods. Maybe it will dissolve in some particular regeant. With gold (IIUC) you end up with particles of metalic gold that are big enough to see. So now you use agitation to let the heavier particles settle to the bottom. Titanium, etc. would obviously need to be handled differently. Perhaps you could get them to excrete Titanium Acetate. That would be nice, if a bit implausible. It would depend on what bacteria would do the job, and how you could tailor it.
I think you may be a bit optomistic. Titanium may actually be common, but how common are high quality ores? This benefits one step of the production process, but I really doubt that it would drop the price by a factor of 10. Perhaps 5, perhaps less. Unless I'm misunderstanding, and this allows one to use rather low quality ores as the basis of extraction.
FWIW, the space shuttle was originally going to be made from Titanium, but it got switched to that ceramic tile system largely because the sources of Titanium ores were in a politically unstable part of the world. I believe that at the time it was called Rhodesia, but I don't know what it's called now, as I believe the country boundaries, as well as the names, have changed. (I think *THE* other source was the USSR. And what that translates into now I have even less idea, since I don't even know if it was in Sibera or the Caucasus mountains. Or elsewhere.)
To me this implies that suitable metalic ores are not common, not even at a moderately increased price. So reducing the costs of extraction may have a limited effect.
I've got one portable with Mate on it. It works. It's better than Gnome3. And I've just spent an entire day (well I was interrupted by other jobs, so say 2-3 hours) trying to figure out how to configure a printer. (I finally did it from a terminal, but the GUI tools just don't seem to be there.)
It's better than Gnome3, but that's a low bar.
I installed Cinnamon a few months ago, but it was too slow to stick with. Probably things that will be worked out with development, so I'll look at it again in another few months, unless I'm better satisfied with the desktop I have installed. (Truthfully, my only real problem with KDE3 is the stupid popup panels that there appears to be no way to turn off. ... But it's a severe enough disfeature that I'm willing to conside alternatives. Unfortunately, one requirement imposed by my wife is that it MUST run the electric-sheep screensaver. This lets out lots of contenders....like xfce. (You were right, that was the desktop I was trying to remember.)
N.B.: There are lots of instructions for running electric-sheep around that depend on it running in the xscreen-saver. The current version fails when you try to do that. Those instructions are for an old version whose servers have been disconnected.
Actually fusion is a bit worse than problematical. Most current designs for fusion reactors will generate more radioactive waste/watt-hour than do current fission reactors, even if they work out as the most optomistic proponents claim.
One reason that "cold-fusion" attracted so much attention, even with the scanty evidence provided and lack of decent theory, was that it DIDN'T have that kind of a waste problem.
The really wierd thing is that this hasn't resulted in backing for fast-breeders, which can "burn up" the waste that they produce until there is almost no resulting radioactive waste. It's true that they appear more complex than current reactors, but that can't be the whole explanation. (I've heard that it's because they couldn't be used to make bombs, but I don't believe that one. If I understand the design correctly that's just wrong...which is unfortunate. I've heard the same thing about Thorium reactors, and I don't believe that either...though I don't believe that the Thorium reactors solve the radioactive waste problem.)
There are good long-term reasons for developing fusion reactors. Without them we won't be building starships or mining the Oort cloud. I'm much less impressed by the short-term reasons, or the reasoning that is frequently used to justify them.
Well developed fusion reactors shoudl be able to give us the solar system out to about Saturn. Perhaps Neptune. But note that I don't expect these engines to be small. Or fast. Think outrigger canoes, not airplanes if you want a good cultural model. Melanesian/Polynesian conquest of the Pacific. It's not a really good model, though, because communications are realtively fast and cheap, even if you get latencies of several days.
But note that this causes a problem. The polynesian colonists could build their own outrigger canoes. They didn't need to pay someone else to, so they didn't need to pay anyone back. Probably what will happen is that corporations will build these things for their own uses, and sell them off when they get old, or perhaps the corporation will BE the colonists, and will buy a ship that someone else makes. In which case it had damn well better be open source. Fixing it when you're at a remote location will be a significant problem.
Lots of possibilities here that I've never encountered a story about...well, except MacroLife by George Zebrowski. Because the problems aren't those typically considered interesting, and the pacing is SLOW!!. But it's one that I think could work. (For some other ideas see the "Rosinante" series. Forget the author. Lots of politics that I didn't find too plausible, but interesting. The real question is "What changes would need to be made in that social system for it to be viable?" I never decided. I've been re-reading it perhaps once a decade, trying to figure out what parts are plausible. I *like* the idea of a robot prophet.)
FWIW, I believe that they are more destructive of bats than of birds. This could probably be fixed with appropriately designed noisemakers, but nobody seems to have done that yet.
Sorry, the escape velocity of Mars is too low for that to work. This may create a short-term denser atmosphere, but it won't stick around long enough for life to evolve to multicellular level...unless it's already present.
OTOH, it could shield the surface from UV for a few million years, and might be enough for people to find useful. (You'd still need a pressure suit, but with less pressure differential, it could be a lot more flexible. And it might make extracting Oxygen from the Martian atmosphere a lot more feasible.)
Still, at the pressure that would result after the collision, and the temperature, water would freeze into ice at the equator, and the ice would sublime directly into vapor with no liquid phase. (At least that's my rough estimate.)
What you really need to do is shield the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere from UV. A really tricky proposition. But if you could do that, then the water and other gasses could stick around. (UV splits off the Hydrogen, with escapes almost immediately, and raises the speed to the other molecules, so that some of them also escape.) IIRC, by no means guaranteed, O2 won't escape from Mars, but O will. So you REALLY need to keep the UV out of the atmosphere if you want to keep said atmosphere.