The place I'm aware of that it's really used is electric trains (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Even there there tends (tended?) to be one electric motor per carriage (a module of two train wheels that is only sprung in its connection to the car). And I *do* remember that BART paid extra to have fancy rails that were only joined once per mile (and I think those joins were welds), though they said that was to reduce noise.
This seems to confirm your idea of where that approach is useful. I had never understood why it wasn't more widely used.
But there could be a scaling problem. Even with normal cylinders (internal combustion), there are optimum sizes, and when you get away from them you've got one problem or another. (Which, of course, is why V-8s are more powerful than V-6s. You don't get good results by just increasing the cylinder bore.)
I can't see a ship run by a thousand engines. Even at each engine being 60% efficient, and generating electricity rather than mechanical power, you'd have a never ending repair job. (OK, that was a wild guess scaling up job, but ships come in all sizes, so I claim it's fair.)
It may be light, but it needs to run at a high temperature. So if it's not running, then it will cool off rapidly. Which could cause it to be both slow and inefficient at getting back to working optimally.
A woman carrying a child cannot run these long distances.
Known hunter-gatherers do not practice agriculture, yet they are not, in the sense you describe, nomads. (True, they *do* use relatively advanced weaponry, like blow-pipes, arrows, and spear chuckers. These, however, merely make hunting safer and more effective.)
I find your proposed ancestral existence implausible, and would only believe it if there were clear and convincing evidence. Frankly, I'd sooner accept the "aquatic ape" hypothesis, which has at least some plausibility.
Yes, but people are not carnivores, they are omnivores. Health tends to suffer significantly if the plant component of the diet is reduced. Also hunting is relatively dangerous, so women would tend to avoid the activity. Social organization is also evolutionary. Human society isn't that of a chimpanzee or gorilla. We are sexually dimorphic with different bodies specialized for different purposes. Women's bodies are not specialized for the same purposes as those of men, and their social skills are also different. Women's psyche is more specialized for child care. Men have only mild inclinations in that regard. Many men actually have an aversion. And children can't run.
More, when it's important that the population increase, women are generally forbidden to do dangerous work, even if they want to. Because the rate of population growth is much more dependent on the number of women than on the number of men. So, again, and for a separate set of reason, women would not have been hunters.
Additionally, very few women *want* to hunt, while the desire is common among men. Another indication.
So I cannot accept your picture without convincing evidence. (I will, however, agree that my evidence falls short of clearly convincing.)
The stress I was thinking of was the carrying back, and I disagree that the women went on the run. Male bodies ended up designed for that, women's bodies much less so. So there probably wasn't a direct selection for the capability. (At least not one that was strong enough to override the need for wider hips.)
When males are selected for a trait, women tend to also pick it up unless it's fairly strongly selected against.
ASCII doesn't suffice, unless you impress (not burn) it onto CDROMs with glass protective plates (not plastic). Then it's probably good for a couple of hundred years. But modern burned CDROMs are probably good for a decade or two. And DVDs are good for a much shorter span of time. (No good estimate, but some people have told me a couple of years.)
OTOH, I don't know how long flash drives are good for. And hard disks *might* be good for a century if they are undisturbed in a constant temperature room. Of course you'd need to open them up, re-lube the bearings and seal them up again before you could even try.
The best thing I've heard of for durable media isn't actually on the market. It's a MEM device (slightly too large to call a nanotech device) where each bit is basically an iron rod in one of two positions. If it locks in place, you could still read it's value with a laser. The designer claims, however, that this wouldn't be necessary, so that will be an expensive recovery procedure. But one that will be possible. It's one or zero depending on which way the iron bar is slid. Supposedly it's as dense as a Flash Rom, permanent, fast, and durable. But it only exists (existed?) as a lab model. But it would be a durable RAM memory. Even if the emergency recovery procedure was unreasonably expensive, if *would* be possible.
Well, there weren't "massive plagues" until after the creation of cities. So that's just about at the tail end of evolutionary time. You probably couldn't tell an average person then from an average person now by looking at his genes. (There's a few differences, but not many, and they don't appear significant.)
So recorded history isn't in it. When the Bible talks about "Methuselah lived 900 years", that's almost certainly a poetic exaggeration. But it's not totally rubbish. People probably lived a lot longer before they started living in cities than they did when the Bible was written (i.e., before sanitation).
For that matter, I recall a grave of an old woman, probably a potter, from the times when Neanderthals still walked the earth. (And were still distinguishable from Cro Magnon. I'm of the camp that believes that the two varieties interbred, but that Neanderthal women had narrow hips that were often a death sentence when they had a Cro Magnon baby, with it's wider head.) She was quite elderly, and had suffered from a stroke at least years, probably decades, before her death. Of course, I'm presuming that the heads they found were self-portraits. This can't be proven. But they're proof that there was SOMEONE who looked like an 80+ year old woman with a stroke way back then. And I don't believe we have very many realistic human images from that long ago.
Most of what you say is correct. The exception is "not getting a short high stress event (killing an animal) and then relaxing the rest of the day". Humans, pre-bow & spear-chucker, were cursory hunters. This meant they ran down the game rather than ambushing it. (People being people, they probably did both, and only ran when the ambush didn't work...but that was a large portion of the time.) Then they had to get the game back home without being tackled on the way by a lion equiv. This was a high stress event that went on for hours. But then they probably did take a day or two off, at least if it was a sizable prize. (And we aren't usually talking about solitary hunters. They came later. In most environs we are talking about a hunting band of around 12 people. Better chance for a workable ambush, better defense against predators while on the way home (and smelling of blood). And help in carrying the booty. (What size prey they tackled would depend not only on where they were, but on what kind of weapons they had. You don't tackle a rhinoceros with a spear with a wooden point.
P.S.: The "noble hunter" was also probably a primary scavenger. 12 people with spears could back off most predators and save themselves the chase. But that, again, wasn't something they could count on happening across.
When the spear chucker came in, it created a whole new ball game. Then people could attack from a distance, without getting close enough to expose themselves to danger. But that wasn't until after Homo Sapiens had diverged from Homo Neanderthalis. (They don't have the correct shoulder joint.)
N.B.: I am not an archaeologist. Or an anthropologist. Some of this info may be discarded theories. (But I don't think so.)
Well, if the code is no longer in use, *I* wouldn't have a problem with someone relicensing it. Of course, it would continue to be available under it's original license. But if FOSS users either don't have enough interest to continue with it, or have come up with better ways to do things, why would anyone object?
Mind you, it might be difficult to show that most FOSS software has gone out of publication, since the form of publication most often used is hosting on a site, and many sites have a LONG archival back reach. You could probably find the original version of Slackware if you went searching for it seriously. And anything that is put on Sourceforge is supposed to stay there "forever". So even if it's abandoned, it's not out of publication.
The actual way that GPL enforcement seems to happen is: 1) Some company decides to develop something based on available code. 2) The release it in binary. (I think there's a lot of backstory here, but we never hear it.) 3) Somebody looks at the project, analyzes the binary, and says "Hey, I know what code that's based on!" 4) Somebody asks for the code and is refused. 5) The EFF lawyer asks for the code, and the code is made available.
Now if nobody does step 3, then there won't be any objection filed. The risk is minimal.
There's only two things I object to about the deals that I've heard of that Google did with the libraries: 1) The deal prevents anyone else from doing the same thing. and 2) The scans are so bad as to be nearly (and occasionally not just nearly) illegible.
Other than that I've been fine with it.
P.S.: I've only heard of a couple of deals, not of any large number. Harvard and the Chicago public library IIRC. But they were both said to contain the last existing copy of some works.
I agree it's often easier said than done. So what? As long as you let a proprietary program hold your data hostage, the situation will continue to get worse and more expensive.
As I suggested it took me years to find a suitable application. But this didn't mean I stopped looking. If I'd found it earlier it would have saved a bunch of time, cost, and effort, but I didn't. (Actually, I think the score editors only got good enough last year, but I wasn't watching all the time.) But now the situation has stopped getting worse. Now I can save my data in open formats, and it can be read by multiple programs (even if only one formats it properly yet). But because I waited so long, I've got lots of data that needs to be converted from three different incompatible proprietary formats. (And, no, midi won't do. They can all export midi, but midi doesn't even keep track of the length of the shortest note, only of relative note length. And it loses all formatting information.)
And do what for other applications that you use and which fail in Wine?
Find alternate applications. I'll grant it may take a bit of searching. And transfer your data to an open format. The longer you wait, the more expensive it will end up being.
It took years to switch my wife, because she was using music score editing software, and now we've got the problem of converting the data. But the problem is no longer getting worse. (Or it wouldn't be, except that the computers with the other OSs are getting older, and thus nearer to failure. When they die, unconverted data will be lost. (Backups don't do any good if you can't read the data formats.)
It took me over a decade to realize just how bad closed proprietary formats holding my data was. Don't you be as stupid. It was an expensive learning process.
If you'd ever read an article that covered an event you had personal knowledge of, you'd *know* what a work of fiction most "researched" news stories are. They damn well should give sources. They don't because most of their stories are a pack of lies, and they don't want it easily proven.
P.S.: I don't know if it's still true, but in past decades, in the stories that I checked out, the lies generally took the form of deliberate omission of information required to form an accurate picture of what was happening, rather than actual fabrication of facts. There have been, however, many indications that they no longer so restrict themselves. The footage of the "Tiamen Square" uprising in China where the people shown were speaking in English was the first indication. Not that it's impossible that this could happen, but there was sufficient question raised about it that the Network (can't remember which one) admitted that it was a "docudrama". The first time I ever heard that word. And they didn't admit it until a week or so after the event.
P.P.S.: Which network: ABC, NBC, or CBS. It was one of those.
I'm aware of thaat text. That does specify what was written to justify copyrights. It doesn't say what "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" means. To me it means the works become publicly available. I.e., public domain.
You demonstrated your ability to quote, but not to understand.
Jobs isn't exactly a marketing person, more a sort of technological missionary. And when Sculley was running it, Apple tanked. Sculley *was* a marketing person (imported from Pepsi).
Even Sculley has admitted that he was the wrong choice as director. He's a marketer, and a good one. But that wasn't the right specialty.
Both, except that it would have been 4/8ths, except that they'd previously lost the other three.
I.e., if rights are determined legally, then they are within their rights. If rights are determined morally, then they are immoral.
If you believe "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights", the the usage is clearly moral. But if you're a lawyer, then it's the other way around.
Actually, *I* never liked Ultima. And *I* don't think it's right that copyrights should last that long. 5-10 years is reasonable, if there's no DRM. If there's DRM, then the work should not be copyrightable. The entire *purpose* of copyrights is to get works into the public domain. It has not other justification for existence. So DRM should make the work uncopyrightable. And the period of copyright should be long enough that most of the profit can be extracted from the predictable customers, but no longer. So 5-10 years. I can understand reasons for making it shorter, but I don't accept them. The only reason I can understand for allowing it to be longer is greed, and that shouldn't be encouraged.
Ada has several problems that are difficult to overcome. The first one that occurs to me is that string literals have their length as a part of their type. One can generally work around this, but when one needs to work around something so central to the language, you've got problems. Another is that garbage collection is optional, and almost never implemented. This means you can't depend on it being present. Then there's the syntax of their object model, which clearly indicates that objects were an afterthought. It's awkward to use, even though it's powerful enough. Then there's the way they manage memory.
Ada has it's niche, where it's clearly the best language, but it's a *small* niche. It *can* be used nearly anywhere, but in many places it's quite clearly a kludge. (Databases and GUIs come to mind.)
That's a bit of a mistake. D can call routines from C libraries, but C code is not compatible with D. This can cause problems when the library wants to make callbacks. It can also be a bit difficult to figure out. It's MUCH better than the FFI interfaces found in many non-C languages, but it's far from perfect. You need to rewrite any complex header files before you can call many routines.
It *should* be relatively simple to wrap C libraries to be called by D, but because the developer community is so small, this is only occasionally done, and tends to be done once and then forgotten. Which means that after awhile it stops working, but there's no notice that it's stopped working. So there is a collection of obsolete library ports, and a few that still work. And many that were started, but never finished.
All in all, this has lead me to look for another language, even though I really like D as a language (except for the compile time features...but I don't like those in any languages, except, perhaps, LISP and Scheme).
The real problem with D is lack of libraries. There are IDEs, though not fancy ones. But the lack of libraries is a constant source of grief. To the point that I started looking elsewhere. (They've also got a problem with garbage collection, and in some circumstances it can spend a hideous amount of time there. But that's rather clearly a bug that will be cleaned up. [And I don't even recall whether that's D1 or D2 [D2 is the developmental version. D1 just gets bug fixes.])
Yes, Google's stated goal is to index all information in the world. This is, in itself, neither good nor bad. And they want to make it available. I'm a bit less comfortable with this. Why do I think that information on me will be available far before that on those who have power over me? But I *do* feel that.
I've been dubious about Google ever since they got that court decision that gave them, and nobody else, the right to index and show list all out of print books. On the one hand, it seems to have been the judge himself that came up with the idea, and I can sure see why they wouldn't dare turn it down. But on the other it drastically tilts the playing field against smaller companies. (It was only largely tilted before.) Then there's the contracts that they signed with various libraries to scan all the books in their collections, which prevented them from signing equivalent contracts with any other company. I just plain don't believe that those terms were requested by the librarians. So that counts as believing that they lied as well as acted to suppress competition from anyone else. (And the scans were often of such an inferior quality that it also counts as destroying information that they didn't bother to properly collect.)
So I'm not real pleased with Google. It's just that, bad as they are, they are far superior to those they are up against. (But at one point I thought that MS was ethically superior to IBM, also. And maybe it was. IBM changed, and the moral defects of MS became more obvious. I don't know how much of which happened.)
But centralized powers cannot be trusted in the hands of humans. Even if the current custodians are, in face, incorruptible, they will be replaced. And incorruptible people in positions of power are few and far between. Until trustworthy custodians exist, the only solution is decentralization. (And the trustworthy custodians will not, as I said, be people. So there may be a bit of a wait.)
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The place I'm aware of that it's really used is electric trains (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Even there there tends (tended?) to be one electric motor per carriage (a module of two train wheels that is only sprung in its connection to the car). And I *do* remember that BART paid extra to have fancy rails that were only joined once per mile (and I think those joins were welds), though they said that was to reduce noise.
This seems to confirm your idea of where that approach is useful. I had never understood why it wasn't more widely used.
But there could be a scaling problem. Even with normal cylinders (internal combustion), there are optimum sizes, and when you get away from them you've got one problem or another. (Which, of course, is why V-8s are more powerful than V-6s. You don't get good results by just increasing the cylinder bore.)
I can't see a ship run by a thousand engines. Even at each engine being 60% efficient, and generating electricity rather than mechanical power, you'd have a never ending repair job. (OK, that was a wild guess scaling up job, but ships come in all sizes, so I claim it's fair.)
It may be light, but it needs to run at a high temperature. So if it's not running, then it will cool off rapidly. Which could cause it to be both slow and inefficient at getting back to working optimally.
A woman carrying a child cannot run these long distances.
Known hunter-gatherers do not practice agriculture, yet they are not, in the sense you describe, nomads. (True, they *do* use relatively advanced weaponry, like blow-pipes, arrows, and spear chuckers. These, however, merely make hunting safer and more effective.)
I find your proposed ancestral existence implausible, and would only believe it if there were clear and convincing evidence. Frankly, I'd sooner accept the "aquatic ape" hypothesis, which has at least some plausibility.
Yes, but people are not carnivores, they are omnivores. Health tends to suffer significantly if the plant component of the diet is reduced. Also hunting is relatively dangerous, so women would tend to avoid the activity. Social organization is also evolutionary. Human society isn't that of a chimpanzee or gorilla. We are sexually dimorphic with different bodies specialized for different purposes. Women's bodies are not specialized for the same purposes as those of men, and their social skills are also different. Women's psyche is more specialized for child care. Men have only mild inclinations in that regard. Many men actually have an aversion. And children can't run.
More, when it's important that the population increase, women are generally forbidden to do dangerous work, even if they want to. Because the rate of population growth is much more dependent on the number of women than on the number of men. So, again, and for a separate set of reason, women would not have been hunters.
Additionally, very few women *want* to hunt, while the desire is common among men. Another indication.
So I cannot accept your picture without convincing evidence. (I will, however, agree that my evidence falls short of clearly convincing.)
The stress I was thinking of was the carrying back, and I disagree that the women went on the run. Male bodies ended up designed for that, women's bodies much less so. So there probably wasn't a direct selection for the capability. (At least not one that was strong enough to override the need for wider hips.)
When males are selected for a trait, women tend to also pick it up unless it's fairly strongly selected against.
ASCII doesn't suffice, unless you impress (not burn) it onto CDROMs with glass protective plates (not plastic). Then it's probably good for a couple of hundred years. But modern burned CDROMs are probably good for a decade or two. And DVDs are good for a much shorter span of time. (No good estimate, but some people have told me a couple of years.)
OTOH, I don't know how long flash drives are good for. And hard disks *might* be good for a century if they are undisturbed in a constant temperature room. Of course you'd need to open them up, re-lube the bearings and seal them up again before you could even try.
The best thing I've heard of for durable media isn't actually on the market. It's a MEM device (slightly too large to call a nanotech device) where each bit is basically an iron rod in one of two positions. If it locks in place, you could still read it's value with a laser. The designer claims, however, that this wouldn't be necessary, so that will be an expensive recovery procedure. But one that will be possible. It's one or zero depending on which way the iron bar is slid. Supposedly it's as dense as a Flash Rom, permanent, fast, and durable. But it only exists (existed?) as a lab model. But it would be a durable RAM memory. Even if the emergency recovery procedure was unreasonably expensive, if *would* be possible.
Well, there weren't "massive plagues" until after the creation of cities. So that's just about at the tail end of evolutionary time. You probably couldn't tell an average person then from an average person now by looking at his genes. (There's a few differences, but not many, and they don't appear significant.)
So recorded history isn't in it. When the Bible talks about "Methuselah lived 900 years", that's almost certainly a poetic exaggeration. But it's not totally rubbish. People probably lived a lot longer before they started living in cities than they did when the Bible was written (i.e., before sanitation).
For that matter, I recall a grave of an old woman, probably a potter, from the times when Neanderthals still walked the earth. (And were still distinguishable from Cro Magnon. I'm of the camp that believes that the two varieties interbred, but that Neanderthal women had narrow hips that were often a death sentence when they had a Cro Magnon baby, with it's wider head.) She was quite elderly, and had suffered from a stroke at least years, probably decades, before her death. Of course, I'm presuming that the heads they found were self-portraits. This can't be proven. But they're proof that there was SOMEONE who looked like an 80+ year old woman with a stroke way back then. And I don't believe we have very many realistic human images from that long ago.
Most of what you say is correct. The exception is "not getting a short high stress event (killing an animal) and then relaxing the rest of the day". Humans, pre-bow & spear-chucker, were cursory hunters. This meant they ran down the game rather than ambushing it. (People being people, they probably did both, and only ran when the ambush didn't work...but that was a large portion of the time.) Then they had to get the game back home without being tackled on the way by a lion equiv. This was a high stress event that went on for hours. But then they probably did take a day or two off, at least if it was a sizable prize. (And we aren't usually talking about solitary hunters. They came later. In most environs we are talking about a hunting band of around 12 people. Better chance for a workable ambush, better defense against predators while on the way home (and smelling of blood). And help in carrying the booty. (What size prey they tackled would depend not only on where they were, but on what kind of weapons they had. You don't tackle a rhinoceros with a spear with a wooden point.
P.S.: The "noble hunter" was also probably a primary scavenger. 12 people with spears could back off most predators and save themselves the chase. But that, again, wasn't something they could count on happening across.
When the spear chucker came in, it created a whole new ball game. Then people could attack from a distance, without getting close enough to expose themselves to danger. But that wasn't until after Homo Sapiens had diverged from Homo Neanderthalis. (They don't have the correct shoulder joint.)
N.B.: I am not an archaeologist. Or an anthropologist. Some of this info may be discarded theories. (But I don't think so.)
Well, if the code is no longer in use, *I* wouldn't have a problem with someone relicensing it. Of course, it would continue to be available under it's original license. But if FOSS users either don't have enough interest to continue with it, or have come up with better ways to do things, why would anyone object?
Mind you, it might be difficult to show that most FOSS software has gone out of publication, since the form of publication most often used is hosting on a site, and many sites have a LONG archival back reach. You could probably find the original version of Slackware if you went searching for it seriously. And anything that is put on Sourceforge is supposed to stay there "forever". So even if it's abandoned, it's not out of publication.
The actual way that GPL enforcement seems to happen is:
1) Some company decides to develop something based on available code.
2) The release it in binary. (I think there's a lot of backstory here, but we never hear it.)
3) Somebody looks at the project, analyzes the binary, and says "Hey, I know what code that's based on!"
4) Somebody asks for the code and is refused.
5) The EFF lawyer asks for the code, and the code is made available.
Now if nobody does step 3, then there won't be any objection filed. The risk is minimal.
There's only two things I object to about the deals that I've heard of that Google did with the libraries:
1) The deal prevents anyone else from doing the same thing.
and
2) The scans are so bad as to be nearly (and occasionally not just nearly) illegible.
Other than that I've been fine with it.
P.S.: I've only heard of a couple of deals, not of any large number. Harvard and the Chicago public library IIRC. But they were both said to contain the last existing copy of some works.
I agree it's often easier said than done. So what? As long as you let a proprietary program hold your data hostage, the situation will continue to get worse and more expensive.
As I suggested it took me years to find a suitable application. But this didn't mean I stopped looking. If I'd found it earlier it would have saved a bunch of time, cost, and effort, but I didn't. (Actually, I think the score editors only got good enough last year, but I wasn't watching all the time.) But now the situation has stopped getting worse. Now I can save my data in open formats, and it can be read by multiple programs (even if only one formats it properly yet). But because I waited so long, I've got lots of data that needs to be converted from three different incompatible proprietary formats. (And, no, midi won't do. They can all export midi, but midi doesn't even keep track of the length of the shortest note, only of relative note length. And it loses all formatting information.)
And do what for other applications that you use and which fail in Wine?
Find alternate applications. I'll grant it may take a bit of searching. And transfer your data to an open format. The longer you wait, the more expensive it will end up being.
It took years to switch my wife, because she was using music score editing software, and now we've got the problem of converting the data. But the problem is no longer getting worse. (Or it wouldn't be, except that the computers with the other OSs are getting older, and thus nearer to failure. When they die, unconverted data will be lost. (Backups don't do any good if you can't read the data formats.)
It took me over a decade to realize just how bad closed proprietary formats holding my data was. Don't you be as stupid. It was an expensive learning process.
If you'd ever read an article that covered an event you had personal knowledge of, you'd *know* what a work of fiction most "researched" news stories are. They damn well should give sources. They don't because most of their stories are a pack of lies, and they don't want it easily proven.
P.S.: I don't know if it's still true, but in past decades, in the stories that I checked out, the lies generally took the form of deliberate omission of information required to form an accurate picture of what was happening, rather than actual fabrication of facts. There have been, however, many indications that they no longer so restrict themselves. The footage of the "Tiamen Square" uprising in China where the people shown were speaking in English was the first indication. Not that it's impossible that this could happen, but there was sufficient question raised about it that the Network (can't remember which one) admitted that it was a "docudrama". The first time I ever heard that word. And they didn't admit it until a week or so after the event.
P.P.S.: Which network: ABC, NBC, or CBS. It was one of those.
I'm aware of thaat text. That does specify what was written to justify copyrights. It doesn't say what "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" means. To me it means the works become publicly available. I.e., public domain.
You demonstrated your ability to quote, but not to understand.
Jobs isn't exactly a marketing person, more a sort of technological missionary. And when Sculley was running it, Apple tanked. Sculley *was* a marketing person (imported from Pepsi).
Even Sculley has admitted that he was the wrong choice as director. He's a marketer, and a good one. But that wasn't the right specialty.
Both, except that it would have been 4/8ths, except that they'd previously lost the other three.
I.e., if rights are determined legally, then they are within their rights. If rights are determined morally, then they are immoral.
If you believe "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights", the the usage is clearly moral. But if you're a lawyer, then it's the other way around.
Actually, *I* never liked Ultima. And *I* don't think it's right that copyrights should last that long. 5-10 years is reasonable, if there's no DRM. If there's DRM, then the work should not be copyrightable. The entire *purpose* of copyrights is to get works into the public domain. It has not other justification for existence. So DRM should make the work uncopyrightable. And the period of copyright should be long enough that most of the profit can be extracted from the predictable customers, but no longer. So 5-10 years. I can understand reasons for making it shorter, but I don't accept them. The only reason I can understand for allowing it to be longer is greed, and that shouldn't be encouraged.
Nah...he just has more people who claim to be his followers, and then do whatever they would have done anyway.
Ada has several problems that are difficult to overcome. The first one that occurs to me is that string literals have their length as a part of their type. One can generally work around this, but when one needs to work around something so central to the language, you've got problems. Another is that garbage collection is optional, and almost never implemented. This means you can't depend on it being present. Then there's the syntax of their object model, which clearly indicates that objects were an afterthought. It's awkward to use, even though it's powerful enough. Then there's the way they manage memory.
Ada has it's niche, where it's clearly the best language, but it's a *small* niche. It *can* be used nearly anywhere, but in many places it's quite clearly a kludge. (Databases and GUIs come to mind.)
That's a bit of a mistake. D can call routines from C libraries, but C code is not compatible with D. This can cause problems when the library wants to make callbacks. It can also be a bit difficult to figure out. It's MUCH better than the FFI interfaces found in many non-C languages, but it's far from perfect. You need to rewrite any complex header files before you can call many routines.
It *should* be relatively simple to wrap C libraries to be called by D, but because the developer community is so small, this is only occasionally done, and tends to be done once and then forgotten. Which means that after awhile it stops working, but there's no notice that it's stopped working. So there is a collection of obsolete library ports, and a few that still work. And many that were started, but never finished.
All in all, this has lead me to look for another language, even though I really like D as a language (except for the compile time features...but I don't like those in any languages, except, perhaps, LISP and Scheme).
The real problem with D is lack of libraries. There are IDEs, though not fancy ones. But the lack of libraries is a constant source of grief. To the point that I started looking elsewhere. (They've also got a problem with garbage collection, and in some circumstances it can spend a hideous amount of time there. But that's rather clearly a bug that will be cleaned up. [And I don't even recall whether that's D1 or D2 [D2 is the developmental version. D1 just gets bug fixes.])
He left out a colon. You left out a period. Your sin was considerably worse than his.
Not that it matters. Judging by your handle you're just being obnoxious intentionally. I'd call that a troll, but flamebait might be a better term.
Yes, Google's stated goal is to index all information in the world. This is, in itself, neither good nor bad. And they want to make it available. I'm a bit less comfortable with this. Why do I think that information on me will be available far before that on those who have power over me? But I *do* feel that.
I've been dubious about Google ever since they got that court decision that gave them, and nobody else, the right to index and show list all out of print books. On the one hand, it seems to have been the judge himself that came up with the idea, and I can sure see why they wouldn't dare turn it down. But on the other it drastically tilts the playing field against smaller companies. (It was only largely tilted before.) Then there's the contracts that they signed with various libraries to scan all the books in their collections, which prevented them from signing equivalent contracts with any other company. I just plain don't believe that those terms were requested by the librarians. So that counts as believing that they lied as well as acted to suppress competition from anyone else. (And the scans were often of such an inferior quality that it also counts as destroying information that they didn't bother to properly collect.)
So I'm not real pleased with Google. It's just that, bad as they are, they are far superior to those they are up against. (But at one point I thought that MS was ethically superior to IBM, also. And maybe it was. IBM changed, and the moral defects of MS became more obvious. I don't know how much of which happened.)
But centralized powers cannot be trusted in the hands of humans. Even if the current custodians are, in face, incorruptible, they will be replaced. And incorruptible people in positions of power are few and far between. Until trustworthy custodians exist, the only solution is decentralization. (And the trustworthy custodians will not, as I said, be people. So there may be a bit of a wait.)
Apple *IS* being destroyed. Steve Jobs has serious health problems. And we know what happened to Apple the last time he left.