It's also a false presumption that I care what Oracle as an entity thinks. I care about the effects that they have, but not at all about what they intended the effects to be. I can't know their intent, and I don't trust their pronouncements, so I can't be bothered to consider their intentions. Their effects I can see and estimate.
In my estimation, Java is going to either split off from Oracle (probably under some other name) or die. And the transition is likely to be rough. LibreOffice has made a promising start in splitting off from OpenOffice. I've no idea which MySQL forks are going to be significant, but they'll all be fully GPL. (Previously, as all the copyright was owned by one company, there were non-GPL branches.)
Also the fork of Java will be fully GPL. Another benefit, which may eventually pay for the intermediate hard times. (Probably GPL with the Classpath exception rather than vanilla GPL, but still a major benefit.)
I really don't care what happens to Oracle. It can die or grow, and I'll still ignore it. It only impinges on me when it releases software that I find important, and when Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice split off, that doesn't leave anything. If they want to make their name as a sponsor of football teams it's fine with me.
However, for the next year or so I wouldn't want to depend on Java for much, and I'd prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. But I'm concerned about LibreOffice.
Heard of Iced Tea? LibreOffice? Any of numerous MySQL forks?
Open your eyes, it's happening NOW, not sometime in the future. (Actually, it's well under weigh, and started happening several months ago, even before the purchase was finalized.)
The problem, such as it is, is that FOSS projects don't have large advertising budgets. That's one of the reasons why it's important that distributions put things together properly.
Java is an excellent language. But I'm not at all thrilled by the libraries. Any of them. And needing three levels of indirection to use a file is just stupid. (Some people seem to like it, and I'll never understand that.)
Yeah, but I'd bet that they'll still be a major company in 5 years. No bet at 15 years, though. Depends on too many decision they haven't yet made.
OTOH, I'd also bet that in 5 years they were considerably less important than they are right now. Say at least 10% lower in market share. (But how to you measure market penetration by FOSS?) Still, I'd also guess that they'd be at least 3% lower compared to today and using IBM as the fixed point. (The smaller variation is due to uncertainties about what IBM will do. It increases the uncertainty.) A definite wager, of course, would require tying things down a lot more specifically as in, e.g., how you measure things.
OTOH, I'd also bet that Java was less successful. I'm uncertain whether the difference will be due to people fleeing Java or to a fork which is developing independently. Or a combination. But if there's a fork, I think you can count on the Oracle version being determinedly incompatible with the fork, and enforcing that incompatibility with the threat of law suits.
The GPLv2 doesn't EXPLICITLY deal with patents at all.
It doesn't take much reading into it at all, however, to realize that it is an implicit license to all patents possessed by the distributor and used in the software. (Note the two caveats. It's not a general patent grant.)
OTOH, the license is only clearly good for use in code derived from the original code. Which may get Google into trouble. I suspect, however, that Google's lawyers are well informed, and Google decided to risk being sued. Why isn't clear. (Possibly they think the patents are invalid, for any of several possible reasons.)
The primary motivation for the GPLv3 was to make it consistent with the laws of as many nations as feasible. They also made the patent grant explicit, but that probably wasn't necessary. (Except to avoid explaining things to computer geeks.)
On your last point: It's not pure evil. Evil, I'll grant, given the last EULA I read. (Several years ago now. I dropped Apple even for my wife, and that took work.) But they copied that evil word for word from MS. (Which I left earlier. Over the same issue.)
But Apple is focused on style and quality (in varying degrees). This isn't pure evil. It has many good points. It does, however, require enslaving the users. But many of them enjoy it. (And I think that ALL Apple developers are Apple users.)
Earlier: If you can't trust the developer of your software tools, you'd better find new tools. If your boss insists that those are the proper tools...you'd better think about finding a new boss...if you can't change his mind. (Getting Linux into the job I was at was so difficult that I finally took early retirement...just as they decided that I was right. O, well. Timing is everything, and I'm enjoying being retired. [And it meant that I never had to accept that revised MS EULA!!! That pays for a lot.])
I can understand, and even sympathize with, a devotion to style and quality. I may think that it leaves out vitally important pieces, but that doesn't make it pure evil. Only impure.
COBOL isn't dead, but it's moribund. There aren't any new COBOL programmers.
This does mean that the remaining COBOL programmers have good job prospects. But it means that the language is on it's last legs.
This looks to me like the way Java is headed...only Java faces considerably more competent competition than COBOL did while it was healthy. Java programs can be automatically translated into other languages. (The code resulting may not be intelligible, but it can be done.)
It will certainly be ironic if Javascript outlives Java (as a live language).
OTOH, even Snobol isn't dead. Not really. It's just that no new programs are written in it, and you can't find anyone to maintain the ones that exist. But I went checking a year or two ago and I could still find Snobol interpreters.
With a decent FOSS license, you don't get the IP. Well...you get the trademarks. So patent trolls can just go whistle.
That means that if you piss off the developers enough that they up and leave, you have, indeed, wasted your money. This tells you what not to do.
And as for companies that want to buy things up and to hell with the developers, to hell with *them*. FOSS groups are better off if those scum don't want to buy us.
P.S.: It's usually rather difficult to piss off developers enough that they want to leave their job. Developers tend to want to put their attention in other places than looking for work. So if you're driving them away, you're really doing something wrong.
They'd have needed to make unbounded string the default literal character type, and given it a better name. Say, just "string". They'd have needed to make it easier to use the heap. Garbage collection would need to be built-in (optionally disableable) rather than optional, and never implemented.
And they should start from the Spark subset of Ada.
But Ada won't ever go anywhere, and wishing it would is futile. It's been purposed to the embedded systems market, and it's not likely to change.
O, they should also define a built-in B+Tree data-type. (Generic, so it could be adapted to the particular types that you want to work with.)
A problem is in the GUI. If you allow C callbacks you don't have a secure system. If you don't, you need to maintain your own GUI system. And it will never look like the other systems. Probably this would mean you need to partition the compilation into secure modules and non-secure modules. (Allowing you to call C libraries eases all kinds of problems...but it's death on a secure system. This means that you need to be able to partition things into parts that you can't really trust, and parts that you can.)
It's a pity this is a waste of speculation, because it's not going to happen. Most people hear the term Ada and they think of scare stories, not realizing how much worse C++ is than Ada ever was in terms of complexity and difficulty to master.
"Besides, if the data does matter, like the recording studio guy, these days the best backup strategy is still an external/removable drive."
Are you sure about that? I've heard that the spindles tend to freeze if you don't use them for a few years. And that tape, though more expensive, is still a better choice for backup. (Of course, pressed CDs would be an even better choice, but it's far more expensive, and burned CDs/DVDs go bad quickly.)
That said, I generally back up to a spare disk. And don't think of it as a secure backup. Cost rules.
You just don't understand. The Desktop is dead as a major market. Compare Android sales, however, and you get a rather different picture. Unfortunately, the screens are too small, and the systems tend to be too locked down, to do anything decent with them, but they are linux user interfaces.
OTOH, I'm not sanguine. KDE4 was a tremendous step backwards from KDE3 in terms of anything but eye-candy. The news coming out about Gnome3 isn't making me very happy either...but that could be misleading. It seems (to me) like the developers forgot about the users. And a lot of the changes benefit either those with very large screens, or very small screens. (Both are legitimate causes, but that's not my situation. I could fit in a 21" screen, if I went to a flat-panel, but currently I'm limited to a 19" screen. And my eyes aren't quite what they were a couple of years ago, so higher resolution doesn't solve the problem.)
I think KDE3 pretty much hit the sweet spot in utility. You could fancy up the eye-candy without hurting functionality, but changing the menu layout was a bad mistake. (And, no, KDE4's "classical menus" didn't solve the problem. That was only a half-step back toward where they had just taken 3 giant steps from.)
It doesn't matter much anymore anyway. The desktop is not the major market. That's laptops, netbooks, and phones. Linux is sufficiently dominant in phones that I don't have to worry about my ability to connect being sabotaged. That was the only reason I ever really cared, and a few years ago it was a valid worry. And if Gnome3 is as big a disappointment as KDE4, then there's always LXDE. (It was almost good enough the last time I looked, and I'm sure it's been polished since then.) Or failing that xfce.
I was going to say "You must not have any idea how much work that is", but reading your comment, that's clearly wrong.
It is still true, however, that that's a lot of intensive work during a couple of months of the year, and you need to have enough space to store the results. (I've done it, and didn't like it. Others seem to get into it. YMMV. But remember that you need to be able to store the results of your efforts. It makes loads of sense if you live on a farm where space is cheap. A lot less sense if you live in a city. [Though if you can find the space there are arguments for keeping enough food on hand to last for a month without electricity or gas. Just be sure you keep at least twice as much water.])
Many (most?) medicines are poisons when taken improperly, which usually means excessively. Actually, many are even poisons when taken at the proper dose. It's just that the poison does less damage than that which it is medicating.
That said, it's pretty clear that BPA is a estrogen mimic that is damaging especially to children, but also to adults. It doesn't appear to have any redeeming biochemical effects. I *think* that it's also been linked to cancer, and is thus illegal in the US. This, however, has not been officially recognized. If I understand correctly the law didn't say that the government had to acknowledge that the chemical promoted cancer for it to become illegal to sell it, but that's the way the laws have been interpreted. (For obvious reasons, both good and bad.)
It is complex, but you are ignoring the relative isolation between levels that exists in the human, and rat, body.
Protein folding may be complex, but most of it is irrelevant detail. What's usually important is the final shape that one ends up with, e.g. But when wants to modify that process, then the details of that process become important. This is roughly equivalent to...at the level that I work, I pay no attention to how the compiler is going to optimize my code. If I wanted to modify that I'd need to pay attention to things at a much finer level of detail.
It *is* true that people tend to oversimplify things they aren't dealing with directly. But to make it a fair statement it needs to be made fully *that* general. (This doesn't make you original assertion false, but observationally it *is* false. I've never known a knowledgeable geek that oversimplified the biochemistry of life in the way that you painted. I'm sure they exist, but they aren't, as you implied, common. If they are common among your friends, well, then you have some uncommon friends.)
In addition to dealing with reflections, which I consider just a part of polishing step one, step two will use the position of something in the video as an anchor and substitute the image of something else.
How far off do you think *that* is? I give it two years to the the lab demo with problems.
No, I'm not talking about only the executive wing. I'm talking about ALL elective governmental offices, State as well as federal, legislative as well as executive. I'd say judicial too, but people don't usually know enough about judges to vote sensibly even now, and anyway those positions are nominally non-partisan. Do away with the parties and they'd be actually non-partisan.
Personally, I feel that the real basic flaw in the system is that it's controlled by groups of people who lust for power.
Despite the obvious flaws, I would favor an selection of office holders by random choice from qualified citizens. The qualifications should be fairly loose, perhaps no more than over thirty and graduated from high school. (Though obviously it should be more difficult to graduate from high school. One should at least be able write a paragraph of acceptable English on the current president and solve an algebraic equation of the first degree in one unknown.) This does, of course, mean that power should be more decentralized. With potentially lunatics being selected for every office, you don't want one person able to make disastrous decisions. A group of three is less likely to make such, even if they are also less likely to be unusually wise. There are many obvious problems with this answer, but it eliminates the limitation of the job to only the power hungry. Next you need rules that eliminate bribery...or at least make it actually quite dangerous rather than only nominally so. And recall would be an important option.
But I'm not really convinced that any system that systematically selects only the power hungry can possibly be even approximately either fair or honest. Still, the current system could be improved by allowing people to vote for the candidates they chose, without worrying about "throwing away my vote".
The terms left and right did, as another poster noticed, originate with the French parliament, but the current usage is more along the lines of "us vs. them". If you divide things that way, you trivialize important decisions, and ensure that bad decisions will be common. They are NOT useful terms, because they encourage oversimplification. Simplification is good, but oversimplification is bad, and leads to, at best, suboptimal decisions.
Or how about noticing that "left" and "right" are pretty much media inventions. To make politics easy to explain using sports metaphors. Yay for our team!
What this was, was people in power manipulating a situation to disadvantage people without power, and masses of people accepting the explanation, because they didn't have much choice, and anyway only one side was really heard. (Different sides in different places, but still only one side.)
It was after this that it coincidentally happened that all the major publishers started being acquired by major corporations...which wasn't a directly profitable action, publishing being relatively unprofitable. But which did mean that those publishers wouldn't print anything that the major corporations didn't approve of. (At least nothing they strongly disapproved of. The control was, and remains, indirect. The management chooses the editor who chooses what to publish.) In this context it's worth noting that demonstrations now get minimal coverage in any media. This despite the fact that one would expect them to be more newsworthy as that occur less frequently.
Note that this is not a unanimous group. To call this a conspiracy is probably incorrect. It's merely that people in a position of power have certain interests in common that are not the same as the interests of people who are not in a position of power. And they tend to act to forward those interests.
Another thing that happened at around this time was that the political process was nominally loosened by allowing the easier formation of political parties while simultaneously centralized by removing the requirement that broadcasting stations allow equal amounts of partisan campaigning by all parties. This made money the central requirement for being heard. (It had already become a major requirement.)
Also note that in the US the election system (primarily, but not entirely, the means used to count the votes) is so structured that only two parties have a reasonable chance to win an election. There have been only a few times when an incumbent party became so weak that it essentially abdicated it's position to an alternate third party. Even Teddy Rooseveldt wasn't able to overcome this bias. I *think* that Instant Runoff would be quite superior, and I'm quite convinced that Condorcet voting would be superior. And, yes, it's true that it can be proven that no fair voting system can exist, but this doesn't mean that some aren't better than others. And the majority rule system is about the worst. (Not as bad as minority rule, of course.)
That's one of the reasons you use microwave power transmission, and have your antennas be a mile or two in diameter. No tight focus killer ray needed. And microwave transmissions are (relatively) lossless. (Better than 90%, but I'm not sure how much better.)
You site your antennas in the middle of a desert so there isn't much water to adsorb the radiation. This improves things a couple of ways. It is likely that it will make the area warmer, but this is an area that's warmer than the surrounding area anyway. If you're really worried about leakage, you could put reflectors under your antenna, but that's probably a waste of effort.
I do, however, believe that the power intensities projected are excessive. I don't think we can handle transmitting that much power. It's still probably a good idea, just not as good as it's being painted. (And this thing wouldn't be in geo-stationary orbit, so you need several of them and several ground stations. And a positive feedback so that it will only send energy down to where it's receiving an up signal from. (That one *could* be a laser, to make it easy to home in on.)
P.S.: Test versions of this kind of power transmission didn't bother the cows grazing under the receiving antenna.
I'm not convinced that Oracle *has* become a part of the FOSS community. Their actions have been, at best, ambiguous. And often a bit predatory.
Buying a company in order to kill of it's FOSS projects doesn't make a corporation a FOSS community member. Oracle has only killed off OpenSolaris, and perhaps that deserved to die. I don't know. But it looks suspicious. Then it sued Google over Davik. Again this is something that's justifiable, but quite suspicious.
Let's just say that I'm not convinced that Oracle is a legitimate FOSS community member. I'm not convinced that they aren't. How they react to this will be quite telling, and how they develop Java will be even more telling. Also what they do with MySQL and SleepyCatDB. (They've had SleepyCatDB for awhile now, and it doesn't seem to have suffered, but it's a rather small product. I note that it's been dropped from Python, but the reasons given were more version incompatibility than anything else.)
Let's just say the jury's still out on this one. And it may be awhile reaching a consensus.
It is correct to blame Obama because he is the commander in chief. For such an office to refrain from taking action is to approve the action that was taken. If he chose, he could act to remove the bar to reprinting the original edition. He hasn't. Until he does, he is tacitly approving the action. (If he waits until after the second edition is printed to take action, he will continue to justly deserve to be blamed for the action, as it's unlikely that the publisher would re-instate the original edition at that point.)
OTOH, you might want to notice what happened to the works of Wilhelm Reich and his teachings. I suspect that they were snake-oil, but the government destroyed the evidence. And, last I checked, they still suppress it. That's over 60 years of suppression of an idea (that's probably quackery). You can't plausibly even claim national security.
So don't think that this is proof that our government is more corrupt that it's been for quite awhile. (I believe it is, but this isn't proof, only more evidence.)
Maybe we don't like it when we hear about it? What does whether it's new or not have to do with *THAT*?
And if you didn't see the post far above that referred back to the prior article, you weren't reading very carefully. (I had to read that to figure out what the book was about.)
Yes. It is censorship if the government decides what can be published. That's the definition. It goes back to Roman law, where they had a government official known as the Censor.
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It's also a false presumption that I care what Oracle as an entity thinks. I care about the effects that they have, but not at all about what they intended the effects to be. I can't know their intent, and I don't trust their pronouncements, so I can't be bothered to consider their intentions. Their effects I can see and estimate.
In my estimation, Java is going to either split off from Oracle (probably under some other name) or die. And the transition is likely to be rough. LibreOffice has made a promising start in splitting off from OpenOffice. I've no idea which MySQL forks are going to be significant, but they'll all be fully GPL. (Previously, as all the copyright was owned by one company, there were non-GPL branches.)
Also the fork of Java will be fully GPL. Another benefit, which may eventually pay for the intermediate hard times. (Probably GPL with the Classpath exception rather than vanilla GPL, but still a major benefit.)
I really don't care what happens to Oracle. It can die or grow, and I'll still ignore it. It only impinges on me when it releases software that I find important, and when Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice split off, that doesn't leave anything. If they want to make their name as a sponsor of football teams it's fine with me.
However, for the next year or so I wouldn't want to depend on Java for much, and I'd prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. But I'm concerned about LibreOffice.
Heard of Iced Tea? LibreOffice? Any of numerous MySQL forks?
Open your eyes, it's happening NOW, not sometime in the future. (Actually, it's well under weigh, and started happening several months ago, even before the purchase was finalized.)
The problem, such as it is, is that FOSS projects don't have large advertising budgets. That's one of the reasons why it's important that distributions put things together properly.
Java is an excellent language. But I'm not at all thrilled by the libraries. Any of them. And needing three levels of indirection to use a file is just stupid. (Some people seem to like it, and I'll never understand that.)
Be *certain* that it's identified as yours, and not the company's.
Even then be ready for them to wipe your disk...without warning.
Yeah, but I'd bet that they'll still be a major company in 5 years. No bet at 15 years, though. Depends on too many decision they haven't yet made.
OTOH, I'd also bet that in 5 years they were considerably less important than they are right now. Say at least 10% lower in market share. (But how to you measure market penetration by FOSS?) Still, I'd also guess that they'd be at least 3% lower compared to today and using IBM as the fixed point. (The smaller variation is due to uncertainties about what IBM will do. It increases the uncertainty.) A definite wager, of course, would require tying things down a lot more specifically as in, e.g., how you measure things.
OTOH, I'd also bet that Java was less successful. I'm uncertain whether the difference will be due to people fleeing Java or to a fork which is developing independently. Or a combination. But if there's a fork, I think you can count on the Oracle version being determinedly incompatible with the fork, and enforcing that incompatibility with the threat of law suits.
The GPLv2 doesn't EXPLICITLY deal with patents at all.
It doesn't take much reading into it at all, however, to realize that it is an implicit license to all patents possessed by the distributor and used in the software. (Note the two caveats. It's not a general patent grant.)
OTOH, the license is only clearly good for use in code derived from the original code. Which may get Google into trouble. I suspect, however, that Google's lawyers are well informed, and Google decided to risk being sued. Why isn't clear. (Possibly they think the patents are invalid, for any of several possible reasons.)
The primary motivation for the GPLv3 was to make it consistent with the laws of as many nations as feasible. They also made the patent grant explicit, but that probably wasn't necessary. (Except to avoid explaining things to computer geeks.)
On your last point:
It's not pure evil. Evil, I'll grant, given the last EULA I read. (Several years ago now. I dropped Apple even for my wife, and that took work.) But they copied that evil word for word from MS. (Which I left earlier. Over the same issue.)
But Apple is focused on style and quality (in varying degrees). This isn't pure evil. It has many good points. It does, however, require enslaving the users. But many of them enjoy it. (And I think that ALL Apple developers are Apple users.)
Earlier:
If you can't trust the developer of your software tools, you'd better find new tools. If your boss insists that those are the proper tools...you'd better think about finding a new boss...if you can't change his mind. (Getting Linux into the job I was at was so difficult that I finally took early retirement...just as they decided that I was right. O, well. Timing is everything, and I'm enjoying being retired. [And it meant that I never had to accept that revised MS EULA!!! That pays for a lot.])
I can understand, and even sympathize with, a devotion to style and quality. I may think that it leaves out vitally important pieces, but that doesn't make it pure evil. Only impure.
COBOL isn't dead, but it's moribund. There aren't any new COBOL programmers.
This does mean that the remaining COBOL programmers have good job prospects. But it means that the language is on it's last legs.
This looks to me like the way Java is headed...only Java faces considerably more competent competition than COBOL did while it was healthy. Java programs can be automatically translated into other languages. (The code resulting may not be intelligible, but it can be done.)
It will certainly be ironic if Javascript outlives Java (as a live language).
OTOH, even Snobol isn't dead. Not really. It's just that no new programs are written in it, and you can't find anyone to maintain the ones that exist. But I went checking a year or two ago and I could still find Snobol interpreters.
With a decent FOSS license, you don't get the IP. Well...you get the trademarks. So patent trolls can just go whistle.
That means that if you piss off the developers enough that they up and leave, you have, indeed, wasted your money. This tells you what not to do.
And as for companies that want to buy things up and to hell with the developers, to hell with *them*. FOSS groups are better off if those scum don't want to buy us.
P.S.: It's usually rather difficult to piss off developers enough that they want to leave their job. Developers tend to want to put their attention in other places than looking for work. So if you're driving them away, you're really doing something wrong.
They'd have needed to make unbounded string the default literal character type, and given it a better name. Say, just "string". They'd have needed to make it easier to use the heap. Garbage collection would need to be built-in (optionally disableable) rather than optional, and never implemented.
And they should start from the Spark subset of Ada.
But Ada won't ever go anywhere, and wishing it would is futile. It's been purposed to the embedded systems market, and it's not likely to change.
O, they should also define a built-in B+Tree data-type. (Generic, so it could be adapted to the particular types that you want to work with.)
A problem is in the GUI. If you allow C callbacks you don't have a secure system. If you don't, you need to maintain your own GUI system. And it will never look like the other systems. Probably this would mean you need to partition the compilation into secure modules and non-secure modules. (Allowing you to call C libraries eases all kinds of problems...but it's death on a secure system. This means that you need to be able to partition things into parts that you can't really trust, and parts that you can.)
It's a pity this is a waste of speculation, because it's not going to happen. Most people hear the term Ada and they think of scare stories, not realizing how much worse C++ is than Ada ever was in terms of complexity and difficulty to master.
So you believe article headline?
I've got a bridge you could buy, cheap.
"Besides, if the data does matter, like the recording studio guy, these days the best backup strategy is still an external/removable drive."
Are you sure about that? I've heard that the spindles tend to freeze if you don't use them for a few years. And that tape, though more expensive, is still a better choice for backup. (Of course, pressed CDs would be an even better choice, but it's far more expensive, and burned CDs/DVDs go bad quickly.)
That said, I generally back up to a spare disk. And don't think of it as a secure backup. Cost rules.
You just don't understand. The Desktop is dead as a major market. Compare Android sales, however, and you get a rather different picture. Unfortunately, the screens are too small, and the systems tend to be too locked down, to do anything decent with them, but they are linux user interfaces.
OTOH, I'm not sanguine. KDE4 was a tremendous step backwards from KDE3 in terms of anything but eye-candy. The news coming out about Gnome3 isn't making me very happy either...but that could be misleading. It seems (to me) like the developers forgot about the users. And a lot of the changes benefit either those with very large screens, or very small screens. (Both are legitimate causes, but that's not my situation. I could fit in a 21" screen, if I went to a flat-panel, but currently I'm limited to a 19" screen. And my eyes aren't quite what they were a couple of years ago, so higher resolution doesn't solve the problem.)
I think KDE3 pretty much hit the sweet spot in utility. You could fancy up the eye-candy without hurting functionality, but changing the menu layout was a bad mistake. (And, no, KDE4's "classical menus" didn't solve the problem. That was only a half-step back toward where they had just taken 3 giant steps from.)
It doesn't matter much anymore anyway. The desktop is not the major market. That's laptops, netbooks, and phones. Linux is sufficiently dominant in phones that I don't have to worry about my ability to connect being sabotaged. That was the only reason I ever really cared, and a few years ago it was a valid worry. And if Gnome3 is as big a disappointment as KDE4, then there's always LXDE. (It was almost good enough the last time I looked, and I'm sure it's been polished since then.) Or failing that xfce.
I was going to say "You must not have any idea how much work that is", but reading your comment, that's clearly wrong.
It is still true, however, that that's a lot of intensive work during a couple of months of the year, and you need to have enough space to store the results. (I've done it, and didn't like it. Others seem to get into it. YMMV. But remember that you need to be able to store the results of your efforts. It makes loads of sense if you live on a farm where space is cheap. A lot less sense if you live in a city. [Though if you can find the space there are arguments for keeping enough food on hand to last for a month without electricity or gas. Just be sure you keep at least twice as much water.])
Those statements *aren't* contradictory.
Many (most?) medicines are poisons when taken improperly, which usually means excessively. Actually, many are even poisons when taken at the proper dose. It's just that the poison does less damage than that which it is medicating.
That said, it's pretty clear that BPA is a estrogen mimic that is damaging especially to children, but also to adults. It doesn't appear to have any redeeming biochemical effects. I *think* that it's also been linked to cancer, and is thus illegal in the US. This, however, has not been officially recognized. If I understand correctly the law didn't say that the government had to acknowledge that the chemical promoted cancer for it to become illegal to sell it, but that's the way the laws have been interpreted. (For obvious reasons, both good and bad.)
It is complex, but you are ignoring the relative isolation between levels that exists in the human, and rat, body.
Protein folding may be complex, but most of it is irrelevant detail. What's usually important is the final shape that one ends up with, e.g. But when wants to modify that process, then the details of that process become important. This is roughly equivalent to...at the level that I work, I pay no attention to how the compiler is going to optimize my code. If I wanted to modify that I'd need to pay attention to things at a much finer level of detail.
It *is* true that people tend to oversimplify things they aren't dealing with directly. But to make it a fair statement it needs to be made fully *that* general. (This doesn't make you original assertion false, but observationally it *is* false. I've never known a knowledgeable geek that oversimplified the biochemistry of life in the way that you painted. I'm sure they exist, but they aren't, as you implied, common. If they are common among your friends, well, then you have some uncommon friends.)
In addition to dealing with reflections, which I consider just a part of polishing step one, step two will use the position of something in the video as an anchor and substitute the image of something else.
How far off do you think *that* is? I give it two years to the the lab demo with problems.
No, I'm not talking about only the executive wing. I'm talking about ALL elective governmental offices, State as well as federal, legislative as well as executive. I'd say judicial too, but people don't usually know enough about judges to vote sensibly even now, and anyway those positions are nominally non-partisan. Do away with the parties and they'd be actually non-partisan.
Personally, I feel that the real basic flaw in the system is that it's controlled by groups of people who lust for power.
Despite the obvious flaws, I would favor an selection of office holders by random choice from qualified citizens. The qualifications should be fairly loose, perhaps no more than over thirty and graduated from high school. (Though obviously it should be more difficult to graduate from high school. One should at least be able write a paragraph of acceptable English on the current president and solve an algebraic equation of the first degree in one unknown.) This does, of course, mean that power should be more decentralized. With potentially lunatics being selected for every office, you don't want one person able to make disastrous decisions. A group of three is less likely to make such, even if they are also less likely to be unusually wise. There are many obvious problems with this answer, but it eliminates the limitation of the job to only the power hungry. Next you need rules that eliminate bribery...or at least make it actually quite dangerous rather than only nominally so. And recall would be an important option.
But I'm not really convinced that any system that systematically selects only the power hungry can possibly be even approximately either fair or honest. Still, the current system could be improved by allowing people to vote for the candidates they chose, without worrying about "throwing away my vote".
The terms left and right did, as another poster noticed, originate with the French parliament, but the current usage is more along the lines of "us vs. them". If you divide things that way, you trivialize important decisions, and ensure that bad decisions will be common. They are NOT useful terms, because they encourage oversimplification. Simplification is good, but oversimplification is bad, and leads to, at best, suboptimal decisions.
Or how about noticing that "left" and "right" are pretty much media inventions. To make politics easy to explain using sports metaphors. Yay for our team!
What this was, was people in power manipulating a situation to disadvantage people without power, and masses of people accepting the explanation, because they didn't have much choice, and anyway only one side was really heard. (Different sides in different places, but still only one side.)
It was after this that it coincidentally happened that all the major publishers started being acquired by major corporations...which wasn't a directly profitable action, publishing being relatively unprofitable. But which did mean that those publishers wouldn't print anything that the major corporations didn't approve of. (At least nothing they strongly disapproved of. The control was, and remains, indirect. The management chooses the editor who chooses what to publish.)
In this context it's worth noting that demonstrations now get minimal coverage in any media. This despite the fact that one would expect them to be more newsworthy as that occur less frequently.
Note that this is not a unanimous group. To call this a conspiracy is probably incorrect. It's merely that people in a position of power have certain interests in common that are not the same as the interests of people who are not in a position of power. And they tend to act to forward those interests.
Another thing that happened at around this time was that the political process was nominally loosened by allowing the easier formation of political parties while simultaneously centralized by removing the requirement that broadcasting stations allow equal amounts of partisan campaigning by all parties. This made money the central requirement for being heard. (It had already become a major requirement.)
Also note that in the US the election system (primarily, but not entirely, the means used to count the votes) is so structured that only two parties have a reasonable chance to win an election. There have been only a few times when an incumbent party became so weak that it essentially abdicated it's position to an alternate third party. Even Teddy Rooseveldt wasn't able to overcome this bias. I *think* that Instant Runoff would be quite superior, and I'm quite convinced that Condorcet voting would be superior. And, yes, it's true that it can be proven that no fair voting system can exist, but this doesn't mean that some aren't better than others. And the majority rule system is about the worst. (Not as bad as minority rule, of course.)
That's one of the reasons you use microwave power transmission, and have your antennas be a mile or two in diameter. No tight focus killer ray needed. And microwave transmissions are (relatively) lossless. (Better than 90%, but I'm not sure how much better.)
You site your antennas in the middle of a desert so there isn't much water to adsorb the radiation. This improves things a couple of ways. It is likely that it will make the area warmer, but this is an area that's warmer than the surrounding area anyway. If you're really worried about leakage, you could put reflectors under your antenna, but that's probably a waste of effort.
I do, however, believe that the power intensities projected are excessive. I don't think we can handle transmitting that much power. It's still probably a good idea, just not as good as it's being painted. (And this thing wouldn't be in geo-stationary orbit, so you need several of them and several ground stations. And a positive feedback so that it will only send energy down to where it's receiving an up signal from. (That one *could* be a laser, to make it easy to home in on.)
P.S.: Test versions of this kind of power transmission didn't bother the cows grazing under the receiving antenna.
I'm not convinced that Oracle *has* become a part of the FOSS community. Their actions have been, at best, ambiguous. And often a bit predatory.
Buying a company in order to kill of it's FOSS projects doesn't make a corporation a FOSS community member. Oracle has only killed off OpenSolaris, and perhaps that deserved to die. I don't know. But it looks suspicious. Then it sued Google over Davik. Again this is something that's justifiable, but quite suspicious.
Let's just say that I'm not convinced that Oracle is a legitimate FOSS community member. I'm not convinced that they aren't. How they react to this will be quite telling, and how they develop Java will be even more telling. Also what they do with MySQL and SleepyCatDB. (They've had SleepyCatDB for awhile now, and it doesn't seem to have suffered, but it's a rather small product. I note that it's been dropped from Python, but the reasons given were more version incompatibility than anything else.)
Let's just say the jury's still out on this one. And it may be awhile reaching a consensus.
It is correct to blame Obama because he is the commander in chief. For such an office to refrain from taking action is to approve the action that was taken. If he chose, he could act to remove the bar to reprinting the original edition. He hasn't. Until he does, he is tacitly approving the action. (If he waits until after the second edition is printed to take action, he will continue to justly deserve to be blamed for the action, as it's unlikely that the publisher would re-instate the original edition at that point.)
It is disgusting.
OTOH, you might want to notice what happened to the works of Wilhelm Reich and his teachings. I suspect that they were snake-oil, but the government destroyed the evidence. And, last I checked, they still suppress it. That's over 60 years of suppression of an idea (that's probably quackery). You can't plausibly even claim national security.
So don't think that this is proof that our government is more corrupt that it's been for quite awhile. (I believe it is, but this isn't proof, only more evidence.)
Maybe we don't like it when we hear about it? What does whether it's new or not have to do with *THAT*?
And if you didn't see the post far above that referred back to the prior article, you weren't reading very carefully. (I had to read that to figure out what the book was about.)
Yes. It is censorship if the government decides what can be published. That's the definition. It goes back to Roman law, where they had a government official known as the Censor.