Yes, it's impressive. If it were totally water it wouldn't be impressive, it would be unbelievable.
There are several questions, of course. Like how much will it cost to make? Is it really as green as it sounds? (Water + clay sounds pretty green.) How much will it be possible to adjust it's properties? What tensile strength can be achieved? What compressive strength? Can it be made edible? Is it a good diet food? Et, multitudinous, cetera.
Now this isn't up in the range of being as impressive as a working assembler, but it's in the range of a bio-compatible steel. (Makes me wonder... could you lay down conductive traces in it and have them remain in position? Might turn out to be just the thing for dynamic connections to nerve cells. [Probably not, but it's possible.])
No, but it should be illegal to act to maintain a monopoly. Not, I hasten to add, to make the best product (which would make writing the law quite a challenge, if a just law were ever to be contemplated).
The patent system is so bad that the entire patent law system should be abolished. Probably something similar in some way should be created, but I think that we've demonstrated that the grant of even a limited monopoly will be abused for anti-social ends.
But Lala didn't change the terms of the agreement. Apple did. So Apple deserves at least the majority, and perhaps all, of the blame.
You could say that the contracts gave Lala the opportunity to act in an evil way, but that they never chose to act in that way. It might have been better if they had written a more decent contract, but even though they had the opportunity they still chose not to act evilly. (I can think of several possible reasons as to why they might have written the contracts that way, and I have no way of knowing which of these stories is true. So it's more reasonable to judge them based on their known actions.)
I know he claimed to be a Deist, but remember, he was also a politician. He wouldn't offend people who might vote for him. (The Deists claimed to be Christian, which was good PR, but didn't have much to do with their actual beliefs. They don't fit any reasonable definition of Christian that I'm aware of. [OTOH, I don't think of being Christian as a particularly good thing, and sometimes I think it's particularly odious. So by doubting that he's a christian, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.])
You definition of agnostic appears to be the same as mine, unless you can justify being certain that a religious truth exists without knowing what it is, or having any way to test it. (I altered the standard form of presentation for artistic purposes without, so far as I could tell, altering its meaning, though of course I changed the emphasis, intentionally.)
Yes, the word itself just means "without knowledge", but I've never encountered it used in reference to any knowledge other than religious knowledge...at least without qualifying phrases as in "I'm a UFO agnostic.". (I don't *think* that's a religious usage.)
Not every day, but it does seem to be increasing every week, or perhaps just every month.
Consider that it may be due to changed circumstances. A few years ago when Apple acted evil, it only affected those who were committed to it...often idealistically committed. These days it is having a much bigger impact on the average user. So it's more significant when they do something evil.
If you ever though that Apple was a good company, you just weren't paying attention. This was safe, as there was a large space to go to when you didn't like something they did. If, however, you invest a lot of money in something, say a collection of LaLa music, and you are suddenly told "That music is going away, but we'll give you the cost of it as credits at our new store, where things cost 10 times as much" (I'm relying on another poster for that figure.), then it's understandable if you are less than enchanted with the company coercing you thusly. These aren't people who CHOSE to use Apple, these are people coerced into using them.
An analogous action happens whenever a company ties you into a long-term service agreement, and then raises the price a lot in the middle of the agreement. This is clearly "Bait and Switch", but the usual laws don't usually cover this technique. So the people who get shafted are unhappy with the entity applying the shaft. (N.B.: In some of these deals, the entity applying the shaft had no say in what would happen. Like the way the phone company collects taxes. There are commercial analogues to that measure, which insulate the malefactor from public anger over the results of his misdeeds.)
Apple has deserved bad press ever since the days of the Apple ][. They also generally deserve all the good press they get, and that's been continuing. (If you check, you should see that there are also more stories praising Apple;than there were in an equivalent period a year or two ago.) But when most of the people affected by Apple's actions were committed to them, bad press wasn't interesting to anyone, and good press was mainly interested to those committed. Now there's a broader base for the stories, and a lot fewer of them are willing to uncritically praise Apple.
I don't know if it's still true, but at one point a lot of his "Charitable Giving" was MS software. Donation value given as full market value, even when it commonly sold for less than half of list price (and was frequently given away at, say, trade shows...though I doubt that was listed as a charitable donation.)
But Jefferson WAS a profane philosopher and an infidel. The meanings of the words have changed a bit since then. Now it would be more accurately said "A secular philosopher, and not a Christian."
Actually, one could argue reasonably about whether he was, indeed, a christian, but I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that he was, at worst, a Deist, and more probably either a Gnostic or an Agnostic. (Gnostic: One who has found a convincing religious truth through personal experience, rather than by accepting appeals to authority. Agnostic: One who is not certain that such a truth exists.)
OTOH: "Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, Ha ha ha." vs. "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine."
When people are vying for immense power, honesty and civility are not to be found. You may occasionally find one of them, but not both.
Admittedly, it was over a different issue, but this is another case reaffirming that as a wise decision. (My original reason was the CDs they sold containing a rootkit that they paid to have created. I.e., intentional, not an accident.)
The efficiency isn't changed much by having a few holes punched in the sail, and meteors actually do less damage to the sail than they do to something thicker. The sail doesn't stop them, so they don't turn into heated balls of vaporized stone. Generally that hole caused by a meteor in a resistive craft is several times the size of the meteor. If it leaves a pit an inch across, the original was probably smaller than a pinhead. (This is just my rough guess...I don't know enough to calculate it...but figure the collision at, say, 10 miles/sec.... which is a gentle collision as such go, but not unreasonable. Though if you're both in orbit, and headed the same direction it could be a LOT less, even down to inches/hour, which wouldn't put much of a hole in much of anything.)
If they're large enough you could use them to burn down cities and wipe out food supplies, but I guess we already have pretty effective ways of doing that.
Both work, but they have different operating characteristics. An absorptive solar sail can only impart velocity directly away from the sun. A reflective solar sail can impart momentum at an angle, because the angle at which the photon leaves the sail also imparts momentum.
Unfortunately, both kinds are affected by the solar wind (which is usually approx. directly away from the sun, but can vary wildly when it's distorted by magnetic fields. And which can't be tacked against, unless you charge your sails sufficiently with a charge opposite to that of the incoming wind...and maybe not then. (Even if this would work, it's impractical.)
So solar sailing can be expected to be tricky, and difficult to develop. Highly worth it, though, for slow freight. (Which means automating it enough [and hardening it enough] that it doesn't need to carry a life support system, and doesn't depend on remote controllers when the solar wind and magnetic fields are kicking up a storm.)
Not sure about that. I've seen claims that a lot of the thrust of a solar sail would be due to the solar wind...which would tend to stick, and thus couldn't be tacked against.
Also, solar cells tend to absorb photons, capturing their momentum, and when they re-radiate it (at a lower frequency) the direction is random.
If this is correct, then the simple model of solar sails tacking using reflected light is at least an oversimplification, and possibly so much of an oversimplification that it doesn't properly predict the effects.
You probably bought into the propaganda for this guy...sorry! You probably thought this government was to be, as his campaign touted "Open and Honest", but clearly neither is true. I can't find a single promise kept.
It's not a very good record, but it could be much worse. The problem is that he didn't keep lots of very important promisses. (A simple count doesn't tell you the whole story.) And lots of the ones he did keep are saved by keeping exactly what he said rather than what people interpreted him as meaning.
Well, he's better than Bush. Praise doesn't come much fainter, but I guess it's still praise.
OTOH, anyone who noticed that he voted for FISA and still believed his campaign promises is really beyond help.
Their business, their choice. If you want a non-profit distribution, check out Debian Stable. (Testing is usually OK, but right not it's a bit volatile.)
Sorry, for *his* complaint, that's why we have the AGPL. Unfortunately, it's not widely used. With cloud-style applications becoming more common, this will eventually be appreciated by some end users.
Web accessable applications are an area where the GPL places no restrictions on source code availability. In this area, it's in the same boat as the BSD. The AGPL addresses this weakness, and is compatible with GPL3. (I.e., GPL code can be moved to AGPL [though not, I believe, vice versa].) CAUTION: IANAL. This is not a legal opinion. Etc. I've never had to deal with this interaction myself, this is based on on-line discussions between people I don't know.
I looked at Fedora a year or so ago. The package manager was ok. (I prefer apt-get + synaptic, but yum + synaptic + rpm wasn't bad.) OTOH, the package selection was poor. They had most of the more common packages, but finding anything what wasn't in the main repository meant trusting someone I'd never heard of. Not something I like to do regularly. And sometimes even finding the repository was sufficient work that it was easier to compile from source. And sometimes that didn't work. Debian was just more reliable and convenient. I'm thinking of switching to the new Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) fts, but that's largely because my wife is currently using Ubuntu, and it would be nice to be more familiar with the particular system she's using.
But for Fedora... well, a couple of years ago the basic system was quite solid. But they needed lots of work on application availability. (N.B.: They didn't have this problem back when it was the "Professional Version". And as I'm only considering FOSS software, price isn't likely to be the issue. It could be interest. I'm basically a programmer, not a systems admin, so I might have very different interests than the Fedora people, though I'd have expected that Debian would have the same bias, and it shows less of it than Ubuntu [which is biased towards simple].)
50 centimeters? Ideal? Someone read a humor piece and took it seriously. Possibly because they didn't understand metric. 50 centimeters is about 18 inches. That's a truly silly thing to hook an electric generator to. And, apparently, that's only at high tide, so the duty cycle would be less than 50%. Lots less.
It also assumes that money is Apple's primary motivational force. To me, looking at it's history, it appears more likely that the emphasis is on control. (Not that money is despised. If's very useful in acquiring and maintaining control.)
Probably not. That would probably call in the regulators.
OTOH, they could get advance design information that wasn't currently available outside of the company. It would be very difficult to ensure that didn't happen unless Apple was required to keep Arm as a totally separate company at totally separate sites. And even then it could be difficult.
What does "Which came first?" have to do with ANYTHING? That's a silly argument. Not saying you couldn't make a decent argument, but you didn't.
I could, but wouldn't, argue that private property is a natural right, and monopoly is a fiction of the state. Unfortunately, I know a bit too much history. Private property is also a fiction of the state. What's natural is the amount of property that you can carry while you run from a leopard. Possibly one could argue that it's what you can carry while you chase a wounded antelope. Anything more than that requires a proto-state to enforce it.
(OTOH, we CO-EVOLVED with such proto-states. So in that sense, the state, itself, is a natural phenomenon. In which case state guaranteed property is also natural, and rules about monopolies, etc. is just argument about the details.)
You can guess that sort of thing, and it *MIGHT* be true.
The problem is, that sounds an awful lot like the excuses that kept being given for the actions of various judges in the SCOx cases over the last seven years. And those were almost all eventually displayed to be wrong. So I have a hard time accepting that kind of excuse now.
It's true, the police are not the courts. But actually the courts have a better reputation for justice than do the police. And over the last seven years I've become convinced that the courts have a minimal interest in justice. Further, the police aren't under any obligation to protect you (which came as a bit of a shock to me). They usually do, because it's usually department policy. They *are* under an official obligation to enforce the laws, but in practice they can choose which laws they consider it important to be enforcing right now. And they can decide that right now it's that litterbug over there that's important, not the lynch mob. Policy means they don't usually make that decision. Usually they call for reinforcements. But there's no legal obligation.
Remember, the primary function of the police is to defend the government. After that policy determines to a great extent what they do. There are more laws than can possibly be properly enforced, so policy chooses which ones to enforce. (Currently, in the city I live in, the government is in sufficient financial distress that the primary job of the police is to enforce laws that bring in money. E.g., speeding tickets. And maintaining social order, of course...at least to the point that businesses don't flee the city, and customers are willing to shop here.) (P.S.: I don't mean that's all they do. But that's where they put their priorities.)
(N.B.: I'm exaggerating slightly to state my case clearly. But it's just an exaggeration, the directional trend is clearly evident. And it's clear where things will go if the financial condition continues to deteriorate.)
I'll blame Obama for doing something that I didn't like when Bush was doing it and feel quite justified, thank you.
Just because one bastard started doing something doesn't mean that someone elected to reverse what that bastard was doing should continue doing it. That just makes him another bastard.
I'll grant that smoke doesn't contain much protein. I doubt that it contains none. (That seems *extremely* unlikely.) I also doubt that proteins are the only allergens, though I'll readily grant that they are the major ones.
But you could be right. My doubt may be based on ignorance. If so, the ignorance still exists after reading your posts.
From what I've read, it appears that the active region of allergens are generally small fractions of a molecule, and that they would be equally reactive were they attached to a different molecule, or even drifting about as a radical. If a complete protein doesn't exist in smoke, therefore, it can still have allergenic properties. I'll admit I'm not an MD or a biochemist or other such specialist. I see no grounds, however, for believing that you are either.
Slashdot Mirror
That shows your lack of understanding.
Yes, it's impressive. If it were totally water it wouldn't be impressive, it would be unbelievable.
There are several questions, of course. Like how much will it cost to make? Is it really as green as it sounds? (Water + clay sounds pretty green.) How much will it be possible to adjust it's properties? What tensile strength can be achieved? What compressive strength? Can it be made edible? Is it a good diet food? Et, multitudinous, cetera.
Now this isn't up in the range of being as impressive as a working assembler, but it's in the range of a bio-compatible steel. (Makes me wonder... could you lay down conductive traces in it and have them remain in position? Might turn out to be just the thing for dynamic connections to nerve cells. [Probably not, but it's possible.])
No, but it should be illegal to act to maintain a monopoly. Not, I hasten to add, to make the best product (which would make writing the law quite a challenge, if a just law were ever to be contemplated).
The patent system is so bad that the entire patent law system should be abolished. Probably something similar in some way should be created, but I think that we've demonstrated that the grant of even a limited monopoly will be abused for anti-social ends.
But Lala didn't change the terms of the agreement. Apple did. So Apple deserves at least the majority, and perhaps all, of the blame.
You could say that the contracts gave Lala the opportunity to act in an evil way, but that they never chose to act in that way. It might have been better if they had written a more decent contract, but even though they had the opportunity they still chose not to act evilly. (I can think of several possible reasons as to why they might have written the contracts that way, and I have no way of knowing which of these stories is true. So it's more reasonable to judge them based on their known actions.)
I know he claimed to be a Deist, but remember, he was also a politician. He wouldn't offend people who might vote for him. (The Deists claimed to be Christian, which was good PR, but didn't have much to do with their actual beliefs. They don't fit any reasonable definition of Christian that I'm aware of. [OTOH, I don't think of being Christian as a particularly good thing, and sometimes I think it's particularly odious. So by doubting that he's a christian, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.])
You definition of agnostic appears to be the same as mine, unless you can justify being certain that a religious truth exists without knowing what it is, or having any way to test it. (I altered the standard form of presentation for artistic purposes without, so far as I could tell, altering its meaning, though of course I changed the emphasis, intentionally.)
Yes, the word itself just means "without knowledge", but I've never encountered it used in reference to any knowledge other than religious knowledge...at least without qualifying phrases as in "I'm a UFO agnostic.". (I don't *think* that's a religious usage.)
Not every day, but it does seem to be increasing every week, or perhaps just every month.
Consider that it may be due to changed circumstances. A few years ago when Apple acted evil, it only affected those who were committed to it...often idealistically committed. These days it is having a much bigger impact on the average user. So it's more significant when they do something evil.
If you ever though that Apple was a good company, you just weren't paying attention. This was safe, as there was a large space to go to when you didn't like something they did. If, however, you invest a lot of money in something, say a collection of LaLa music, and you are suddenly told "That music is going away, but we'll give you the cost of it as credits at our new store, where things cost 10 times as much" (I'm relying on another poster for that figure.), then it's understandable if you are less than enchanted with the company coercing you thusly. These aren't people who CHOSE to use Apple, these are people coerced into using them.
An analogous action happens whenever a company ties you into a long-term service agreement, and then raises the price a lot in the middle of the agreement. This is clearly "Bait and Switch", but the usual laws don't usually cover this technique. So the people who get shafted are unhappy with the entity applying the shaft. (N.B.: In some of these deals, the entity applying the shaft had no say in what would happen. Like the way the phone company collects taxes. There are commercial analogues to that measure, which insulate the malefactor from public anger over the results of his misdeeds.)
Apple has deserved bad press ever since the days of the Apple ][. They also generally deserve all the good press they get, and that's been continuing. (If you check, you should see that there are also more stories praising Apple ;than there were in an equivalent period a year or two ago.) But when most of the people affected by Apple's actions were committed to them, bad press wasn't interesting to anyone, and good press was mainly interested to those committed. Now there's a broader base for the stories, and a lot fewer of them are willing to uncritically praise Apple.
I don't know if it's still true, but at one point a lot of his "Charitable Giving" was MS software. Donation value given as full market value, even when it commonly sold for less than half of list price (and was frequently given away at, say, trade shows...though I doubt that was listed as a charitable donation.)
But Jefferson WAS a profane philosopher and an infidel. The meanings of the words have changed a bit since then. Now it would be more accurately said "A secular philosopher, and not a Christian."
Actually, one could argue reasonably about whether he was, indeed, a christian, but I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that he was, at worst, a Deist, and more probably either a Gnostic or an Agnostic.
(Gnostic: One who has found a convincing religious truth through personal experience, rather than by accepting appeals to authority.
Agnostic: One who is not certain that such a truth exists.)
OTOH:
"Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, Ha ha ha."
vs.
"Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine."
When people are vying for immense power, honesty and civility are not to be found. You may occasionally find one of them, but not both.
And I have stated I'll never buy Sony again.
Admittedly, it was over a different issue, but this is another case reaffirming that as a wise decision. (My original reason was the CDs they sold containing a rootkit that they paid to have created. I.e., intentional, not an accident.)
The efficiency isn't changed much by having a few holes punched in the sail, and meteors actually do less damage to the sail than they do to something thicker. The sail doesn't stop them, so they don't turn into heated balls of vaporized stone. Generally that hole caused by a meteor in a resistive craft is several times the size of the meteor. If it leaves a pit an inch across, the original was probably smaller than a pinhead. (This is just my rough guess...I don't know enough to calculate it...but figure the collision at, say, 10 miles/sec. ... which is a gentle collision as such go, but not unreasonable. Though if you're both in orbit, and headed the same direction it could be a LOT less, even down to inches/hour, which wouldn't put much of a hole in much of anything.)
Well...
If they're large enough you could use them to burn down cities and wipe out food supplies, but I guess we already have pretty effective ways of doing that.
Both work, but they have different operating characteristics. An absorptive solar sail can only impart velocity directly away from the sun. A reflective solar sail can impart momentum at an angle, because the angle at which the photon leaves the sail also imparts momentum.
Unfortunately, both kinds are affected by the solar wind (which is usually approx. directly away from the sun, but can vary wildly when it's distorted by magnetic fields. And which can't be tacked against, unless you charge your sails sufficiently with a charge opposite to that of the incoming wind...and maybe not then. (Even if this would work, it's impractical.)
So solar sailing can be expected to be tricky, and difficult to develop. Highly worth it, though, for slow freight. (Which means automating it enough [and hardening it enough] that it doesn't need to carry a life support system, and doesn't depend on remote controllers when the solar wind and magnetic fields are kicking up a storm.)
Not sure about that. I've seen claims that a lot of the thrust of a solar sail would be due to the solar wind...which would tend to stick, and thus couldn't be tacked against.
Also, solar cells tend to absorb photons, capturing their momentum, and when they re-radiate it (at a lower frequency) the direction is random.
If this is correct, then the simple model of solar sails tacking using reflected light is at least an oversimplification, and possibly so much of an oversimplification that it doesn't properly predict the effects.
You probably bought into the propaganda for this guy...sorry! You probably thought this government was to be, as his campaign touted "Open and Honest", but clearly neither is true. I can't find a single promise kept.
Try Here:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
It's not a very good record, but it could be much worse. The problem is that he didn't keep lots of very important promisses. (A simple count doesn't tell you the whole story.) And lots of the ones he did keep are saved by keeping exactly what he said rather than what people interpreted him as meaning.
Well, he's better than Bush. Praise doesn't come much fainter, but I guess it's still praise.
OTOH, anyone who noticed that he voted for FISA and still believed his campaign promises is really beyond help.
Their business, their choice. If you want a non-profit distribution, check out Debian Stable. (Testing is usually OK, but right not it's a bit volatile.)
Sorry, for *his* complaint, that's why we have the AGPL. Unfortunately, it's not widely used. With cloud-style applications becoming more common, this will eventually be appreciated by some end users.
Web accessable applications are an area where the GPL places no restrictions on source code availability. In this area, it's in the same boat as the BSD. The AGPL addresses this weakness, and is compatible with GPL3. (I.e., GPL code can be moved to AGPL [though not, I believe, vice versa].)
CAUTION: IANAL. This is not a legal opinion. Etc. I've never had to deal with this interaction myself, this is based on on-line discussions between people I don't know.
I looked at Fedora a year or so ago. The package manager was ok. (I prefer apt-get + synaptic, but yum + synaptic + rpm wasn't bad.) OTOH, the package selection was poor. They had most of the more common packages, but finding anything what wasn't in the main repository meant trusting someone I'd never heard of. Not something I like to do regularly. And sometimes even finding the repository was sufficient work that it was easier to compile from source. And sometimes that didn't work. Debian was just more reliable and convenient. I'm thinking of switching to the new Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) fts, but that's largely because my wife is currently using Ubuntu, and it would be nice to be more familiar with the particular system she's using.
But for Fedora... well, a couple of years ago the basic system was quite solid. But they needed lots of work on application availability. (N.B.: They didn't have this problem back when it was the "Professional Version". And as I'm only considering FOSS software, price isn't likely to be the issue. It could be interest. I'm basically a programmer, not a systems admin, so I might have very different interests than the Fedora people, though I'd have expected that Debian would have the same bias, and it shows less of it than Ubuntu [which is biased towards simple].)
50 centimeters? Ideal? Someone read a humor piece and took it seriously. Possibly because they didn't understand metric. 50 centimeters is about 18 inches. That's a truly silly thing to hook an electric generator to. And, apparently, that's only at high tide, so the duty cycle would be less than 50%. Lots less.
The original *must* have been a humor piece.
But you'd better either have a way to reset those answers, or a fool-proof way to remember them. Everyone's sometimes a fool.
It also assumes that money is Apple's primary motivational force. To me, looking at it's history, it appears more likely that the emphasis is on control. (Not that money is despised. If's very useful in acquiring and maintaining control.)
Probably not. That would probably call in the regulators.
OTOH, they could get advance design information that wasn't currently available outside of the company. It would be very difficult to ensure that didn't happen unless Apple was required to keep Arm as a totally separate company at totally separate sites. And even then it could be difficult.
What does "Which came first?" have to do with ANYTHING? That's a silly argument. Not saying you couldn't make a decent argument, but you didn't.
I could, but wouldn't, argue that private property is a natural right, and monopoly is a fiction of the state. Unfortunately, I know a bit too much history. Private property is also a fiction of the state. What's natural is the amount of property that you can carry while you run from a leopard. Possibly one could argue that it's what you can carry while you chase a wounded antelope. Anything more than that requires a proto-state to enforce it.
(OTOH, we CO-EVOLVED with such proto-states. So in that sense, the state, itself, is a natural phenomenon. In which case state guaranteed property is also natural, and rules about monopolies, etc. is just argument about the details.)
You can guess that sort of thing, and it *MIGHT* be true.
The problem is, that sounds an awful lot like the excuses that kept being given for the actions of various judges in the SCOx cases over the last seven years. And those were almost all eventually displayed to be wrong. So I have a hard time accepting that kind of excuse now.
It's true, the police are not the courts. But actually the courts have a better reputation for justice than do the police. And over the last seven years I've become convinced that the courts have a minimal interest in justice. Further, the police aren't under any obligation to protect you (which came as a bit of a shock to me). They usually do, because it's usually department policy. They *are* under an official obligation to enforce the laws, but in practice they can choose which laws they consider it important to be enforcing right now. And they can decide that right now it's that litterbug over there that's important, not the lynch mob. Policy means they don't usually make that decision. Usually they call for reinforcements. But there's no legal obligation.
Remember, the primary function of the police is to defend the government. After that policy determines to a great extent what they do. There are more laws than can possibly be properly enforced, so policy chooses which ones to enforce. (Currently, in the city I live in, the government is in sufficient financial distress that the primary job of the police is to enforce laws that bring in money. E.g., speeding tickets. And maintaining social order, of course...at least to the point that businesses don't flee the city, and customers are willing to shop here.) (P.S.: I don't mean that's all they do. But that's where they put their priorities.)
(N.B.: I'm exaggerating slightly to state my case clearly. But it's just an exaggeration, the directional trend is clearly evident. And it's clear where things will go if the financial condition continues to deteriorate.)
I'll blame Obama for doing something that I didn't like when Bush was doing it and feel quite justified, thank you.
Just because one bastard started doing something doesn't mean that someone elected to reverse what that bastard was doing should continue doing it. That just makes him another bastard.
It matters a lot if you're trying to decide, e.g., whether your next project should be written in, say, Java.
It could be decisive.
I'll grant that smoke doesn't contain much protein. I doubt that it contains none. (That seems *extremely* unlikely.) I also doubt that proteins are the only allergens, though I'll readily grant that they are the major ones.
But you could be right. My doubt may be based on ignorance. If so, the ignorance still exists after reading your posts.
From what I've read, it appears that the active region of allergens are generally small fractions of a molecule, and that they would be equally reactive were they attached to a different molecule, or even drifting about as a radical. If a complete protein doesn't exist in smoke, therefore, it can still have allergenic properties. I'll admit I'm not an MD or a biochemist or other such specialist. I see no grounds, however, for believing that you are either.