The problem, as I see it, is that Google has a monopoly on this. They had to break the law to get this monopoly, and it took both slick lawyers and a pliant "adversary", but they got a court to give them a global right to copy "orphaned" works that are still within copyright.
Now it's true, someone else could try the same game. Break the law and see if their lawyers are slick enough and their "adversary" is pliant enough and the judge is.... I can't figure out HOW to categorize that judge. If it all works out right, the Google would no longer have a monopoly. Now it would be a duopoly. But take a close look at that process, and see what you think of it.
I'm all in favor of rare and out-of-print books being preserved. I just don't trust a monopoly to do the preservation for me. Google's goals aren't the same as mine, even if they overlap in places. I'd rather trust Gutenprint...but they were shut out of the deal. So was everyone else except Google. (I've heard that Google is going to subcontract producing hardcopies of their work to others, I haven't heard that they've done so. And even if they did, as long as Google gets to act as a monopoly gatekeeper, I'm not going to trust the process.)
That's the way it works for magnetic fusion. In fact, magnetic confinement fusion depends on it working that way. In laser fusion, each little drop of liquid hydrogen fuses separately, and it *does* "stop in its tracks".
At least that's this design. There are some combination proposals that combine magnetic confinement with laser fusion...or there were. I haven't heard of one recently (but then I haven't been listening).
The thing is, this approach to laser ignition doesn't have ANY confinement, so there's no continual fusion.
It isn't. In the US, at least, Banks are given the authorization to create an amount of money equal to 1/3 (I think. The fraction may be wrong.) of their deposits. They frequently cheat and exceed this fraction.
This is, therefore, a state granted monopoly. As such, any institution that profits from it cannot be used as an honest example of libertarianism in action (whether pro or con).
Then there are all the special state granted charters, limits on who can enter the market, etc.
Personally, I don't believe that libertarianism would work, but banks aren't an honest counter-example.
With this design, a successful ignition with a very positive result wouldn't produce commercially practical electricity within 40 years. This isn't a design that has a significant chance at commercial use. (That wasn't it's intent.)
Where we go from here is dependant as much on political decisions as scientific ones. The scientific ones (including engineering, but not economic) would probably put commercial reactors 20 years out. Political decisions could either accelerate or retard that by quite a lot, but not less than 10 years even with an all-out go-for-broke push. So I'd say somewhere between 10 and 50 years. With 50 years NOT being the upper limit, and with 10 years being a very hard lower limit.
OTOH, we could do commercial fusion reaction this year if we decided to. Thus: 1) Dig a deep hole. 2) Explode a fusion bomb inside the hole. 3) Treat this as a source for heating water to live steam. 4) Run a turbine.
Sorry, but laser fusion systems aren't self-sustaining. The lasers smash a compression wave into the hydorgen, it fuses, this releases heat causing an expansion, and it rarefies. Think of it as an amplifier. A very complex amplifier for electricity, which burns hydrogen. If you stop feeding in power, the reaction stops in it's tracks. (This is actually good. You don't want a self-sustaining fusion reaction on the surface of the planet you're currently living on.)
So in this case, ignition just means that the amplifier has a positive gain. It "increases the signal strength".
No, before the time MSWindows first came out, the term "window" was already used to denote a particular area of the screen that was a "window" into the execution of some program, e.g. a word processor. I think it was used in curses though I'm not sure. It was definitely used with GEM. I'm not totally sure that the Mac used that term, though. (I rather think it did, but too much of using the Mac is stored in my mind for the period 1984-1995, and it tends to leak into areas where it's inappropriate. The term existed, and I used it to refer to Mac things, but I can't be sure that others did.)
Remember that MSWind wasn't released until 1995, while the Mac dated from 1984. And, of course, the Xerox PARC computers pre-dated the Mac. And the Xerox PARC computers were described as "graphics windowing systems", so I'm rather certain that those who worked with them called the designated screen segments "windows".
But it makes it impossible to demo the liveCD. (Well, possible in certain ways, of course, but not to graphics users.)
Was it just removed from the liveCD or was it also removed from the live DVD? (Is there one? If not, why not? If they're so packed for space that they need to remove the Gimp, then they clearly need to move to a DVD.)
(After checking, there clearly is a live DVD. What I can't tell is whether it will include the Gimp. I'm going to presume so, but the only benefit they mention is added language packs.)
Yahoo may have better privacy policies (at the moment), but what about Bing? It's MS, so I'm not going to bother reading their EULA, I'll just skip using it...because I wouldn't trust whatever it happened to say. I'd expect that somewhere in the small print it allowed them to change the terms without direct notification by altering a web site that it was my responsibility to keep watching.
I don't know about you, but my first act will be to switch default search engines back to Google. I don't trust Bing as far as I can throw it, and there's no place to grab.
So does Cannonical get paid even if I don't use the default? I hope so, but the wording wasn't encouraging.
It's true that learned people believed the earth was flat once. Sometime before Euclid.
That intelligent and informed people believed the earth was flat during the middle ages is false. And the argument against Columbus was that he was drastically underestimating the size of the earth. They were right about that, and Columbus never did reach India. Fortunately there were these other continents that nobody knew about. (There were myths, but they were appallingly vague, and nobody really believed them anyway.) If it hadin't been for Columbus, the American continents would have been discoved by some Viking, Hibernian, or British sailor. Or possibly the Chinese would have emerged from isolation and resumed trade with South America. Remember, by that time the Vikings had colonized Iceland, and established a temporary settlement on Greenland (which failed when the climate worsened). All they would have had to do was go into seal hunting or fishing in a big way, and they would soon have re-discovered Vinland.
Why is that a problem? Floods happen. Occasionally an extremely large one happens. It's impossible the check the flood myths to detect that they happened at the same time, so the most reasonable theory is that they didn't.
"I was up on top of this large hill, and there was water as far as I could see" may well have been the original story. Each transmission to the next generation "improved" the story. Ever played telephone?
Not necessarily detectably so. Consider mice. If you wiped out 90% of the mice in a locality, the remaining population would probably still have most of the genetic diversity. Because there are so many mice. Now if you wiped them down to 200,000 mice, then they'd loose juat as much genetic variability as people did. But no natural disaster is likely to do that. There are too many mice.
And if mice don't work for you, then consider cockroaches. They've remained essentially unchanged since the early dinosaurs. They've survived giant meteors and supervolcanos and ice ages. And maintained their genetic variability.
OTOH, larger animals may well experience problems. But the single event didn't stress most of them anywhere near as much as the continual predation by people.
So I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't find the signs of this in other populations of animals.
Besides, the ancestral hominids might have lived in a rather small area.
The Lord of the Rings also presents itself as factual. So does Star Wars. Why (i.e., to what extent) should the Bible be considered any more factual?
Are you going to believe that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt just because the Bible says that happened? I'm sorry, but I find it a lot more reasonable to consider that as fiction. OTOH, I don't have much trouble believing that Lot shacked up with his daughters, and that this was the foundation of two of the tribes of Israel. So I tend to consider PARTS of the Bible as probably historical. *PROBABLY*!!! I don't give it a high probability unless it's confirmed from other sources, but I'll give it 55 or 60% if it's inherently plausible. And not contradicted by other sources.
Note also that the Bible has been translated multiple times, and the different translations, even where they agree on what happened, tend to put different emotional weighing on different parts. Also remember that a lot of the Bible was political propaganda when it was written. And was as reliable as such things usually are.
E.g.: Was John the Baptist a non-worldly prophet, or the leader of a political revolutionary movement? I have seen evidence both ways. And also that he didn't really exist, at least not at the time reported. And also that he was the leader of a religious revolutionary movement. (OTOH, I'm not sure that any separation between religious and political has any meaning at that time and place.)
1: Very few people read Star Wars. I certainly didn't. (I gave one of the books a try, and gave up after two chapters.)
2: I don't think Star Wars counts as Science Fiction. Space Opera, yes, but that's not the same thing. Forbidden Planet was a lot deeper, but movies traditionally aren't about getting you to think.
Some science fiction is meant to prevent the future it describes. But it's intended to make you think about alternatives. Other science fiction is just designed to explore what certain conditions might yield. Consider "Mission of Gravity".
I can remember two or three science fiction stories that had flying cars. No more. In all of them very few owned such a vehicle. Most of them are from the 1940's. Fancy spaceships are much more common. (I still want my own "Skylark of Valeron", or even "Skylark III".)
??? The USB sticks were to hold copies of the files. When you have the disks reformatted, you copy them back to the computer's hard disk. At that point, the USB sticks are just backups.
As to what virtual machine to use, I generally use qemu (which I get at through qemu launcher. OTOH, the system I'm installing in the virtual machine is Linux. (I can't agree to the MSWind EULA.)
In the past I've also had success with VMWare. (But I have trouble even figuring out ANY sensible meaning for what you're asking to do.)
Also, if the requirement is to use hardware that won't work with Linux, then it's probable that any solution that doesn't involve installing MSWind on the bare metal won't work. So you'll just end up in the same situation again in a month or so. In that case you might want to re-think the hardware. (I'm not certain of this. If it doesn't need initialization at boot time, then possibly a driver running in a virtual machine could access it. *I* wouldn't try, and I'm not the person to ask for advice on how to make that work. I'd rather just avoid the garbage. [You may not think of that hardware as garbage, but that's how I think of it.])
Agreeing with what you said, it's still true that some languages are worse than others (along some particular vector of evaluation). Perl is used to produce more crufty code BECAUSE it's used to quickly hack together solutions.
N.B.: It's not because Perl looks (to me) like line noise. APL is as bad for that (though not worse!). And several other languages are also noted for "write only code". But Perl was created specially for quick hacks. That is both it's power and it's weakness.
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The problem, as I see it, is that Google has a monopoly on this. They had to break the law to get this monopoly, and it took both slick lawyers and a pliant "adversary", but they got a court to give them a global right to copy "orphaned" works that are still within copyright.
Now it's true, someone else could try the same game. Break the law and see if their lawyers are slick enough and their "adversary" is pliant enough and the judge is .... I can't figure out HOW to categorize that judge. If it all works out right, the Google would no longer have a monopoly. Now it would be a duopoly. But take a close look at that process, and see what you think of it.
I'm all in favor of rare and out-of-print books being preserved. I just don't trust a monopoly to do the preservation for me. Google's goals aren't the same as mine, even if they overlap in places. I'd rather trust Gutenprint...but they were shut out of the deal. So was everyone else except Google. (I've heard that Google is going to subcontract producing hardcopies of their work to others, I haven't heard that they've done so. And even if they did, as long as Google gets to act as a monopoly gatekeeper, I'm not going to trust the process.)
That's the way it works for magnetic fusion. In fact, magnetic confinement fusion depends on it working that way. In laser fusion, each little drop of liquid hydrogen fuses separately, and it *does* "stop in its tracks".
At least that's this design. There are some combination proposals that combine magnetic confinement with laser fusion...or there were. I haven't heard of one recently (but then I haven't been listening).
The thing is, this approach to laser ignition doesn't have ANY confinement, so there's no continual fusion.
How far back? I don't use it, so this is an honest question, but I had heard that the current MSOffice was unable to open MSWord98 documents.
It isn't. In the US, at least, Banks are given the authorization to create an amount of money equal to 1/3 (I think. The fraction may be wrong.) of their deposits. They frequently cheat and exceed this fraction.
This is, therefore, a state granted monopoly. As such, any institution that profits from it cannot be used as an honest example of libertarianism in action (whether pro or con).
Then there are all the special state granted charters, limits on who can enter the market, etc.
Personally, I don't believe that libertarianism would work, but banks aren't an honest counter-example.
With this design, a successful ignition with a very positive result wouldn't produce commercially practical electricity within 40 years. This isn't a design that has a significant chance at commercial use. (That wasn't it's intent.)
Where we go from here is dependant as much on political decisions as scientific ones. The scientific ones (including engineering, but not economic) would probably put commercial reactors 20 years out. Political decisions could either accelerate or retard that by quite a lot, but not less than 10 years even with an all-out go-for-broke push. So I'd say somewhere between 10 and 50 years. With 50 years NOT being the upper limit, and with 10 years being a very hard lower limit.
OTOH, we could do commercial fusion reaction this year if we decided to. Thus:
1) Dig a deep hole.
2) Explode a fusion bomb inside the hole.
3) Treat this as a source for heating water to live steam.
4) Run a turbine.
Sorry, but laser fusion systems aren't self-sustaining. The lasers smash a compression wave into the hydorgen, it fuses, this releases heat causing an expansion, and it rarefies. Think of it as an amplifier. A very complex amplifier for electricity, which burns hydrogen. If you stop feeding in power, the reaction stops in it's tracks. (This is actually good. You don't want a self-sustaining fusion reaction on the surface of the planet you're currently living on.)
So in this case, ignition just means that the amplifier has a positive gain. It "increases the signal strength".
Have you ever READ an MS EULA? (Not that Apple's are any better this year, but MS was the innovator in this field.)
If you've read the EULA and still trust MS with your data, well, it's your neck.
MS has repeatedly proved that anyone who trusts them is a fool. Google has only indicated it a few times, and never done a thorough proof.
No, before the time MSWindows first came out, the term "window" was already used to denote a particular area of the screen that was a "window" into the execution of some program, e.g. a word processor. I think it was used in curses though I'm not sure. It was definitely used with GEM. I'm not totally sure that the Mac used that term, though. (I rather think it did, but too much of using the Mac is stored in my mind for the period 1984-1995, and it tends to leak into areas where it's inappropriate. The term existed, and I used it to refer to Mac things, but I can't be sure that others did.)
Remember that MSWind wasn't released until 1995, while the Mac dated from 1984. And, of course, the Xerox PARC computers pre-dated the Mac. And the Xerox PARC computers were described as "graphics windowing systems", so I'm rather certain that those who worked with them called the designated screen segments "windows".
But it makes it impossible to demo the liveCD. (Well, possible in certain ways, of course, but not to graphics users.)
Was it just removed from the liveCD or was it also removed from the live DVD? (Is there one? If not, why not? If they're so packed for space that they need to remove the Gimp, then they clearly need to move to a DVD.)
(After checking, there clearly is a live DVD. What I can't tell is whether it will include the Gimp. I'm going to presume so, but the only benefit they mention is added language packs.)
Yahoo may have better privacy policies (at the moment), but what about Bing? It's MS, so I'm not going to bother reading their EULA, I'll just skip using it...because I wouldn't trust whatever it happened to say. I'd expect that somewhere in the small print it allowed them to change the terms without direct notification by altering a web site that it was my responsibility to keep watching.
I don't know about you, but my first act will be to switch default search engines back to Google. I don't trust Bing as far as I can throw it, and there's no place to grab.
So does Cannonical get paid even if I don't use the default? I hope so, but the wording wasn't encouraging.
One could see this announcement as an advertisement for someone else to set up a mirror site in a country with different restrictions.
It's true that learned people believed the earth was flat once. Sometime before Euclid.
That intelligent and informed people believed the earth was flat during the middle ages is false. And the argument against Columbus was that he was drastically underestimating the size of the earth. They were right about that, and Columbus never did reach India. Fortunately there were these other continents that nobody knew about. (There were myths, but they were appallingly vague, and nobody really believed them anyway.) If it hadin't been for Columbus, the American continents would have been discoved by some Viking, Hibernian, or British sailor. Or possibly the Chinese would have emerged from isolation and resumed trade with South America. Remember, by that time the Vikings had colonized Iceland, and established a temporary settlement on Greenland (which failed when the climate worsened). All they would have had to do was go into seal hunting or fishing in a big way, and they would soon have re-discovered Vinland.
Why is that a problem? Floods happen. Occasionally an extremely large one happens. It's impossible the check the flood myths to detect that they happened at the same time, so the most reasonable theory is that they didn't.
"I was up on top of this large hill, and there was water as far as I could see" may well have been the original story. Each transmission to the next generation "improved" the story. Ever played telephone?
Not necessarily detectably so. Consider mice. If you wiped out 90% of the mice in a locality, the remaining population would probably still have most of the genetic diversity. Because there are so many mice. Now if you wiped them down to 200,000 mice, then they'd loose juat as much genetic variability as people did. But no natural disaster is likely to do that. There are too many mice.
And if mice don't work for you, then consider cockroaches. They've remained essentially unchanged since the early dinosaurs. They've survived giant meteors and supervolcanos and ice ages. And maintained their genetic variability.
OTOH, larger animals may well experience problems. But the single event didn't stress most of them anywhere near as much as the continual predation by people.
So I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't find the signs of this in other populations of animals.
Besides, the ancestral hominids might have lived in a rather small area.
The Lord of the Rings also presents itself as factual. So does Star Wars. Why (i.e., to what extent) should the Bible be considered any more factual?
Are you going to believe that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt just because the Bible says that happened? I'm sorry, but I find it a lot more reasonable to consider that as fiction. OTOH, I don't have much trouble believing that Lot shacked up with his daughters, and that this was the foundation of two of the tribes of Israel. So I tend to consider PARTS of the Bible as probably historical. *PROBABLY*!!! I don't give it a high probability unless it's confirmed from other sources, but I'll give it 55 or 60% if it's inherently plausible. And not contradicted by other sources.
Note also that the Bible has been translated multiple times, and the different translations, even where they agree on what happened, tend to put different emotional weighing on different parts. Also remember that a lot of the Bible was political propaganda when it was written. And was as reliable as such things usually are.
E.g.: Was John the Baptist a non-worldly prophet, or the leader of a political revolutionary movement? I have seen evidence both ways. And also that he didn't really exist, at least not at the time reported. And also that he was the leader of a religious revolutionary movement. (OTOH, I'm not sure that any separation between religious and political has any meaning at that time and place.)
1: Very few people read Star Wars. I certainly didn't. (I gave one of the books a try, and gave up after two chapters.)
2: I don't think Star Wars counts as Science Fiction. Space Opera, yes, but that's not the same thing. Forbidden Planet was a lot deeper, but movies traditionally aren't about getting you to think.
Some science fiction is meant to prevent the future it describes. But it's intended to make you think about alternatives. Other science fiction is just designed to explore what certain conditions might yield. Consider "Mission of Gravity".
I can remember two or three science fiction stories that had flying cars. No more. In all of them very few owned such a vehicle. Most of them are from the 1940's. Fancy spaceships are much more common. (I still want my own "Skylark of Valeron", or even "Skylark III".)
Every physical Moebius strip has two sides. The face and the edge. And if you conflate the two, then you loose the visual paradox.
Want to buy a bridge?
The portions that have been leaked (and not denied) do not confirm that as the reason. Citizen outrage appears more likely.
What you do is, you wear glasses that display the screen across your entire visual field, and you connect them to the computer with Bluetooth.
Why not? The glasses have already been built. (At least one design of them has.) And it might make for a *REALLY* interesting driving experience.
???
The USB sticks were to hold copies of the files. When you have the disks reformatted, you copy them back to the computer's hard disk. At that point, the USB sticks are just backups.
As to what virtual machine to use, I generally use qemu (which I get at through qemu launcher. OTOH, the system I'm installing in the virtual machine is Linux. (I can't agree to the MSWind EULA.)
In the past I've also had success with VMWare. (But I have trouble even figuring out ANY sensible meaning for what you're asking to do.)
Also, if the requirement is to use hardware that won't work with Linux, then it's probable that any solution that doesn't involve installing MSWind on the bare metal won't work. So you'll just end up in the same situation again in a month or so. In that case you might want to re-think the hardware. (I'm not certain of this. If it doesn't need initialization at boot time, then possibly a driver running in a virtual machine could access it. *I* wouldn't try, and I'm not the person to ask for advice on how to make that work. I'd rather just avoid the garbage. [You may not think of that hardware as garbage, but that's how I think of it.])
Agreeing with what you said, it's still true that some languages are worse than others (along some particular vector of evaluation). Perl is used to produce more crufty code BECAUSE it's used to quickly hack together solutions.
N.B.: It's not because Perl looks (to me) like line noise. APL is as bad for that (though not worse!). And several other languages are also noted for "write only code". But Perl was created specially for quick hacks. That is both it's power and it's weakness.