Mining isn't sufficient to justify the construction. You'll need to plan a space-ship factory. Which means that the components built on the moon would need to be small enough to fit on the tether. Somehow. (Probably not inside a normal passenger capsule.)
And remember mass imported needs to equal weight mass. People tend to forget this point, but it's important, or the elevator won't remain stable. (There's a ballast mass to offset short-term imbalances, but it won't work for an improper average.)
A decent solution might be for the first construction project to be a solar sail designed to capture an asteroid, and bring it in to lunar orbit. Then it could be cut-up and ferried down for manufacturing. If you can capture an icy asteroid, and shield it from heat, then that would be something really valuable to import into the moon as counterweight to the exports.
And the nice thing about the lunar elevator is that Kelvar is more than strong enough for the cable. It needs to be overstrength, because the outer layers need to be UV shielding. That, also, can be strong, so it doesn't need to be dead weight, but it might not be strong enough to build the cable out of.
Fortunately, we should be able to do better than Kelvar. This will allow the cable to be both stronger and lighter.
OTOH, for planets with atmosphere allowing flight, I still prefer the pinwheel design. It's not confined to one "touch down" point. (Well it never touches down, but you know what I mean.) It's not quite as cheap / pound, but it's faster and cheaper to build. And one pinwheel can service several locations on the planet (depending on how fast it's spinning).
That's why the comment about compiling it with an independent compiler. That was the solution last time.
Of course, now with the NSA involved, one could claim that all possible compilers had been jiggered to recognize each other. So to be secure one would need to go back to an early version and compile the chain forwards. Or write your own mini-C compiler in, say, Python, extending it sufficiently to compile an early version of GNU C...and then compile forwards from there. Though I suppose that if you've done that, you might as well extend your own compiler to handle all of the subset of C required to compile the GCC, and then compile directly.
Even then, unless you've reviewed ALL the source, you can't be sure, so it's safer to just use your own compiler.
Do I think anyone will do that? Or reasonably could? No. The community could, but if you're going to trust the community, why not trust the GCC? It has sources not only reviewed by the community, but also by multiple independent governments.
I think that around the time of the GCC-EGCC split and remerger many independent people thoroughly reviewed the source code, and that (partially) independent compilers were frequently compiling different compilers. The Thompson back door was fragile, and depended on Thompson being one of the developers. (In fact, as I recall [from reports, I wasn't there], he originally wrote it as an aid to debugging...then he expanded it.)
Absolute security isn't available. We (the community) try to come as close as is practical.
I've never before heard that it was his user group he stole it from.
Also, at least once, I've heard that it was stuff being thrown out into the garbage by his college. (Well, *a* college. I'm adding the presumption that it was one he was attending classes at.)
One consistent feature of the stories is that he didn't write it. This doesn't make it true. Somehow, though, he's never seemed like a programmer to me. Socially inept, yeah. He has/had that part down. That doesn't suffice.
My conclusions about polygamy and violence are based on historical rather than current records. I don't know what the current state is. But cultural attitudes tend to persist even after the instigating circumstance has abated. So..
1. Having multiple wives is not allowed by the governments of most Muslim countries. Polygamy used to be permitted. It's allowed by the Koran.
2. Even where it is allowed (very few places) it is a very very small majority of the population that has multiple wives. This is true, and has always been true. And it's still true that societies that practice Polygamy tend to have higher levels of violence.
3. Violence is *not* common in Muslim countries. I'm not sure where you get your news from (or if you just imagine it) but please do your research before making vague and blatant statements like these. And I'm not sure how you could justify your statement, either. Probably we're classifying different incidents as violence. That said, there is a large amount of evidence for violence in muslim countries. I'll admit that most of what I'm considering is several decades old, but occasional news stories come along that indicate it's still and on-going problem. (Well, *I* think of it as a problem.) I have a friend whose daughter is currently residing in a muslim country as a muslim. *SHE*, the daughter, thinks my opinions are unreasonable. But she doesn't deny the facts upon which they are based. (I think she's a masochist to chose such a lifestyle, but it was her free choice...her children won't have that choice.)
Could I recommend a book to you. It's called "Not without my daughter!"
If you've actually read the Old Testament, and haven't noticed the incitements to violence, then there's little I can say. And it wasn't, by any means, all defensive. A lot of it was, but those were in periods where Israel was the weaker party.
How about this bit: A prince wants to marry the daughter of a leading Israelite, and she's agreeable. They've had a bit of premarital sex. Her brothers trick all the males in town into getting circumcised on the same day, and while they're in recovery, the kill them all.*
Or the bit about killing everyone worshiping a golden calf after they think Moses has abandoned them?
There are lots of others. (I *DON'T* have the Bible on my computer, so I'm not going to cite chapter and verse, or anything that doesn't come readily to mind.)
The christian testament *IS* less inciteful. Somehow, however, the christians have traditionally been more violent than the jews. I think it has to do with who has how much power more than with official religious doctrine. If you want to convince me otherwise, I'd need some good examples that aren't easily explained as hagiography (i.e., that are based around facts that can be checked with reliable sources).
----- *(I know, the bible version is a bit different...but NOT MUCH, and it's been propaganda for centuries, so can't be trusted to be a fair version of what happened. My reinterpretation is what any reasonable person would believe happened based on the victors version of the story.)
Until the formation of the Nation of Israel, the Jews weren't in any position to engage in the listed activities. Now...now they use a *real* army. And instead of terrorists, they have an intelligence service. The christians haven't been so limited. But they still prefer to use real armies and real intelligence services.
Do you think it's really about religion? It's US vs THEM. Any "us" you pick. It's not the power that corrupts, it's the immunity to consequences. Peer pressure helps. Riots used to be common after a high school team lost it's game. Now it's less so, as the local community is less supportive. (They've got professional teams to watch on TV.)
This violence *is* common in muslim countries, but not only muslim countries. It's probably related to polygamy, where the less successfully aggressive males are denied all access to women. (Look for an increase of this in China in the coming decades. Different reason, but the number of male children is far higher than the number of females.)
All THAT said, yes, the Koran explicitly encourages violence against the non-muslim. Read your bible. It does the same thing. Less so in the new testament, but the christians have, if anything, been more violent than the jews. This probably dates back to the christians out-competing the mithraists for dominance of the Roman Empire. Ever since then christians have had considerable conventional military power in their hands.
There is only one "religion" that has arguably decreased the amount of violence and that's Buddhism. Even there, it's dubious. One could argue that the violence just became secular. (OTOH, the various schools of hand-to-hand combat were developed because the secular authorities felt it necessary to prevent the Buddhist sects from forming their own armies, so they made it illegal for monks [or peasants] to carry weapons.)
Recruiting officers have a long and well earned reputation for lying to those they are trying to enlist. They are MUCH less trustworthy than used car salesmen. If a used car salesman lies to you, you may be able to force him to refund your money. If a recruiting officer lies to you, you are stuck and he is rewarded.
There's an old song called "Stung Right" that summarizes it nicely. It starts off: "I joined the Navy......to see the world,
What did I see.........I saw the sea...." There are many others with the same theme. Do NOT trust the recruiting officer. He is not required to be honest...but rather to get recruits. He also never finds out what happens to them after he fills out their request for a specialty. (And it's a request, not a promise, no matter what he tells you.)
Many people join the military and are fortunate. They attribute this to their good planning. You never hear from the dead or the quadriplegics. So if you hear from someone who survived, the fact that you are even hearing from them is due to their being a part of a statistically biased sample.
I think you've got a somewhat narrow definition of dimension. There are definitely different dimensions than those you enumerate. What you're talking about are the spatial dimensions (including time).
Another blatantly obvious non-spatial dimension is color. Basically a dimension is anything that can form a consistent ordering and is measurable. Such dimensions are often spatialized for display purposes, just as spatial dimensions are often transformed into non-spatial dimensions. (Consider a globe that's color coded to show height above or below sea level.)
The difference between the spatial dimensions and other dimensions is only a reliable transform or two. (If you could extract time from the spatial dimensions, then I'd say two or three transforms, but post-relativity it seems to be welded in solidly.)
Notice that time used to be considered completely separate from the spatial dimensions. This implies that you can't be certain that some other common dimension won't also turn out to be welded in just as solidly. Candidates to consider are mass and charge. *I* don't have any idea how one could do such a thing, or what the implications of doing it might be...but this certainly doesn't mean that it couldn't be done, (Note that in welding time to space Einstein used sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z - t*t) as the distance function...he subtracted the square of time. (Yeah, I simplified it. And it's delta x, y, z, and t that are being squared. But there's some complex other function that's normally ignorable, and it's somehow analogous to the dot product.) This wasn't at all an obvious thing to do, and it means that separation in time acts differently from separation in the other spatial dimensions. You notice that every time you try to change your mind about having done something.
You are the only person I've ever encountered who was so lost in time as to assert that. OTOH, many are quite critical of his theology and other mystical writings. Usually without even reading them.
Generally we evaluate theories from the past based on our current theories, and also on our understanding of what those theories actually were. Usually both stances are fatally flawed.
If there were more electrons than protons, their charge would need to be balanced by positrons, so we'd see gamma ray peaks indicating annihilation of electrons by positrons. We don't.
OTOH, this is based on other theories. E.g. it presumes that the net charge is neutral. There are lots of good reasons to believe this, but a direct proof is obviously impossible. (We couldn't even do a direct proof that your hand was neutral...but there are lots of good reasons to believe that it's at least approximately neutral. E.g., it doesn't fly apart.) There are a indefinite number of quibbles possible, but each one known can be answered in a plausible and relatively consistent manner. So it's probably true. Absolute truth is only the province of theology. Even mathematical theories have, occasionally, been proven wrong. And proofs of theories are frequently shown to be wrong.)
Dark Matter just means it's heavy and we can't see it. This includes wandering planets, Black holes without an accretion disk, brown dwarf stars that are a few light years away, etc.
But it comes in several different flavors. If the big bang theories are correct, most of the missing mass of the universe can't be baryonic. (I.e., it can't be built around protons and neutrons.) In that case what is it? Some of it's massive neutrinos...but not all. It can't be electrons, as there aren't any more electrons than protons. (If there were we'd see some peaks in the gamma range that we don't see.) So what is it?
Well, we know-for-certain that it's Dark Matter. Being more specific beyond that requires asserting a theory that hasn't been proven. (There are LOTS of candidates...but we, at least I, don't have any sound basis to choose between them.)
If tons are measured in pounds, then tons are already units of force. And I've never heard of tons being measured in poundals or kilograms.
I suspect that the term "ton" was invented before the concept of mass was invented. (People still get mass and force confused, so it can't be obvious. I wonder who holds the patent.)
Seems like it. It would appear that the original article was talking about something that was superconducting up to 17 Kelvin. Whoops! That's not any room I've ever been in.
Because your vision of the present has been programmed. It's a dystopia, alright, but not particularly that one (though there *are* elements).
Remember, the dystopias that are written about are that author's metaphor for their present time, taking certain aspects of it, and exaggerating it for a combination of disguise and rhetorical warning.
I'm not saying that Atlas Shrugged isn't a powerful book, and isn't a valid warning, but don't literalize. If you do you miss the point. (Note, e.g., that the most creative people are arguing in favor of the GPL, which is antithetical to the theme that Rand was pushing. But I can practically guarantee that she wasn't even thinking about software when she wrote that. [Software is more like "The Fountainhead", and that doesn't match either. Her idea of how creativity works in complex projects was just wrong.])
P.S.: Note also that software differs greatly from construction in that there is no requirement that you already be wealthy before creating. This is a big part of the difference.
Logs were probably kept... but the main developers never seemed to read them. Too busy developing, I guess.
That said, the IRC was useful in getting the system operating in a minimal kind of way (it *WAS* alpha). It just kept me from doing any development myself, or even doing the kind of documentation that they wanted.
Thing about IRC.... I know that there are development projects that use IRC, and I've even participated in one. It turned out that the most active developers were never on the IRC list. They met for conversation occasionally at a local pizza joint (which didn't help me, as I wasn't sufficiently local, and I'm on a salt restricted diet). But it did make trying to get things fixed/changed/documented/etc. via the IRC relatively pointless. (It's a synchronous medium. If they aren't on when you're talking, they'll probably never hear about it.)
Of course you can't trust the people to report honestly. But you ***** sure can't trust the professional news people. They'll say whatever the company line is. And they reprocess what they report so that you can't recognize it. I've been present at a couple of events that I later saw news coverage of. They *did* happen... but the news was so reprocessed that I had a hard time recognizing them. And this was just done by carefully selected camera angles and by cutting out anything that wasn't "interesting" enough. (I.e., it was over a decade ago.)
You can't trust what some stranger tells you, because you don't know what ax he has to grind. But you certainly can't trust the professional liars. (There was a story of some fake NBC coverage of a demonstration in China that was only given away because the crowd were chanting in English. It was one of the early "Docudrama"s about the Tiamen Square events. But this one was totally faked. It was "What we think you might have seen if you had been there...edited to be more interesting".) I believe that *something* happened there. Just what... I don't know anyone who was present, and the news sources were blatantly lying. (They later admitted that it was a fake, but they didn't say so until challenged about it.)
I switched to Linux because I read the MSWind2000 EULA.
That was, in and of itself, sufficient. That I chose Linux was to avoid buying a new computer. (At that time the Apple Mac had, or I believed it had, a reasonable EULA...even if it wasn't the GPL. This has since changed, and I no longer consider the Mac a viable choice. [I noticed the change last year. Perhaps it wasn't new then.])
Another option that I considered was Unix (BSD). Linux had the reputation of being friendlier and of supporting more hardware. Also, for awhile I needed to double-boot, and this was easier for me with Linux...or at least it looked easier before attempting to install Unix. (And it still looks easier, as I've never yet tried to dual-boot with Unix.)
Well, Poul Anderson once wrote a serial for Astounding (now Analog) called "A Bicycle Built for Brew" with the summary "In which it takes a beer with a good head to make much headway.".
(Hint: To make this work you need low gravity places, and small delta-V.)
P.S.: From your comments I feel that we read very different MS patent pledges about OOXML. (Do you have any reason to believe that they only made one that became public?) The alternative is that we understood certain sentences as having very different implications. Admittedly, IANAL, and I tend to put the darkest reasonable interpretation on words that are represented as coming from MS. If they guarantee a right to do something, I tend to take the narrowest reasonable interpretation of what that covers. I'm told that this is the appropriate method of understanding what is meant by a legal guarantee.
I didn't say I was comfortable with Sun or IBM EULAs...I said I was reasonably comfortable with the GPL family of licenses. Saying that Sun and IBM didn't make the same limitations that MS made doesn't mean that I trust or accept their pledges either. But I haven't had occasion to try to understand them. I've had occasion to try to understand MS' EULA, and that's when I decided to switch to Linux. And I've had occasion to understand the GPL, and the GPL3.
When Sun's license is the GPL3 or the LGPL3, then I'm comfortable with their patent pledge, and then is *doesn't* contain the kind of limitations that you say exist in the Sun and IBM patent pledges, and which definitely existed in the MS patent pledge that I read. (You may assert that "they are all quite reasonably sized, and the language isn't bad for legal documents.", but I generally feel that I'd rather debug Forth.)
I rarely read MS EULAs, because I never use MS products. But I've read one of the patent non-assert agreements on a proposed OOXML standard. ("A", because they've continued to shift the proposal, and because they reserve the right to continue to change it after it gets approved, presuming that it does.)
The non-assert agreement only guaranteed that the patents would not be asserted against fully conforming implementations. But the specifications of the standard (at that time) were such that nobody, including MS, could actually build a fully conforming implementation. (Including such wonderful statements as "split the text layout in the same way that Word 95 did."(paraphrase. I'm *NOT* going to read that mess of garbage again!). Also the non-assert agreement named a particular version of the specifications to which it applied. Which didn't imply in any way that if some security fix was mandatory, that it would be legal to apply that fix.
Additionally, I have reasonable grounds based on past history of actions, for trusting Sun to not act maliciously towards folk who were not acting maliciously toward them. The case for MS is rather different.
Additionally the GPL3 and LGPL3 have been verified by lawyers that I trust to have good intentions. This is not true of ANY license offered by MS. Several of them have been roundly denounced by legal experts that I give reasonable credence to. "Nearly unconscionable" is a phrase that pops to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Mining isn't sufficient to justify the construction. You'll need to plan a space-ship factory. Which means that the components built on the moon would need to be small enough to fit on the tether. Somehow. (Probably not inside a normal passenger capsule.)
And remember mass imported needs to equal weight mass. People tend to forget this point, but it's important, or the elevator won't remain stable. (There's a ballast mass to offset short-term imbalances, but it won't work for an improper average.)
A decent solution might be for the first construction project to be a solar sail designed to capture an asteroid, and bring it in to lunar orbit. Then it could be cut-up and ferried down for manufacturing. If you can capture an icy asteroid, and shield it from heat, then that would be something really valuable to import into the moon as counterweight to the exports.
And the nice thing about the lunar elevator is that Kelvar is more than strong enough for the cable. It needs to be overstrength, because the outer layers need to be UV shielding. That, also, can be strong, so it doesn't need to be dead weight, but it might not be strong enough to build the cable out of.
Fortunately, we should be able to do better than Kelvar. This will allow the cable to be both stronger and lighter.
OTOH, for planets with atmosphere allowing flight, I still prefer the pinwheel design. It's not confined to one "touch down" point. (Well it never touches down, but you know what I mean.) It's not quite as cheap / pound, but it's faster and cheaper to build. And one pinwheel can service several locations on the planet (depending on how fast it's spinning).
Well, it works all right with Konqueror.
OTOH, if they're going to do this, why shouldn't I just *use* Konqueror?
(Currently, I'll admit, what I use is SeaMonkey. And it's nominally independent of FireFox.)
That's why the comment about compiling it with an independent compiler.
That was the solution last time.
Of course, now with the NSA involved, one could claim that all possible compilers had been jiggered to recognize each other. So to be secure one would need to go back to an early version and compile the chain forwards. Or write your own mini-C compiler in, say, Python, extending it sufficiently to compile an early version of GNU C...and then compile forwards from there. Though I suppose that if you've done that, you might as well extend your own compiler to handle all of the subset of C required to compile the GCC, and then compile directly.
Even then, unless you've reviewed ALL the source, you can't be sure, so it's safer to just use your own compiler.
Do I think anyone will do that? Or reasonably could? No. The community could, but if you're going to trust the community, why not trust the GCC? It has sources not only reviewed by the community, but also by multiple independent governments.
I think that around the time of the GCC-EGCC split and remerger many independent people thoroughly reviewed the source code, and that (partially) independent compilers were frequently compiling different compilers. The Thompson back door was fragile, and depended on Thompson being one of the developers. (In fact, as I recall [from reports, I wasn't there], he originally wrote it as an aid to debugging...then he expanded it.)
Absolute security isn't available. We (the community) try to come as close as is practical.
I've never before heard that it was his user group he stole it from.
Also, at least once, I've heard that it was stuff being thrown out into the garbage by his college. (Well, *a* college. I'm adding the presumption that it was one he was attending classes at.)
One consistent feature of the stories is that he didn't write it. This doesn't make it true. Somehow, though, he's never seemed like a programmer to me. Socially inept, yeah. He has/had that part down. That doesn't suffice.
You're right, sort of.
My conclusions about polygamy and violence are based on historical rather than current records. I don't know what the current state is. But cultural attitudes tend to persist even after the instigating circumstance has abated. So..
1. Having multiple wives is not allowed by the governments of most Muslim countries.
Polygamy used to be permitted. It's allowed by the Koran.
2. Even where it is allowed (very few places) it is a very very small majority of the population that has multiple wives.
This is true, and has always been true. And it's still true that societies that practice Polygamy tend to have higher levels of violence.
3. Violence is *not* common in Muslim countries. I'm not sure where you get your news from (or if you just imagine it) but please do your research before making vague and blatant statements like these.
And I'm not sure how you could justify your statement, either. Probably we're classifying different incidents as violence. That said, there is a large amount of evidence for violence in muslim countries. I'll admit that most of what I'm considering is several decades old, but occasional news stories come along that indicate it's still and on-going problem. (Well, *I* think of it as a problem.) I have a friend whose daughter is currently residing in a muslim country as a muslim. *SHE*, the daughter, thinks my opinions are unreasonable. But she doesn't deny the facts upon which they are based. (I think she's a masochist to chose such a lifestyle, but it was her free choice...her children won't have that choice.)
Could I recommend a book to you. It's called "Not without my daughter!"
If you've actually read the Old Testament, and haven't noticed the incitements to violence, then there's little I can say. And it wasn't, by any means, all defensive. A lot of it was, but those were in periods where Israel was the weaker party.
How about this bit: A prince wants to marry the daughter of a leading Israelite, and she's agreeable. They've had a bit of premarital sex. Her brothers trick all the males in town into getting circumcised on the same day, and while they're in recovery, the kill them all.*
Or the bit about killing everyone worshiping a golden calf after they think Moses has abandoned them?
There are lots of others. (I *DON'T* have the Bible on my computer, so I'm not going to cite chapter and verse, or anything that doesn't come readily to mind.)
The christian testament *IS* less inciteful. Somehow, however, the christians have traditionally been more violent than the jews. I think it has to do with who has how much power more than with official religious doctrine. If you want to convince me otherwise, I'd need some good examples that aren't easily explained as hagiography (i.e., that are based around facts that can be checked with reliable sources).
-----
*(I know, the bible version is a bit different...but NOT MUCH, and it's been propaganda for centuries, so can't be trusted to be a fair version of what happened. My reinterpretation is what any reasonable person would believe happened based on the victors version of the story.)
Until the formation of the Nation of Israel, the Jews weren't in any position to engage in the listed activities. Now...now they use a *real* army. And instead of terrorists, they have an intelligence service.
The christians haven't been so limited. But they still prefer to use real armies and real intelligence services.
Do you think it's really about religion? It's US vs THEM. Any "us" you pick. It's not the power that corrupts, it's the immunity to consequences. Peer pressure helps. Riots used to be common after a high school team lost it's game. Now it's less so, as the local community is less supportive. (They've got professional teams to watch on TV.)
This violence *is* common in muslim countries, but not only muslim countries. It's probably related to polygamy, where the less successfully aggressive males are denied all access to women. (Look for an increase of this in China in the coming decades. Different reason, but the number of male children is far higher than the number of females.)
All THAT said, yes, the Koran explicitly encourages violence against the non-muslim. Read your bible. It does the same thing. Less so in the new testament, but the christians have, if anything, been more violent than the jews. This probably dates back to the christians out-competing the mithraists for dominance of the Roman Empire. Ever since then christians have had considerable conventional military power in their hands.
There is only one "religion" that has arguably decreased the amount of violence and that's Buddhism. Even there, it's dubious. One could argue that the violence just became secular. (OTOH, the various schools of hand-to-hand combat were developed because the secular authorities felt it necessary to prevent the Buddhist sects from forming their own armies, so they made it illegal for monks [or peasants] to carry weapons.)
Well, if nothing else its everything you need to commit identity theft.
Recruiting officers have a long and well earned reputation for lying to those they are trying to enlist. They are MUCH less trustworthy than used car salesmen. If a used car salesman lies to you, you may be able to force him to refund your money. If a recruiting officer lies to you, you are stuck and he is rewarded.
..."
There's an old song called "Stung Right" that summarizes it nicely. It starts off:
"I joined the Navy......to see the world,
What did I see.........I saw the sea.
There are many others with the same theme. Do NOT trust the recruiting officer. He is not required to be honest...but rather to get recruits. He also never finds out what happens to them after he fills out their request for a specialty. (And it's a request, not a promise, no matter what he tells you.)
Many people join the military and are fortunate. They attribute this to their good planning. You never hear from the dead or the quadriplegics. So if you hear from someone who survived, the fact that you are even hearing from them is due to their being a part of a statistically biased sample.
I think you've got a somewhat narrow definition of dimension. There are definitely different dimensions than those you enumerate. What you're talking about are the spatial dimensions (including time).
Another blatantly obvious non-spatial dimension is color. Basically a dimension is anything that can form a consistent ordering and is measurable. Such dimensions are often spatialized for display purposes, just as spatial dimensions are often transformed into non-spatial dimensions. (Consider a globe that's color coded to show height above or below sea level.)
The difference between the spatial dimensions and other dimensions is only a reliable transform or two. (If you could extract time from the spatial dimensions, then I'd say two or three transforms, but post-relativity it seems to be welded in solidly.)
Notice that time used to be considered completely separate from the spatial dimensions. This implies that you can't be certain that some other common dimension won't also turn out to be welded in just as solidly. Candidates to consider are mass and charge. *I* don't have any idea how one could do such a thing, or what the implications of doing it might be...but this certainly doesn't mean that it couldn't be done, (Note that in welding time to space Einstein used sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z - t*t) as the distance function...he subtracted the square of time. (Yeah, I simplified it. And it's delta x, y, z, and t that are being squared. But there's some complex other function that's normally ignorable, and it's somehow analogous to the dot product.) This wasn't at all an obvious thing to do, and it means that separation in time acts differently from separation in the other spatial dimensions. You notice that every time you try to change your mind about having done something.
You are the only person I've ever encountered who was so lost in time as to assert that. OTOH, many are quite critical of his theology and other mystical writings. Usually without even reading them.
Generally we evaluate theories from the past based on our current theories, and also on our understanding of what those theories actually were. Usually both stances are fatally flawed.
Re: there aren't any more electrons than protons
If there were more electrons than protons, their charge would need to be balanced by positrons, so we'd see gamma ray peaks indicating annihilation of electrons by positrons. We don't.
OTOH, this is based on other theories. E.g. it presumes that the net charge is neutral. There are lots of good reasons to believe this, but a direct proof is obviously impossible. (We couldn't even do a direct proof that your hand was neutral...but there are lots of good reasons to believe that it's at least approximately neutral. E.g., it doesn't fly apart.) There are a indefinite number of quibbles possible, but each one known can be answered in a plausible and relatively consistent manner. So it's probably true. Absolute truth is only the province of theology. Even mathematical theories have, occasionally, been proven wrong. And proofs of theories are frequently shown to be wrong.)
Dark Matter just means it's heavy and we can't see it. This includes wandering planets, Black holes without an accretion disk, brown dwarf stars that are a few light years away, etc.
But it comes in several different flavors. If the big bang theories are correct, most of the missing mass of the universe can't be baryonic. (I.e., it can't be built around protons and neutrons.) In that case what is it? Some of it's massive neutrinos...but not all. It can't be electrons, as there aren't any more electrons than protons. (If there were we'd see some peaks in the gamma range that we don't see.) So what is it?
Well, we know-for-certain that it's Dark Matter. Being more specific beyond that requires asserting a theory that hasn't been proven. (There are LOTS of candidates...but we, at least I, don't have any sound basis to choose between them.)
If tons are measured in pounds, then tons are already units of force. And I've never heard of tons being measured in poundals or kilograms.
I suspect that the term "ton" was invented before the concept of mass was invented. (People still get mass and force confused, so it can't be obvious. I wonder who holds the patent.)
I prefer the term "telefactor", but yes. (And RC is shorter, so it will win out once they become common.)
Seems like it. It would appear that the original article was talking about something that was superconducting up to 17 Kelvin. Whoops! That's not any room I've ever been in.
Because your vision of the present has been programmed. It's a dystopia, alright, but not particularly that one (though there *are* elements).
Remember, the dystopias that are written about are that author's metaphor for their present time, taking certain aspects of it, and exaggerating it for a combination of disguise and rhetorical warning.
I'm not saying that Atlas Shrugged isn't a powerful book, and isn't a valid warning, but don't literalize. If you do you miss the point. (Note, e.g., that the most creative people are arguing in favor of the GPL, which is antithetical to the theme that Rand was pushing. But I can practically guarantee that she wasn't even thinking about software when she wrote that. [Software is more like "The Fountainhead", and that doesn't match either. Her idea of how creativity works in complex projects was just wrong.])
P.S.: Note also that software differs greatly from construction in that there is no requirement that you already be wealthy before creating. This is a big part of the difference.
Logs were probably kept ... but the main developers never seemed to read them. Too busy developing, I guess.
That said, the IRC was useful in getting the system operating in a minimal kind of way (it *WAS* alpha). It just kept me from doing any development myself, or even doing the kind of documentation that they wanted.
Thing about IRC .... I know that there are development projects that use IRC, and I've even participated in one. It turned out that the most active developers were never on the IRC list. They met for conversation occasionally at a local pizza joint (which didn't help me, as I wasn't sufficiently local, and I'm on a salt restricted diet). But it did make trying to get things fixed/changed/documented/etc. via the IRC relatively pointless. (It's a synchronous medium. If they aren't on when you're talking, they'll probably never hear about it.)
Of course you can't trust the people to report honestly. But you ***** sure can't trust the professional news people. They'll say whatever the company line is. And they reprocess what they report so that you can't recognize it. I've been present at a couple of events that I later saw news coverage of. They *did* happen ... but the news was so reprocessed that I had a hard time recognizing them. And this was just done by carefully selected camera angles and by cutting out anything that wasn't "interesting" enough. (I.e., it was over a decade ago.)
... I don't know anyone who was present, and the news sources were blatantly lying. (They later admitted that it was a fake, but they didn't say so until challenged about it.)
You can't trust what some stranger tells you, because you don't know what ax he has to grind. But you certainly can't trust the professional liars. (There was a story of some fake NBC coverage of a demonstration in China that was only given away because the crowd were chanting in English. It was one of the early "Docudrama"s about the Tiamen Square events. But this one was totally faked. It was "What we think you might have seen if you had been there...edited to be more interesting".) I believe that *something* happened there. Just what
I switched to Linux because I read the MSWind2000 EULA.
That was, in and of itself, sufficient. That I chose Linux was to avoid buying a new computer. (At that time the Apple Mac had, or I believed it had, a reasonable EULA...even if it wasn't the GPL. This has since changed, and I no longer consider the Mac a viable choice. [I noticed the change last year. Perhaps it wasn't new then.])
Another option that I considered was Unix (BSD). Linux had the reputation of being friendlier and of supporting more hardware. Also, for awhile I needed to double-boot, and this was easier for me with Linux...or at least it looked easier before attempting to install Unix. (And it still looks easier, as I've never yet tried to dual-boot with Unix.)
Well, Poul Anderson once wrote a serial for Astounding (now Analog) called "A Bicycle Built for Brew" with the summary "In which it takes a beer with a good head to make much headway.".
(Hint: To make this work you need low gravity places, and small delta-V.)
P.S.: From your comments I feel that we read very different MS patent pledges about OOXML. (Do you have any reason to believe that they only made one that became public?) The alternative is that we understood certain sentences as having very different implications. Admittedly, IANAL, and I tend to put the darkest reasonable interpretation on words that are represented as coming from MS. If they guarantee a right to do something, I tend to take the narrowest reasonable interpretation of what that covers. I'm told that this is the appropriate method of understanding what is meant by a legal guarantee.
I didn't say I was comfortable with Sun or IBM EULAs...I said I was reasonably comfortable with the GPL family of licenses. Saying that Sun and IBM didn't make the same limitations that MS made doesn't mean that I trust or accept their pledges either. But I haven't had occasion to try to understand them. I've had occasion to try to understand MS' EULA, and that's when I decided to switch to Linux. And I've had occasion to understand the GPL, and the GPL3.
When Sun's license is the GPL3 or the LGPL3, then I'm comfortable with their patent pledge, and then is *doesn't* contain the kind of limitations that you say exist in the Sun and IBM patent pledges, and which definitely existed in the MS patent pledge that I read. (You may assert that "they are all quite reasonably sized, and the language isn't bad for legal documents.", but I generally feel that I'd rather debug Forth.)
I rarely read MS EULAs, because I never use MS products. But I've read one of the patent non-assert agreements on a proposed OOXML standard. ("A", because they've continued to shift the proposal, and because they reserve the right to continue to change it after it gets approved, presuming that it does.)
The non-assert agreement only guaranteed that the patents would not be asserted against fully conforming implementations. But the specifications of the standard (at that time) were such that nobody, including MS, could actually build a fully conforming implementation. (Including such wonderful statements as "split the text layout in the same way that Word 95 did."(paraphrase. I'm *NOT* going to read that mess of garbage again!). Also the non-assert agreement named a particular version of the specifications to which it applied. Which didn't imply in any way that if some security fix was mandatory, that it would be legal to apply that fix.
Additionally, I have reasonable grounds based on past history of actions, for trusting Sun to not act maliciously towards folk who were not acting maliciously toward them. The case for MS is rather different.
Additionally the GPL3 and LGPL3 have been verified by lawyers that I trust to have good intentions. This is not true of ANY license offered by MS. Several of them have been roundly denounced by legal experts that I give reasonable credence to. "Nearly unconscionable" is a phrase that pops to mind.