I take it that you're referring to "If this goes on..." rather than to his early works, like "Sixth Column" (though you might be referring to the "Puppet Masters"). "Jerry was a man..." is rather prophetic, but we haven't come to the testing point for that one yet. "Gulf" doesn't seem like decent prediction to me. Etc.
Perhaps you could be more specific?
Science Fiction is usually about predicting social reactions to a changed circumstance. There are "gadget stories", but those are hard to make interesting. And there's "Space Opera", but I find it hard to consider that as real science fiction. (I *like* a well done space opera, I just don't think of it as science fiction.)
So what Charles Stross is doing here is looking at CURRENT capabilities (with only modest engineering refinements) and predicting the kinds of social changes that might evolve. He is explicitly not noticing likely breakthroughs in this prediction. He's intentionally being much more conservative that is realistic, even without breakthroughs. And he's still coming up with this scenario. Look through it and see if you can pick out something that isn't only a minor engineering advance over current state of the art. (P.S.: don't underestimate how much people can identify with their customized artifacts. Remember that people have paid thousands of dollars for a D&D sword to use in a particular on-line game. And remember the lady who drove onto railroad tracks because that's where here satnav system said she had to go next. And that she ignored real-world directions that said "Don't go through when the light is red!" and that she ignored the presence of railroad tracks as she parked her car on the tracks.)
Not exactly. There are several possibilities. For one: Perhaps (certainly) certain climatic conditions make fossilization more likely. Perhaps these occur more frequently when the climate is warmer. Dry and sandy works for fossilization, but so do peat bogs, tar pits, deep swamps with lots of much at the bottom, etc. Several of these seem more likely in hot climates. Caves are OK, if you don't mind your fossils coming in lots of tiny pieces...and being mixed with the fragments of bones from several different species. (Carnivores tend to bring kills into caves, and gnaw the bones to pieces. Also cave-in's tend to be quite destructive before they turn preservational. Even if the cave-in causes the death it's quite likely that many of the bones will be broken, or even shattered, by that one event. Drowning in a peat-bog, or being buried by a sand-dune, however, preserves (at least temporarily) the entire corpse.
And, to take your bait, it could also be that it's by chance. I haven't estimated the sigma, so I don't know how unlikely it would be (and estimating chance after the fact is theoretically unsound anyway).
You *do* realize just how fragmentary the fossil record is, don't you?
My personal opinion (without studying the matter) is that we probably don't have enough evidence to guess whether there were more or fewer species. (Well, except that clearly there were fewer, e.g., right after the asteroid hit. And right after whatever caused the Permian Catastrophe. Etc.) Most species never leave any discovered and recognized fossil record, and we don't know what percentage "most" means, just that it's large relative to 50%. (There may, of course, people who have reasons to believe some particular number is "about right", but I'm not one of them.)
Unfortunately, many places have zoning laws forbidding having more than about two chickens. (Naturally the exact details vary from place to place.) Also, they *do* tend to tie you down. If you've got a flock of chickens, you can't ever go away for a week. Getting a reliable chicken sitter just isn't possible. (It was difficult enough when all my neighbors had them.)
Your like of reasoning, unethical as it appears to me, isn't unusual. One result is that the news sources aren't trusted by anyone with any sense.
Do you recall when, I think it was NBC, invented using the docudrama to cover the Tiananmen Square riots? Nobody noticed until some lip-readers wondered why the demonstraters were shouting in English. (Once suspicion had been aroused, however...) Now everybody uses them, though supposedly they aren't substituted for actual footage. I don't know. I stopped bothering to watch. It's easier to determine what the lies are in printed text, which holds still long enough for you to check it.
So you've got lots of company. But I consider it all unethical.
What's reported wasn't that Wine wasn't going to be available to Ubuntu, but rather that Wine would not be installed on the Dell machines. I seriously doubt that they'll set up special repositories for the Dell version, and not let them update from anywhere else. (If they were to do so, it would be rather easy to circumvent unless they went all out with DRM...and why bother?)
Also, Wine isn't all that great. It's probably better to not have it available by default. So it makes sense to not include it as a default.
Well, it's been a long time since I used an MS "jvm" implementation. I didn't find it superior, or even as good. Perhaps it depends on what you are doing.
P.S.: I put jvm in quotes when referring to the MS version, as I found it not standard-compliant. Admittedly that was in the VERY early days. (I did rather like SuperCede Java compiler, which also was non-standard. One difference is that they didn't try to pretend that it was. Another is that is was EASY [i.e., trivial] to blend Java and C.)
It never was. I suprised that you thought that (at some time) only teenagers tried to deny responsibility. Watch either young children, captains of industry, or movie stars. They all try to deny responsibility, and shift to blame to someone else.
That's a bit too strong a statement about patents. It's quite plausible that if they didn't exist some other mechanism would need to be found to encourage various development efforts that require a lot of up-front costs.
OTOH, I'm not convinced the "High budget Movies, TV Shows, and Video Games" is a reasonable justification for a law that restricts the actions of individuals. Copyright does have many socially redeeming features...but those aren't examples. And the examples that exist don't justify a copyright length of more than 10 years, OR justify the existence of DRM. And they certainly don't justify the existence of DRM on copyrighted works. (It should be an either/or proposition. If you are trying to prevent the artistic work from ever entering the intellectual commons, then you don't deserve ANY legal protection on it. Possibly only a few DRM-free copies should be required as a few "libraries of repository", as I'll agree that the [presumed] ease of copying means that illegal copying will happen. N.B.: DRM free is an abbreviation for a long statement boiling down to, approx.: It must be available in the form normally used for editing. I.e., after the copyright expires, it's available for everyone to use for any purpose.])
You'll note that I am in favor of copyright law...just not of the current ones.
Were they to do that I would switch from thinking of them as evil to thinking of them as sneaky. And I still wouldn't want to do business with them (beyond that $0.50 license).
Unfortunately, MS wrote into the contract that they can cancel it whenever they feel like it. The terms of the contract to not indicate that afte the contract is cancelled, that MS still won't sue Novell's customers.
The public terms of the contract are of no benefit to anyone except MS. There are a lot of smooth phrases that emulate a promise, but when you analyse carefully who is protected...well, it's people who aren't paid, don't do the work for money, and don't distribute their code. In other words, people that MS couldn't trace down anyway.
What must be very interesting are the private terms. Novell so far hasn't revealed even the parts that it promissed (on it's customer mailing list--or possibly the developer one) it would reveal (which were probably not considered as interesting).
You can't act like that and be considered a good member of the FOSS community, rather than a part of the criminal substratum. We don't have courts or police, so all we can do is censure people and companies, and remind each other of why you shouldn't associate with them. Even the FSF only has a very small legal staff, and that's mainly defensive. (Not entirely, but mainly. And several other groups have arrangements, of various kinds, for legal protection...but hardly anything in the way of offensive capability.)
Well, if you go back to derivation of the term: Rapo, rapare, rapavi,rapatus (I think I remembered my Latin correctly) to carry off or abduct.
The modern English meaning probably owes a lot to a famous painting called "The Rape of the Sabines" which depicted the early Romans acquiring brides from another tribe. One may suspect that this was the rather common "bride-stealing" commonly practiced to allow exogamy, but the painting depicted it at a battle, with the Romans literally carrying off various buxom & scantily clad Sabine women. (I was a teenager, and the internet wasn't around.)
It's not unheard of for a factory to radically change WHAT it makes. If you don't find customers for one product, you make something else. Factories have intrinsic value. Like shovels and hammers, and other tools, only magnified.
Now if you want to assert that there won't be any market for Barbie dolls, and what else can you make with the same equipment... There you've got me. You'd be able to make practically anything that only depended on plastic molds and coloring, and that's too wide a spectrum to guess. If you could add wiring and small electric motors (Do Barbies have that kind of thing this year?) you could do even more. Everything from doorbells (well, not the chimes, themselves) to miniature rockets. (Note that I did NOT say "model".)
Because I am not a lawyer, I don't trust licenses that I can't understand. (I also don't trust some that I can understand.)
From what I know of patent law (not that much), I feel that it's best to not use techniques that have been used by a coercive monopoly. As a result, I prefer to NOT use CLI, mono, etc. I may, possibly, be overly cautious, but I have no way of knowing. If you do, you apear to be under a NDA.
It's all very well to say "if I never share my code with anyone, then I'm safe". It's probably also true, but it defeats the entire purpose of FOSS. As such, I consider mono unsafe to develop in. Clean-room approaches are no protection at all from patents.
I rather like gnumeric. Now I'll grant that it's not that much different than other spreadsheets, but it doesn't arbitrarily capitalize words that I don't want capitalized, so it's better than most, and it was available before most.
This isn't an excuse for what he's doing now, of course...
You don't spin it fast enough to hold water in place. The spin isn't for gravity, it's to ensure that the non-even distribution of mass doesn't cause stability problems. SLOW. This would probably result in 0.01g acceleration. Or less, you also don't want to strain the framework. You build it of something as close to saran-wrap as you dare! Materials for this much construction are EXPENSIVE!! in whatever currency you are using.
Think of it as a super-high-tech Space Station and you'll be close to correct. It's got the same gravity, and the same basic construction. It's just spread out over a much larger area. (As such, I don't think it would be a good place to live. (OTOH, nobody seems interested by my favorite structure, the Topopolis, though it could be a rather nice place to live, with gravity to suit the local residents, etc. Ditto for air pressure, amount of water, etc. But it doesn't have to be built gigantic to get started, so it doesn't WHOW! people.)
The one benefit claimed for the Dyson Sphere is that it could reclaim close to 100% of the solar energy. This is probably true, if the entire inner surface is plated with 100% efficient solar cells. (Actual designs are less efficient, but they still make an effort in that direction, emitting infra-red radiation rather than using it, usually.) I've yet to encounter someone who has thought seriously about a Dyson Sphere who thinks it would likely be a good place to live without invoking magic, like small gravity generators.
A single Dyson sphere wouldn't have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, certainly not a breatheable one. So you live between two layers, and you build the layer closer to the sun transparent to allow for "natural lighting". Within the two layers there would, effectively, be no gravity. Beyond the outer layer..., yeah, there's gravity. Not much, but some. (Well, how much depends, of course, on how much mass the sphere contains, but you've got to remember that the center of gravity is at the sun's center (approximately). That's a long way from the edge. Say you use all the planetary mass of the solar system to build the sphere...it's still a pretty weak gravity in any one place...of course it falls off rather slowly, so it might actually be able to hold an atmosphere...but not one of any density in any one place. You couldn't jump free of it, but a combination of a decent catapult and an ion rocket should do the job. It might collect an atmosphere as dense as (Wild Ass Guess!) the Earth's upper ionosphere...but that atmosphere could well extend out an AU or so (getting thinner all the way, of course).
P.S.: I think you might well need more mass than I suggested. I haven't calculated any of this out, I'm merely remembering from calculations that some other people reported that I read a decade or so ago. OTOH, A Dyson Sphere doesn't need much in the way of strength. Just enough to remain air tight under atmospheric pressure. You will, however, want to be able to seal off compartments.
P.P.S.: Note again that gravity has essentially gone missing (because of radially symmetric design. This means that anything that lives there will adapt to neither need nor use gravity. And probably such features as legs would disappear. (The easy way to do this would appear to be to revert to monkey feet, adapted into an extra set of hands...but remember that hands are much more useful if you can see what they are doing, so you'll need to be able to bend them around so that you can bring at least three hands to bear on a problem. [The remaining hand might well be used to anchor yourself in position.])
OTOH, if you chop off the ends to save the wasted space, you decrease the gravitational stability. A Dyson sphere is much less gravitationally unstable than a ringworld, because spherical shells of equally distributed mass have zero net internal gravitation. The instability of a Dyson sphere is caused because mass will NEVER be evenly distributed. And, of course, inertia. (A slow rotation would probably be advantageous for this reason...but not much, because you don't want to drag all of the air away from the poles.)
With a Dyson Sphere it's useful to correct for very minor drift. Being off center isn't catastrophic, but drifting "soon" will be.
That said, my favorite space structure is "Topopolis" AKA "Cosmic Spaghetti". This is a tube up to several miles in diameter which is built in orbit as a RingWorld might be, but it's not open. You can spin it for gravity, or not. Sections can be linked magnetically, without coming into actual contact. And it can be extended ad-lib. (Forking a chain can be problematic...but there are ways.) You can extend it to encircle the sun several times. You can split off a branch and sent it climbing into the Oort cloud, and possibly to the stars. You can get as much surface as a Dyson Sphere with not horrendously more material, and you can build it in sections, and move into those sections.
Think of a worm crossed with a chambered Nautillus, and expanded to cosmic proportions. With a radius of five miles you could loop a sun at Earth's orbital distance, and still be spinning the whole thing for gravity. (Personally I'd prefer that only segments be spinning, and that others be non-spinning, and linked in magnetically with vacuum insulation between them. This allows cross-linking between different strands.
Note that as with all cosmic engineering, maintenance WILL be required. With a Topopolis, you can separate any problem segments and deal with them separately without injuring the integrity of the rest (though if you move one segment out of the way you'll probably require inserting a spacer).
Dyson spheres are also unstable, though not drastically so. And, practically speaking, you need a pair of them, concentric (you hold the atmosphere between them. There really WOULD be pillars holding up the sky! And etherial spheres (well, at least one of them). Keeping the sun in the center, however, looks to be a bit tricky, but fortunately the net gravitational instability should be quite small even if the sun is slightly off center (you can't assume that mass is actually symmetrically distributed, only approximately).
Note that as you don't spin a Dyson Sphere, net gravity is very low. About half that of the Sun's from the distance of the Earth. This makes ponds, lakes & seas possible (if not probable, and probably temporary), but quite dangerous. Rivers, however, are not going to occur.
Sorry, but you are understating things. This wasn't the decision of a single teacher, but of a panel. And a policeman. And the police chief.
ALL of them should be charged with misfeasance, or possibly malfeasance. Also fired without recommendation. Or pension. Or other benefits. And possibly fined for their past years salary.
This was a creative writing assignment!! He was specifically instructed NOT to censor himself.
One can hope he will now have learned how much he can trust authority. This isn't certain, because teens have a very strong urge to trust authority, but perhaps this will be a sufficiently graphic instruction that he will now know better.
The thing is, if this is a wired connection we're talking about, it will benefit only the relatively wealthy. I.e., the relatively powerful. And if it's a wireless connection, then it's a lot cheaper than roads or electricity. And faster to build. (Consider cell phones vs. wired phones. Lots of countries appear to be just skipping the stage of wired phones, because it's so much cheaper and faster to put in cell phones.)
This may well be a reasonable use of resources. If you have a foot-powered generator, then charging the battery of a computer is reasonable, and if it has a wireless connection, then this will allow messages to get in and out, even when the roads are out. Could be important. IS relatively cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
You must admit, however, that Linux is less uniform...presuming you're only considering one version of MSWind.
And you believed something because Microsoft said so? Who washed YOUR brain. MS has a long history of lies, deceit, and treachery.
I take it that you're referring to "If this goes on..." rather than to his early works, like "Sixth Column" (though you might be referring to the "Puppet Masters"). "Jerry was a man..." is rather prophetic, but we haven't come to the testing point for that one yet. "Gulf" doesn't seem like decent prediction to me. Etc.
Perhaps you could be more specific?
Science Fiction is usually about predicting social reactions to a changed circumstance. There are "gadget stories", but those are hard to make interesting. And there's "Space Opera", but I find it hard to consider that as real science fiction. (I *like* a well done space opera, I just don't think of it as science fiction.)
So what Charles Stross is doing here is looking at CURRENT capabilities (with only modest engineering refinements) and predicting the kinds of social changes that might evolve. He is explicitly not noticing likely breakthroughs in this prediction. He's intentionally being much more conservative that is realistic, even without breakthroughs. And he's still coming up with this scenario. Look through it and see if you can pick out something that isn't only a minor engineering advance over current state of the art. (P.S.: don't underestimate how much people can identify with their customized artifacts. Remember that people have paid thousands of dollars for a D&D sword to use in a particular on-line game. And remember the lady who drove onto railroad tracks because that's where here satnav system said she had to go next. And that she ignored real-world directions that said "Don't go through when the light is red!" and that she ignored the presence of railroad tracks as she parked her car on the tracks.)
Not exactly. There are several possibilities. For one: Perhaps (certainly) certain climatic conditions make fossilization more likely. Perhaps these occur more frequently when the climate is warmer. Dry and sandy works for fossilization, but so do peat bogs, tar pits, deep swamps with lots of much at the bottom, etc. Several of these seem more likely in hot climates. Caves are OK, if you don't mind your fossils coming in lots of tiny pieces...and being mixed with the fragments of bones from several different species. (Carnivores tend to bring kills into caves, and gnaw the bones to pieces. Also cave-in's tend to be quite destructive before they turn preservational. Even if the cave-in causes the death it's quite likely that many of the bones will be broken, or even shattered, by that one event. Drowning in a peat-bog, or being buried by a sand-dune, however, preserves (at least temporarily) the entire corpse.
And, to take your bait, it could also be that it's by chance. I haven't estimated the sigma, so I don't know how unlikely it would be (and estimating chance after the fact is theoretically unsound anyway).
You *do* realize just how fragmentary the fossil record is, don't you?
My personal opinion (without studying the matter) is that we probably don't have enough evidence to guess whether there were more or fewer species. (Well, except that clearly there were fewer, e.g., right after the asteroid hit. And right after whatever caused the Permian Catastrophe. Etc.) Most species never leave any discovered and recognized fossil record, and we don't know what percentage "most" means, just that it's large relative to 50%. (There may, of course, people who have reasons to believe some particular number is "about right", but I'm not one of them.)
Unfortunately, many places have zoning laws forbidding having more than about two chickens. (Naturally the exact details vary from place to place.) Also, they *do* tend to tie you down. If you've got a flock of chickens, you can't ever go away for a week. Getting a reliable chicken sitter just isn't possible. (It was difficult enough when all my neighbors had them.)
Your like of reasoning, unethical as it appears to me, isn't unusual. One result is that the news sources aren't trusted by anyone with any sense.
Do you recall when, I think it was NBC, invented using the docudrama to cover the Tiananmen Square riots? Nobody noticed until some lip-readers wondered why the demonstraters were shouting in English. (Once suspicion had been aroused, however...) Now everybody uses them, though supposedly they aren't substituted for actual footage. I don't know. I stopped bothering to watch. It's easier to determine what the lies are in printed text, which holds still long enough for you to check it.
So you've got lots of company. But I consider it all unethical.
If this gets serious, look for at least one of these companies to file a counterclaim, so that the case *can't* just be dropped.
What's reported wasn't that Wine wasn't going to be available to Ubuntu, but rather that Wine would not be installed on the Dell machines. I seriously doubt that they'll set up special repositories for the Dell version, and not let them update from anywhere else. (If they were to do so, it would be rather easy to circumvent unless they went all out with DRM...and why bother?)
Also, Wine isn't all that great. It's probably better to not have it available by default. So it makes sense to not include it as a default.
Well, more Chinese speak English than USians speak Chinese. This is also true if you throw in the British, the Aussie's, and the New Zealanders.
English is probably the most common second language on the planet, though it's far from being the most common primary language.
Well, it's been a long time since I used an MS "jvm" implementation. I didn't find it superior, or even as good. Perhaps it depends on what you are doing.
P.S.: I put jvm in quotes when referring to the MS version, as I found it not standard-compliant. Admittedly that was in the VERY early days. (I did rather like SuperCede Java compiler, which also was non-standard. One difference is that they didn't try to pretend that it was. Another is that is was EASY [i.e., trivial] to blend Java and C.)
It never was. I suprised that you thought that (at some time) only teenagers tried to deny responsibility. Watch either young children, captains of industry, or movie stars. They all try to deny responsibility, and shift to blame to someone else.
For that matter, watch you boss. Carefully.
That's a bit too strong a statement about patents. It's quite plausible that if they didn't exist some other mechanism would need to be found to encourage various development efforts that require a lot of up-front costs.
OTOH, I'm not convinced the "High budget Movies, TV Shows, and Video Games" is a reasonable justification for a law that restricts the actions of individuals. Copyright does have many socially redeeming features...but those aren't examples. And the examples that exist don't justify a copyright length of more than 10 years, OR justify the existence of DRM. And they certainly don't justify the existence of DRM on copyrighted works. (It should be an either/or proposition. If you are trying to prevent the artistic work from ever entering the intellectual commons, then you don't deserve ANY legal protection on it. Possibly only a few DRM-free copies should be required as a few "libraries of repository", as I'll agree that the [presumed] ease of copying means that illegal copying will happen. N.B.: DRM free is an abbreviation for a long statement boiling down to, approx.: It must be available in the form normally used for editing. I.e., after the copyright expires, it's available for everyone to use for any purpose.])
You'll note that I am in favor of copyright law...just not of the current ones.
Were they to do that I would switch from thinking of them as evil to thinking of them as sneaky. And I still wouldn't want to do business with them (beyond that $0.50 license).
Unfortunately, MS wrote into the contract that they can cancel it whenever they feel like it. The terms of the contract to not indicate that afte the contract is cancelled, that MS still won't sue Novell's customers.
The public terms of the contract are of no benefit to anyone except MS. There are a lot of smooth phrases that emulate a promise, but when you analyse carefully who is protected...well, it's people who aren't paid, don't do the work for money, and don't distribute their code. In other words, people that MS couldn't trace down anyway.
What must be very interesting are the private terms. Novell so far hasn't revealed even the parts that it promissed (on it's customer mailing list--or possibly the developer one) it would reveal (which were probably not considered as interesting).
You can't act like that and be considered a good member of the FOSS community, rather than a part of the criminal substratum. We don't have courts or police, so all we can do is censure people and companies, and remind each other of why you shouldn't associate with them. Even the FSF only has a very small legal staff, and that's mainly defensive. (Not entirely, but mainly. And several other groups have arrangements, of various kinds, for legal protection...but hardly anything in the way of offensive capability.)
Well, if you go back to derivation of the term:
Rapo, rapare, rapavi,rapatus (I think I remembered my Latin correctly) to carry off or abduct.
The modern English meaning probably owes a lot to a famous painting called "The Rape of the Sabines" which depicted the early Romans acquiring brides from another tribe. One may suspect that this was the rather common "bride-stealing" commonly practiced to allow exogamy, but the painting depicted it at a battle, with the Romans literally carrying off various buxom & scantily clad Sabine women. (I was a teenager, and the internet wasn't around.)
It's not unheard of for a factory to radically change WHAT it makes. If you don't find customers for one product, you make something else. Factories have intrinsic value. Like shovels and hammers, and other tools, only magnified.
Now if you want to assert that there won't be any market for Barbie dolls, and what else can you make with the same equipment... There you've got me. You'd be able to make practically anything that only depended on plastic molds and coloring, and that's too wide a spectrum to guess. If you could add wiring and small electric motors (Do Barbies have that kind of thing this year?) you could do even more. Everything from doorbells (well, not the chimes, themselves) to miniature rockets. (Note that I did NOT say "model".)
Because I am not a lawyer, I don't trust licenses that I can't understand. (I also don't trust some that I can understand.)
From what I know of patent law (not that much), I feel that it's best to not use techniques that have been used by a coercive monopoly. As a result, I prefer to NOT use CLI, mono, etc. I may, possibly, be overly cautious, but I have no way of knowing. If you do, you apear to be under a NDA.
It's all very well to say "if I never share my code with anyone, then I'm safe". It's probably also true, but it defeats the entire purpose of FOSS. As such, I consider mono unsafe to develop in. Clean-room approaches are no protection at all from patents.
I rather like gnumeric. Now I'll grant that it's not that much different than other spreadsheets, but it doesn't arbitrarily capitalize words that I don't want capitalized, so it's better than most, and it was available before most.
This isn't an excuse for what he's doing now, of course...
I'll readily grant that many other companies are more evil that Google. This is praise?
This clearly counts as evil. It's not on the same level as smashing babies heads in front of their mothers (see the Bible), but it's still evil.
You don't spin it fast enough to hold water in place. The spin isn't for gravity, it's to ensure that the non-even distribution of mass doesn't cause stability problems. SLOW. This would probably result in 0.01g acceleration. Or less, you also don't want to strain the framework. You build it of something as close to saran-wrap as you dare! Materials for this much construction are EXPENSIVE!! in whatever currency you are using.
Think of it as a super-high-tech Space Station and you'll be close to correct. It's got the same gravity, and the same basic construction. It's just spread out over a much larger area. (As such, I don't think it would be a good place to live. (OTOH, nobody seems interested by my favorite structure, the Topopolis, though it could be a rather nice place to live, with gravity to suit the local residents, etc. Ditto for air pressure, amount of water, etc. But it doesn't have to be built gigantic to get started, so it doesn't WHOW! people.)
The one benefit claimed for the Dyson Sphere is that it could reclaim close to 100% of the solar energy. This is probably true, if the entire inner surface is plated with 100% efficient solar cells. (Actual designs are less efficient, but they still make an effort in that direction, emitting infra-red radiation rather than using it, usually.) I've yet to encounter someone who has thought seriously about a Dyson Sphere who thinks it would likely be a good place to live without invoking magic, like small gravity generators.
A single Dyson sphere wouldn't have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, certainly not a breatheable one. So you live between two layers, and you build the layer closer to the sun transparent to allow for "natural lighting". Within the two layers there would, effectively, be no gravity. Beyond the outer layer..., yeah, there's gravity. Not much, but some. (Well, how much depends, of course, on how much mass the sphere contains, but you've got to remember that the center of gravity is at the sun's center (approximately). That's a long way from the edge. Say you use all the planetary mass of the solar system to build the sphere...it's still a pretty weak gravity in any one place...of course it falls off rather slowly, so it might actually be able to hold an atmosphere...but not one of any density in any one place. You couldn't jump free of it, but a combination of a decent catapult and an ion rocket should do the job. It might collect an atmosphere as dense as (Wild Ass Guess!) the Earth's upper ionosphere...but that atmosphere could well extend out an AU or so (getting thinner all the way, of course).
P.S.: I think you might well need more mass than I suggested. I haven't calculated any of this out, I'm merely remembering from calculations that some other people reported that I read a decade or so ago. OTOH, A Dyson Sphere doesn't need much in the way of strength. Just enough to remain air tight under atmospheric pressure. You will, however, want to be able to seal off compartments.
P.P.S.: Note again that gravity has essentially gone missing (because of radially symmetric design. This means that anything that lives there will adapt to neither need nor use gravity. And probably such features as legs would disappear. (The easy way to do this would appear to be to revert to monkey feet, adapted into an extra set of hands...but remember that hands are much more useful if you can see what they are doing, so you'll need to be able to bend them around so that you can bring at least three hands to bear on a problem. [The remaining hand might well be used to anchor yourself in position.])
OTOH, if you chop off the ends to save the wasted space, you decrease the gravitational stability. A Dyson sphere is much less gravitationally unstable than a ringworld, because spherical shells of equally distributed mass have zero net internal gravitation. The instability of a Dyson sphere is caused because mass will NEVER be evenly distributed. And, of course, inertia. (A slow rotation would probably be advantageous for this reason...but not much, because you don't want to drag all of the air away from the poles.)
With a Dyson Sphere it's useful to correct for very minor drift. Being off center isn't catastrophic, but drifting "soon" will be.
That said, my favorite space structure is "Topopolis" AKA "Cosmic Spaghetti". This is a tube up to several miles in diameter which is built in orbit as a RingWorld might be, but it's not open. You can spin it for gravity, or not. Sections can be linked magnetically, without coming into actual contact. And it can be extended ad-lib. (Forking a chain can be problematic...but there are ways.) You can extend it to encircle the sun several times. You can split off a branch and sent it climbing into the Oort cloud, and possibly to the stars. You can get as much surface as a Dyson Sphere with not horrendously more material, and you can build it in sections, and move into those sections.
Think of a worm crossed with a chambered Nautillus, and expanded to cosmic proportions. With a radius of five miles you could loop a sun at Earth's orbital distance, and still be spinning the whole thing for gravity. (Personally I'd prefer that only segments be spinning, and that others be non-spinning, and linked in magnetically with vacuum insulation between them. This allows cross-linking between different strands.
Note that as with all cosmic engineering, maintenance WILL be required. With a Topopolis, you can separate any problem segments and deal with them separately without injuring the integrity of the rest (though if you move one segment out of the way you'll probably require inserting a spacer).
Etc.
Dyson spheres are also unstable, though not drastically so. And, practically speaking, you need a pair of them, concentric (you hold the atmosphere between them. There really WOULD be pillars holding up the sky! And etherial spheres (well, at least one of them). Keeping the sun in the center, however, looks to be a bit tricky, but fortunately the net gravitational instability should be quite small even if the sun is slightly off center (you can't assume that mass is actually symmetrically distributed, only approximately).
Note that as you don't spin a Dyson Sphere, net gravity is very low. About half that of the Sun's from the distance of the Earth. This makes ponds, lakes & seas possible (if not probable, and probably temporary), but quite dangerous. Rivers, however, are not going to occur.
Sorry, but you are understating things. This wasn't the decision of a single teacher, but of a panel. And a policeman. And the police chief.
ALL of them should be charged with misfeasance, or possibly malfeasance. Also fired without recommendation. Or pension. Or other benefits. And possibly fined for their past years salary.
This was a creative writing assignment!! He was specifically instructed NOT to censor himself.
One can hope he will now have learned how much he can trust authority. This isn't certain, because teens have a very strong urge to trust authority, but perhaps this will be a sufficiently graphic instruction that he will now know better.
The thing is, if this is a wired connection we're talking about, it will benefit only the relatively wealthy. I.e., the relatively powerful. And if it's a wireless connection, then it's a lot cheaper than roads or electricity. And faster to build. (Consider cell phones vs. wired phones. Lots of countries appear to be just skipping the stage of wired phones, because it's so much cheaper and faster to put in cell phones.)
This may well be a reasonable use of resources. If you have a foot-powered generator, then charging the battery of a computer is reasonable, and if it has a wireless connection, then this will allow messages to get in and out, even when the roads are out. Could be important. IS relatively cheap.