Combining A+B and C may not be easy, but it is obvious. This is actually the main problem I see with software patents: idea C is "with a computer", and A+B is some existing invention. Newspapers - on a computer! Alarm clocks - on a computer! Bank transactions - on a computer! Sure it was hard to program them. It's still obvious. But if securing the bank transactions requires new innovations in security technology to glue the pieces together, those innovations could merit patent D. Does not and should not prevent anybody else from making their own secure bank transactions with a different security method because somebody got an A+B+C patent covering the obvious part.
Really not understanding your point about pharmaceuticals. How is the benzene ring different from "including a library or function in a program [which] should have an absolutely predictable result"? I do agree though that pharmaceuticals are a bit different than other patent issues, but for a different reason: selling a drug requires round after round of expensive clinical trials because of the FDA. Without exclusivity, there may not be enough incentive for drug companies to pay for those trials if a generic manufacturer can reverse engineer the same drug and sell it on the cheap without paying for the trials. Maybe the FDA should have its own special exclusivity granting system so we can peel off one of the complications of patent law.
Google is not an agnostic search system. Google is the king of search, and everyone is trying to hack around their algorithms to boost their search rankings. Is it really so terrible that Google itself should be outright asked to prefer search results that are "better for society"?
Don't get me wrong. I want a truly agnostic search engine. Badly. I want to be able to find the best source for what I'm looking for, not a couple dozen support forums with great SEO and an actual honest-to-goodness answer buried on page 47 of the search results. Google used to be the closest we could get to that, but that was a long time ago. Now they're basically a public utility, much like the internet itself. Although since so many people are stealing from it and its customers, I'd say it's more like cable TV.
I read through my above post and have decided to shorten and revise it. It really is too long and despite my efforts at the time still went on a couple of unrelated tangents. I know this is still long, but at least it is better organized. So, for the tl;dr crowd:
Why does it seem that the first response to these kinds of problems is always legal? To sue someone? Is it just because that's what is expedient to existing victims? Because it won't help future potential victims. Even changing the law or boosting enforcement won't get at the root cause.
The fact is that sadly, sociopathic behavior like this is socially acceptable. Every time a woman speaks up, half of the crowd chimes in to defend the sociopath. "It was her own fault", you say. "Women are such whiners; this happens to everyone", you say. And let's be clear: there's a point to be made that women are perhaps too often thin-skinned. But often this point is made regardless to the sexist nature (rape threats) or severity of the harassment (total destruction of career, made to feel unsafe and insecure even in her own home or the home of her family, made to fear for the safety of that family). And most of the people making this point, especially in a place like Slashdot that allows people to post anonymously, make their point with misogynistic slurs. It's only understandable that this position is almost always attacked as "blaming the victim" when there are only a couple of rational voices in the mob.
When you strip away the fact that women are the most common victims, you are left with the uncontroversial problem: sociopaths. Even when they aren't attacking you personally, their assaults harm society and by extension harm you. Every time a Kathy Sierra is harassed out of her comfort zone, we lose another intelligent perspective. We lose the voice behind javaranch.com. And to all you lonely nerds out there: we lose one more woman that understands and appreciates what you do. One more woman that might have shared your dreams and obsessions.
How can the law help us? Will it stop people from being sociopaths? Not any more than drunk driving laws made people stop driving drunk. Drunk driving used to be just as socially acceptable as wife beating and criminal harassment. What changed? MADD and systematic messaging from law enforcement and driver's education told entire generations of new drivers that it is not acceptable. Now drunk driving is the sort of thing only completely irresponsible people do, right? While that doesn't mean nobody does it, it does mean nobody defends the behavior. We need a single message to spread to every single child regarding harassment: this is not OK.
Stopping sociopaths and the harassment they inflict means we have to focus on their actions, not the possible failings of their victims. The victim has already been through enough and doesn't need you to tell them to toughen up. You don't even have to personally believe the victim! Attack the crime, even if you don't believe it happened. You might say, "Harassment is wrong, and I am appalled to think this kind of thing even happens." You might say, "I actually have trouble believing the story because it's so unthinkable that someone could be this much of a sociopath." You might say, "I thought this sort of thing never happened, and it certainly never should." Casting doubt on the victim doesn't help anybody. It just makes you the kind of asshole that future victims are afraid will attack their credibility if they seek help. And if they're lying, let that come out at trial; our public discussion cannot come nearly as close to justice for the specific people involved. All we can do is try to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future by making clear that it is unacceptable.
Changing the law is a nice idea, but people tend to be pretty resentful of laws that don't match their personal beliefs. That's why the above is so important. You will never get people to report harassment and support victims just by passing laws. This is where we are
The anti-troll measures described in TFA don't sounds to me like they would be particularly effective for most cases. Patent trolls seek out people for whom legal representation is likely to cost as much as a settlement, since those people don't have lawyers on staff and patents are a complicated and specialized field. What the measures would do is provide more opportunities for a lawyer to contest the patent letter. Since the typical targets tend to settle solely to avoid having to pay a lawyer, this will not help. What needs to happen instead is a mandatory notification in the demand letter of certain pieces of evidence which will automatically avoid patent fees if produced. I'm talking known prior art or existing license agreements, as well as other categories of potentially more complicated evidence to be created. Patent trolls thrive on the over-complication in the law, so the solution to them is to create short circuits to their lawsuits that protect 80% of the innocent without retaining a lawyer.
And before someone mentions any specific reserve that isn't being drilled for "political or environmental reasons", keep in mind there are "plenty" of them. Any individual reserve won't hold very much oil in the grand scheme of things, but in many areas drilling would prove disastrous to the local environment. Not even "vague threat of global warming" disastrous - "permanent destruction of beautiful landscapes and sole remaining habitats for endangered species" disastrous. This does not apply to all unexplored reserves (especially most offshore); with so many options it's important to know exactly how much oil you'd actually get for the destruction of those few.
At least deuterium derived from water is a more abundant fuel source than oil. The energy density for deuterium fusion is so much higher than oil combustion. And clearly, we do have a lot more water than trees or oil. But it should make us all a little bit uneasy that ultimately, using water this way is nonrenewable.
It won't be "scuppered" until Lockheed has a product for sale cheaper than the remainder of work left on ITER ready to install. Even then, ITER is a valuable engineering research project that may survive anyway; the alleged breakthroughs Lockheed has made are almost certainly informed by the engineering work that's already been done on ITER.
First, not a troll. Trolling means trying to incite a response that devolves the conversation. An example: turn the topic into an attack on Thorium reactors, knowing that some people will defend the idea and others will flame the people that defended it. I don't see any such possibility in this, and I certainly don't see the intent.
Second, some numbers. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.
I think the egomania is getting worse, because the Slashdot audience has been steadily expanding for its entire existence. It's not necessarily a matter of what sort of people make up the community. It's probably more a matter of the size of the community and why people joined. When you join a small community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to contribute. When you join a large community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to enjoy the benefits. On Slashdot, the biggest benefit is and always has been the ease with which we can communicate our opinions to our peers. Surely lots of people, new members and existing ones who've gone through subtle personality changes, now use Slashdot primarily to try and assert their opinions. All they needed was an audience.
Presumably with an announcement this large, they've solved those problems somehow. Even if the article tried to explain how, it would certainly be wrong considering the factual accuracy of some of its claims about nuclear power in general. The details are probably very complicated. I know you (and I, and most Slashdotters) are not accustomed to missing some of the information, but this is how most people get through life. Just accept the announcement, perhaps with a bit of healthy skepticism, and hope like everyone else does that they're telling the truth because from what little we understand, this could be revolutionary.
I'm fairly sure that they have built smaller versions of this as proofs of concept.
That is the next stage of development. When they say "the design can be built and tested within a year", they're talking about the smaller proof of concept versions. They are aiming for a full-scale prototype within 10 years.
Run out of oil? You do realize that we are constantly running out of oil, and the oil companies have just gotten really good at finding new sources? The latest breakthroughs are twofold:
Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", making accessible broad swaths of previously unharvestable shale oil.
New reserves opening up in the Arctic, primarily opening up due to longer summers and milder winters melting the ice caps.
How long do you think before these sources dry up, like every other source before them already has? Pennsylvania, Texas, and California all used to be world-class suppliers of oil. Saudi Arabia is believed to have reached its peak oil extraction and is declining, although they won't admit to it. And do we really want to count it as a good thing that global scale climate change has opened up more fossil fuels with which we can induce even more global scale climate change?
And as for trees, deforestation in northern Europe had major economic consequences and contributed to the constant stream of instability and war over the last 3000 years. The Amazonian rainforest and the African jungles are our largest remaining reserves of trees, and the Brazilians are in the process of systematically clearing them for farmland. But we won't run out of trees. Unlike fossil fuels or water, it is possible to grow enough of certain trees (especially pine) to sustain forest ecosystems and supply human needs.
Water, at least, is a bit more abundant, but still not renewable. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.
And I suppose you have magical powers that let you convert mass into energy at will? And E is measured in Joules, or for some reason when we're talking about electricity consumption, Kilowatt-Hours. 1 Megawatt would mean 1 Megajoule per second. In any case, the energy source is still your magical mass-to-energy power, not the concrete.
Unfortunately the video does not quite touch on the lynchpin of the operation: how they are achieving the high ß. He explained that tokomak shaped reactors generate the magnetic field with the plasma itself, but he did not explain how the magnetic field is being generated apparently by the containment cylinder itself. If it's as simple as superconducting magnets, then what makes this a breakthrough? Is it just another useful but ignored approach like Thorium reactors?
An idea I've been rattling around in my head recently is that marriage may have actually been about clan building. Think about it: the oldest traditions of marriage involve the wife going off to be with the husband, at a time when families otherwise tended to stick pretty close together. There were many arranged marriages often made for strategic reasons, even among the common people in smaller tribes. The husband even had to pay the wife's family a dowry - presumably because they were essentially buying a young, healthy worker away from her family. On top of that, polygamy was also very common. What's the overall result? Birthing HUGE numbers of children all definitely belonging to the same tribe (at least the boys), despite high mortality rates for childbirth. Since the wives go off to be with the husband's family, they aren't striking out on their own or finding any kind of balance; they just are part of this large, loyal hierarchy that ultimately can accomplish more together. And according to the book of Genesis in the bible, this was God's plan to raise up the nation of Israel. Even if you don't believe the story, the people of the resulting ancient nation must have thought it plausible and believed it; otherwise it would not still be held up as part of the foundational story of three major religions.
Of course there's no use for clan building now. We have enough people and enough newer and fairer ways of organizing people. But this kind of marriage tradition could bootstrap a nation in a time when there was no such thing as national loyalty.
P.S.: According to tradition, the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, Israel's brother that Abraham conceived with a slave woman because he doubted God's word that he would conceive with his wife. Ishmael and his mother were then cast out into the wilderness because Israel's mother was jealous. Just a little wrinkle in Arab-Israeli relations of which most of them are probably aware but most Americans, even alleged Christians, probably aren't.
It only takes 18 years of supervision to raise one child. With two or three, you're looking at about 19-24 years of child rearing, only half of which really takes constant supervision, the rest of which take a bit more intelligence and emotional stamina but less physical presence. Between the age of 20 and 65, that leaves you another ~20 years with no children in the home. Have fun.
An objective of maintaining order is not bad. It's also not necessary to be some evil subjugation of our right to define "love" however we please. Government just chooses to recognize and encourage an institution which existed otherwise. You'll notice that the United States state and federal governments have been slowly legalizing one type of marriage over the loud objections of some of the population, primarily because the the government does not define marriage in terms of what kinds of love are legitimate or not. Government makes the exact same argument that you do, that it's not their responsibility to tell you what "love" is. It's only the proto-fascist religious zealots who think it is.
You must work in a pretty dedicated corner of open source to think that you can actually get all your flaws fixed. I myself write and post patches to fix bugs and my patches are ignored like the bug doesn't exist. I've got a nice suite of patched open source projects since the flaw was in my way and I needed it gone. Getting other people to do stuff you want, even if it's as simple as accept a patch to make their own project work better, is non-trivial. 100x as much when you're dealing with proprietary code.
OK, so we can't give the tasks to fresh recruits. So we give them to people who have 5+ years with C++. What happens when those people disappear? What happens when you can't find enough engineers anymore with the kind of experience? How do you get from zero knowledge to competence in not blowing up C++, if not by actually blowing it up a few times?
Slashdot Mirror
Combining A+B and C may not be easy, but it is obvious. This is actually the main problem I see with software patents: idea C is "with a computer", and A+B is some existing invention. Newspapers - on a computer! Alarm clocks - on a computer! Bank transactions - on a computer! Sure it was hard to program them. It's still obvious. But if securing the bank transactions requires new innovations in security technology to glue the pieces together, those innovations could merit patent D. Does not and should not prevent anybody else from making their own secure bank transactions with a different security method because somebody got an A+B+C patent covering the obvious part.
Really not understanding your point about pharmaceuticals. How is the benzene ring different from "including a library or function in a program [which] should have an absolutely predictable result"? I do agree though that pharmaceuticals are a bit different than other patent issues, but for a different reason: selling a drug requires round after round of expensive clinical trials because of the FDA. Without exclusivity, there may not be enough incentive for drug companies to pay for those trials if a generic manufacturer can reverse engineer the same drug and sell it on the cheap without paying for the trials. Maybe the FDA should have its own special exclusivity granting system so we can peel off one of the complications of patent law.
Google is not an agnostic search system. Google is the king of search, and everyone is trying to hack around their algorithms to boost their search rankings. Is it really so terrible that Google itself should be outright asked to prefer search results that are "better for society"?
Don't get me wrong. I want a truly agnostic search engine. Badly. I want to be able to find the best source for what I'm looking for, not a couple dozen support forums with great SEO and an actual honest-to-goodness answer buried on page 47 of the search results. Google used to be the closest we could get to that, but that was a long time ago. Now they're basically a public utility, much like the internet itself. Although since so many people are stealing from it and its customers, I'd say it's more like cable TV.
I read through my above post and have decided to shorten and revise it. It really is too long and despite my efforts at the time still went on a couple of unrelated tangents. I know this is still long, but at least it is better organized. So, for the tl;dr crowd:
Why does it seem that the first response to these kinds of problems is always legal? To sue someone? Is it just because that's what is expedient to existing victims? Because it won't help future potential victims. Even changing the law or boosting enforcement won't get at the root cause.
The fact is that sadly, sociopathic behavior like this is socially acceptable. Every time a woman speaks up, half of the crowd chimes in to defend the sociopath. "It was her own fault", you say. "Women are such whiners; this happens to everyone", you say. And let's be clear: there's a point to be made that women are perhaps too often thin-skinned. But often this point is made regardless to the sexist nature (rape threats) or severity of the harassment (total destruction of career, made to feel unsafe and insecure even in her own home or the home of her family, made to fear for the safety of that family). And most of the people making this point, especially in a place like Slashdot that allows people to post anonymously, make their point with misogynistic slurs. It's only understandable that this position is almost always attacked as "blaming the victim" when there are only a couple of rational voices in the mob.
When you strip away the fact that women are the most common victims, you are left with the uncontroversial problem: sociopaths. Even when they aren't attacking you personally, their assaults harm society and by extension harm you. Every time a Kathy Sierra is harassed out of her comfort zone, we lose another intelligent perspective. We lose the voice behind javaranch.com. And to all you lonely nerds out there: we lose one more woman that understands and appreciates what you do. One more woman that might have shared your dreams and obsessions.
How can the law help us? Will it stop people from being sociopaths? Not any more than drunk driving laws made people stop driving drunk. Drunk driving used to be just as socially acceptable as wife beating and criminal harassment. What changed? MADD and systematic messaging from law enforcement and driver's education told entire generations of new drivers that it is not acceptable. Now drunk driving is the sort of thing only completely irresponsible people do, right? While that doesn't mean nobody does it, it does mean nobody defends the behavior. We need a single message to spread to every single child regarding harassment: this is not OK.
Stopping sociopaths and the harassment they inflict means we have to focus on their actions, not the possible failings of their victims. The victim has already been through enough and doesn't need you to tell them to toughen up. You don't even have to personally believe the victim! Attack the crime, even if you don't believe it happened. You might say, "Harassment is wrong, and I am appalled to think this kind of thing even happens." You might say, "I actually have trouble believing the story because it's so unthinkable that someone could be this much of a sociopath." You might say, "I thought this sort of thing never happened, and it certainly never should." Casting doubt on the victim doesn't help anybody. It just makes you the kind of asshole that future victims are afraid will attack their credibility if they seek help. And if they're lying, let that come out at trial; our public discussion cannot come nearly as close to justice for the specific people involved. All we can do is try to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future by making clear that it is unacceptable.
Changing the law is a nice idea, but people tend to be pretty resentful of laws that don't match their personal beliefs. That's why the above is so important. You will never get people to report harassment and support victims just by passing laws. This is where we are
The anti-troll measures described in TFA don't sounds to me like they would be particularly effective for most cases. Patent trolls seek out people for whom legal representation is likely to cost as much as a settlement, since those people don't have lawyers on staff and patents are a complicated and specialized field. What the measures would do is provide more opportunities for a lawyer to contest the patent letter. Since the typical targets tend to settle solely to avoid having to pay a lawyer, this will not help. What needs to happen instead is a mandatory notification in the demand letter of certain pieces of evidence which will automatically avoid patent fees if produced. I'm talking known prior art or existing license agreements, as well as other categories of potentially more complicated evidence to be created. Patent trolls thrive on the over-complication in the law, so the solution to them is to create short circuits to their lawsuits that protect 80% of the innocent without retaining a lawyer.
And before someone mentions any specific reserve that isn't being drilled for "political or environmental reasons", keep in mind there are "plenty" of them. Any individual reserve won't hold very much oil in the grand scheme of things, but in many areas drilling would prove disastrous to the local environment. Not even "vague threat of global warming" disastrous - "permanent destruction of beautiful landscapes and sole remaining habitats for endangered species" disastrous. This does not apply to all unexplored reserves (especially most offshore); with so many options it's important to know exactly how much oil you'd actually get for the destruction of those few.
$15 per minute?? That sounds like a terrible deal.
All we needed was an audience
FTFM: Fixed That For...Myself?
At least deuterium derived from water is a more abundant fuel source than oil. The energy density for deuterium fusion is so much higher than oil combustion. And clearly, we do have a lot more water than trees or oil. But it should make us all a little bit uneasy that ultimately, using water this way is nonrenewable.
It won't be "scuppered" until Lockheed has a product for sale cheaper than the remainder of work left on ITER ready to install. Even then, ITER is a valuable engineering research project that may survive anyway; the alleged breakthroughs Lockheed has made are almost certainly informed by the engineering work that's already been done on ITER.
First, not a troll. Trolling means trying to incite a response that devolves the conversation. An example: turn the topic into an attack on Thorium reactors, knowing that some people will defend the idea and others will flame the people that defended it. I don't see any such possibility in this, and I certainly don't see the intent.
Second, some numbers. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.
What else is supposed to power our megawatt lasers?
I think the egomania is getting worse, because the Slashdot audience has been steadily expanding for its entire existence. It's not necessarily a matter of what sort of people make up the community. It's probably more a matter of the size of the community and why people joined. When you join a small community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to contribute. When you join a large community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to enjoy the benefits. On Slashdot, the biggest benefit is and always has been the ease with which we can communicate our opinions to our peers. Surely lots of people, new members and existing ones who've gone through subtle personality changes, now use Slashdot primarily to try and assert their opinions. All they needed was an audience.
Presumably with an announcement this large, they've solved those problems somehow. Even if the article tried to explain how, it would certainly be wrong considering the factual accuracy of some of its claims about nuclear power in general. The details are probably very complicated. I know you (and I, and most Slashdotters) are not accustomed to missing some of the information, but this is how most people get through life. Just accept the announcement, perhaps with a bit of healthy skepticism, and hope like everyone else does that they're telling the truth because from what little we understand, this could be revolutionary.
I'm fairly sure that they have built smaller versions of this as proofs of concept.
That is the next stage of development. When they say "the design can be built and tested within a year", they're talking about the smaller proof of concept versions. They are aiming for a full-scale prototype within 10 years.
Run out of oil? You do realize that we are constantly running out of oil, and the oil companies have just gotten really good at finding new sources? The latest breakthroughs are twofold:
How long do you think before these sources dry up, like every other source before them already has? Pennsylvania, Texas, and California all used to be world-class suppliers of oil. Saudi Arabia is believed to have reached its peak oil extraction and is declining, although they won't admit to it. And do we really want to count it as a good thing that global scale climate change has opened up more fossil fuels with which we can induce even more global scale climate change?
And as for trees, deforestation in northern Europe had major economic consequences and contributed to the constant stream of instability and war over the last 3000 years. The Amazonian rainforest and the African jungles are our largest remaining reserves of trees, and the Brazilians are in the process of systematically clearing them for farmland. But we won't run out of trees. Unlike fossil fuels or water, it is possible to grow enough of certain trees (especially pine) to sustain forest ecosystems and supply human needs.
Water, at least, is a bit more abundant, but still not renewable. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.
And I suppose you have magical powers that let you convert mass into energy at will? And E is measured in Joules, or for some reason when we're talking about electricity consumption, Kilowatt-Hours. 1 Megawatt would mean 1 Megajoule per second. In any case, the energy source is still your magical mass-to-energy power, not the concrete.
If An Atomic Bomb Explodes...
Bomb Safety Drill from Matinee (1993)
Unfortunately the video does not quite touch on the lynchpin of the operation: how they are achieving the high ß. He explained that tokomak shaped reactors generate the magnetic field with the plasma itself, but he did not explain how the magnetic field is being generated apparently by the containment cylinder itself. If it's as simple as superconducting magnets, then what makes this a breakthrough? Is it just another useful but ignored approach like Thorium reactors?
An idea I've been rattling around in my head recently is that marriage may have actually been about clan building. Think about it: the oldest traditions of marriage involve the wife going off to be with the husband, at a time when families otherwise tended to stick pretty close together. There were many arranged marriages often made for strategic reasons, even among the common people in smaller tribes. The husband even had to pay the wife's family a dowry - presumably because they were essentially buying a young, healthy worker away from her family. On top of that, polygamy was also very common. What's the overall result? Birthing HUGE numbers of children all definitely belonging to the same tribe (at least the boys), despite high mortality rates for childbirth. Since the wives go off to be with the husband's family, they aren't striking out on their own or finding any kind of balance; they just are part of this large, loyal hierarchy that ultimately can accomplish more together. And according to the book of Genesis in the bible, this was God's plan to raise up the nation of Israel. Even if you don't believe the story, the people of the resulting ancient nation must have thought it plausible and believed it; otherwise it would not still be held up as part of the foundational story of three major religions.
Of course there's no use for clan building now. We have enough people and enough newer and fairer ways of organizing people. But this kind of marriage tradition could bootstrap a nation in a time when there was no such thing as national loyalty.
P.S.: According to tradition, the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, Israel's brother that Abraham conceived with a slave woman because he doubted God's word that he would conceive with his wife. Ishmael and his mother were then cast out into the wilderness because Israel's mother was jealous. Just a little wrinkle in Arab-Israeli relations of which most of them are probably aware but most Americans, even alleged Christians, probably aren't.
In name (and ritual) only.
It only takes 18 years of supervision to raise one child. With two or three, you're looking at about 19-24 years of child rearing, only half of which really takes constant supervision, the rest of which take a bit more intelligence and emotional stamina but less physical presence. Between the age of 20 and 65, that leaves you another ~20 years with no children in the home. Have fun.
An objective of maintaining order is not bad. It's also not necessary to be some evil subjugation of our right to define "love" however we please. Government just chooses to recognize and encourage an institution which existed otherwise. You'll notice that the United States state and federal governments have been slowly legalizing one type of marriage over the loud objections of some of the population, primarily because the the government does not define marriage in terms of what kinds of love are legitimate or not. Government makes the exact same argument that you do, that it's not their responsibility to tell you what "love" is. It's only the proto-fascist religious zealots who think it is.
You must work in a pretty dedicated corner of open source to think that you can actually get all your flaws fixed. I myself write and post patches to fix bugs and my patches are ignored like the bug doesn't exist. I've got a nice suite of patched open source projects since the flaw was in my way and I needed it gone. Getting other people to do stuff you want, even if it's as simple as accept a patch to make their own project work better, is non-trivial. 100x as much when you're dealing with proprietary code.
OK, so we can't give the tasks to fresh recruits. So we give them to people who have 5+ years with C++. What happens when those people disappear? What happens when you can't find enough engineers anymore with the kind of experience? How do you get from zero knowledge to competence in not blowing up C++, if not by actually blowing it up a few times?