My first response to this was, "Say what"? But I did a little Googling and it seems you're quite correct. I'm not as literate on IPv6 issues as I should be, but this strikes me as pretty dumb.
The main thesis of this argument seems to be that the primary purpose of NATs is to work around the IP address shortage, which IPv6 eliminates. But there's another big reason to want an IP address in a private space: security. Do you want every script kiddie on the planet banging on your firewall day in and day out? I certainly don't. I much prefer to expose exactly one (1) IP address to the public Internet, and to leave provisioning of that node either to my corporate IT department, or the developers of my off-the-shelf home route. Either of which can do a better job of fighting off the barbarians than I can.
Some pundits insist that they can actually provide better security if they have a true peer to peer link. Possibly true if you have a lot of development and maintenance resources. But for most users, the simple solution, having an IP address that doesn't resolve outside your network, would seem to be the best one. To quote Monty Python, if you don't want to be seen, don't stand up.
Seriously, though, the problem with setting "a moonbase" as a major target is that it's purely a symbol. What's wrong with symbols? We've already got too damn many of them. Almost all our "accomplishments" in space have been symbolic. We specify some grand-sounding goal: put up an artificial satellite, put a man in orbit, put a man on the moon, create a permanent presence in orbit. Now it's create a permanent presence on the moon and put a man (or woman) on Mars.
The problem with these big symbolic projects is that they mostly don't go anywhere. Once the goal is achieved, people lose interest. Getting to moon made everybody feel all good and patriotic, but once we got there, the constituency for the Apollo program disappeared, and funding for half the planned missions dried up. Same thing's happening with the ISS. Oh, it's still there, but it's still not completely built, and given the funding issues and absence of a good delivery vehicle, it probably never will be. So it's just a symbolic presence, with the crew mostly acting as highly-skilled janitors, spending most of their time on maintenance, with a little time out now and then for a science experiment or teaching a groundside science class. This is just not a sustainable project.
To make a permanent presence in space sustainable, you need two things. First you need to cut the cost of putting stuff in orbit, which basically means starting the shuttle program all over again, and this time not trying to do it on the cheap. Second, you need to move towards making space travel economically self-sustainable. And that doesn't mean taking a few rich tourists on a suborbital junket. It means doing serious industry: manufacturing that leverages cheap microgravity and vacuum, and mining materials both for export back to earth and for supplying your colony.
From this point of view, Bush's big Moon/Mars venture is actually a big step backward. Not only does it create more expensive, dead-end goals with no economic self-sustainability, it abandons the important goal of creating a reusable launch vehicle. Instead, we get another gigantic, expensive throwaway Apollo-style launch vehicle. The cost of creating a moonbase with this monstrosity is mind boggling. And that guarantees that your moonbase, if it gets built at all, will never be much more than another expensive box in space manned by highly educated janitors. Another expensive, pointless symbol.
No more symbolic projects. We've been doing them for 50 years now, and we're no closer to having a permanent presence in space than we were when Laika died. I once heard Chris Craft (one of the pioneers of the early space program, though he seems to be pretty much forgotten now) suggest that without the Apollo program to suck up all its resources, NASA could have created a real space infrastructure, and we might have been to Mars long ago. Maybe not, but I'd like to see a serious attempt to prove him wrong, not pointless reruns of the whole Apollo boondogle.
Personally, I don't have a problem with people attaching proprietary tools to open source products. But I have to point out that "offering paid support" is supposed to mean providing an actual human who can help you make the software work. It most definitely does not mean selling people closed-source management tools.
The basic issue here is between the "open source software" people and the "free software" people. Superficially, the two groups want the same thing: access to the source code. But the two groups come from completely different ethical assumptions. For OSS people, sharing source is just good business, and opening up their products (or deciding not to) is a business decision.
By contrast, the "free" software folks are in revolt against the very concept of proprietary software. Their consider its very existence an abrogation of their rights.
I've always considered the whole "free software" concept to be just a little naive. No, make that dumb. Its arguments are convoluted and not very compelling, and ignore inconvenient ethical precedents and economic realities. To me, the only good thing about the "free" software movement is that it unintentionally gave birth to the open source software movement.
But that's just my opinion. There are a lot of people who honestly believe that there's a big moral issue at stake in "setting software free" and especially in attaching "unfree" software to "free" software. When such people object to the MySQL/ESM bundle, you can accuse them of being soft in head. But it's not fair to accuse them of being hypocrites.
Of course SCOTUS admitted that perpetual copyright is unconstitutional. The enumerated powers clause is quite specific about that. They way they rationalize that a last-minute retroactive extension of copyright ownership is not "perpetual" is kind of beside the point. If doing it twice is constitutional, why isn't doing it three times, or four?
After all DRM doesnt (currently) recognise or pay heed to the copyright status of the work it protects. True. But if a work is copyrighted in country A and public domain in country B, what's to prevent a citizen of A going to a B web site and downloading it? To prevent that, you'd have to have mandatory copyright enforcement on every computer sold. There are those who'd like to impose just such a restriction, but I don't think it's either technically or socially feasible.
Actually, it's not the lengthy term that's obscene. That's just irritating. The real problem is that every time some valuable copyrights threaten to expire, congress extends the term. And here's what's obscene: the Supereme Court's inability to grasp that endless extensions abrogate the Constitution's requirement that copyrights be "for limited times".
But here's some good news: more and more old books and music will go public-domain in Europe, and will be available for order at a reasonable cost — or downloadable from the inevitable "pirate" servers. Another reason to buy a Kindle.
As always somebody sees a conspiracy. It's much likely that it's the usual issue: getting permission from all the people you licensed code from. That can be expensive and difficult.
Supporting OS is a business decision, not an act of corporate niceness. IBM has been OS-friendly because it's helped them keep alive software products that still had some profit in them, in the form of hardware sales and support contracts. OS/2 is too far gone to be kept alive that way, and even if it could be revived, it wouldn't make IBM enough money to make it worth the hassle.
Unix and Linux are similiar, but they are not the same. OSX is Unix. Dude, do you even know what the difference is? It's a purely legal one. The only requirement for calling an OS "Unix" is that you have a license to do so.
Yes, there is some technology behind the license. (Though there hasn't always been. More on that in a sec.) The current trademark holder is X/Open, who will sell you a license if your OS passes a bunch of compatibility tests. For obvious reasons, systems that started out as forks of the original Bell Labs source tree don't find it too hard to pass these tests, and they've all gone through the process. But you don't have to use AT&T source to use the trademark. You just have to pass the tests and pay a fee. Any OS, no matter the origin of the source code, is eligible.
It would be perfectly feasible to create a UNIX[TM] distro of Linux. Spend some money knocking out the little incompatibilities that separate Linux from "real" Unix. Then spend some more money to pass the tests. But no Linux vendor has bothered to do this. Why? Because it's expensive, and nobody gives a shit. How often do you see Sun or IBM touting the fact that Solaris or AIX is "real" UNIX[TM]? It's just a minor compatibility issue.
Only Apple fanboys care that OS X is "real" UNIX. You might think that developers would care, but if there are any applications that require strong UNIX[tm] compatibility (I'm not sure there are, but perhaps there are some I don't know about) would be targeted at servers, not desktops. Apple does sell a few servers, but it's not their bread and butter.
A developer targeting a desktop (which is mostly what OS X runs on) mostly cares about the GUI. Hey, guess what? OS X uses a different GUI API than all the "other" Unixes!
(Don't bother mentioning that you can get X Windows for the Mac. No sane developer who wants to target the Mac marketplace is going to use any but the official Apple APIs.)
Note that the UNIX[tm] wasn't always available on this compatibility basis. A long time ago, I worked for Zilog and Convergent Technolgies, both among the first companies to sell Unix boxes when the OS became commercially available. We did not have the right to say that our Unix-derived OSs were "UNIX[tm]". This wasn't a compatibility issue: AT&T wanted to keep the trademark for its own products.
This led to some weird situations. At Convergent, our 68010 port of Unix was called CTIX. (Basically System V, with a bunch of BSD features.) As I said, AT&T wouldn't let us call this puppy "UNIX[tm]" — except that there was one system that we OEMed through AT&T, that was sold under their label. On that system, "CTIX" was officially "UNIX" despite being the same OS!
Bottom line: the difference between Unix and Linux is not specified by any software person. It's specified by the lawyers. Does anybody here take their word on these subjects as gospel?
I think the pundits are overcongratulating themselves. Yes, many predicted that Apple would come out with an ultraskinny laptop. But all the stories I saw the day before, from multiple sources, all predicted that Apple would announce a system with no hard disk. Not clear to me whether they were talking about a simple flash-based system or a serious SSD-computer (not sure any of them knew the difference) but most versions basically said it would be something that would be an adjunct to your main computer. In other words, an Apple version of the Palm Foleo! Yeah, right.
Not to run down the Air, which seems to be a decent little box. But it's just a laptop with a minimum of extraneous hardware. (Unless you consider a fixed-focus camera to be extraneous; come to think of it, I do.) Not exactly a major revolution worthy of all the religious awe and ecstasy.
You better! If you don't, they will write you out of reality!
This debunking is the first I heard of this "news". I guess I don't follow enough blogs...
My favorite Stupid Journalist story, reported by Herb Caen, concerns a modern poet. A journalist asked him why his verses didn't rhyme. He responded that many great poets dispensed with rhyme, including Homer and Virgil. The journalist quoted him as saying that rhyme was invented by a poet named Homer Virgil!
Technically speaking, you're correct on all points. But you're overlooking a political/social problem: most people just don't grasp the difference between a spreadsheet and a database. This includes a lot of programmers, but the real problem is that it includes almost all non-programmers, even people who are relatively tech-savvy. So if you tell them to go create, say, a mailing list in MS Office, they'll use Excel rather than Access, because they grok Excel, and they don't understand why Access even exists.
(Not an endorsement of Access, which is a really crappy desktop database. FileMaker is superior in every way, though it lacks any real market penetration. Most people just don't understand what it's for.)
Once in a tech writing group, I was assigned to work out a way to store a huge amount of automatically generated data that would be the basis for documentation. Everybody assumed that I'd use a spreadsheet, but I knew that wouldn't fly. So I wrote a little program to feed the data into a relational database. Everybody though I was freaking genius. Ironically, this was at a software company that created tools for (among other things) database programming!
"Blinded" is the wrong word. I plead guilty to stereotyping you as the standard libertarian who believes the marketplace is the answer to all questions.
Be that as it may, you've cited a lot of expensive propositions that sound unlikely to get cheaper no matter how much money you throw at them. Deuterium, to cite one example, is not exactly a commodity product.
Your example are all variations on fusion tech. I'm no expert on that (not enough comic books on the subject) but it's my understanding that tons of money have been poured into fusion power and that a serious solution is still decades away. Of course, you can get helium out of a fusion reaction even if it's not running an energy surplus. But then you have to pour a lot of energy into the process, further adding to its cost. Add the resource consumption and carbon footprint of that energy generation...
You make one last point:
Markets are powerful tools to find solutions to problems, but not necessarily the solutions we expect. And, quite often, they cheat by redefining the problem. I heartily agree. Clever entrepreneurs may well find solutions, surprising or not, to this particular resource issue. They may also find lots of ways for civilization to reduce its carbon footprint. (Which is why carbon cap-and-trade is better than simple carbon caps.) Given the right incentives, they might find solutions to each of our many problems with dwindling resources, loss of biodiversity, and a host of other environmental problems.
But the key word here is "might". It's perfectly possible that alternatives to helium or practical technologies to generate it can't be created quickly, no matter what the market incentives. (In which case, it'd be good to consider rationing the stuff, so that vital industries get priority over party balloons and flying billboards.) Every time we assume that the best thing to do is to rely on the marketplace to solve the problem, we're rolling the dice. And yes, each roll of the dice is stacked in our favor, because profit is a strong incentive to innovation. But we're having to roll the dice more and more — often to deal with problems the market itself created. And if we roll snake eyes often enough...
In short, I'm arguing against your complacency. Resource issues are real crises, and economic self-correction is no guarantee. Come to think of it, my stereotyping is not so off the mark after all.
They've shifted scripting paradigms before. Word used to have its own dialect of Basic, and Excel originally did all its scripting with those @ functions.
What's really painful is not the death of VBA as such. What's painful is Microsoft's decision to do away with the whole Visual Basic paradigm without providing anything to replace it.
What do I mean by by "Visual Basic paradigm"? I don't mean the (very sucky) language. I mean the integration of the language to all those COM interfaces that permeate Microsoftland, including Office. These COM interfaces are all part of object frameworks, but because they're interfaces rather than objects, you don't have to master the object framework in order to use them
When MS got bored with COM and decided to move on to.NET, they neglected to replicate this functionality. They did provide a.NET version of VB, but it's just another OO language. So VB.NET programmers have to master the.NET object framework. Might as well learn C# and be done with it.
I'm a user of OneNote, which was the first MS Office application to be released without a builtin Visual Basic engine. You can automate OneNote, but the learning curve's much steeper than it would be with VBA. I've never found time to assault it.
Even though I've always despised the pre-.NET dialect of Visual Basic, I find I'm missing it terribly.
Excuse me? Existing fusion technology that "very old" and "just needs to scale". I seemed to have missed that. I guess I overlooked Thomas Edison's work on the subject. If only they'd put more pictures in science books....
Please tell me you're talking about Cold Fusion. I need a good laugh right now.
The selection has improved drastically in recent months. Of course, they'll never have most of the big hollywood movies, not as long as the studios remain uptight about online distribution. But there's lots of good foreign, indy, and classic stuff, with a fair selection of documentaries.
If WI were a separate feature I had to pay extra for, I wouldn't pay very much for it. But they just threw it in about a year ago, without raising rates. (They've even knocked down rates slightly since then.) It's nice to watch the odd Bollywood movie that doesn't quite rate a place in my queue, and sample a lot of movies that might or might not totally suck.
Caveat: if you're picky about compression artificats, you need at least a 2Mb connection.
So if I offer a billion-trillion dollars for the secret of immortality, somebody's bound to come up with it? Before I die, of course, or the offer's off.
Libertarians are so freaking dense. Yes, a market economy is a powerful engine for creating shit. But like any other engine, it has a finite speed. You can't solve every resource issue with "the marketplace will take care of it." The marketplace is not magic.
Hey, I just invented a new joke: How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? None. If there's really a need for light, the marketplace will take care of it.
You'll jump through any hoop I provide in order to admit that you made a simple impatient mistake. (One, I might as well admit, I often make myself.) That's very sad.
And how old were these kids? Middle or high school, I'll bet. That's about when you start thinking about getting their workplace and college skills in place. But it's silly to expect 10 year olds to learn a serious word processor. If they need to write something, they can use a more simple one, or even a text editor.
Younger children need to work on their thinking skills, not learn how to write papers. The people who put the XO together understand this. And in the best Seussian tradition, appeal to kids fondness for play to get them started. How do you "play" with a word processor? You don't.
Old joke: "Daddy, what's a word processor?" "Well son, you know what a food processor does to food, right?"
As long as we're questioning the educational value of a "standard" OS, let's question the educational value of "standard" end-user software. Face it, 10 year olds aren't very interested in playing with a word processor or spreadsheet. How about something that will actually engage and challenge them? Even if they don't go for the XO, schools should consider installing some of the software from that system. Which is not terribly tied to the OLPC project, or even to Linux. OLPC's innovative user interface also deserves a close look.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's just sad. It makes me want to cry crocodile tears!
The main thesis of this argument seems to be that the primary purpose of NATs is to work around the IP address shortage, which IPv6 eliminates. But there's another big reason to want an IP address in a private space: security. Do you want every script kiddie on the planet banging on your firewall day in and day out? I certainly don't. I much prefer to expose exactly one (1) IP address to the public Internet, and to leave provisioning of that node either to my corporate IT department, or the developers of my off-the-shelf home route. Either of which can do a better job of fighting off the barbarians than I can.
Some pundits insist that they can actually provide better security if they have a true peer to peer link. Possibly true if you have a lot of development and maintenance resources. But for most users, the simple solution, having an IP address that doesn't resolve outside your network, would seem to be the best one. To quote Monty Python, if you don't want to be seen, don't stand up.
What, you mean the U.S. is going to declare war on anybody who doesn't get on the copyrighted forever bandwagon? Get real!
Seriously, though, the problem with setting "a moonbase" as a major target is that it's purely a symbol. What's wrong with symbols? We've already got too damn many of them. Almost all our "accomplishments" in space have been symbolic. We specify some grand-sounding goal: put up an artificial satellite, put a man in orbit, put a man on the moon, create a permanent presence in orbit. Now it's create a permanent presence on the moon and put a man (or woman) on Mars.
The problem with these big symbolic projects is that they mostly don't go anywhere. Once the goal is achieved, people lose interest. Getting to moon made everybody feel all good and patriotic, but once we got there, the constituency for the Apollo program disappeared, and funding for half the planned missions dried up. Same thing's happening with the ISS. Oh, it's still there, but it's still not completely built, and given the funding issues and absence of a good delivery vehicle, it probably never will be. So it's just a symbolic presence, with the crew mostly acting as highly-skilled janitors, spending most of their time on maintenance, with a little time out now and then for a science experiment or teaching a groundside science class. This is just not a sustainable project.
To make a permanent presence in space sustainable, you need two things. First you need to cut the cost of putting stuff in orbit, which basically means starting the shuttle program all over again, and this time not trying to do it on the cheap. Second, you need to move towards making space travel economically self-sustainable. And that doesn't mean taking a few rich tourists on a suborbital junket. It means doing serious industry: manufacturing that leverages cheap microgravity and vacuum, and mining materials both for export back to earth and for supplying your colony.
From this point of view, Bush's big Moon/Mars venture is actually a big step backward. Not only does it create more expensive, dead-end goals with no economic self-sustainability, it abandons the important goal of creating a reusable launch vehicle. Instead, we get another gigantic, expensive throwaway Apollo-style launch vehicle. The cost of creating a moonbase with this monstrosity is mind boggling. And that guarantees that your moonbase, if it gets built at all, will never be much more than another expensive box in space manned by highly educated janitors. Another expensive, pointless symbol.
No more symbolic projects. We've been doing them for 50 years now, and we're no closer to having a permanent presence in space than we were when Laika died. I once heard Chris Craft (one of the pioneers of the early space program, though he seems to be pretty much forgotten now) suggest that without the Apollo program to suck up all its resources, NASA could have created a real space infrastructure, and we might have been to Mars long ago. Maybe not, but I'd like to see a serious attempt to prove him wrong, not pointless reruns of the whole Apollo boondogle.
Personally, I don't have a problem with people attaching proprietary tools to open source products. But I have to point out that "offering paid support" is supposed to mean providing an actual human who can help you make the software work. It most definitely does not mean selling people closed-source management tools.
The basic issue here is between the "open source software" people and the "free software" people. Superficially, the two groups want the same thing: access to the source code. But the two groups come from completely different ethical assumptions. For OSS people, sharing source is just good business, and opening up their products (or deciding not to) is a business decision.
By contrast, the "free" software folks are in revolt against the very concept of proprietary software. Their consider its very existence an abrogation of their rights.
I've always considered the whole "free software" concept to be just a little naive. No, make that dumb. Its arguments are convoluted and not very compelling, and ignore inconvenient ethical precedents and economic realities. To me, the only good thing about the "free" software movement is that it unintentionally gave birth to the open source software movement.
But that's just my opinion. There are a lot of people who honestly believe that there's a big moral issue at stake in "setting software free" and especially in attaching "unfree" software to "free" software. When such people object to the MySQL/ESM bundle, you can accuse them of being soft in head. But it's not fair to accuse them of being hypocrites.
Of course SCOTUS admitted that perpetual copyright is unconstitutional. The enumerated powers clause is quite specific about that. They way they rationalize that a last-minute retroactive extension of copyright ownership is not "perpetual" is kind of beside the point. If doing it twice is constitutional, why isn't doing it three times, or four?
Actually, it's not the lengthy term that's obscene. That's just irritating. The real problem is that every time some valuable copyrights threaten to expire, congress extends the term. And here's what's obscene: the Supereme Court's inability to grasp that endless extensions abrogate the Constitution's requirement that copyrights be "for limited times".
But here's some good news: more and more old books and music will go public-domain in Europe, and will be available for order at a reasonable cost — or downloadable from the inevitable "pirate" servers. Another reason to buy a Kindle.
Please don't feed the troll.
Why get so complicated? Simply design the router software so that you have to change the default password before you can start using it.
As always somebody sees a conspiracy. It's much likely that it's the usual issue: getting permission from all the people you licensed code from. That can be expensive and difficult.
Supporting OS is a business decision, not an act of corporate niceness. IBM has been OS-friendly because it's helped them keep alive software products that still had some profit in them, in the form of hardware sales and support contracts. OS/2 is too far gone to be kept alive that way, and even if it could be revived, it wouldn't make IBM enough money to make it worth the hassle.
By that logia, Rush Limbaugh should be on welfare.
Yes, there is some technology behind the license. (Though there hasn't always been. More on that in a sec.) The current trademark holder is X/Open, who will sell you a license if your OS passes a bunch of compatibility tests. For obvious reasons, systems that started out as forks of the original Bell Labs source tree don't find it too hard to pass these tests, and they've all gone through the process. But you don't have to use AT&T source to use the trademark. You just have to pass the tests and pay a fee. Any OS, no matter the origin of the source code, is eligible.
It would be perfectly feasible to create a UNIX[TM] distro of Linux. Spend some money knocking out the little incompatibilities that separate Linux from "real" Unix. Then spend some more money to pass the tests. But no Linux vendor has bothered to do this. Why? Because it's expensive, and nobody gives a shit. How often do you see Sun or IBM touting the fact that Solaris or AIX is "real" UNIX[TM]? It's just a minor compatibility issue.
Only Apple fanboys care that OS X is "real" UNIX. You might think that developers would care, but if there are any applications that require strong UNIX[tm] compatibility (I'm not sure there are, but perhaps there are some I don't know about) would be targeted at servers, not desktops. Apple does sell a few servers, but it's not their bread and butter.
A developer targeting a desktop (which is mostly what OS X runs on) mostly cares about the GUI. Hey, guess what? OS X uses a different GUI API than all the "other" Unixes!
(Don't bother mentioning that you can get X Windows for the Mac. No sane developer who wants to target the Mac marketplace is going to use any but the official Apple APIs.)
Note that the UNIX[tm] wasn't always available on this compatibility basis. A long time ago, I worked for Zilog and Convergent Technolgies, both among the first companies to sell Unix boxes when the OS became commercially available. We did not have the right to say that our Unix-derived OSs were "UNIX[tm]". This wasn't a compatibility issue: AT&T wanted to keep the trademark for its own products.
This led to some weird situations. At Convergent, our 68010 port of Unix was called CTIX. (Basically System V, with a bunch of BSD features.) As I said, AT&T wouldn't let us call this puppy "UNIX[tm]" — except that there was one system that we OEMed through AT&T, that was sold under their label. On that system, "CTIX" was officially "UNIX" despite being the same OS!
Bottom line: the difference between Unix and Linux is not specified by any software person. It's specified by the lawyers. Does anybody here take their word on these subjects as gospel?
I think the pundits are overcongratulating themselves. Yes, many predicted that Apple would come out with an ultraskinny laptop. But all the stories I saw the day before, from multiple sources, all predicted that Apple would announce a system with no hard disk. Not clear to me whether they were talking about a simple flash-based system or a serious SSD-computer (not sure any of them knew the difference) but most versions basically said it would be something that would be an adjunct to your main computer. In other words, an Apple version of the Palm Foleo! Yeah, right.
Not to run down the Air, which seems to be a decent little box. But it's just a laptop with a minimum of extraneous hardware. (Unless you consider a fixed-focus camera to be extraneous; come to think of it, I do.) Not exactly a major revolution worthy of all the religious awe and ecstasy.
You better! If you don't, they will write you out of reality!
This debunking is the first I heard of this "news". I guess I don't follow enough blogs...
My favorite Stupid Journalist story, reported by Herb Caen, concerns a modern poet. A journalist asked him why his verses didn't rhyme. He responded that many great poets dispensed with rhyme, including Homer and Virgil. The journalist quoted him as saying that rhyme was invented by a poet named Homer Virgil!
Technically speaking, you're correct on all points. But you're overlooking a political/social problem: most people just don't grasp the difference between a spreadsheet and a database. This includes a lot of programmers, but the real problem is that it includes almost all non-programmers, even people who are relatively tech-savvy. So if you tell them to go create, say, a mailing list in MS Office, they'll use Excel rather than Access, because they grok Excel, and they don't understand why Access even exists.
(Not an endorsement of Access, which is a really crappy desktop database. FileMaker is superior in every way, though it lacks any real market penetration. Most people just don't understand what it's for.)
Once in a tech writing group, I was assigned to work out a way to store a huge amount of automatically generated data that would be the basis for documentation. Everybody assumed that I'd use a spreadsheet, but I knew that wouldn't fly. So I wrote a little program to feed the data into a relational database. Everybody though I was freaking genius. Ironically, this was at a software company that created tools for (among other things) database programming!
Be that as it may, you've cited a lot of expensive propositions that sound unlikely to get cheaper no matter how much money you throw at them. Deuterium, to cite one example, is not exactly a commodity product.
Your example are all variations on fusion tech. I'm no expert on that (not enough comic books on the subject) but it's my understanding that tons of money have been poured into fusion power and that a serious solution is still decades away. Of course, you can get helium out of a fusion reaction even if it's not running an energy surplus. But then you have to pour a lot of energy into the process, further adding to its cost. Add the resource consumption and carbon footprint of that energy generation...
You make one last point: Markets are powerful tools to find solutions to problems, but not necessarily the solutions we expect. And, quite often, they cheat by redefining the problem. I heartily agree. Clever entrepreneurs may well find solutions, surprising or not, to this particular resource issue. They may also find lots of ways for civilization to reduce its carbon footprint. (Which is why carbon cap-and-trade is better than simple carbon caps.) Given the right incentives, they might find solutions to each of our many problems with dwindling resources, loss of biodiversity, and a host of other environmental problems.
But the key word here is "might". It's perfectly possible that alternatives to helium or practical technologies to generate it can't be created quickly, no matter what the market incentives. (In which case, it'd be good to consider rationing the stuff, so that vital industries get priority over party balloons and flying billboards.) Every time we assume that the best thing to do is to rely on the marketplace to solve the problem, we're rolling the dice. And yes, each roll of the dice is stacked in our favor, because profit is a strong incentive to innovation. But we're having to roll the dice more and more — often to deal with problems the market itself created. And if we roll snake eyes often enough...
In short, I'm arguing against your complacency. Resource issues are real crises, and economic self-correction is no guarantee. Come to think of it, my stereotyping is not so off the mark after all.
They've shifted scripting paradigms before. Word used to have its own dialect of Basic, and Excel originally did all its scripting with those @ functions.
.NET, they neglected to replicate this functionality. They did provide a .NET version of VB, but it's just another OO language. So VB.NET programmers have to master the .NET object framework. Might as well learn C# and be done with it.
What's really painful is not the death of VBA as such. What's painful is Microsoft's decision to do away with the whole Visual Basic paradigm without providing anything to replace it.
What do I mean by by "Visual Basic paradigm"? I don't mean the (very sucky) language. I mean the integration of the language to all those COM interfaces that permeate Microsoftland, including Office. These COM interfaces are all part of object frameworks, but because they're interfaces rather than objects, you don't have to master the object framework in order to use them
When MS got bored with COM and decided to move on to
I'm a user of OneNote, which was the first MS Office application to be released without a builtin Visual Basic engine. You can automate OneNote, but the learning curve's much steeper than it would be with VBA. I've never found time to assault it.
Even though I've always despised the pre-.NET dialect of Visual Basic, I find I'm missing it terribly.
Excuse me? Existing fusion technology that "very old" and "just needs to scale". I seemed to have missed that. I guess I overlooked Thomas Edison's work on the subject. If only they'd put more pictures in science books....
Please tell me you're talking about Cold Fusion. I need a good laugh right now.
The selection has improved drastically in recent months. Of course, they'll never have most of the big hollywood movies, not as long as the studios remain uptight about online distribution. But there's lots of good foreign, indy, and classic stuff, with a fair selection of documentaries.
If WI were a separate feature I had to pay extra for, I wouldn't pay very much for it. But they just threw it in about a year ago, without raising rates. (They've even knocked down rates slightly since then.) It's nice to watch the odd Bollywood movie that doesn't quite rate a place in my queue, and sample a lot of movies that might or might not totally suck.
Caveat: if you're picky about compression artificats, you need at least a 2Mb connection.
So if I offer a billion-trillion dollars for the secret of immortality, somebody's bound to come up with it? Before I die, of course, or the offer's off.
Libertarians are so freaking dense. Yes, a market economy is a powerful engine for creating shit. But like any other engine, it has a finite speed. You can't solve every resource issue with "the marketplace will take care of it." The marketplace is not magic.
Hey, I just invented a new joke: How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? None. If there's really a need for light, the marketplace will take care of it.
Then replace the mothers. You can get a decent router for $25.
You'll jump through any hoop I provide in order to admit that you made a simple impatient mistake. (One, I might as well admit, I often make myself.) That's very sad.
And how old were these kids? Middle or high school, I'll bet. That's about when you start thinking about getting their workplace and college skills in place. But it's silly to expect 10 year olds to learn a serious word processor. If they need to write something, they can use a more simple one, or even a text editor.
Younger children need to work on their thinking skills, not learn how to write papers. The people who put the XO together understand this. And in the best Seussian tradition, appeal to kids fondness for play to get them started. How do you "play" with a word processor? You don't.
Old joke: "Daddy, what's a word processor?" "Well son, you know what a food processor does to food, right?"
As long as we're questioning the educational value of a "standard" OS, let's question the educational value of "standard" end-user software. Face it, 10 year olds aren't very interested in playing with a word processor or spreadsheet. How about something that will actually engage and challenge them? Even if they don't go for the XO, schools should consider installing some of the software from that system. Which is not terribly tied to the OLPC project, or even to Linux. OLPC's innovative user interface also deserves a close look.