If a developer doesn't want to enforce OSS license terms himself, he can always assign the copyright to somone who will. Such as the FSF (for GPL project) or the Apache foundation (for Apache-licensed projects) and so on.
The fact that the FSF hasn't actually been to court over a GPL violation isn't because they don't do anything, but rather because they're so successful at it that violators have chosen to settle instead.
Besides, what business is it of yours to ask lawyers to defend the copyright of a third party? What if the developer/copyright owner himself doesn't care about the violation? It's nobodies business but his.
How can you claim damages on something that is free to the public to use and distribute? What is copyright violation worth when the software has no value in dollars?
This is also ridiculous. The software has value in dollars. If it didn't, there would be no point in ripping it off in the first place.
Try this: "What is the cost of commercially developing something with equal functionality?"
Apparently they've been up to rewriting copyright notices. That is illegal. There is not a single OSS license which allows you to do that. (Except for public domain, which doesn't really count as a license.)
Because having thousands of people noticing 'Look! There's copyright infringement going on over at _this_ site!" is just about the fastest way to get a site shut-down nowadays.
Scams and frauds are crimes best dealt with as publicly as possible. Do you seriously believe anyone is going to buy their 'product' because of this story?
If you want to see a real open source mess, check out Zaurus - just as an example there is a large number of libSDL ports, each different, each having different problems, each compatible with different games, none fully usable.
How is this a problem with open source? It's a management problem, and those exist in closed-source too.
Unlike in the closed-source world, you have a chance to do something about it. Merge these ports into something fully usable then. You are free to do it. Don't like how the SDL people are running things? Start your own fork.
Correct. An alternating current will create an alternating expansion/contraction of the crystal. (so it's not really a vibration, since it's not -moving- back and forth, but actually changing its volume!)
And of course the opposite works: A vibration will compress the material repeatedly, creating an AC current, which is how you use it in accelerometers.
Another cool use is to probe stuff (like beams in walls or cracks in material), you can use the same crystal as both the emitter and reciver, by sending a pulse of current (creating a pulse vibration) and then use the same crystal to get an electric signal recording the echoes when they come back.
Doesn't allow free redistribution, so redistribution in source code fails, too.
Derived Works
Nope.
Integrity of The Author's Source Code
Doesn't allow free distribution of separate modifications either.
No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
I guess it passes that one, yay!
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
Nope. Explicitely limits fields of endeavor to research, commercial use, or internal use.
Distribution of License
Nope. The TCK license comes with what's effectively a NDA.
License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
I guess it passes that one, yay!
License Must Not Restrict Other Software
Nope. Once you've agreed to SCSL, you can't distribute non-compliant software. So you couldn't redistribute kaffe, gcj, or even more up-to-date versions of Xerces if they break tests in the TCK.
License Must Be Technology-Neutral
Nope. It's a click-wrap license. It even has a pointless [ACCEPT] [REJECT] at the bottom
Total: 2 out of 10.
In summary, it's not open source. It's not even close.
Most viable project that Adobe can open source is Postscript above all else.
How is postscript not open? Adobe provides full specifications available to anyone to implement it. Completely royalty free and without patent encumbrance.
Postscript is not a end product thus no real self threat
Wrong. Postscript is a product. Who makes the embedded PS systems for the millions of PS printers out there, eh?
it can however very much gain a large programmer pool and a good image.
It already has these things. Have you been living under a rock since 1985 when Postscript language specifications and reference manual (AKA 'the blue-book' and 'the red-book')
Their image currently is one of being very hostile towards the community.
It's water, but it's too expensive and hot for you. It's de ionized and monitored for purity so that nothing plates out and it does not eat your cladding, that's the costly part. But, under pressure, it's hot enough to light paper on fire. That's a little too hot for your little cpu.
That's just the core.. then you've usually got a secondary loop (taken from a river or such) to drive the turbines.
And then that water is either let out into a river or lake, or sent to a nice Simpsons-Springfieldish natural draught cooling tower.
Now there we're talking one heck of a big radiator!
Natural draught towers work by pumping the hot water up and spraying it out in the tower, which will heat the air.. the warm moist air goes out the top (and usually condenses a bit in the colder air above, causing the big white plume) and fresh cold air gets sucked in the bottom. Nothing nasty about them at all, except that they're really, really big.
Its always struck me as funny at how these cooling towers, in the public mind, are kind of 'gigantic smokestacks', when they're not smokestacks at all.
Or perhaps it was because it was a quote taken out of context:..was made possible by acid trips." He laughs. "Or not only by acid trips but without the slightest doubt empowered by them.
"And Stallman was like, Wait a minute there, that's not quite the way it went," Gil recalls. "It freaked him a little to think I was associating the free software movement with the movement to legalize drugs."
But in fact, that wasn't quite the link Gil was making. He was suggesting that the free software movement and the '60s counterculture had a shared goal of transforming culture from the inside out. Gil talks a little crazy, sure, but he's no fool.
Is it possible that the surface of Titan is basically a hydrocarbon mix that is basically like slush or jelly? With the cold temperature and higher atmospheric pressure wouldn't that turn all the ethane and methane into something not unlike diesel fuel when its really cold?
I'm a chemist, and you're off-base.
The intermolecular forces between methane and ethane molecules are very small. Even at high pressure/low temperature they will have low density and viscosity.
Look it up (then choose 'fluid properties' and play around with the settings.)
For methane, in the range of 0-300 MPa of pressure (0-300 atmospheres) and 100 Kelvin (-280 F) for instance, the viscosity ranges about 150-200 uPa*s. Contrast that to water at room temperature and pressure, it's about 1000 uPa*s.
So.. no way it's jelly. It's not slushy. It's not even watery. It's light and whispy.
Played around with liquid nitrogen? It has a very low viscosity. Think something in that direction.
A relative of mine worked with a guy who wrote a program to do a single thing: Terminate itself. (They were doing OS programming and this was actually a useful thing to have in that context.)
That's it. The simplest possible program you could write. It was a single assembly instruction. So the guy started bragging about how he'd written the only bug-free program, ever.
Well.. the gods did not look kindly upon that hubris. It turned out he'd forgotten something. He'd forgotten to zero-out the register containing the programs exit code. So the exit code would be just whatever random value happened to be in the register. And a non-zero error code indicates a termination on error. There was a bug in the simplest program ever written.
So..no, there is no flawless software which does anything non-trivial. It's hard enough to get the trivial stuff right.
The poll numbers are useless to imply moral righteousness to Bush or Kerry. Despite the USA's many flaws, you do know that the majority of the world's population lives in countries with little to no respect for human rights, with dictatorial governments that don't care about the people.
And from this you imply that the people of those countries don't respect human rights. That's just plain racist.
There's a certain difference between this and the issue at hand here though.
When did France supposedly sue Google? I haven't heard of that. But as for the Yahoo cae: France and Germany were trying to enforce their own laws on their own territory. They weren't trying to stop Yahoo US from selling Nazi stuff, they were trying to stop them from selling them to people in France and Germany, where such a sale would be illegal.
It seems a relatively reasonable given that there isn't any international law on this subject.
The case at hand here is a copyright issue. The international rules here are clearer. It's not much a matter of interpretation because this stuff is adressed in the Berne Convention, which the USA has signed.
As far as I understand Berne, the person downloading from the USA is the one committing the infringement, and liable under US copyright law. But the person in Australia serving the text which isn't copyrighted there is not commiting any crime.
I think you're comparing an apple to an orange here.
>I could've sworn that equation had a Devil's fork in it somewhere.
Psi = fork-shaped
>Incidentally, I'll buy you a glass of whatever alcohol beverage you'd like, assuming you can solve it for all of the molecules in that beverage.
How about this: I'll solve it for about 100 atoms (which is about as many as can be done with todays computing power) and then use group theory to extrapolate that result to the rest?
Of course, a co-worker of mine actually did that last year already, using density-functional methods. (which is a reformulation of the Schrödinger equation)
See: Molecular Structure of Alcohol-Water Mixtures Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 157401 (2003) J.-H. Guo, Y. Luo, A. Augustsson, S. Kashtanov, J.-E. Rubensson, D. K. Shuh, H. Ågren and J. Nordgren
H*Psi = E*Psi (note: H is an operator folks, not a number)
Perhaps not as famous as E=mc^2.. or as exact as the Dirac equation (relativistic version of the S.E.), but.. in terms of practical benefit to mankind, I think this one has done more than any other equation during the last century.
Atoms. Molecules. Semiconductors. Lasers.
The number of things explained and modelled by the Schrödinger equation are just uncountable. You can explain almost* all of chemistry with that thing.
Relativity is nice, but it hasn't had the technical uses quantum physics has.
(*Relativistic effects are important in heavy elements. For instance the yellow color of gold is a relativistic effect.)
Speaking of semiconductors.. that's another interesting property that should be mentioned.
This graphite monolayer should conduct electricity fairly well.
Graphite itself conducts electricity, but with a pretty big resistance. But most of the restistance in graphite is because the electrons have a difficult time moving between the layers, not because of moving within the layers.
So, since this material only has a single layer, the conductivity should be pretty good.
now that I have the attention of somone who knows chemical and intermelecular bonds, with this new configuration (4 interconnects) does this create yet another material, due of it's own properties and description? also, what would the physical properties of this material be?
But it's not a new configuration, it's the same as graphite (3 bonds per carbon in a six-ring stucture)
The new thing here is that you only have a single layer. Even though the layer itself is relatively strong, it doesn't mean the thing is strong as a macroscopic material. It's strong on the axis of the plane of atoms, but very weak in the other direction.
One idea would be to build up the layers and make a super-strong material, but you can't do that here, because the bonds which would hold the layers together are weak. You just end up with ordinary graphite, which is soft. Van der Waals bonds are the weakest kind there is.
I think the main uses here aren't trying to make some new macroscopic material out of this stuff alone.
I think the idea here is that you can use this monolayer of graphite together with other stuff to create new materials. For instance as a coating or as a layer in a semiconductor. Like a slice of cheese in a sandwich.
It's infrastructure. You could say the same thing about highways too.
It's very, very difficult to calculate the benefits of this, and really of any infrastructure investment. (as far as I understand, there are no good models for this. Building roads is still mostly a political decision.)
But there are lots of things which conciveably balance the costs, most notably increased business productivity, competition and growth, and increased property value (which generates returns though property tax).
So, yeah, it's political.. but it doesn't automatically mean it's not economically justified. But whether it is or not is pure speculation. There's no way to tell in the short run.
and if this new... uh... material is just graphite, can you send me some graphite bundles from the jewlery shop? it has as much a right being called planiar diamond as graphite.
Only if because you don't know what you're talking about.
Let me hit you with some undergraduate-level chemistry:
Graphite is the planar crystal conformation of carbon where each carbon atom binds to three others, forming plane unit rings of 6 carbon atoms. See this image, for example. The bonds between the layers are not chemical bonds. They are van der Waals bonds, which are intermolecular bonds, and are far weaker than a real chemical bond.
Diamond, on the other hand, is a conformation of carbon where the atoms bind with four others in a tetrahedral fashion. See this picture. All bonds here are equally strong, and far much stronger than the interplane bonds in graphite. That's why diamond is hard.
Fullerenes on the other hand, are bonded like graphite, with three bonds on each carbon. However, in the case of these molecules, there are both five and six-member rings, causing a curved structure. See this picture.
These are the three distinct types of stuctures pure carbon can have. This monolayer compound belongs to the first. It is a monolayer of graphite, or a single 'graphite molecule' if you want.
Seriously, does this mean the edge of the fabric is really sharp? Can it cut through stuff?
Nope. It's not rigid.
But.. if you could add a layer on top of that layer, juxtaposed by the minimal amount (half of a ring, see this picture of graphite crystal structure), and then add another layer, and another..
Then you could form a 'perfectly sharp' knife.
I'm not sure how durable it'd be though, because the inter-layer bonds in graphite are rather weak.
I wouldn't cry too much - piracy is going to hurt the publishers of weak games worst, 'cos everyone can find out that it sucks before it goes on sale
Which leads to the further polarization of the games industry, with the top 10% of games making up 90% of sales (or some disproportion like that).
Which means fewer games will return a profit. Which means the risk is greater. Which means that the investors, e.g. the game producers, will be less and less willing to take risks on games which differ from the existing top 10%.
So if you think that's an OK rationale, the don't bitch about how games are getting less and less innovative.
It's not a new idea, trying to correlate climate and society..
Although, he likely wasn't the first to ever have the idea, the first well-known example of it is Montesquieu's climate theory.
Of course.. it's still a bogus idea. Naturally climate is a factor in the development of society, but history hardly suggests it's the most important one.
Civilization first developed in warm places. And about 1000 years ago, the Caliphate of north africa was far more advanced and 'civilized' than Europe.. The industrial advantage of northern countries is a relatively new phenomenon, historically.
I know an Indian guy who said that the greatest contribution the English made to the industrialization of India was the introduction of trousers, being a far more suitable form of clothing to work in than traditional indian clothing...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know what you're talking about.
If a developer doesn't want to enforce OSS license terms himself, he can always assign the copyright to somone who will. Such as the FSF (for GPL project) or the Apache foundation (for Apache-licensed projects) and so on.
The fact that the FSF hasn't actually been to court over a GPL violation isn't because they don't do anything, but rather because they're so successful at it that violators have chosen to settle instead.
Besides, what business is it of yours to ask lawyers to defend the copyright of a third party?
What if the developer/copyright owner himself doesn't care about the violation? It's nobodies business but his.
How can you claim damages on something that is free to the public to use and distribute? What is copyright violation worth when the software has no value in dollars?
This is also ridiculous. The software has value in dollars. If it didn't, there would be no point in ripping it off in the first place.
Try this: "What is the cost of commercially developing something with equal functionality?"
Apparently they've been up to rewriting copyright notices. That is illegal. There is not a single OSS license which allows you to do that.
(Except for public domain, which doesn't really count as a license.)
Hmm.. How about:
Because having thousands of people noticing 'Look! There's copyright infringement going on over at _this_ site!" is just about the fastest way to get a site shut-down nowadays.
Scams and frauds are crimes best dealt with as publicly as possible. Do you seriously believe anyone is going to buy their 'product' because of this story?
How many credit cards do you reckon they have with a $2.5 million credit limit?
Well, I can think of at least one.
If you want to see a real open source mess, check out Zaurus - just as an example there is a large number of libSDL ports, each different, each having different problems, each compatible with different games, none fully usable.
How is this a problem with open source? It's a management problem, and those exist in closed-source too.
Unlike in the closed-source world, you have a chance to do something about it. Merge these ports into something fully usable then. You are free to do it. Don't like how the SDL people are running things? Start your own fork.
But bitching on slashdot is just stupid.
Correct. An alternating current will create an alternating expansion/contraction of the crystal. (so it's not really a vibration, since it's not -moving- back and forth, but actually changing its volume!)
And of course the opposite works: A vibration will compress the material repeatedly, creating an AC current, which is how you use it in accelerometers.
Another cool use is to probe stuff (like beams in walls or cracks in material), you can use the same crystal as both the emitter and reciver, by sending a pulse of current (creating a pulse vibration) and then use the same crystal to get an electric signal recording the echoes when they come back.
Open Source Definition vs. SCSL
Free Redistribution
Nope.
Source Code
Doesn't allow free redistribution, so redistribution in source code fails, too.
Derived Works
Nope.
Integrity of The Author's Source Code
Doesn't allow free distribution of separate modifications either.
No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
I guess it passes that one, yay!
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
Nope. Explicitely limits fields of endeavor to research, commercial use, or internal use.
Distribution of License
Nope. The TCK license comes with what's effectively a NDA.
License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
I guess it passes that one, yay!
License Must Not Restrict Other Software
Nope. Once you've agreed to SCSL, you can't distribute non-compliant software. So you couldn't redistribute kaffe, gcj, or even more up-to-date versions of Xerces if they break tests in the TCK.
License Must Be Technology-Neutral
Nope. It's a click-wrap license. It even has a pointless [ACCEPT] [REJECT] at the bottom
Total: 2 out of 10.
In summary, it's not open source. It's not even close.
Most viable project that Adobe can open source is Postscript above all else.
How is postscript not open? Adobe provides full specifications available to anyone to implement it. Completely royalty free and without patent encumbrance.
Postscript is not a end product thus no real self threat
Wrong. Postscript is a product. Who makes the embedded PS systems for the millions of PS printers out there, eh?
it can however very much gain a large programmer pool and a good image.
It already has these things. Have you been living under a rock since 1985 when Postscript language specifications and reference manual (AKA 'the blue-book' and 'the red-book')
Their image currently is one of being very hostile towards the community.
In your mind perhaps.
It's water, but it's too expensive and hot for you. It's de ionized and monitored for purity so that nothing plates out and it does not eat your cladding, that's the costly part. But, under pressure, it's hot enough to light paper on fire. That's a little too hot for your little cpu.
That's just the core.. then you've usually got a secondary loop (taken from a river or such) to drive the turbines.
And then that water is either let out into a river or lake, or sent to a nice Simpsons-Springfieldish natural draught cooling tower.
Now there we're talking one heck of a big radiator!
Natural draught towers work by pumping the hot water up and spraying it out in the tower, which will heat the air.. the warm moist air goes out the top (and usually condenses a bit in the colder air above, causing the big white plume) and fresh cold air gets sucked in the bottom. Nothing nasty about them at all, except that they're really, really big.
Its always struck me as funny at how these cooling towers, in the public mind, are kind of 'gigantic smokestacks', when they're not smokestacks at all.
Or perhaps it was because it was a quote taken out of context: ..was made possible by acid trips." He laughs. "Or not only by acid trips but without the slightest doubt empowered by them.
"And Stallman was like, Wait a minute there, that's not quite the way it went," Gil recalls. "It freaked him a little to think I was associating the free software movement with the movement to legalize drugs."
But in fact, that wasn't quite the link Gil was making. He was suggesting that the free software movement and the '60s counterculture had a shared goal of transforming culture from the inside out. Gil talks a little crazy, sure, but he's no fool.
Not my picture, but my (former!) bank had ATMs which did stuff like this.
I've seen it personally. None of the keys on the ATM were mapped to 'return' so you were stuck with the message there.
(For those who don't read Swedish, it's an 'out of virtual memory' error, and that's Win95/98!!)
Is it possible that the surface of Titan is basically a hydrocarbon mix that is basically like slush or jelly? With the cold temperature and higher atmospheric pressure wouldn't that turn all the ethane and methane into something not unlike diesel fuel when its really cold?
I'm a chemist, and you're off-base.
The intermolecular forces between methane and ethane molecules are very small. Even at high pressure/low temperature they will have low density and viscosity.
Look it up (then choose 'fluid properties' and play around with the settings.)
For methane, in the range of 0-300 MPa of pressure (0-300 atmospheres) and 100 Kelvin (-280 F) for instance, the viscosity ranges about 150-200 uPa*s. Contrast that to water at room temperature and pressure, it's about 1000 uPa*s.
So.. no way it's jelly. It's not slushy. It's not even watery. It's light and whispy.
Played around with liquid nitrogen? It has a very low viscosity. Think something in that direction.
Nope. All software has bugs.
A relative of mine worked with a guy who wrote a program to do a single thing: Terminate itself.
(They were doing OS programming and this was actually a useful thing to have in that context.)
That's it. The simplest possible program you could write. It was a single assembly instruction. So the guy started bragging about how he'd written the only bug-free program, ever.
Well.. the gods did not look kindly upon that hubris. It turned out he'd forgotten something. He'd forgotten to zero-out the register containing the programs exit code. So the exit code would be just whatever random value happened to be in the register. And a non-zero error code indicates a termination on error. There was a bug in the simplest program ever written.
So..no, there is no flawless software which does anything non-trivial. It's hard enough to get the trivial stuff right.
The poll numbers are useless to imply moral righteousness to Bush or Kerry. Despite the USA's many flaws, you do know that the majority of the world's population lives in countries with little to no respect for human rights, with dictatorial governments that don't care about the people.
And from this you imply that the people of those countries don't respect human rights.
That's just plain racist.
There's a certain difference between this and the issue at hand here though.
When did France supposedly sue Google? I haven't heard of that.
But as for the Yahoo cae: France and Germany were trying to enforce their own laws on their own territory. They weren't trying to stop Yahoo US from selling Nazi stuff, they were trying to stop them from selling them to people in France and Germany, where such a sale would be illegal.
It seems a relatively reasonable given that there isn't any international law on this subject.
The case at hand here is a copyright issue. The international rules here are clearer. It's not much a matter of interpretation because this stuff is adressed in the Berne Convention, which the USA has signed.
As far as I understand Berne, the person downloading from the USA is the one committing the infringement, and liable under US copyright law. But the person in Australia serving the text which isn't copyrighted there is not commiting any crime.
I think you're comparing an apple to an orange here.
>I could've sworn that equation had a Devil's fork in it somewhere.
Psi = fork-shaped
>Incidentally, I'll buy you a glass of whatever alcohol beverage you'd like, assuming you can solve it for all of the molecules in that beverage.
How about this: I'll solve it for about 100 atoms (which is about as many as can be done with todays computing power) and then use group theory to extrapolate that result to the rest?
Of course, a co-worker of mine actually did that last year already, using density-functional methods. (which is a reformulation of the Schrödinger equation)
See:
Molecular Structure of Alcohol-Water Mixtures
Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 157401 (2003)
J.-H. Guo, Y. Luo, A. Augustsson, S. Kashtanov, J.-E. Rubensson, D. K. Shuh, H. Ågren and J. Nordgren
Come on, folks? The Schrödinger equation!
H*Psi = E*Psi
(note: H is an operator folks, not a number)
Perhaps not as famous as E=mc^2.. or as exact as the Dirac equation (relativistic version of the S.E.),
but.. in terms of practical benefit to mankind, I think this one has done more than any other equation during the last century.
Atoms. Molecules. Semiconductors. Lasers.
The number of things explained and modelled by the Schrödinger equation are just uncountable. You can explain almost* all of chemistry with that thing.
Relativity is nice, but it hasn't had the technical uses quantum physics has.
(*Relativistic effects are important in heavy elements. For instance the yellow color of gold is a relativistic effect.)
Speaking of semiconductors.. that's another interesting property that should be mentioned.
This graphite monolayer should conduct electricity fairly well.
Graphite itself conducts electricity, but with a pretty big resistance. But most of the restistance in graphite is because the electrons have a difficult time moving between the layers, not because of moving within the layers.
So, since this material only has a single layer, the conductivity should be pretty good.
now that I have the attention of somone who knows chemical and intermelecular bonds, with this new configuration (4 interconnects) does this create yet another material, due of it's own properties and description? also, what would the physical properties of this material be?
But it's not a new configuration, it's the same as graphite (3 bonds per carbon in a six-ring stucture)
The new thing here is that you only have a single layer. Even though the layer itself is relatively strong, it doesn't mean the thing is strong as a macroscopic material. It's strong on the axis of the plane of atoms, but very weak in the other direction.
One idea would be to build up the layers and make a super-strong material, but you can't do that here, because the bonds which would hold the layers together are weak. You just end up with ordinary graphite, which is soft. Van der Waals bonds are the weakest kind there is.
I think the main uses here aren't trying to make some new macroscopic material out of this stuff alone.
I think the idea here is that you can use this monolayer of graphite together with other stuff to create new materials. For instance as a coating or as a layer in a semiconductor. Like a slice of cheese in a sandwich.
It's infrastructure. You could say the same thing about highways too.
It's very, very difficult to calculate the benefits of this, and really of any infrastructure investment.
(as far as I understand, there are no good models for this. Building roads is still mostly a political decision.)
But there are lots of things which conciveably balance the costs, most notably increased business productivity, competition and growth, and increased property value (which generates returns though property tax).
So, yeah, it's political.. but it doesn't automatically mean it's not economically justified. But whether it is or not is pure speculation. There's no way to tell in the short run.
and if this new... uh... material is just graphite, can you send me some graphite bundles from the jewlery shop? it has as much a right being called planiar diamond as graphite.
Only if because you don't know what you're talking about.
Let me hit you with some undergraduate-level chemistry:
Graphite is the planar crystal conformation of carbon where each carbon atom binds to three others, forming plane unit rings of 6 carbon atoms. See this image, for example. The bonds between the layers are not chemical bonds. They are van der Waals bonds, which are intermolecular bonds, and are far weaker than a real chemical bond.
Diamond, on the other hand, is a conformation of carbon where the atoms bind with four others in a tetrahedral fashion. See this picture. All bonds here are equally strong, and far much stronger than the interplane bonds in graphite. That's why diamond is hard.
Fullerenes on the other hand, are bonded like graphite, with three bonds on each carbon. However, in the case of these molecules, there are both five and six-member rings, causing a curved structure. See this picture.
These are the three distinct types of stuctures pure carbon can have. This monolayer compound belongs to the first. It is a monolayer of graphite, or a single 'graphite molecule' if you want.
Actually it's all just hype.
This material was known before.. long before fullerenes even. It's just graphite.
The structure of graphite and the fact that the interplanar bonds are weak has been known for quite a long time.
The news here is that someone actually found a practical way to produce a single graphite layer.
But it's not really a new compound.
Seriously, does this mean the edge of the fabric is really sharp? Can it cut through stuff?
Nope. It's not rigid.
But.. if you could add a layer on top of that layer, juxtaposed by the minimal amount (half of a ring, see this picture of graphite crystal structure), and then add another layer, and another..
Then you could form a 'perfectly sharp' knife.
I'm not sure how durable it'd be though, because the inter-layer bonds in graphite are rather weak.
I wouldn't cry too much - piracy is going to hurt the publishers of weak games worst, 'cos everyone can find out that it sucks before it goes on sale
Which leads to the further polarization of the games industry, with the top 10% of games making up 90% of sales (or some disproportion like that).
Which means fewer games will return a profit. Which means the risk is greater. Which means that the investors, e.g. the game producers, will be less and less willing to take risks on games which differ from the existing top 10%.
So if you think that's an OK rationale, the don't bitch about how games are getting less and less innovative.
It's not a new idea, trying to correlate climate and society..
Although, he likely wasn't the first to ever have the idea, the first well-known example of it is Montesquieu's climate theory.
Of course.. it's still a bogus idea. Naturally climate is a factor in the development of society, but history hardly suggests it's the most important one.
Civilization first developed in warm places. And about 1000 years ago, the Caliphate of north africa was far more advanced and 'civilized' than Europe.. The industrial advantage of northern countries is a relatively new phenomenon, historically.
I know an Indian guy who said that the greatest contribution the English made to the industrialization of India was the introduction of trousers, being a far more suitable form of clothing to work in than traditional indian clothing...