I don't think Mac resource forks were really considered the same thing. The data in them was usually only read by the same program reading the "main" data, and the id's of each piece of data was usually only figured out by careful analysis of the main data (ie a program ran and said "i want resourc x98734 from my executable file"). Also as you point out the creator/app id's seemed to be seperate from the resource fork, what most people are thinking about here is a way to store data like creator/app and thus different from the intentions of resource forks.
In my opinion unless there is a trivial method to reduce ALL the data of a file to a single stream of bytes that can be read/written with Unix-style calls, this is doomed to be a failure and a return to 1960's "pip" programs. MicroSoft would love this (it would quickly make all file transfers proprietery) but it would be a disaster for all software development.
Unfortunately I see no sign that anybody is going to address this. Even older Unix's have "attributes" like name/time/date/owner/permission and there is no way to communicate these without the program knowing about each of them and making up it's own encoding.
Although we certainly need seperate home directories for each user, and it is best if system stuff is kept out of them, I would agree that it would be nice to allow "home" to be a completley free-form and clean slate. If you want a "desktop" it would be nice if that *was* "home" so that everything is below the desktop.
Unfortunatley Unix (not unix itself but the many applications) have put so much crap into the home directory that it is not user-friendly to present that as a desktop. So instead all the systems make a subdirectory called Desktop. From there it is a quick slide to crap like "My Documents" and "My Pictures".
I also think it is interesting that people who complain about the Unix (and Windows) putting types of files into directories (ie an installed app has to spread it's libraries, setup files, and executable into different directories) seem to not complain about this requirement that users segregate their own file types in this way.
If you read my mail you would see that I am quite familiar with child window ordering. X has this too.
This only works if there is an unchangable ordering of windows. As I said (and you seem to ignore) this means THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE TOOL WINDOW. If there is more than one, trying to make them not click up and hide each other requires a bogus ordering (like say "colors are more important than brushes and thus will always be on top"). This is totally user-unfriendly and has forced everybody to reduce everything to at most one overlapping window.
Furthermore, an application can raise itself if it wants to when it is clicked. This is a way perferrable because at least the option is there for it not to raise.
The current behavior of Windows is for back compatability only and has absolutely nothing to do with GUI preferences. An app can raise itself! Get it?
Also take a look at the X11 release notes from 1984!!! They specifically removed this "feature" from X10 because it made overlapping windows impossible. IE THEY THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA AND THEY GOT RID OF IT. Unfortunately Windows (and Mac and NeXT) did not study the few things X11 learned and have foisted this bad behavior on us.
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with GUI studies and you really ought to think a bit before you spout garbage like that. Think again: THE APPLICATION CAN RAISE ITSELF! Got it? I hope so.
No, it can happen. Recordable CD will become a data storage medium. With new DRM Windows it will be impossible to get data from a CD to a sound card, thus this is not a playable device and thus not outlawed. All the leftover machines that can play recordable CD's will gradually break and people will throw them out because they cannot play any new music.
Of course piracy helps the music industry, we all know that, and they know that. The attacks on piracy are just a front to hide their real intentions. What they want is pay-per-play and they want to outlaw the ability for people to distribute entertainment without a contract with them, and they are using piracy as an excuse to force this vision through.
I doubt it. I think this would be as successful trying to sue a software company for making a copy protected disk, or making the program so that Windows is required to run it.
Though maybe the difference is: the software company can make a legitimate claim that the difficulty of making the program work without Windows would be a huge cost or hinderence to them, while the difficulty of making the CD work on old CD players cannot possibly be claimed to be a cost (in fact companies pay to license the copy control technology).
Unfortunatley what the RIAA an MPAA want in the end is for recording devices to be illegal. This will be done by making a "new format" of playback device and using laws and copyrights and patents to make the manufacture and sale of devices that can record this new format illegal (since those are obviously tools of piracy). The same laws will make sale and manufacturing of devices that play back old recordable formats illegal. Eventually too few people will have working versions of the old formats to make playback of copied music possible.
It will also have the side effect that no musician can record music without having a contract with one of the record companies!
Actually by making the creation of an MP3 slightly painful, I think they will actually decrease sales. Before, if you wanted an MP3, you could buy the CD and then rip it, or you could search on the net for it and download it. Guess what option they have eliminated? They have eliminated the option where they make money! Idiots.
It would be useful for all the word processor devlopers to somehow get together and make a "read & write Office" library. Possibly make it LGPL. It seems to me that this is would allow them to cooperate and share information on the biggest problem for a word processor nowadays, yet allow them to go and do the fun an innovative parts (ie the actual application) on their own.
Multiple windows would work if it were not for stupid window managers and Windows that insist on two bugs:
One is raising windows on clicks. This makes it impossible to have a number of control panels that the user can easily rearrange in the order they want. The only solution is to enforce an ordering by "parent/child" (the only ordering interface provided by Windows or X window managers) which is so annoying that more than one control panel is nearly impossible.
Fortunately some X window managers have avoided the above problem or can be configured to turn it off (but not KDE, alas...). However the second problem (also on Windows) is that when you raise a "child" window the window managers insist on raising all "parent" windows to immediately below them.
The end result is that anybody trying to make a multi-window interface is forced to make every window a main window (thus cluttering the task bar, as you noticed) and trying to tell people that they need to reconfigure their window manager to get best performance.
Let me plead again with the KDE/Gnome (and MicroSoft) designers: NEVER NEVER NEVER raise a window unless the user clicks ON THE TITLE BAR of THAT WINDOW (or one of it's parents). DO NOT RAISE WINDOWS WHEN USERS CLICK BUTTONS, DO NOT RAISE WINDOWS THAT ARE PARENTS OF THE CLICKED WINDOW. And maybe get rid of NeXTstep-like "layers", I can raise the taskbar myself.
PLEASE! You are completely killing any innovations in user interface with this stupid behavior.
I think the argument is about double-clicking icons. This was definately invented by Apple for the Mac/Lisa.
Double-click to select words, and triple-click to select larger items (it has varied between lines, sentences, and paragraphs) is certainly older and may be an X invention, although it may be from Lisp or Intergraph or Andrew or even from text terminals with mice.
Certainly *good* ideas from Windows/Apple should be copied. I think the complaint is when they copy bad or arbitrary decisions by those companies in an attempt to make things as comfortable as possible, and defeat any possibility of Linux actually being better.
Best example is the complete breakage of point-to-type because the window managers default to having this turned off, and don't ever test it. Point to type is obviously superior (try to find anybody who uses it for a week that wants to switch back, and you can try this on Windows as well, it is a registry switch). Yet the things that make point-to-type frustrating on Windows are copied in KDE and Gnome: raising windows on click, the inability to drag a window without raising it, the raising of "parent" windows when you raise a dialog box, and a lot of other little frustrations that were solved in the simpler window managers of ten years ago.
It is great to see them copying good ideas, but it is really sad that the ease of use of Linux is being thrown away in an attempt to make an exact clone.
As several other people have pointed out, the purpose of this is to restrict it to hardware solutions. At least the people writing this are smart enough to know that any software solution will be cracked.
DeCSS exists because of cheapo software players that were cracked. A reason they want legislation rather than industry consenses is a worry that industry will come out with another cheap software solution that will be cracked.
In fact there may be people there who realize that if all possible accessible data is fully published (ie open source is required for final implementation right down to the machine instructions that control the chip) then they have actually done the best job possible to make sure it won't be cracked. Everybody, not just "pirates", will have access to every possible piece of information, and some good samaritan will probably point out any deficiencies in their implementation. This will also mean that it won't harm Linux much, it will actually make it much easier for Linux to play movies. However I doubt they are that smart, and the temptation to allow "old hardware" to work is going to result in an easily-cracked software protection and lawsuits for open source people.
I also suspect that sticking "respect fair use" and "use open source" are put in there just so anybody who says "this hurts fair use" or "this hurts open source" can be dismissed right away by saying "but the bill explicitly says it is not doing what you say". The actual words, especially the "fair use" one, are meaningless, though maybe they can get the bill thrown out for being self-contradictory.
This won't work, nothing like this will work. It is painfully obvious that their goal is to get legislation passed so that all recording devices are illegal. That *will* work and will make casual pirating impossible (pirates making money will be able to afford to steal or buy a "professional" recording machine).
Will this give them more profits? No, of course not. Piracy reduces their income by trivial amounts, we all laugh about their vastly inflated estimates of trillions lost (implying everybody in the USA would spend $1000 or more on entertainment if they just were not pirating it!). But everybody here should realize that they are well aware that stopping piracy will have little effect on their income, certainly not enough to warrent this expensive lobbying effort and bad publicity.
Since stopping piracy is hardly worth the effort, what are they trying to do? What if recording devices of sufficient quality for entertainment were illegal? Guess what: nobody can produce content except them. This is what they want, everything else is just a scam to try to get this final solution.
Laugh if you want, but recording devices are going to be illegal in 5 to 10 years. Selling devices capable of playback of older technology that can record will also be illegal. It is going to happen.
You are just setting yourself up to look like an idiot.
You said right in your message: "NaN published a closed source but free beer piece of software called Blender"
Okay, try to remember what RMS is in favor of.
Hmm, remember "free as in speech, as opposed to free as in beer"? How about a more obvious one: "closed source" is what RMS is against.
NaN did not fail because it followed RMS. It did exactly the opposite of what RMS wants! (not that that is a proof that disobeying RMS leads to failure, either).
Although you said several times "there were no standards" you also said several times "Alt was used for something". I have programmed PCs for 20 years and I worked with Lotus and early MSWord and many other programs. Ctrl was rarely used for anything other than Emacs emulation, the average user knew that if they held down Ctrl they would get a card suit or something dangerous would happen, and stayed away from it.
You also said Microsoft's standard was that "Alt+key" does something in a menu. That is exactly wrong, the problem is that for some reason they said "Ctrl+key" selects menu items, rather than "Alt+Key". And I can guarantee you that ONE HUNDRED PRECENT of the Mac-copying programs before that used "Alt" as replacement for the "Apple" key that exectued menu shortcuts. MicroSoft (and perhaps IBM) changed this well established standard for unknown reasons (though I don't think they were being evil, they were confused).
I agree that Ctrl+letter should be a shortcut for cutting and pasting text. However the MicroSoft design means that these letters must also be used for cutting and pasting anything and this has seriously hurt GUI design because you cannot have a text field on the same window as any other selectable objects. For instance "illustrator" type programs usually make it quite difficult to modify the text, usually by having modes, which are very hard on users, because Ctrl+X may need to cut the letters or cut the text object depending on the mode.
I challenge you to locate a popular Windows program where the main window has a text field and also has an area where the user can select objects. This very useful design (which would allow somebody to type in text commands or rename objects without any extra clicking) cannot be done due to MicroSoft's use of ctrl+letter for the menu shortcuts. (of course the Mac design where Alt+x did everything has the same problems, but at least they had another shift key (ctrl) free so they may have fixed it, try OS/X and you will see that Emacs control keys have reappeared!)
Please take a look at the history. Yes there were many programs where neither ctrl+x or alt+x did menu shortcuts. But there were 3 or 4 years of alt+letter doing menu shortcuts before ctrl+letter was used for this.
I also get disgusted with all the people complaining "Linux is inconsistent, do I use Alt+X or Ctrl+X to cut text" when this is entirely MicroSoft's fault for changing standards right in the middle.
What? So all the increase in CO2 emission is due to increased volcanoes? And in fact man's output has decreased at the same time?
You obviously are completly out of touch. You can argue that the increase is not significant, or is harmless, but trying to say any easily refuted fact like "CO2 emmisions are less than last century" is making you look like an idiot.
You also seem to be confusing soot with CO2, and seem to think the suburbs of London are the entire world. I have no idea where you got that 1% figure either, that is almost as stupid and is off by several orders of magnitude, but at least the sign is correct.
The "big freeze scare" was "nuclear winter", ie the results of huge numbers of fires caused by nuclear bombs. Most global warming predictions do not take into account a nuclear war.
Unfortunately, the greatest level of greenhouse gasses and pollution were released during the Industrial Revolution (that's the captial "I" and "R"), which was during the 18th and 19th century.
Much as I would like to see informed argument on two sides here, you are not helping your side by saying obviously stupid and incorrect things like this. CO2 emmissions have increased every year for centuries.
Possibly this is per-capita? That I might buy. But even if true you do yourself no help by mistyping your statements so that you can be so easily refuted. Try being a little more careful next time.
Anybody who read the article would have seen the fact that the ice is already floating and thus it melting would do absolutely nothing to the sea level.
Lets all check our math however. The mass is about 50 times larger than that other lake you talked about because you divided by 1000 rather than multiplied by 1000.
Divide by the.75 times the surface area of the earth will get you (3250*1e6*200)/(.75*4*pi*pow(6376000,2)) =.00169 or about.17 centimeters. This would probably be measurable but I have a hard time believing it would have any climatic effect.
You have to realize the floating ice shelf is very thin compared to the actual ice pack on the continent, which we do have to worry about if it melts, because it really will increase the ocean's depth.
You are right that the Windows API interpreted &x in widget labels as meaning that Alt+x was the shortcut to activate that widget. However most logical people would take that to mean that MicroSoft wanted Alt+letter to mean "shortcuts" and that it should cause menu items to *execute*, to match the buttons. Instead the &x in menu items "navigated" to that menu item, completely different from what it did in buttons!
I now believe they (and the CDE people who are just as guilty) screwed up with over-engineering. Every program up to then used Alt+letters as "shortcuts" whether that caused a menu item to be picked, a button to be pushed, or something to happen that you could not do with a GUI. This also matched the normal user's expectations. This screw up has greatly hurt the ability to have fast editing (with Emacs or similar control functions in text fields) and screwed up GUI design by requiring that the "focus" be able to move to non-text objects so that Ctrl+X can cut a non-text object (more practically it has required that all text entry fields be on pop-up windows so that average users are not confused by the need to move the focus).
I am pretty certain that ctrl+P dates back to command.com. That program was incapable of detecting the PrtSc or any other function key if written in "portable MSDOS" that did not use the IBM PC Bios, thus all functions had to be on control keys.
It would be *far* too easy for them to abuse this by making the package depend on items installed by the proprietary installer.
No that would violate the GPL.
I agree with the previous response, the GPL allows exactly what the anonymous poster is asking for. He seems to think the GPL requires the user compile the code, that is absolutely false and I don't understand why anybody would think that.
He also seems to think the GPL means the source code must be free to anybody, in fact the GPL says the source code must be available to the person who buys the software. The source code could in fact be on the disk, or the downloading could require something proprietary from the disk, so you have to buy the disk to get the source code (the GPL does say that you can't prevent one person from buying the disk from doing anything with the source code such as give it away for free).
Also nothing prevents a company from packing the disk with proprietary add-ons as long as they can make a convincing demonstration that these add-ons are not required by the core GPL program for it to do useful things.
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In my opinion unless there is a trivial method to reduce ALL the data of a file to a single stream of bytes that can be read/written with Unix-style calls, this is doomed to be a failure and a return to 1960's "pip" programs. MicroSoft would love this (it would quickly make all file transfers proprietery) but it would be a disaster for all software development.
Unfortunately I see no sign that anybody is going to address this. Even older Unix's have "attributes" like name/time/date/owner/permission and there is no way to communicate these without the program knowing about each of them and making up it's own encoding.
Jpeg is not covered by any patents, or at least not any enforced ones.
Please point out the post where somebody said these things should be illegal.
Unfortunatley Unix (not unix itself but the many applications) have put so much crap into the home directory that it is not user-friendly to present that as a desktop. So instead all the systems make a subdirectory called Desktop. From there it is a quick slide to crap like "My Documents" and "My Pictures".
I also think it is interesting that people who complain about the Unix (and Windows) putting types of files into directories (ie an installed app has to spread it's libraries, setup files, and executable into different directories) seem to not complain about this requirement that users segregate their own file types in this way.
This only works if there is an unchangable ordering of windows. As I said (and you seem to ignore) this means THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE TOOL WINDOW. If there is more than one, trying to make them not click up and hide each other requires a bogus ordering (like say "colors are more important than brushes and thus will always be on top"). This is totally user-unfriendly and has forced everybody to reduce everything to at most one overlapping window.
Furthermore, an application can raise itself if it wants to when it is clicked. This is a way perferrable because at least the option is there for it not to raise.
The current behavior of Windows is for back compatability only and has absolutely nothing to do with GUI preferences. An app can raise itself! Get it?
Also take a look at the X11 release notes from 1984!!! They specifically removed this "feature" from X10 because it made overlapping windows impossible. IE THEY THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA AND THEY GOT RID OF IT. Unfortunately Windows (and Mac and NeXT) did not study the few things X11 learned and have foisted this bad behavior on us.
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with GUI studies and you really ought to think a bit before you spout garbage like that. Think again: THE APPLICATION CAN RAISE ITSELF! Got it? I hope so.
Of course piracy helps the music industry, we all know that, and they know that. The attacks on piracy are just a front to hide their real intentions. What they want is pay-per-play and they want to outlaw the ability for people to distribute entertainment without a contract with them, and they are using piracy as an excuse to force this vision through.
Though maybe the difference is: the software company can make a legitimate claim that the difficulty of making the program work without Windows would be a huge cost or hinderence to them, while the difficulty of making the CD work on old CD players cannot possibly be claimed to be a cost (in fact companies pay to license the copy control technology).
It will also have the side effect that no musician can record music without having a contract with one of the record companies!
Actually by making the creation of an MP3 slightly painful, I think they will actually decrease sales. Before, if you wanted an MP3, you could buy the CD and then rip it, or you could search on the net for it and download it. Guess what option they have eliminated? They have eliminated the option where they make money! Idiots.
It would be useful for all the word processor devlopers to somehow get together and make a "read & write Office" library. Possibly make it LGPL. It seems to me that this is would allow them to cooperate and share information on the biggest problem for a word processor nowadays, yet allow them to go and do the fun an innovative parts (ie the actual application) on their own.
One is raising windows on clicks. This makes it impossible to have a number of control panels that the user can easily rearrange in the order they want. The only solution is to enforce an ordering by "parent/child" (the only ordering interface provided by Windows or X window managers) which is so annoying that more than one control panel is nearly impossible.
Fortunately some X window managers have avoided the above problem or can be configured to turn it off (but not KDE, alas...). However the second problem (also on Windows) is that when you raise a "child" window the window managers insist on raising all "parent" windows to immediately below them.
The end result is that anybody trying to make a multi-window interface is forced to make every window a main window (thus cluttering the task bar, as you noticed) and trying to tell people that they need to reconfigure their window manager to get best performance.
Let me plead again with the KDE/Gnome (and MicroSoft) designers: NEVER NEVER NEVER raise a window unless the user clicks ON THE TITLE BAR of THAT WINDOW (or one of it's parents). DO NOT RAISE WINDOWS WHEN USERS CLICK BUTTONS, DO NOT RAISE WINDOWS THAT ARE PARENTS OF THE CLICKED WINDOW. And maybe get rid of NeXTstep-like "layers", I can raise the taskbar myself.
PLEASE! You are completely killing any innovations in user interface with this stupid behavior.
Explain how Motif can have copied windows when it has a button and scrollbar appearance that is totally different from every version of Windows.
Double-click to select words, and triple-click to select larger items (it has varied between lines, sentences, and paragraphs) is certainly older and may be an X invention, although it may be from Lisp or Intergraph or Andrew or even from text terminals with mice.
The Lisa actually required a double-click of the close box to close a window. I forget what a single click did, possibly it did nothing.
Best example is the complete breakage of point-to-type because the window managers default to having this turned off, and don't ever test it. Point to type is obviously superior (try to find anybody who uses it for a week that wants to switch back, and you can try this on Windows as well, it is a registry switch). Yet the things that make point-to-type frustrating on Windows are copied in KDE and Gnome: raising windows on click, the inability to drag a window without raising it, the raising of "parent" windows when you raise a dialog box, and a lot of other little frustrations that were solved in the simpler window managers of ten years ago.
It is great to see them copying good ideas, but it is really sad that the ease of use of Linux is being thrown away in an attempt to make an exact clone.
DeCSS exists because of cheapo software players that were cracked. A reason they want legislation rather than industry consenses is a worry that industry will come out with another cheap software solution that will be cracked.
In fact there may be people there who realize that if all possible accessible data is fully published (ie open source is required for final implementation right down to the machine instructions that control the chip) then they have actually done the best job possible to make sure it won't be cracked. Everybody, not just "pirates", will have access to every possible piece of information, and some good samaritan will probably point out any deficiencies in their implementation. This will also mean that it won't harm Linux much, it will actually make it much easier for Linux to play movies. However I doubt they are that smart, and the temptation to allow "old hardware" to work is going to result in an easily-cracked software protection and lawsuits for open source people.
I also suspect that sticking "respect fair use" and "use open source" are put in there just so anybody who says "this hurts fair use" or "this hurts open source" can be dismissed right away by saying "but the bill explicitly says it is not doing what you say". The actual words, especially the "fair use" one, are meaningless, though maybe they can get the bill thrown out for being self-contradictory.
Will this give them more profits? No, of course not. Piracy reduces their income by trivial amounts, we all laugh about their vastly inflated estimates of trillions lost (implying everybody in the USA would spend $1000 or more on entertainment if they just were not pirating it!). But everybody here should realize that they are well aware that stopping piracy will have little effect on their income, certainly not enough to warrent this expensive lobbying effort and bad publicity.
Since stopping piracy is hardly worth the effort, what are they trying to do? What if recording devices of sufficient quality for entertainment were illegal? Guess what: nobody can produce content except them. This is what they want, everything else is just a scam to try to get this final solution.
Laugh if you want, but recording devices are going to be illegal in 5 to 10 years. Selling devices capable of playback of older technology that can record will also be illegal. It is going to happen.
You said right in your message: "NaN published a closed source but free beer piece of software called Blender"
Okay, try to remember what RMS is in favor of.
Hmm, remember "free as in speech, as opposed to free as in beer"? How about a more obvious one: "closed source" is what RMS is against.
NaN did not fail because it followed RMS. It did exactly the opposite of what RMS wants! (not that that is a proof that disobeying RMS leads to failure, either).
You also said Microsoft's standard was that "Alt+key" does something in a menu. That is exactly wrong, the problem is that for some reason they said "Ctrl+key" selects menu items, rather than "Alt+Key". And I can guarantee you that ONE HUNDRED PRECENT of the Mac-copying programs before that used "Alt" as replacement for the "Apple" key that exectued menu shortcuts. MicroSoft (and perhaps IBM) changed this well established standard for unknown reasons (though I don't think they were being evil, they were confused).
I agree that Ctrl+letter should be a shortcut for cutting and pasting text. However the MicroSoft design means that these letters must also be used for cutting and pasting anything and this has seriously hurt GUI design because you cannot have a text field on the same window as any other selectable objects. For instance "illustrator" type programs usually make it quite difficult to modify the text, usually by having modes, which are very hard on users, because Ctrl+X may need to cut the letters or cut the text object depending on the mode.
I challenge you to locate a popular Windows program where the main window has a text field and also has an area where the user can select objects. This very useful design (which would allow somebody to type in text commands or rename objects without any extra clicking) cannot be done due to MicroSoft's use of ctrl+letter for the menu shortcuts. (of course the Mac design where Alt+x did everything has the same problems, but at least they had another shift key (ctrl) free so they may have fixed it, try OS/X and you will see that Emacs control keys have reappeared!)
Please take a look at the history. Yes there were many programs where neither ctrl+x or alt+x did menu shortcuts. But there were 3 or 4 years of alt+letter doing menu shortcuts before ctrl+letter was used for this.
I also get disgusted with all the people complaining "Linux is inconsistent, do I use Alt+X or Ctrl+X to cut text" when this is entirely MicroSoft's fault for changing standards right in the middle.
You obviously are completly out of touch. You can argue that the increase is not significant, or is harmless, but trying to say any easily refuted fact like "CO2 emmisions are less than last century" is making you look like an idiot.
You also seem to be confusing soot with CO2, and seem to think the suburbs of London are the entire world. I have no idea where you got that 1% figure either, that is almost as stupid and is off by several orders of magnitude, but at least the sign is correct.
The "big freeze scare" was "nuclear winter", ie the results of huge numbers of fires caused by nuclear bombs. Most global warming predictions do not take into account a nuclear war.
Much as I would like to see informed argument on two sides here, you are not helping your side by saying obviously stupid and incorrect things like this. CO2 emmissions have increased every year for centuries.
Possibly this is per-capita? That I might buy. But even if true you do yourself no help by mistyping your statements so that you can be so easily refuted. Try being a little more careful next time.
Lets all check our math however. The mass is about 50 times larger than that other lake you talked about because you divided by 1000 rather than multiplied by 1000.
Divide by the .75 times the surface area of the earth will get you (3250*1e6*200)/(.75*4*pi*pow(6376000,2)) = .00169 or about .17 centimeters. This would probably be measurable but I have a hard time believing it would have any climatic effect.
You have to realize the floating ice shelf is very thin compared to the actual ice pack on the continent, which we do have to worry about if it melts, because it really will increase the ocean's depth.
I now believe they (and the CDE people who are just as guilty) screwed up with over-engineering. Every program up to then used Alt+letters as "shortcuts" whether that caused a menu item to be picked, a button to be pushed, or something to happen that you could not do with a GUI. This also matched the normal user's expectations. This screw up has greatly hurt the ability to have fast editing (with Emacs or similar control functions in text fields) and screwed up GUI design by requiring that the "focus" be able to move to non-text objects so that Ctrl+X can cut a non-text object (more practically it has required that all text entry fields be on pop-up windows so that average users are not confused by the need to move the focus).
I am pretty certain that ctrl+P dates back to command.com. That program was incapable of detecting the PrtSc or any other function key if written in "portable MSDOS" that did not use the IBM PC Bios, thus all functions had to be on control keys.
It would be *far* too easy for them to abuse this by making the package depend on items installed by the proprietary installer.
No that would violate the GPL.
I agree with the previous response, the GPL allows exactly what the anonymous poster is asking for. He seems to think the GPL requires the user compile the code, that is absolutely false and I don't understand why anybody would think that.
He also seems to think the GPL means the source code must be free to anybody, in fact the GPL says the source code must be available to the person who buys the software. The source code could in fact be on the disk, or the downloading could require something proprietary from the disk, so you have to buy the disk to get the source code (the GPL does say that you can't prevent one person from buying the disk from doing anything with the source code such as give it away for free).
Also nothing prevents a company from packing the disk with proprietary add-ons as long as they can make a convincing demonstration that these add-ons are not required by the core GPL program for it to do useful things.