The only way to anonymously donate money is to put some paper money into an envelope and mail it to its destination.
With the advancements in DNA PCR technology, make sure you do not use your saliva to moisten the glue on the back of the envelope. In fact, it is better if you handled the cash and the envelope while wearing latex gloves too.
Now, let us move to the electronic realm. The parent post says that you can make an anonymous donation on the net. Sadly, no such technology exists.
There is no on-line method in which you can trade money anonymously. With paper money, the recipient gets the cash and nothing else. You disclose absolutely no personal information.
Current on-line systems are much to chatty. They also disclose your name, your account, your e-mail address, and leave a paper trail anyone could follow.
It is funny, but not ha-ha funny. The whole reason that many people enjoy using computers so much is the feeling of control.
Each of us can choose our operating system, our programs, and our data. If so motivated, anyone sitting in front of a keyboard could learn to program, and choose the development environment they enjoy most.
But with DRM, those feelings of power and control are over. Even as the owner of a PC, you no longer control your machine. You have to ask (and receive) permission to run your own files.
Personally, I refuse to become an electronic vassal. So long as there remain alternatives that allow me complete access to my PC, then I choose those, no matter how beautiful or functional the DRM solutions are. If that means I have to abandon both Windows and OS X, then so be it.
What a strange name to give a supposedly useful website. Clearly, the Python language was named after Monty Python, but in trying to keep the joke going, they have made a bad choice in name.
In the Cheese Emporium sketch, the customer walks into to a cheese store, spends a great deal of time trying to figure out what is available, and in the end leaves the store angry and empty handed.
So if you go to Python's Cheese Shop, are you supposed to be tantalized with all sorts of wonderful modules, only to find there are none?
Large-system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it. Most have emerged with running systems -- few have met goals, schedules, and budgets.
Can anyone read the above paragraph and not think of Microsoft Vista (nee Longhorn)?
It would appear that the words of Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. still apply, even 21 years after he wrote The Mystical Man-Month.
Someday I am going to have to learn Smalltalk so I can see precisely what you mean by this.
Then you should download Squeak and try it for yourself.
Re:What are the current fads? List them below!
on
Top 10 Web Fads
·
· Score: 1
It's true. I can attest to the cross-pollination of the high-tech with the low-brow.
I went to a Slashdot Meetup in Toronto and the girl who used to work for Microsoft who now works for the Toronto Star talked about Fark. That's were I heard about it.
Come to think of it, I stopped lurking and became a Slashdot user just so I could post my report on the party.
Instead of just monitoring let's modify the system so that we can turn circuits on and off remotely as well as being able to monitor usage.
This is already possible. Many breakers can be bought with a shunt trip mechanism. Essentially, you provide a small current into the shunt trip, and it will cause the breaker to trip. So yes, you can turn the power off. If you want to turn it back on, you have to walk over to the panel.
Are there breakers with two shunt trips, one to turn it on, another to turn it off? I have not seen them, but they might exist.
Another solution would be to put a bistable AC contactor in series with breaker. Then you could energize the contactor to turn power off and on each individual circuit without using the breaker.
Most slashdotters could use a trip to a power plant or an electrical utility. After seeing battery chargers the size of refridgerators, it would help put the piddling amount of AC trickling through house plugs into perspective.
Incidentally, that software looks amazing. I want to wire my house now, just to watch my power consumption graphs wiggle by in real time. With help of a close personal friend (Google), I was able to find the company, called TrendPoint which makes CircuitView.
Our good friend and frustrated hero of the Victorian age designed a printer for his Difference Engine. Using his blueprints, the Science Museum of London has got this printer working.
Naturally, it's easy to find some humour for the Linux crowd about this printer too.
I spent all the money I made from my summer job on a LaserJet IIP+ Plus printer with a Postscript cartridge and a 4MB memory module in 1992.
So far, this printer has outlasted
a Commodore Amiga 500 running AmigaOS 1.2, 1.3, & 2
a Commodore Amiga 4000 running AmigaOS 3
a Compaq 486 Presario running Windows 3.1
a homebuilt Pentium MMX running Windows 95 & 2000
a homebuilt Athlon (Barton Core) running Windows 2000
Amazingly, brand new printer cartridges are still available directly from HP, and they cost about 2-3 times the price of an inkjet cartridge in my city. I am able to print about 1200 pages per cartridge, which would make the average inkjet owner envious.
I once had to take it in for servicing. A technician told me that a little plastic gear had split. It was a documented problem, and HP had corrected the problem on my model LaserJet during its production run. My LaserJet was up and running for about the price of a low-end inkjet printer.
I cannot think of another piece of computing hardware that has served me so well throughout the years.
A few days after this article was published, Brandeis University decided to issue a press release adding that Alex was the "first bird to comprehend numerical concept akin to zero."
I disagree with the blogger, and with the university if the quotation is correctly attributed to them.
Alex is not the "first bird to comprehend [...] zero". Rather, Alex is the first bird to demonstrate his knowledge of the number zero.
For all we know, birds count down to zero all the time, we just have not witnessed it before.
When you allow for the likely inefficiency of allocation of IPv6 network addresses, there will likely only be about 10,000 available addresses per square meter of the earth's surface. (Source: Principles of Network and System Administration, ISBN 0-470-86807-4, p. 68.)
Clearly this is better than NAT, but it is no panacea.
Do you know all those comments you read about the web, where users grouse that "Client X breaks my web browser"?
Well, if the Opera browser is handling both the web pages and the torrents, then it can give selective priority to the HTTP traffic, compensating by automatically scaling back the number of BitTorrent packets sent or acknowledged.
Advanced users can tweak their BitTorrent clients already to achieve this, but with the Opera browser, it will happen transparently, without user intervention. Very nice.
(Of course, if this was not the intention of the programmers at Opera, they can always thank me for the idea later.)
Metapad is a small, fast (and completely free) text editor for Windows 9x/NT/XP with similar features to Microsoft Notepad but with many extra (and rather useful) features. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad's features and much, much more.
Software for Windows is generally uninspired, generically cloned, and overwhelmingly wrought with lackluster (read: lousy) user interfaces.
The author of the article is completely and utterly mistaken. The Windows UI is well thought out, and users expect consistency among their applications. Once the user learns the conventions used in a few applications, they can confidently use new programs. The user interface fades away, and users can concentrate that the task at hand instead.
If Windows users did not feel passionately about the look of their programs, then why are countless websites dedicated to pointing out those programs where designers have broken the rules?
If Windows programs can be constructed in any which way, then why do users become frustrated when they encounter a badly-ported program that does not follow the Windows GUI?
So the article's author loves Mac OS X, all power to him, but that love does not invalidate the expectations and preferences of other users.
So my question is, why not just use the browser? IT ALREADY DOES THESE THINGS!
I could not agree with you more. Each of these stupid little things does one job, and even then, it does not do it well.
These widgets seem to go against everything that Apple has been promoting. As far as I can tell, there are no consistent look and feel to them, other than the rule that you can flip them over to change their settings.
Like the Dock, these are pure eye candy. Widgets add no new functionality to your computer, and can either be done better as stand-alone applications or as web pages.
Apple likes to gloat about their user interface, but allowing users to goober up some second, virtual desktop on which lurk a dozen ugly, crappy applets does not seem like progress.
At 5 bucks a pop, they do brisk business, especially in poorer neighborhoods where going to the movies and/or buying a full price dvd is a costly proposition.
Agreed. This is the point which the MPAA is missing: For the poor and dispossessed, the cost of going to watch a movie in the cinema is prohibitive.
It is likely that these pirate DVDs are counted as lost sales, when in fact they are not. If the poor had no access to these cheap, pirated materials, they simply would have stayed away from the theatres and waited for it to appear on television.
Piracy by the middle classes may be a nightmarish proposition for the studios, but for those at the bottom of society, the impact for the copyright holders is negligible.
The lives of the poor are hard enough. It is too bad for the movie distributors that they are unwilling to create a cheap way for the ragged masses to watch their films legitimately.
No, you are wrong. Microsoft is easily a two hit wonder.
Before Microsoft got into operating systems with MS DOS, they were considered the premier programming language company.
Essentially, you bought you 8-bit microcomputer from some company which you chose based on glossy magazine ads and whatever your friends were thinking of buying.
But when it came to running programs, more often than not you would be running Microsoft BASIC. Microsoft wrote the first BASIC interpreter for the first personal computer (the Altair) and from that point on, it went from success to success.
Either your computer was installed with Microsoft BASIC or you could get it on data cassette or floppy disk. (It might have been sold on tape, both magnetic and punch as well. I can't remember.)
Even if IBM had not agreed to let Microsoft sell PC DOS to others, the company was a success. Even if Compaq had not reverse engineered the BIOS and created the PC Clone market, Microsoft was a success.
I wonder if Google was asked nicely to ruin the satellite maps around Washington D.C. of whether there is some law mandating them to do so.
Although the politicians may sleep better knowing that a direct attack on them may be reduced ever so little, it does not, on the whole, add to the security of everyone.
After all, terrorists are nothing if not resourceful. If you cannot blow up the Capitol Building based on its satellite images, at least you could take out something like this CANDU nuclear reactor.
The fact is, very little software actually runs without administrator privileges.
If you have ever had to sys admin Windows desktops, you know the headaches that this involves. Many programs run up to a point and then fail, often mysteriously, sometimes giving incorrect error messages.
Even Microsoft does not get it right. Take this screenshot, for example, of Word 97 running on top of Windows 2000, which is not an uncommon experience where I work. Every time a non-admin account tries to open an existing file, this is the stupid, incorrect error message that pops up. It's madness.
As anyone who grew up with a one-button Atari joystick can vouch for, the only limitation to the complexity of the games that can be created is the programmer's imagination.
In the eyes of that generation past, the present-day controllers seem ridiculous. Instead of getting a joystick, you get a little plastic pad, and you have to press the joystick contacts yourself. Worse still, just pressing the button won't help you discover how to play the game: You are to waste weeks learning that pressing A-A-B-B-A will get your on-screen avatar to work properly. It's nonsense.
I completely disagree with you. Nationalism is the very reason that humanity managed to escape from gravity during the 20th century.
Take for example, the race to the moon. Did the US go to the moon because the American population wanted to, just for the fun of it? No. The US and the USSR were locked in a cold war, each side vying for superiority on the global stage.
Europe was seen as the battlefield for the Third World War, which seemed like it might begin at any moment during the 1950s and 1960s.
If you were part of the leadership of a European nation during those years, you really would like to be aligned with the victor. Since the war would be fought with rockets, you probably watched the space race with great interest: After all, without an actual war, rockets into space provided a good proxy for actual military prowess.
In this game, the US was doing quite badly:
The first artificial satellite in orbit around the Earth? The USSR did that first, in 1957.
Who sent the first living animal (a dog) into space? The USSR, of course, also in 1957.
The first man in space? The USSR did that first too, in 1961.
How about the first woman in space? The USSR beat the US there too, sending Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova skywards.
Which nation launched a man to orbit who then donned a spacesuit and drifted in the emptiness of space by himself? Yet again, the USSR did it first, in 1965.
Time after time after time, the USSR was handing the US its ass on a plate.
In the international community, the USSR was winning the propaganda battle against the US.
Without the presence of the USSR, the US would have never sent people to the moon. We would have never seen the earth rise from behind the moon. We would have never seen people bouncing around the surface of the moon, kicking up dust.
So, parent poster, please do not say that nationalism is bad for space. Without it, we would have never escaped the gravity well.
Apparently Russia has revived a previous plan to send a spacecraft to Phobos, a tiny Martian moon.
A tiny Martian moon? What, as opposed to the dozens of hyper-massive moons that orbit Mars? Seriously, neither Deimos nor Phobos could be called a large moon by any stretch of the imagination.
What would have been wrong with simply saying "Russia has revived a previous plan to send a spacecraft to the Martian moon Phobos"?
Those who do not know their astronomy can always Google or Wikipedia their way toward an understanding of the inner solar system. (Yes, I realize that I just verbed two nouns in the last sentence. Lighten up.)
In 1984, I toured the Samsonite luggage factory in Ontario, which made Lego bricks under contract for the Canadian market. I got to see the grinders, the presses, and the other equipment that makes Lego.
One of the interesting things on the tour were the reject bins. Lego (unlike their cheap, plastic brick competitors) had a stringent quality control system in place. If a brick was not perfect in fit or finish, it was placed in reject bins.
Each production run was for a particular brick, and so the reject bin would be filled with, for example, the standard 2-row by 4-column red Lego blocks.
These bricks were collected, melted back into a solid blob of plastic, and then reground into a fine powder. This powder was then used to make new Lego blocks, indistinguishable in material strength and finish from those made of new plastic.
Unlike plastic pop bottles or tetrapak containers, which cannot be recycled into new bottles or containers, Lego bricks can be made into Lego bricks.
Incidentally, the Samsonite factory closed. The Lego bricks are made elsewhere nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to anonymously donate money is to put some paper money into an envelope and mail it to its destination.
With the advancements in DNA PCR technology, make sure you do not use your saliva to moisten the glue on the back of the envelope. In fact, it is better if you handled the cash and the envelope while wearing latex gloves too.
Now, let us move to the electronic realm. The parent post says that you can make an anonymous donation on the net. Sadly, no such technology exists.
There is no on-line method in which you can trade money anonymously. With paper money, the recipient gets the cash and nothing else. You disclose absolutely no personal information.
Current on-line systems are much to chatty. They also disclose your name, your account, your e-mail address, and leave a paper trail anyone could follow.
It is funny, but not ha-ha funny. The whole reason that many people enjoy using computers so much is the feeling of control.
Each of us can choose our operating system, our programs, and our data. If so motivated, anyone sitting in front of a keyboard could learn to program, and choose the development environment they enjoy most.
But with DRM, those feelings of power and control are over. Even as the owner of a PC, you no longer control your machine. You have to ask (and receive) permission to run your own files.
Personally, I refuse to become an electronic vassal. So long as there remain alternatives that allow me complete access to my PC, then I choose those, no matter how beautiful or functional the DRM solutions are. If that means I have to abandon both Windows and OS X, then so be it.
What a strange name to give a supposedly useful website. Clearly, the Python language was named after Monty Python, but in trying to keep the joke going, they have made a bad choice in name.
In the Cheese Emporium sketch, the customer walks into to a cheese store, spends a great deal of time trying to figure out what is available, and in the end leaves the store angry and empty handed.
So if you go to Python's Cheese Shop, are you supposed to be tantalized with all sorts of wonderful modules, only to find there are none?
Mythical Man-Month
The preview button works, but apparently not my eyes.
Large-system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it. Most have emerged with running systems -- few have met goals, schedules, and budgets.
Can anyone read the above paragraph and not think of Microsoft Vista (nee Longhorn)?
It would appear that the words of Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. still apply, even 21 years after he wrote The Mystical Man-Month.
Someday I am going to have to learn Smalltalk so I can see precisely what you mean by this.
Then you should download Squeak and try it for yourself.
It's true. I can attest to the cross-pollination of the high-tech with the low-brow.
I went to a Slashdot Meetup in Toronto and the girl who used to work for Microsoft who now works for the Toronto Star talked about Fark. That's were I heard about it.
Come to think of it, I stopped lurking and became a Slashdot user just so I could post my report on the party.
Instead of just monitoring let's modify the system so that we can turn circuits on and off remotely as well as being able to monitor usage.
This is already possible. Many breakers can be bought with a shunt trip mechanism. Essentially, you provide a small current into the shunt trip, and it will cause the breaker to trip. So yes, you can turn the power off. If you want to turn it back on, you have to walk over to the panel.
Are there breakers with two shunt trips, one to turn it on, another to turn it off? I have not seen them, but they might exist.
Another solution would be to put a bistable AC contactor in series with breaker. Then you could energize the contactor to turn power off and on each individual circuit without using the breaker.
Most slashdotters could use a trip to a power plant or an electrical utility. After seeing battery chargers the size of refridgerators, it would help put the piddling amount of AC trickling through house plugs into perspective.
Incidentally, that software looks amazing. I want to wire my house now, just to watch my power consumption graphs wiggle by in real time. With help of a close personal friend (Google), I was able to find the company, called TrendPoint which makes CircuitView.
If you are going to go old tech, go all the way.
Our good friend and frustrated hero of the Victorian age designed a printer for his Difference Engine. Using his blueprints, the Science Museum of London has got this printer working.
Naturally, it's easy to find some humour for the Linux crowd about this printer too.
I spent all the money I made from my summer job on a LaserJet IIP+ Plus printer with a Postscript cartridge and a 4MB memory module in 1992.
So far, this printer has outlasted
- a Commodore Amiga 500 running AmigaOS 1.2, 1.3, & 2
- a Commodore Amiga 4000 running AmigaOS 3
- a Compaq 486 Presario running Windows 3.1
- a homebuilt Pentium MMX running Windows 95 & 2000
- a homebuilt Athlon (Barton Core) running Windows 2000
Amazingly, brand new printer cartridges are still available directly from HP, and they cost about 2-3 times the price of an inkjet cartridge in my city. I am able to print about 1200 pages per cartridge, which would make the average inkjet owner envious.I once had to take it in for servicing. A technician told me that a little plastic gear had split. It was a documented problem, and HP had corrected the problem on my model LaserJet during its production run. My LaserJet was up and running for about the price of a low-end inkjet printer.
I cannot think of another piece of computing hardware that has served me so well throughout the years.
A few days after this article was published, Brandeis University decided to issue a press release adding that Alex was the "first bird to comprehend numerical concept akin to zero."
I disagree with the blogger, and with the university if the quotation is correctly attributed to them.
Alex is not the "first bird to comprehend [...] zero". Rather, Alex is the first bird to demonstrate his knowledge of the number zero.
For all we know, birds count down to zero all the time, we just have not witnessed it before.
When you allow for the likely inefficiency of allocation of IPv6 network addresses, there will likely only be about 10,000 available addresses per square meter of the earth's surface. (Source: Principles of Network and System Administration, ISBN 0-470-86807-4, p. 68.)
Clearly this is better than NAT, but it is no panacea.
Oh wait. I get it.
Do you know all those comments you read about the web, where users grouse that "Client X breaks my web browser"?
Well, if the Opera browser is handling both the web pages and the torrents, then it can give selective priority to the HTTP traffic, compensating by automatically scaling back the number of BitTorrent packets sent or acknowledged.
Advanced users can tweak their BitTorrent clients already to achieve this, but with the Opera browser, it will happen transparently, without user intervention. Very nice.
(Of course, if this was not the intention of the programmers at Opera, they can always thank me for the idea later.)
metapad.exe!!!
Metapad is a small, fast (and completely free) text editor for Windows 9x/NT/XP with similar features to Microsoft Notepad but with many extra (and rather useful) features. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad's features and much, much more.
Software for Windows is generally uninspired, generically cloned, and overwhelmingly wrought with lackluster (read: lousy) user interfaces.
The author of the article is completely and utterly mistaken. The Windows UI is well thought out, and users expect consistency among their applications. Once the user learns the conventions used in a few applications, they can confidently use new programs. The user interface fades away, and users can concentrate that the task at hand instead.
If Windows users did not feel passionately about the look of their programs, then why are countless websites dedicated to pointing out those programs where designers have broken the rules?
If Windows programs can be constructed in any which way, then why do users become frustrated when they encounter a badly-ported program that does not follow the Windows GUI?
So the article's author loves Mac OS X, all power to him, but that love does not invalidate the expectations and preferences of other users.
So my question is, why not just use the browser? IT ALREADY DOES THESE THINGS!
I could not agree with you more. Each of these stupid little things does one job, and even then, it does not do it well.
These widgets seem to go against everything that Apple has been promoting. As far as I can tell, there are no consistent look and feel to them, other than the rule that you can flip them over to change their settings.
Like the Dock, these are pure eye candy. Widgets add no new functionality to your computer, and can either be done better as stand-alone applications or as web pages.
Apple likes to gloat about their user interface, but allowing users to goober up some second, virtual desktop on which lurk a dozen ugly, crappy applets does not seem like progress.
At 5 bucks a pop, they do brisk business, especially in poorer neighborhoods where going to the movies and/or buying a full price dvd is a costly proposition.
Agreed. This is the point which the MPAA is missing: For the poor and dispossessed, the cost of going to watch a movie in the cinema is prohibitive.
It is likely that these pirate DVDs are counted as lost sales, when in fact they are not. If the poor had no access to these cheap, pirated materials, they simply would have stayed away from the theatres and waited for it to appear on television.
Piracy by the middle classes may be a nightmarish proposition for the studios, but for those at the bottom of society, the impact for the copyright holders is negligible.
The lives of the poor are hard enough. It is too bad for the movie distributors that they are unwilling to create a cheap way for the ragged masses to watch their films legitimately.
Microsoft, OTOH, is a one hit wonder.
No, you are wrong. Microsoft is easily a two hit wonder.
Before Microsoft got into operating systems with MS DOS, they were considered the premier programming language company.
Essentially, you bought you 8-bit microcomputer from some company which you chose based on glossy magazine ads and whatever your friends were thinking of buying.
But when it came to running programs, more often than not you would be running Microsoft BASIC. Microsoft wrote the first BASIC interpreter for the first personal computer (the Altair) and from that point on, it went from success to success.
Either your computer was installed with Microsoft BASIC or you could get it on data cassette or floppy disk. (It might have been sold on tape, both magnetic and punch as well. I can't remember.)
Even if IBM had not agreed to let Microsoft sell PC DOS to others, the company was a success. Even if Compaq had not reverse engineered the BIOS and created the PC Clone market, Microsoft was a success.
I wonder if Google was asked nicely to ruin the satellite maps around Washington D.C. of whether there is some law mandating them to do so.
Although the politicians may sleep better knowing that a direct attack on them may be reduced ever so little, it does not, on the whole, add to the security of everyone.
After all, terrorists are nothing if not resourceful. If you cannot blow up the Capitol Building based on its satellite images, at least you could take out something like this CANDU nuclear reactor.
eWeek is being unfair toward users.
The fact is, very little software actually runs without administrator privileges.
If you have ever had to sys admin Windows desktops, you know the headaches that this involves. Many programs run up to a point and then fail, often mysteriously, sometimes giving incorrect error messages.
Even Microsoft does not get it right. Take this screenshot, for example, of Word 97 running on top of Windows 2000, which is not an uncommon experience where I work. Every time a non-admin account tries to open an existing file, this is the stupid, incorrect error message that pops up. It's madness.
As anyone who grew up with a one-button Atari joystick can vouch for, the only limitation to the complexity of the games that can be created is the programmer's imagination.
In the eyes of that generation past, the present-day controllers seem ridiculous. Instead of getting a joystick, you get a little plastic pad, and you have to press the joystick contacts yourself. Worse still, just pressing the button won't help you discover how to play the game: You are to waste weeks learning that pressing A-A-B-B-A will get your on-screen avatar to work properly. It's nonsense.
Take for example, the race to the moon. Did the US go to the moon because the American population wanted to, just for the fun of it? No. The US and the USSR were locked in a cold war, each side vying for superiority on the global stage.
Europe was seen as the battlefield for the Third World War, which seemed like it might begin at any moment during the 1950s and 1960s.
If you were part of the leadership of a European nation during those years, you really would like to be aligned with the victor. Since the war would be fought with rockets, you probably watched the space race with great interest: After all, without an actual war, rockets into space provided a good proxy for actual military prowess.
In this game, the US was doing quite badly:
- The first artificial satellite in orbit around the Earth? The USSR did that first, in 1957.
- Who sent the first living animal (a dog) into space? The USSR, of course, also in 1957.
- The first man in space? The USSR did that first too, in 1961.
- How about the first woman in space? The USSR beat the US there too, sending Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova skywards.
- Which nation launched a man to orbit who then donned a spacesuit and drifted in the emptiness of space by himself? Yet again, the USSR did it first, in 1965.
Time after time after time, the USSR was handing the US its ass on a plate.In the international community, the USSR was winning the propaganda battle against the US.
Without the presence of the USSR, the US would have never sent people to the moon. We would have never seen the earth rise from behind the moon. We would have never seen people bouncing around the surface of the moon, kicking up dust.
So, parent poster, please do not say that nationalism is bad for space. Without it, we would have never escaped the gravity well.
Apparently Russia has revived a previous plan to send a spacecraft to Phobos, a tiny Martian moon.
A tiny Martian moon? What, as opposed to the dozens of hyper-massive moons that orbit Mars? Seriously, neither Deimos nor Phobos could be called a large moon by any stretch of the imagination.
What would have been wrong with simply saying "Russia has revived a previous plan to send a spacecraft to the Martian moon Phobos"?
Those who do not know their astronomy can always Google or Wikipedia their way toward an understanding of the inner solar system. (Yes, I realize that I just verbed two nouns in the last sentence. Lighten up.)
The answer is yes, Lego bricks are recyclable.
In 1984, I toured the Samsonite luggage factory in Ontario, which made Lego bricks under contract for the Canadian market. I got to see the grinders, the presses, and the other equipment that makes Lego.
One of the interesting things on the tour were the reject bins. Lego (unlike their cheap, plastic brick competitors) had a stringent quality control system in place. If a brick was not perfect in fit or finish, it was placed in reject bins.
Each production run was for a particular brick, and so the reject bin would be filled with, for example, the standard 2-row by 4-column red Lego blocks.
These bricks were collected, melted back into a solid blob of plastic, and then reground into a fine powder. This powder was then used to make new Lego blocks, indistinguishable in material strength and finish from those made of new plastic.
Unlike plastic pop bottles or tetrapak containers, which cannot be recycled into new bottles or containers, Lego bricks can be made into Lego bricks.
Incidentally, the Samsonite factory closed. The Lego bricks are made elsewhere nowadays.
The download is a DMG file, so presumably the installer is only for Mac.
Is there a Windows equivalent?