They can avoid mentioning the specifics, and if needed, they can hold back the source. I am certainly glad they did not do that. If they hald back the source those of us who use gentoo or build our browser from source would still be vulnerable until Opera got around to fixing it. Why should we be? Also note that most open source projects CVS tree is very much open, the whole point is that any user can download the source.
In fact, you are a complete moron: The GNU licence means they HAVE to make the source code available on request at the very least.
The Law Lords are from the House of Lords and thus a subset of the House of Lords. Distinguishing one from the other is absurd in the extreme, as anyone in the House of Lords could be appointed a Law Lord, although it was generally someone knowlegeable in the Law. No, the only people who get to sit as Law Lords are Lords with a Legal Background.
So, you're saying Michael Moore is not a trustworthy source? I personally trust him far more than I would any politician, especially Bush (Jnr or Snr).
The House of Lords was another organiztion that opposed such nonsense, which is why the Conservatives gutted it and Labour disembowled what was left. Sorry, You seem confused. They are two different entities both called the House of Lords.
The House of Lords in the context or parliament is the non-democratically selected load of old codgers that was gutted by both parties in an attempt to make the British political system more responsive to change.
The House of Lords in the context of Law is the English equivalent of the Supreme Court. The Lords who sit and decide cases in regards to law are only selected from high ranking judges.
They also get to sit in the Parliamentary House of Lords above but this does not work both ways. The Hereditary Peers (land owners who inherited their position in the Parliamentary House of Lords) have never been able to sit as Law Lords unless they also trained to be a barrister then spent their entire life practicing Law first.
The only exception to this when all Lords (not just Law Lords) can decide a case is in the case of impeachment.
Your comment about them owning most of the land implies that you think both bodies to be the same thing, they are not.
well, it's UK, so substitute whatever you have for constitution Errrr, sod all. We have no consitution what so ever.
In our country anything can be made illegal if government can get it through parliament unless it breaches a Law that is passed down by a higher authority. The higher authorities we currently recognise are the European Court and the International Convention on Human Rights.
But if it makes you feel better to treat it as a contract, you can use this form: http://www.copylaw.com/forms/copyassn.html Interestingly that form recommends it is only used in conjuction with professional legal advice, which was my main point.
Sure, why not? That's exactly what I did. So they typed this up on company letterhead:
"This letter is confirmation that [Company] transfers to you all copyrights and license rights for the Lotus Notes screens and databases you developed for us in 2002. You are free to use or sell the product at your discretion without fees or royalties to [Company]. In other words, you now own the software. We do ask that you destroy our client-specific data." It is signed by the CEO.
See? No fancy legalese necessary... plain English works just fine.
Warning, this may not hold up in a court of law!!!
In order to understand the problem here you need to have an understanding of the concept of consideration as it applies to Contract Law. The basic premise is that you can only have a valid contract if both parties get something out of the agreement. We know you got something, but what did the company get? If the answer is nothing, or something they were already entitled to then the contract is not valid and can simply be ignored.
If your CEO was smart this is exactly why he provided this letter. He knew that if it was ever in the companies interest to sue he could still do so. This is exactly what the open source community does not need! Do NOT commit that code to any open source project, ever, under any circumatances.
This sort of action is exactly what Microsoft would love. Then they can buy they company and then sue this shit out of any other companies that openly use the project your code ends up in. If you got this code used in the linux Kernel it oculd have dire consequences.
Please do not take my word for this though as I am not a Lawyer. Before you engage in anything like this go and consult a real Lawyer on a paid basis. This way you can rely on his advise, in all other circumstances they might be able to claim they were not actually acting in a professional capacity.
Actually in that case it is because we bought useless american made shite. There are a number of reasons why the Chinook is a better aircraft than the Westland it replaced, but it has one major problem:
It requires a complicated linking of the two rotors to prevent the blades ever colliding, this linking prevents the helicopter from being able to auto-rotate in the event of engine failure.
This makes it much more likely to fall out of the sky like a rock if anything goes wrong.
Maybe the Republicans do not expect to win anyway. Maybe they do not want to win. Maybe they know the country is heading into a recession and would rather not have to deal with it.
In which case why not make sure you leave the incomming democratic government a right mess that they will spend there entire term struggling to clear up so they spend the entire term doing this and not actually getting anything constructive done.
There is something far more important that the French get out of this arrangement: Trust.
The problem with buying a closed source American Operating System is that you can never be truly sure that it is not full of backdoors built in by the NSA. Now some of you might consider this to be very paranoid but being paranoid can be quite important when it comes to national security, especially given the current US administrations attitudes to eavesdropping its own citizens and keenness for disrespecting other nations laws.
If I was a French police officer investigating a crime that MAY have been sanctioned by the US Government the fact that I was not able to trust the secrecy of any document I stored in electronic form would seriously hamper my efforts.
You might say I should not trust the secrecy of any document I store in electron form anyway but since I am an avid Linux enthusiast who hast fostered an interest in IT security since my teens (I am now in my thirties) I am fairly sure I can trust my own PC setup to be fairly secure. I would hope the French government can hire similar IT professionals.
I promptly switched off the "I'm willing to test the new discussion system" flag. If they implement it, I'll stop using Slashdot. Well piss off and good riddance then. Since a lot of people work hard to provide the service that is slashdot the least you can do is not begrudge them a fair wage for their troubles.
By visiting this site we all take up a shit load of bandwidth. It's not by accident that we can kill a site that gets linked to if they do not have unlimited bandwidth. How many times have you tried to follow a link and it has been slashdotted? Please have a little more understanding of how much it must cost to host a site like this.
And since a great many of us have the ability to suppress all the adverts we must be a pretty poor group to market to unless you happen to be thinkgeek and sell the sort of crap we want to buy anyway. In which case the advertising was a waste of money anyway as we probably would have bought it anyway for the cheapest price we could find by google or some price comparison website.
I think not if you use an off the shelf browser. I have firefox, IE7, safari and Opera installed on this PC since I am now at work and none of them pass.
So stop talking like there are some defined useable web standards that we can currently use when creating complicated layouts in CSS. Until every browser is truly standards compliant then creating standards compliant web pages is not going to help avoid horrible browser hacks and so is actually me wasting my employers time.
You shouldn't have to add a tag just to get the browser to work correct in the first place. Maybe in your strange web utopia, but here in there real world I have spent the last 5 year developing websites for people who only gave a shit about IE and sometimes gave me a deadline of the day before I started the project (the work I started today was due on Friday). I can honestly say that a large proportion of the work I have done will not render in my chosen browser (mozilla under linux).
I am not proud of this but with tight deadlines cross browser standards compliance is the first thing to slip if you know you are developing a corporate intranet and all the client has deployed is IE6. Anyone who insists on developing for other browers in this situation is just wasting time and hence money.
I do not develop complicated dynamic websites as a religion or hobby, I do it as a job so tailor each project to the clients needs, not my own.
They also have shit loads less space than you lot in the US. That means alot more people share accomodation and only have one small room to call their own.
I think there is another reason why DVD burners are more popular in Europe which nobody seems to have mentioned yet:
DVD's cost more here.
If you in the states want to watch a film that is not likely to be broadcast on TV due to it niche market you can just buy it on DVD for $10 or so. Over here that same DVD would be about £10. Now since the dollar to pound exchange rate is currently about $2 = £1 we effectively pay close to double the price for prerecorded DVDs. That is a real incentive to record any film you might want to watch in future and then keep the disk.
A DVR is all very well but however big the disk in it it will eventually be full and you have to start deleting stuff to make room. At that point you may only be able to watch it again in a few years by paying a fair old wodge of cash.
The other issue is that this is probably a lot less appealing to people in the states due to the adverts every 10 mins. Who wants to have a permanent copy of your favourite film that has so many interruptions. Over here in Europe (well in Britain anyway) we have TV channels with no advert brakes. We also have less advert brakes in general even on the channels that do show advertising. This makes the idea of keeping a permanent copy of something you tape a lot more appealing.
With all this in mind though, I would rather live in the US and simply pay less to buy prerecorded DVDs. Then I would not mind using a DVR as a temporary storage medium for stuff I had not got around to watching yet and deleting it when I did.
For me the lack of a user changeable battery was a show stopper. With every phone I buy I also buy a spare charged battery. That way if one runs out wheil I am out and about I can just swap to a new battery and call whoever I was talking to back straight away. This beats the hell out of trying to find an apple store in a city you may not know and may not have time to piss about in.
I am a die hard Linux user who generally hates Microsoft products, but I could not wait for the Google Phone so I bought a Kaiser instead. Cost me a shitload more than an Iphone would have but is a much better device.
- As montioned above it has a user swappable battery.
- Supports decent encrypted WiFi so I can connect to my home and works networks with no reconfiguration needed.
- It can be used as a 3G modem USB for my laptop when I have no WiFI within range.
- I can run loads more off the shelf apps on it as PocketPC is a much more established platform.
- It has SDK's available now so I develop any new tools I need.
- It has a fold out qwerty keyboard with tactile feedback when a key is pressed.
- It supports MS exchange integration for email, tasks, calendar and notes.
- It doesn't crash anywhere near as much as I was expecting (It IS a microsoft platform after all).
- It supports data encryption on the device so if I lose it the info has cursory protection from prying eyes. (Note cursory, I know you could probably crack it in a day or two)
Like it or not these are key features for a large number of corporate customers with the exception of the keyboard, that was a key factor for me though.
The main plus point of the Iphone seemed to be that it looked pretty.
I consider slashdot, wired and digg to be non-work related sites so I only visit them in my lunch brakes. When I get home I might have a quick glance at slashdot but I don't like spending all my free time on techy stuff as well as when I am at work.
When I am on company time I fairly disiplined about doing work or looking up matters directly relevant to the task at hand. General browsing for news while valuable in the long term, can also just be a distraction in the short term when you have interests as varied as my own.
But, the whole reason to GO to a University, is to get the skills/education to make more money when finished, than you would have if you had not gone. That might have been your reason to go to university, but it is certainly not everyones reason. I am a software developer, I learnt to program before I was 10 years old (ZX Speccy). When I went to Uni, I could have just gone and got a CS degree. I would have rehashed alot of stuff I had long since taught myself or done evening classes in but been given a nive piece of paper telling me I knew how to program.
Instead I choose Physics with Space Technology because it sounded interesting. I got to spend several years doing stuff that was very hard and did not come to me naturally thereby expanding my mind quite considerably. I got to learn about exploring the universe even though I knew some of the theory we learnt would never be put into practice in my lifetime.
I always knew I would eventually go back into working with computers as I have always loved software development since the first game I wrote on that Speccy.
If people could make good $$ without college, I doubt you'd see so many people trying to go.... You can. It is harder but if you are very good at what you do and stand out as having a passion for it all you need to do is get your foot in the door. My first job involved me doing an unpaid apprentiship for 5 weeks. By the end of week 1 I was bored and asked for a proper project of my own. The boss gave me one but said not to worry if it got taken from me when someone else was ready to start it as I was not expected to be working on my own projects yet. By the end of week 2 I had made significant progress, had already been near gauranteed a job and the original developer who was tasked with the project was starting something else instead. I worked for that company for 2 and half years after they started paying me.
Some of us actually have jobs to do. That means I don't have time to read every story on all the sites you mention. I like the fact that slashdot shows me the pick of the bunch from various sites chosen by some real human beings (well, geeks anyway)
Sounds like you are pretty dumb yourself by assuming on slashdot everyone reads the same sites as you.
Thanks for the reply. I skipped looking at gPHPedit when evaluating editors since it was unmaintained, guess I will go back and have another look. Cheers again.
On my own laptop, I run a tasty install of Gentoo Linux. Excellent choice.
Trying to build websites outside of a familiar environment is a pain in the ass. So you usually do your web development under gentoo? What editor you prefer? My main wants / needs are syntax higlighting for ASP and PHP dynamic pages (so HTML as well).
Do you do any dynamic development using SQL? If so what software would you recommend for connecting to database servers directly (like Connection Mangler for SQL-Server)? Currently I use Navicat but this seems unreliabel under linux as it it just the windows version and an embedded copy of wine.
"Theres no such thing as a foolproof system because fools are too inventive."
I tried to just verify this is the correct quote but it seems to exist in many forms on the net, all have a similar meaning. Incidentally if anyone can point me in the direction of it original source I would be interested to know where it came from.
Also note that the stats on your page about which party got the most actual votes are wrong. Please re-check the wikipedia page you supposedly use as a source. It shows that Labour got 9,562,122 votes while the Conservatives got 8,772,598.
If your page is based on a different source please quote it so we can see for ourselves.
Yup, I was wrong. I was basing my argument on an old newspaper article and obviously miss-remembered.
It is interesting to note thought that even according to the wikipedia article you base your graphs on the Liberals are still massively under represented. They get 22.2 percent of the vote and yet only get 9 percent of the seats. So my main argument still holds true: That the political system of Great Britain is designed to benefit the two main parties.
Your point on your page about the Conservatives in Scotland bears this out. In Scotland they are the a minority part that very few people vote for (15% of actual votes). The system is not designed to benefit any particular party, just to ensure that the most popular parties are more likely to get a massive majority over the others.
Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with the Liberals in any way:)
Ahhh.... Welll.... If we run out helium we are actually kind of buggered. Look at the periodic table. Good job that will never happen then. Firstly because it is the second most abundant element in the universe.
But also because it is possible to make Helium by allowing an alpha particle to capture two electrons. This is tricky, but not impossible as it is how the stuff gets made in suns anyway.
On another note I would hazard a guess that DARPA are looking at airships again because of oil running out. Unlike Helium, Oil is very difficult to make. Artificially forming long carbon-hydrogen chains is very difficult unless you have thousands of years. It is also debatable whether it would be worth investing all the energy into creating oil for the return it would give you as the way we burn it is not very efficient.
If you are going to make fuel then make Hydrogen instead as this can be coerced to give up its stored energy in a much more efficient manner.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, you are a complete moron: The GNU licence means they HAVE to make the source code available on request at the very least.
The House of Lords in the context or parliament is the non-democratically selected load of old codgers that was gutted by both parties in an attempt to make the British political system more responsive to change.
The House of Lords in the context of Law is the English equivalent of the Supreme Court. The Lords who sit and decide cases in regards to law are only selected from high ranking judges.
They also get to sit in the Parliamentary House of Lords above but this does not work both ways. The Hereditary Peers (land owners who inherited their position in the Parliamentary House of Lords) have never been able to sit as Law Lords unless they also trained to be a barrister then spent their entire life practicing Law first.
The only exception to this when all Lords (not just Law Lords) can decide a case is in the case of impeachment.
Your comment about them owning most of the land implies that you think both bodies to be the same thing, they are not.
The following wikipedia page has some interesting info, pay attention to the section marked Judicial Functions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords
In our country anything can be made illegal if government can get it through parliament unless it breaches a Law that is passed down by a higher authority. The higher authorities we currently recognise are the European Court and the International Convention on Human Rights.
http://www.copylaw.com/forms/copyassn.html Interestingly that form recommends it is only used in conjuction with professional legal advice, which was my main point.
"This letter is confirmation that [Company] transfers to you all copyrights and license rights for the Lotus Notes screens and databases you developed for us in 2002. You are free to use or sell the product at your discretion without fees or royalties to [Company]. In other words, you now own the software. We do ask that you destroy our client-specific data." It is signed by the CEO.
See? No fancy legalese necessary... plain English works just fine. Warning, this may not hold up in a court of law!!!
In order to understand the problem here you need to have an understanding of the concept of consideration as it applies to Contract Law. The basic premise is that you can only have a valid contract if both parties get something out of the agreement. We know you got something, but what did the company get? If the answer is nothing, or something they were already entitled to then the contract is not valid and can simply be ignored.
If your CEO was smart this is exactly why he provided this letter. He knew that if it was ever in the companies interest to sue he could still do so. This is exactly what the open source community does not need! Do NOT commit that code to any open source project, ever, under any circumatances.
This sort of action is exactly what Microsoft would love. Then they can buy they company and then sue this shit out of any other companies that openly use the project your code ends up in. If you got this code used in the linux Kernel it oculd have dire consequences.
Please do not take my word for this though as I am not a Lawyer. Before you engage in anything like this go and consult a real Lawyer on a paid basis. This way you can rely on his advise, in all other circumstances they might be able to claim they were not actually acting in a professional capacity.
Actually in that case it is because we bought useless american made shite. There are a number of reasons why the Chinook is a better aircraft than the Westland it replaced, but it has one major problem:
It requires a complicated linking of the two rotors to prevent the blades ever colliding, this linking prevents the helicopter from being able to auto-rotate in the event of engine failure.
This makes it much more likely to fall out of the sky like a rock if anything goes wrong.
Maybe the Republicans do not expect to win anyway. Maybe they do not want to win. Maybe they know the country is heading into a recession and would rather not have to deal with it.
In which case why not make sure you leave the incomming democratic government a right mess that they will spend there entire term struggling to clear up so they spend the entire term doing this and not actually getting anything constructive done.
There is something far more important that the French get out of this arrangement: Trust.
The problem with buying a closed source American Operating System is that you can never be truly sure that it is not full of backdoors built in by the NSA. Now some of you might consider this to be very paranoid but being paranoid can be quite important when it comes to national security, especially given the current US administrations attitudes to eavesdropping its own citizens and keenness for disrespecting other nations laws.
If I was a French police officer investigating a crime that MAY have been sanctioned by the US Government the fact that I was not able to trust the secrecy of any document I stored in electronic form would seriously hamper my efforts.
You might say I should not trust the secrecy of any document I store in electron form anyway but since I am an avid Linux enthusiast who hast fostered an interest in IT security since my teens (I am now in my thirties) I am fairly sure I can trust my own PC setup to be fairly secure. I would hope the French government can hire similar IT professionals.
By visiting this site we all take up a shit load of bandwidth. It's not by accident that we can kill a site that gets linked to if they do not have unlimited bandwidth. How many times have you tried to follow a link and it has been slashdotted? Please have a little more understanding of how much it must cost to host a site like this.
And since a great many of us have the ability to suppress all the adverts we must be a pretty poor group to market to unless you happen to be thinkgeek and sell the sort of crap we want to buy anyway. In which case the advertising was a waste of money anyway as we probably would have bought it anyway for the cheapest price we could find by google or some price comparison website.
Hang on a minute. You all seem to be talking like there is a web standard I could code to that would actually work.
Last time I checked there was not a single commercially available web browser that was truly standards compliant, is this still the case?
Will this page render correctly in you browser?
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top
I think not if you use an off the shelf browser. I have firefox, IE7, safari and Opera installed on this PC since I am now at work and none of them pass.
So stop talking like there are some defined useable web standards that we can currently use when creating complicated layouts in CSS. Until every browser is truly standards compliant then creating standards compliant web pages is not going to help avoid horrible browser hacks and so is actually me wasting my employers time.
I am not proud of this but with tight deadlines cross browser standards compliance is the first thing to slip if you know you are developing a corporate intranet and all the client has deployed is IE6. Anyone who insists on developing for other browers in this situation is just wasting time and hence money.
I do not develop complicated dynamic websites as a religion or hobby, I do it as a job so tailor each project to the clients needs, not my own.
They also have shit loads less space than you lot in the US. That means alot more people share accomodation and only have one small room to call their own.
I think there is another reason why DVD burners are more popular in Europe which nobody seems to have mentioned yet:
DVD's cost more here.
If you in the states want to watch a film that is not likely to be broadcast on TV due to it niche market you can just buy it on DVD for $10 or so. Over here that same DVD would be about £10. Now since the dollar to pound exchange rate is currently about $2 = £1 we effectively pay close to double the price for prerecorded DVDs. That is a real incentive to record any film you might want to watch in future and then keep the disk.
A DVR is all very well but however big the disk in it it will eventually be full and you have to start deleting stuff to make room. At that point you may only be able to watch it again in a few years by paying a fair old wodge of cash.
The other issue is that this is probably a lot less appealing to people in the states due to the adverts every 10 mins. Who wants to have a permanent copy of your favourite film that has so many interruptions. Over here in Europe (well in Britain anyway) we have TV channels with no advert brakes. We also have less advert brakes in general even on the channels that do show advertising. This makes the idea of keeping a permanent copy of something you tape a lot more appealing.
With all this in mind though, I would rather live in the US and simply pay less to buy prerecorded DVDs. Then I would not mind using a DVR as a temporary storage medium for stuff I had not got around to watching yet and deleting it when I did.
For me the lack of a user changeable battery was a show stopper. With every phone I buy I also buy a spare charged battery. That way if one runs out wheil I am out and about I can just swap to a new battery and call whoever I was talking to back straight away. This beats the hell out of trying to find an apple store in a city you may not know and may not have time to piss about in.
I am a die hard Linux user who generally hates Microsoft products, but I could not wait for the Google Phone so I bought a Kaiser instead. Cost me a shitload more than an Iphone would have but is a much better device.
- As montioned above it has a user swappable battery.
- Supports decent encrypted WiFi so I can connect to my home and works networks with no reconfiguration needed.
- It can be used as a 3G modem USB for my laptop when I have no WiFI within range.
- I can run loads more off the shelf apps on it as PocketPC is a much more established platform.
- It has SDK's available now so I develop any new tools I need.
- It has a fold out qwerty keyboard with tactile feedback when a key is pressed.
- It supports MS exchange integration for email, tasks, calendar and notes.
- It doesn't crash anywhere near as much as I was expecting (It IS a microsoft platform after all).
- It supports data encryption on the device so if I lose it the info has cursory protection from prying eyes. (Note cursory, I know you could probably crack it in a day or two)
Like it or not these are key features for a large number of corporate customers with the exception of the keyboard, that was a key factor for me though.
The main plus point of the Iphone seemed to be that it looked pretty.
I consider slashdot, wired and digg to be non-work related sites so I only visit them in my lunch brakes. When I get home I might have a quick glance at slashdot but I don't like spending all my free time on techy stuff as well as when I am at work.
When I am on company time I fairly disiplined about doing work or looking up matters directly relevant to the task at hand. General browsing for news while valuable in the long term, can also just be a distraction in the short term when you have interests as varied as my own.
Instead I choose Physics with Space Technology because it sounded interesting. I got to spend several years doing stuff that was very hard and did not come to me naturally thereby expanding my mind quite considerably. I got to learn about exploring the universe even though I knew some of the theory we learnt would never be put into practice in my lifetime.
I always knew I would eventually go back into working with computers as I have always loved software development since the first game I wrote on that Speccy. If people could make good $$ without college, I doubt you'd see so many people trying to go.... You can. It is harder but if you are very good at what you do and stand out as having a passion for it all you need to do is get your foot in the door. My first job involved me doing an unpaid apprentiship for 5 weeks. By the end of week 1 I was bored and asked for a proper project of my own. The boss gave me one but said not to worry if it got taken from me when someone else was ready to start it as I was not expected to be working on my own projects yet. By the end of week 2 I had made significant progress, had already been near gauranteed a job and the original developer who was tasked with the project was starting something else instead. I worked for that company for 2 and half years after they started paying me.
Some of us actually have jobs to do. That means I don't have time to read every story on all the sites you mention. I like the fact that slashdot shows me the pick of the bunch from various sites chosen by some real human beings (well, geeks anyway)
Sounds like you are pretty dumb yourself by assuming on slashdot everyone reads the same sites as you.
Thanks for the reply. I skipped looking at gPHPedit when evaluating editors since it was unmaintained, guess I will go back and have another look. Cheers again.
Do you do any dynamic development using SQL? If so what software would you recommend for connecting to database servers directly (like Connection Mangler for SQL-Server)? Currently I use Navicat but this seems unreliabel under linux as it it just the windows version and an embedded copy of wine.
Many thanks for any answers you can provide.
A relevant quote from somewhere or other:
"Theres no such thing as a foolproof system because fools are too inventive."
I tried to just verify this is the correct quote but it seems to exist in many forms on the net, all have a similar meaning. Incidentally if anyone can point me in the direction of it original source I would be interested to know where it came from.
Also note that the stats on your page about which party got the most actual votes are wrong. Please re-check the wikipedia page you supposedly use as a source. It shows that Labour got 9,562,122 votes while the Conservatives got 8,772,598.
If your page is based on a different source please quote it so we can see for ourselves.
Yup, I was wrong. I was basing my argument on an old newspaper article and obviously miss-remembered.
:)
It is interesting to note thought that even according to the wikipedia article you base your graphs on the Liberals are still massively under represented. They get 22.2 percent of the vote and yet only get 9 percent of the seats. So my main argument still holds true: That the political system of Great Britain is designed to benefit the two main parties.
Your point on your page about the Conservatives in Scotland bears this out. In Scotland they are the a minority part that very few people vote for (15% of actual votes). The system is not designed to benefit any particular party, just to ensure that the most popular parties are more likely to get a massive majority over the others.
Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with the Liberals in any way
But also because it is possible to make Helium by allowing an alpha particle to capture two electrons. This is tricky, but not impossible as it is how the stuff gets made in suns anyway.
On another note I would hazard a guess that DARPA are looking at airships again because of oil running out. Unlike Helium, Oil is very difficult to make. Artificially forming long carbon-hydrogen chains is very difficult unless you have thousands of years. It is also debatable whether it would be worth investing all the energy into creating oil for the return it would give you as the way we burn it is not very efficient.
If you are going to make fuel then make Hydrogen instead as this can be coerced to give up its stored energy in a much more efficient manner.