What I don't understand is why the *nixes don't implement something like the Mac's trash can.
First, notice that if you run "rm" on Mac OS X, even it won't use the trash can.
The behavior of Linux and Mac is actually quite similar in this instance. On either platform, removing a file with the GUI tool brings it to a trash holder, but the command line deletes immediately.
Create an invisible directory under each and every mount that is called.trash, and when *any* user does *any* rm command, instead of deleting the files outright, simply move them into the.trash directory.
Simple, practical obstacles: ~/.trash won't work for files which are on other disks, network shares, removable media, etc. It would have to move the file to the same hard drive as your ~ directory first, which will at best take time, and at worst will overfill your own disk.
More fundamental, and historical explanation: Unix was designed as a operating system, a framework for applications. To keep the job managable, they added in things that were necessary for the OS (like files, copying, and deleting), but not things that could be better handled at the application level. ~/trash is GUI sugar: just a minor way to make it more difficult for users to input commands that they likely didn't intend.
So, then the question becomes, why did application-level implementations of a two-stage file deletion become popular? And here, the answer is the old canard "Good is the enemy of great". Because the native "rm" command was adequate for more than 98% of all usages, there was little demand to shift to something more complex, even if it would be occasionally safer.
When finally you are shopping around for disk space, only then do you consider emptying the trash.
Unix is a server-oriented OS, both historically and still today. Servers are expected to go weeks and months without a user sitting at them. Needing a person on-hand to Empty Trash just because the webserver has been creating and deleting a bunch of cache files is a bad thing.
I can't speak for laymen, but as a guy who has taken quite a few classes on formal languages, algorithms, and the theory of computation,
Then you'll really enjoy Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. (Although personally, I couldn't make it across the back cover before feeling sick...)
Some of the Amazon reviews are simultaneously hilarious and sad, particularly when someone thinks she actually learned something from the book. Naturally, Cryptonomicon would be the antidote to such illusions, but good luck getting them to sit through a 900 page book...
i'll save screwing around with 100% kill ratios or wild killing sprees or "tricks" to completing levels easily for
But that's not a trick- it's the most realsitic way to complete the assigned mission. If a game allows you the option of using violence or stealth, the easiest choice is to do both. If it is possible (but difficult) to sneak past 5 guards without them seeing you, it will be easy to sneak up on each one and break his neck.
Going for a 0% kill level is even more of an unrealistic challenge as 100%.
For the last time: PDF is an image format, not a text format. Use image formats to convey images, and text formats to convey text.
not for human consumption? are you saying these are operating systems for our pets or something?
Nope. If you look back on your examples of good uses for postscript, they involve transmission to monitors and printers. Neither monitors nor printers are human.
It's adequate to use Postscript internal to a display system, because the originator of the data is aware of the physical characteristics of the output device, and can reformat as necessary. The application knows what kind of color depth, resolution, and physical centimeters are availible on the output device, and took all that into account when laying out the data.
That works fine for transmission from a computer to its known output devices, but wrong if the publisher is distant from the viewer and unaware of what those output devices will be. PDF/PS is marginally adequate for material that the reciever will print out, because it is basically safe to assume all printers have the same page size available.
(In my specific case, though, it is inadequate. My optical resolution is well above average, so I comfortably read text at 2 or 3 point. If I have text in a text format, I can fill a standard page with 8-10 columns of small text that's fully legible to me. PDF forces me to waste 30-80% additional paper to protect the author's meticulous formatting)
The objection to PDFs comes down to whether or not you believe it's right for the computer revolution to enable the client of a publication to view it formatted for his own needs, instead of the desires of the author. It's about decentralization of power, and is the same philosophy that supports the use of ad-blocker proxies, for example.
the format DOES convey text, which is why there is a text selection tool. you can convert it to text, and read the text.
GIF and MP3 contain text streams too, but they don't deserve to be called "text formats" either. Extracting the text stream from a PDF will produce a far less readable output than if it had been in HTML (or even pure ascii) initially.
I think you're just bitching because it's Adobe's baby,
And you're wrong. As it happens, I do dislike that the PDF specification is not 100% open, but that is a separate concern. Postscript is more open than PDF, but no better in terms of sending a graphic to do a text job.
when you have to sign an agreement to even see the current and probably highly incorrect description of the DOC format.
Oh, I'm not happy that it's such an occulted and convoluted format either. But in terms of functionality and what the format accomplishes, a Microsoft Word Document (or ANY decent word processing format) is superior to PDF.
For real-world proof, just look at an actual hardware "e-book reader" (or download one of the free software e-book readers, such as the one from Microsoft) . Of the possible input files such a device could use, a proprietary format will usually work best, but then txt, htm, and doc files are next most usable. PDF is much less tolerable than any of them, because it is least amenable to client-side repagination.
No, they don't. There is a cost to ads, otherwise it wouldn't be profitable for advertisers. If you didn't know that already, I probably can't help you though...
There is always a cost. Today, that cost is in manipulating (some) people to buy things against their better judgement. It would be better for everyone if that cost was in the form of a simple exchange of money.
AC: Elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits (halflings,) i.e. most of Tolkein's characters are generally consolidated reproductions of archetypes used throughout
Obviously, the names are the same as in ancient myth, but the attributes given to them are mainly original. Pre-Tolkien, dwarves and elves were ghostly spirits, not flesh-and-blood people. They weren't characters- they were godlike forces of nature that shaped the characters' world. Compare the elves in Shakespere or the dwarves in Beowulf to any post-Tolkien representations, and you'll see a tremendous difference.
PS. Pre-Tolkien, an "orc" was a carnivorous manatee, a sea-monster.
Which makes this interesting - would it be too far a step to propose that this design be used to allow LCDs to natively support a number of different resolutions?
Absolutely. That would be just as smart as bolting a compact-car onto the roof of your SUV so you can enjoy the benefits of high fuel mileage and tremendous storage space.
Well, no, that was unfair. It would be like gluing a 22 and 45 caliber rifle together, so you always have the right firepower for large and small game.
AC: I'd really like such a monitor for working in Photoshop. The marching ant line around a selection can make it really hard to see whether the selection is lined up. Either putting the selection line on a second LCD layer or actually lifting the current selection up onto that layer would be very useful.
Won't work in that instance. The nontrivial distance between the two screens means you cannot tell exactly how the border lines up. Shifting 4 cm in your chair will cause 20+ pixels of disalignment between the screens.
The applications where I've seen this provide a genuine benefit was in CAD / 3-d modeling, where the rendered preview can be sitting behind the 3 wireframe panes, and in RTS games (or anything else with a top-down view looking at units, which includes ATC and similar real-life systems)
Eat some paint chips and explain how this is an improvement over looking at the transparencies one at a time.
You left out a critical point- the transparencies have to be of some spatially correlated data, such as an x-ray and radar imagining of the same object. In that case, the utility is obvious.
I am absolutely not saying that this gizmo is worth paying twice was a pair of normal LCDs would cost, but it does produce some benefit. Part of the reason it will never produce more benefit is because GUI toolkits won't be optimized for that type of display.
In that pic, you can read everything, but it is clear that if you use your computer for things like text, this would be a nearly unusable monitor.
Wrong. If you actually sit in front of the monitor, you can see the rear images fairly easily, particularly if you are a dual-eyed human. By subtlely adjusting the convergence angle of your binocular vision, you can instantly shift focus on either the front or rear screen.
The images on the front screen are thin enough (text and gui elements) so that they can block one of your eyes from seeing parts of the rear screen. The other eye can see it, and that's enough for the brain.
How do I know this? Because I used this monitors four years ago when they first came out- this article is absolutely not news to anyone interested in this stuff. Slashdot timeliness wins again.
Taking you seriously: That won't work. You can't encode binary data directly onto a wire as on/off symbols, unless the sender and reciever are synchronized with clocks of unattainable accuracy. It provides no safe way to distinguish (for example) 1000000000010 from 10000000000010, because one long string of silence sounds about like another.
This is why Morse code uses 2 kinds of beep, with "no beep" used only to separate them, and not meaningful on its own. And why ethernet uses an nrz encoding, where 0 = "off on" and 1 = "on off".
So, to fix your suggestion, 0 = short beep, 1 = long beep, and all is well.
Add another decimal place for that to make sense. $100 is more than 1 year of work in the 3rd world, but a USA resident at minimum wage earns more than $10,000 annually.
The html pages, are sent compressed, you localy have a program that acts as a proxy or something like that, then it decompresses it.
Be advised that the operation of any such system is a criminal violation of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Redistributing modified versions of copyrighted works without specific authorization is a serious offense.
But for a complete guide to some of the most basic principles like Calculus, French, English, C, physics, these things should have the equivalent of amazing text books available online but they don't. Sad:(
At least for technical subjects like Calcus and Electrical Engineering, you can find whole textbooks for download online. It's neither hard nor legal.
And another side affect, the sites your visiting will close down because they don't make any ad revenue.
Good. Because then when all internet sites have closed down, we'll finally see some progress on an efficient micropayment-like system of direct compensation from readers.
The traditional advertising-support model for mass-media only made sense because we didn't have the computer networks in place to track payments for small quantities of electrically-transmitted content. The antiquated system of "Pepsi pays InnovateMedia to place banners on Slashdot luring a tiny fraction of the readers to buy from them instead of Coke" is excessively indirect, which creates false economies.
When viewers are directly paying authors, the free market will bring more optimal and accurate content for everyone.
elinks/lynx feel very bizarre to use when you're used to the mouse-based interface of most other browsers.
lynx includes a mouse interface.
-use_mouse turn on mouse support, if available. Clicking the left mouse button on a link traverses it. Clicking the right mouse button pops back. Click on the top line to scroll up. Click on the bottom line to scroll down. The first few positions in the top and bottom line may invoke additional functions. Lynx must be compiled with ncurses or slang to support this feature. If ncurses is used, clicking the middle mouse button pops up a simple menu. Mouse clicks may only work reliably while Lynx is idle waiting for input.
Many people are unaware that terminal protocols include ways to propagate mouse clicks down to text-based applications.
One of the things that made LoTR powerful was the strength of the characters
From the typical viewpoint of "characters are people", then the LOTR books had hardly any characterization. The members of the fellowship were hardly more than stereotypes.
Only if you look at it in context and understand that those stereotypes were new inventions (at that time) can you grasp why the series had such acclaim. In a way, the entire races and cultures of elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits were characters of themselves.
Readers born after the 1970s will barely recognize that fact, because the ideas have been copied so broadly through D&D, World of Warcraft, etc.
These guys are pretty retarded though, since they could easily find out what the sperm whale has to do with anything if they read the book-
That's what they want you to think- they've got an image to uphold.
Maxim's popularity (and thus profit) is based on projecting an aura of exaggerated masculinity. Amoung other effects, that means they must eschew any nerd-like tendencies, such as remembering the plot or backstory to a sci-fi feature.
Understand HGttG = nerd = no girls = no sales.
Such writers can admit to watching something like Matrix or Star Wars only for spectacular stunts and explosions, not for admiring the fictional world or its techno-social implications.
No it doesn't. The phrase "the people" was not attached to "freedom of speech". As written, the amendment applies to all speech, even from beings legally determined to be non-people (slaves & such).
"The people" was used only in connection with the right to assemble, which indeed is the primary right of which felons are deprived (by incarceration)
Mark my words -- if it ever becomes realistic, it will be stopped because we'd be contaminating a native environment.
Yeah, because the groups in charge of environmental exploitation (mega-corporations and their pet congressmen) really care about preserving ecosystems for monocellular alien life that in all likelihood has never existed. Just the same as when the King of Portugal convened that treaty to defend the native cultures of America back in 1493!
The "Red" faction in KSR's "Mars" trilogy? A total fantasy. Humans squeezing out their survival on the pioneer DON'T care about environmentalism.
And what of Mars? I suppose we'll just plant some seeds, spread a little water and have a full fledge hdroponics garden.
You are comparing a persistent base on Mars versus a base on the Moon, when the actual discussion was between a quick, dust-scooping flag-planting Martian visit being launched with or without a moonbase first. Entirely different things. It's true that most of the obstacles to a moon base would also need to be addressed for a Mars base... but nobody actually said it would be a marsbase.
These are advantages only for a particular use, long and/or detailed reading matter, but in that field they rightly outcompete HTML.
HTML can trivially support all those advantages, if the author wishes it. (In fact, they would be the default unless web-server tricks are specifically performed to countervail)
Alternatively, the viewer is free to use client-side software to implement any of those benefits on arbitrary HTML documents. Control is in the hands of the viewer (ie, "power to the people"). PDF is about leaving control with the centralized publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is why the *nixes don't implement something like the Mac's trash can.
.trash, and when *any* user does *any* rm command, instead of deleting the files outright, simply move them into the .trash directory.
First, notice that if you run "rm" on Mac OS X, even it won't use the trash can.
The behavior of Linux and Mac is actually quite similar in this instance. On either platform, removing a file with the GUI tool brings it to a trash holder, but the command line deletes immediately.
Create an invisible directory under each and every mount that is called
Simple, practical obstacles: ~/.trash won't work for files which are on other disks, network shares, removable media, etc. It would have to move the file to the same hard drive as your ~ directory first, which will at best take time, and at worst will overfill your own disk.
More fundamental, and historical explanation: Unix was designed as a operating system, a framework for applications. To keep the job managable, they added in things that were necessary for the OS (like files, copying, and deleting), but not things that could be better handled at the application level. ~/trash is GUI sugar: just a minor way to make it more difficult for users to input commands that they likely didn't intend.
So, then the question becomes, why did application-level implementations of a two-stage file deletion become popular? And here, the answer is the old canard "Good is the enemy of great". Because the native "rm" command was adequate for more than 98% of all usages, there was little demand to shift to something more complex, even if it would be occasionally safer.
When finally you are shopping around for disk space, only then do you consider emptying the trash.
Unix is a server-oriented OS, both historically and still today. Servers are expected to go weeks and months without a user sitting at them. Needing a person on-hand to Empty Trash just because the webserver has been creating and deleting a bunch of cache files is a bad thing.
I can't speak for laymen, but as a guy who has taken quite a few classes on formal languages, algorithms, and the theory of computation,
Then you'll really enjoy Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. (Although personally, I couldn't make it across the back cover before feeling sick...)
Some of the Amazon reviews are simultaneously hilarious and sad, particularly when someone thinks she actually learned something from the book. Naturally, Cryptonomicon would be the antidote to such illusions, but good luck getting them to sit through a 900 page book...
i'll save screwing around with 100% kill ratios or wild killing sprees or "tricks" to completing levels easily for
But that's not a trick- it's the most realsitic way to complete the assigned mission. If a game allows you the option of using violence or stealth, the easiest choice is to do both. If it is possible (but difficult) to sneak past 5 guards without them seeing you, it will be easy to sneak up on each one and break his neck.
Going for a 0% kill level is even more of an unrealistic challenge as 100%.
For the last time: PDF is an image format, not a text format. Use image formats to convey images, and text formats to convey text.
not for human consumption? are you saying these are operating systems for our pets or something?
Nope. If you look back on your examples of good uses for postscript, they involve transmission to monitors and printers. Neither monitors nor printers are human.
It's adequate to use Postscript internal to a display system, because the originator of the data is aware of the physical characteristics of the output device, and can reformat as necessary. The application knows what kind of color depth, resolution, and physical centimeters are availible on the output device, and took all that into account when laying out the data.
That works fine for transmission from a computer to its known output devices, but wrong if the publisher is distant from the viewer and unaware of what those output devices will be. PDF/PS is marginally adequate for material that the reciever will print out, because it is basically safe to assume all printers have the same page size available.
(In my specific case, though, it is inadequate. My optical resolution is well above average, so I comfortably read text at 2 or 3 point. If I have text in a text format, I can fill a standard page with 8-10 columns of small text that's fully legible to me. PDF forces me to waste 30-80% additional paper to protect the author's meticulous formatting)
The objection to PDFs comes down to whether or not you believe it's right for the computer revolution to enable the client of a publication to view it formatted for his own needs, instead of the desires of the author. It's about decentralization of power, and is the same philosophy that supports the use of ad-blocker proxies, for example.
the format DOES convey text, which is why there is a text selection tool. you can convert it to text, and read the text.
GIF and MP3 contain text streams too, but they don't deserve to be called "text formats" either. Extracting the text stream from a PDF will produce a far less readable output than if it had been in HTML (or even pure ascii) initially.
I think you're just bitching because it's Adobe's baby,
And you're wrong. As it happens, I do dislike that the PDF specification is not 100% open, but that is a separate concern. Postscript is more open than PDF, but no better in terms of sending a graphic to do a text job.
when you have to sign an agreement to even see the current and probably highly incorrect description of the DOC format.
Oh, I'm not happy that it's such an occulted and convoluted format either. But in terms of functionality and what the format accomplishes, a Microsoft Word Document (or ANY decent word processing format) is superior to PDF.
For real-world proof, just look at an actual hardware "e-book reader" (or download one of the free software e-book readers, such as the one from Microsoft) . Of the possible input files such a device could use, a proprietary format will usually work best, but then txt, htm, and doc files are next most usable. PDF is much less tolerable than any of them, because it is least amenable to client-side repagination.
Ads make information free. The way it should be.
No, they don't. There is a cost to ads, otherwise it wouldn't be profitable for advertisers. If you didn't know that already, I probably can't help you though...
There is always a cost. Today, that cost is in manipulating (some) people to buy things against their better judgement. It would be better for everyone if that cost was in the form of a simple exchange of money.
AC: Elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits (halflings,) i.e. most of Tolkein's characters are generally consolidated reproductions of archetypes used throughout
Obviously, the names are the same as in ancient myth, but the attributes given to them are mainly original. Pre-Tolkien, dwarves and elves were ghostly spirits, not flesh-and-blood people. They weren't characters- they were godlike forces of nature that shaped the characters' world. Compare the elves in Shakespere or the dwarves in Beowulf to any post-Tolkien representations, and you'll see a tremendous difference.
PS. Pre-Tolkien, an "orc" was a carnivorous manatee, a sea-monster.
Which makes this interesting - would it be too far a step to propose that this design be used to allow LCDs to natively support a number of different resolutions?
Absolutely. That would be just as smart as bolting a compact-car onto the roof of your SUV so you can enjoy the benefits of high fuel mileage and tremendous storage space.
Well, no, that was unfair. It would be like gluing a 22 and 45 caliber rifle together, so you always have the right firepower for large and small game.
AC: I'd really like such a monitor for working in Photoshop. The marching ant line around a selection can make it really hard to see whether the selection is lined up. Either putting the selection line on a second LCD layer or actually lifting the current selection up onto that layer would be very useful.
Won't work in that instance. The nontrivial distance between the two screens means you cannot tell exactly how the border lines up. Shifting 4 cm in your chair will cause 20+ pixels of disalignment between the screens.
The applications where I've seen this provide a genuine benefit was in CAD / 3-d modeling, where the rendered preview can be sitting behind the 3 wireframe panes, and in RTS games (or anything else with a top-down view looking at units, which includes ATC and similar real-life systems)
Eat some paint chips and explain how this is an improvement over looking at the transparencies one at a time.
You left out a critical point- the transparencies have to be of some spatially correlated data, such as an x-ray and radar imagining of the same object. In that case, the utility is obvious.
I am absolutely not saying that this gizmo is worth paying twice was a pair of normal LCDs would cost, but it does produce some benefit. Part of the reason it will never produce more benefit is because GUI toolkits won't be optimized for that type of display.
In that pic, you can read everything, but it is clear that if you use your computer for things like text, this would be a nearly unusable monitor.
Wrong. If you actually sit in front of the monitor, you can see the rear images fairly easily, particularly if you are a dual-eyed human. By subtlely adjusting the convergence angle of your binocular vision, you can instantly shift focus on either the front or rear screen.
The images on the front screen are thin enough (text and gui elements) so that they can block one of your eyes from seeing parts of the rear screen. The other eye can see it, and that's enough for the brain.
How do I know this? Because I used this monitors four years ago when they first came out- this article is absolutely not news to anyone interested in this stuff. Slashdot timeliness wins again.
0=no beep 1=beep
Taking you seriously:
That won't work. You can't encode binary data directly onto a wire as on/off symbols, unless the sender and reciever are synchronized with clocks of unattainable accuracy. It provides no safe way to distinguish (for example) 1000000000010 from 10000000000010, because one long string of silence sounds about like another.
This is why Morse code uses 2 kinds of beep, with "no beep" used only to separate them, and not meaningful on its own. And why ethernet uses an nrz encoding, where 0 = "off on" and 1 = "on off".
So, to fix your suggestion, 0 = short beep, 1 = long beep, and all is well.
but why not just identify yourself as loband?
Add another decimal place for that to make sense. $100 is more than 1 year of work in the 3rd world, but a USA resident at minimum wage earns more than $10,000 annually.
The html pages, are sent compressed, you localy have a program that acts as a proxy or something like that, then it decompresses it.
Be advised that the operation of any such system is a criminal violation of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Redistributing modified versions of copyrighted works without specific authorization is a serious offense.
But for a complete guide to some of the most basic principles like Calculus, French, English, C, physics, these things should have the equivalent of amazing text books available online but they don't. Sad :(
At least for technical subjects like Calcus and Electrical Engineering, you can find whole textbooks for download online. It's neither hard nor legal.
And another side affect, the sites your visiting will close down because they don't make any ad revenue.
Good. Because then when all internet sites have closed down, we'll finally see some progress on an efficient micropayment-like system of direct compensation from readers.
The traditional advertising-support model for mass-media only made sense because we didn't have the computer networks in place to track payments for small quantities of electrically-transmitted content. The antiquated system of "Pepsi pays InnovateMedia to place banners on Slashdot luring a tiny fraction of the readers to buy from them instead of Coke" is excessively indirect, which creates false economies.
When viewers are directly paying authors, the free market will bring more optimal and accurate content for everyone.
lynx includes a mouse interface.
turn on mouse support, if available. Clicking the left mouse button on a link traverses it. Clicking the right mouse button pops back. Click on the top line to scroll up. Click on the bottom line to scroll down. The first few positions in the top and bottom line may invoke additional functions. Lynx must be compiled with ncurses or slang to support this feature. If ncurses is used, clicking the middle mouse button pops up a simple menu. Mouse clicks may only work reliably while Lynx is idle waiting for input.
Many people are unaware that terminal protocols include ways to propagate mouse clicks down to text-based applications.
One of the things that made LoTR powerful was the strength of the characters
From the typical viewpoint of "characters are people", then the LOTR books had hardly any characterization. The members of the fellowship were hardly more than stereotypes.
Only if you look at it in context and understand that those stereotypes were new inventions (at that time) can you grasp why the series had such acclaim. In a way, the entire races and cultures of elves, dwarves, orcs and hobbits were characters of themselves.
Readers born after the 1970s will barely recognize that fact, because the ideas have been copied so broadly through D&D, World of Warcraft, etc.
What I meant was that films are rarely as good as their book versions.
In almost every instance when a book follows a movie, it is much worse.
These guys are pretty retarded though, since they could easily find out what the sperm whale has to do with anything if they read the book-
That's what they want you to think- they've got an image to uphold.
Maxim's popularity (and thus profit) is based on projecting an aura of exaggerated masculinity. Amoung other effects, that means they must eschew any nerd-like tendencies, such as remembering the plot or backstory to a sci-fi feature.
Understand HGttG = nerd = no girls = no sales.
Such writers can admit to watching something like Matrix or Star Wars only for spectacular stunts and explosions, not for admiring the fictional world or its techno-social implications.
Depends on the definition of "the people".
Thank you, thank you for not including the "640k should be enough for anyone" line fancifully attributed to William Gates III.
Back in the 80s when it started making the rounds, everyone could tell it was only a joke, but apparently youngsters heard it and took it seriously...
Depends on the definition of "the people".
No it doesn't. The phrase "the people" was not attached to "freedom of speech". As written, the amendment applies to all speech, even from beings legally determined to be non-people (slaves & such).
"The people" was used only in connection with the right to assemble, which indeed is the primary right of which felons are deprived (by incarceration)
Mark my words -- if it ever becomes realistic, it will be stopped because we'd be contaminating a native environment.
Yeah, because the groups in charge of environmental exploitation (mega-corporations and their pet congressmen) really care about preserving ecosystems for monocellular alien life that in all likelihood has never existed. Just the same as when the King of Portugal convened that treaty to defend the native cultures of America back in 1493!
The "Red" faction in KSR's "Mars" trilogy? A total fantasy. Humans squeezing out their survival on the pioneer DON'T care about environmentalism.
And what of Mars? I suppose we'll just plant some seeds, spread a little water and have a full fledge hdroponics garden.
You are comparing a persistent base on Mars versus a base on the Moon, when the actual discussion was between a quick, dust-scooping flag-planting Martian visit being launched with or without a moonbase first. Entirely different things. It's true that most of the obstacles to a moon base would also need to be addressed for a Mars base... but nobody actually said it would be a marsbase.
Shouldn't you get them to sign a contract before you do the work?
Right! Because nobody's ever broken a contract. Just the same way that copyright law stopped anyone from exchanging MP3 files on Napster.
These are advantages only for a particular use, long and/or detailed reading matter, but in that field they rightly outcompete HTML.
HTML can trivially support all those advantages, if the author wishes it. (In fact, they would be the default unless web-server tricks are specifically performed to countervail)
Alternatively, the viewer is free to use client-side software to implement any of those benefits on arbitrary HTML documents. Control is in the hands of the viewer (ie, "power to the people"). PDF is about leaving control with the centralized publishers.