"... the courts will propably enforce a noncompete clause even if you didn't sign any."
With respect - do you come from some strange alternate reality? This is not in consonance with the reality I inhabit. Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. The court enforce a contract that was never entered into? That would truly be a grotesque conceit on the part of the court.
I don't understand those who think Spatial Nautilus is a boon to new users. The fact of the matter is, the vast majority of 'new' users are previous windows users, so emulating the Windows UI, even if you think it's flawed, is the only sensible way to ease the transition into Linux.
Bingo. Unfortunately, what is as clear as crystal to you and me seems to just bounce dully off The Powers That Be at Gnome. I don't have the self assuredness nor presumptivity (nor hopefully the ill manners) to suppose that it's because they're dumb. It's sort of like dyslexia. If you don't have it, it's very difficult to genuinely understand how those afflicted by it can't just concentrate harder and "get it". I don't mean that to sound condescending but it's difficult to make the point (which is why I'm not a first class writer).
In Windows there is a simple, easy to find checkbox in Folder Options that says "Open each folder in the same window" (yes or no). It's easy to understand, and easy to pick your choice.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo. It's just one example of what seems almost purposely going out of their way to make choice more difficult. I don't even care that the default is the new in-vogue spatial metaphor. Of course the user has the capability to accomplish his choice, but it's needlessly difficult to accomplish.
Everyone who has had an accident while using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing: that they were able to chat... on their phone and drive quite safely
Your denigrating what people use cell phones for ("chatting") is offensive. Many use them as part of their livelihood. But that's not the point here.
Since the rest of your post strongly indicates that you are in favor of ridiculously targeted legislation to cure this problem that you perceive (but in fact statistically is not a very significant cause of traffic accidents), let's take a look at where this big brother / nanny thinking would logically lead.
Consuming food and beverages while driving, yep, statistically a much more significant cause of traffic accidents.
Dealing with the kids - can be very dangerous.
Tuning the radio. Or hey, even LISTENING to the radio.
Talking to passengers - it's distracting.
And finally, you guessed it, THINKING about other things while driving. Distracting, man.
Do you really think targeted laws penalizing all of those activities will make the highways safer? I don't. But I KNOW it will make lawbreakers out of nearly every driver over and over again. Certainly trying to legislate against THINKING about other things is unenforceable (so far, anyway, thank goodness).
Legislating common sense and thoughtfulness. It doesn't work. Legislating to the least common denominator (just because YOU and your hypothetical others can't deal with a simple manual task, you penalize all the rest of us who can). It is wrong.
If the patent system was totally abolished, then few companies would bother to innovate.
BULL. That is what corporate shills would have you think. Are you pleased to have been taken in by them? Ever heard of trade secrets? Hmmmmmmmmmm?
Patents are EVIL and UNNATURAL. They go against the natural right to use the brain God gave you to create things. They are BRUTISH. I thought of that FIRST, NYAH NYAH. It makes no legal difference whether you copy my patented design, or think of it on your own, independently. Have you given any thought to how EVIL that is?
Implicit in many of the responses, which were all very helpful, is the assumption that you can't make a gun-type plutonium bomb work. And indeed, that was the consensus at the time. It was the first design they toyed with, and abandoned. But I'm not sure that I'm persuaded that a gun-type plutonium bomb really won't work. Maybe you would have to fire the projectuile with a higher velocity or make some other adjustment. Big deal.
And note that many users would be perfectly satisfied with even much less than 1.38% efficiency. Suppose Little Boy had only yielded 2 kilotons instead of 15. Methinks it wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference in achieving the desired effect.
So certainly I would never claim that the reasons cited are all invalid, but I'm still not persuaded that today - possibly, let's say - you couldn't do a lot with a few gun-type bombs, for not a lot of trouble.
Yes, but there's a flaw in that logic. If a third world country sponsors terrorist who "test" a nuclear weapon in a US city... even if it doesn't work (dirty bomb)... we might be tempted to show them how a real one works.
Oh? Suppose it does work. Then just how to you propose to figure out who "they" are, beyond a reasonable doubt? And if you do figure out who "they" are, how do you make an iron clad case that they have been sponsored at all? And most of all, iron clad case or not, how do you propose to "explain" that the US has destroyed a substantial part of some nation in response for what some criminal element (even if that includes the government, presumably in great secrecy so the citizens would not know it) has perpetrated?
The only way to know if a bomb will fission properly (i.e. it will blow up and not just very hot) is to test it.
Well, it's the only way to know 100%, but if competent engineers build a Little Boy (Hiroshima) gun-type bomb, they can be very, very confident without bothering to test it.
The Little Boy bomb design was never tested because it was such a no-brainer that it would work. Built as a back-up to the Fat Man (Nagasaki) implosion type bomb, it was always taken for granted that it would work, while no one was that confident about Fat Man, which was why the design was tested in the Trinity test.
In a gun-type bomb, you take a slug of fissile material with a hole in it, and build a gun into the bomb to literally shoot a fissile projectile into the hole. Nothing could be simpler in principle. You need precision and competence in the design, and you need to know that projectile will assemble into the slug, but not fly right through it, and you need to tend to some details I'm not going to enumerate, but that is pretty straightforward engineering.
Little Boy was not very efficient. It had an 85 lb slug of U-235 and a 55 lb projectile of U-235, with what IIRC was a modification of a common 3" gun to shoot it. Only 1.38% of the U-235 actually fissioned, but that was enough to produce an explosion equal to 15,000 tons of TNT.
Little Boy wasn't very "little" either (10 feet long, 9700 lb). But that isn't much of a package requirement to take out a city with a very high assurance factor.
It always escaped me why the US (or someone else) didn't simply mass produce gun-type bombs, rather than apply the tremendous amount of science and engineering to perfect the implosion assembly type, of which Fat Man was the first design of many.
Which is why we'd be a lot better off with the Constitutional Party. I think it combines the best of the Libertarian (before they went off their rocker during the last decade) with an unwavering dedication to the Constitution.
For example, what are we supposed to make of this: "We recognize the right to political secession by political entities, private groups, or individuals."
Or this: "We oppose any abridgment of the freedom of speech through government censorship, regulation or control of communications media, including, but not limited to, laws concerning:"
Then going on to rule out any control whatsoever of obscenity.
Mind you, either party has more intelligence in their little finger than all the Demicans and Republocrats put together.
Actually, when prominent Libertarian candidates speak, they reveal FAR more simple minded and objectionable thoughts than anything in platform.
Neither is any desktop OS. Nonetheless, in my experience it has had far better multimedia performance than, say, Linux, which was hardly suitable at all until quite recently.
and so there is no guarantee that random drivers won't hang the system for arbitrary periods of time.
If they do, they are crap drivers, or drivers catering unsuccessfully to crap hardware. Any OS is at the mercy of this kind of crap.
Doesn't Win32 have some sort of async I/O or select()?
Yes, and yes. Look up "overlapped io" and "completion ports".
Unfortunately many still operate on the principle that the end justifies the means.
Heaven knows I'm not singling you out, but catchphrases like this are devoid of meaningfulness. They are about as meaningful as "The gostak distims the doshes".
Some ends justify some means. Some ends justify more means than other ends do. News flash. There are shades of grey.
So let's say you think "it is wrong to kill" (humans, that is). So an innocent 6 year old girl is taken hostage and is about to be beheaded slowly and painfully, then the body abused. You know this from prior deeds, and because the perpetrator announces he will do it.
You have a clean shot, almost guaranteed to instantly kill the perpetrator and free the unharmed girl. Do you do what you say is wrong, "kill"?
For all I know you might be a Quaker or other pacifist. If you answer "no", that is your choice, but I am thinking here, chances are your answer will be "yes".
I think one means just became justified by one end.
'Luftschifftechnik' is a stretch (luft-shiff-tech-nick)
But not "uft" as in "cruft" - it's closer to halfway between short "u" and long "oo".
But for the life of me I don't know how to pronounce 'GmbH'
I have heard it pronounced pretty close to gay - em -bah - hah. Not by a native German speaker, but someone who was pretty savvy. Native speakers, please jump in here.
There is no conflict. What cost $2500 per cubic foot in 1915 (heyday of the Zeppelins) cost $0.05 per cubic foot in the 1930's. One figure is clearly prohibitive; the other is not. MACON (which was most certainly NOT an "early" Zeppelin, and certainly not German built by the Luftschiff Zeppelin GmbH) cost some $5 million to construct and about $0.3 million to fill.
The US had altogether 4 rigid airships (not counting the British built R.38, which crashed prior to delivery): SHENANDOAH, LOS ANGELES, AKRON, and MACON. Even into the 1930's, helium was in short enough supply that I am not aware of any period of time where more than one of them was inflated with helium concurrently. It is possible there were one or more brief periods of 2 - certainly no more - but I am not aware of it. When MACON was completed, it is likely AKRON would have been laid up due to not enough helium being available, but in the event this decision was obviated by the crash of AKRON.
On the other hand, Germany built over 100 Zeppelins during the period 1900-1937 (the vast bulk of them prior to the close of WW I). If you are talking about early Zeppelins, as the post replied to was, you have to be talking about German Zeppelins.
Nowadays, enough helium is available to fill dozens of MACON size airships and scarcely notice bthe drain.
Re:using up the planet's supply of helium?
on
Zeppelin Flies Again
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Are there many industrial processes that use Helium that can't use something else besides making us talk funny?
Ignoring the "many" part, which seems pointless... let's see... 1) Supercooling, as in superconductivity. Nothing else will allow cooling as near to absolute zero. 2) Breathing mixture for very deep diving. 3) Lifting balloons and airships without extreme peril from fire.
Do you really need more examples of irreplaceability? I'd say a single significant example is enough.
That said, there's no difference whether we extract the helium, or leave it mixed in, when we extract all the natural gas in the planet and burn it up (as we are feverishly doing). Either way, the helium is gone. Might as well use it for something if the natural gas is to be expended anyway.
Just imagine what it would be like if all articles about Alan Turing were required to mention that he was gay, and how ironic that is since the nazis used to kill gays.
Had the Nazis in fact managed to kill this particular individual representative of their targeted class before he was instrumental in breaking the WW II German Naval enigma cipher, we might all perhaps be paying obeisance (or for some of us, some ruder gesture) to Berlin.
1. Wrong. Flammable is a perfectly good word. Inflammable is a redundant and misleading word, since it means flammable, but looks like it means non-flammable. 2. Correct. 3. Wrong, wrong, wrong. No Zeppelin until the 1990s used helium. When the first Zeppelin flew in 1900, there was not enough helium in the world to come close to putting a visible bubble in even one of its 17 gas cells. In 1915, by which time dozens of Zeppelins had flown, a single cubic foot cost $2500, and the cost to fill a single Zeppelin, even if enough were available in the entire world (which was not nearly the case by orders of magnitude), would have been more than the gross national product of Germany for the year.
1 out of 3.
By the way, couldn't agree more with your concluding remark.
Correct. U-235 is not a strong gamma ray emitter. It is mostly dangerous if inhaled in powder form. But the original claim was that the U-235 would be "spent" in short order. It will not. U-235 will stay potent, fuel or weapons grade, for practically an eternity.
The particular satellite class under discussion used U-235 reactors.
Re:Never mind spatial, how awful would THIS be?
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
I think you do a good job with the language, and I think I came down like a ton of bricks. My head will be fine, and hope yours is too.
I do think that you're right about the future. Something like Star Trek. "Computer, analyze tactical situation". If we can figure out how to do it.
So a file finder that can on its own answer broad questions/commands like "where is my letter to Joe" and "go to the directory containing my accounting data for last year" would be very cool.
"Well here's a clue for the terminally short-sighted: Do you think maybe- just maybe -we'll have a better way to deal with it in several hundred years???"
Well, MAYBE (as you put it). Tell you what. You rely on a mystical faith that MAYBE our descendants will develop this capability, while I'll prefer that we don't trust the future of the race to MAYBE.
We may be terminally short-sighted (I hardly think so), but you have terminal faith in "I can't tell you how right now, but things will turn out OK somehow, trust me."
"...most dangerous radioactive components will probably be gone by that time. So you'll have a bunch of somewhat harmless spent uranium..."
Bad guess. The half life of U-235 is 17 million years. The U-235 will hardly be "spent" in a few hundred (or a few thousand) (or for that matter, a few million) years.
Never mind spatial, how awful would THIS be?
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
"there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for different tasks."
But from the context of your post, it is obvious that you really mean "there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for the same task, depending on some arbitrary (and not really predictable, intuitive, or easily explicable) face-changing of the UI, chosen by the damned computer for the hapless user.
Ow, my head hurts just imagining how obstinate such a system would be to use.
When you see your idea explained the way it really would work, I humbly suggest you may have second thoughts.
Excellent! Do it! Anything that tosses even a little whiff of reality toward the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties gets my support (in spirit, of course).
Seriously, if/when you do find the citation, post it here - it would make a good read. Or, here's another idea. Why don't we citizens try to skim over ALL the bills filed each year. It would be an eye opener.
"Someone" should index all this crap and make it publically available (REALLY available, with a GOOD search engine).
Slashdot Mirror
"... the courts will propably enforce a noncompete clause even if you didn't sign any."
With respect - do you come from some strange alternate reality? This is not in consonance with the reality I inhabit. Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. The court enforce a contract that was never entered into? That would truly be a grotesque conceit on the part of the court.
I don't understand those who think Spatial Nautilus is a boon to new users. The fact of the matter is, the vast majority of 'new' users are previous windows users, so emulating the Windows UI, even if you think it's flawed, is the only sensible way to ease the transition into Linux.
Bingo. Unfortunately, what is as clear as crystal to you and me seems to just bounce dully off The Powers That Be at Gnome. I don't have the self assuredness nor presumptivity (nor hopefully the ill manners) to suppose that it's because they're dumb. It's sort of like dyslexia. If you don't have it, it's very difficult to genuinely understand how those afflicted by it can't just concentrate harder and "get it". I don't mean that to sound condescending but it's difficult to make the point (which is why I'm not a first class writer).
In Windows there is a simple, easy to find checkbox in Folder Options that says "Open each folder in the same window" (yes or no). It's easy to understand, and easy to pick your choice.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo. It's just one example of what seems almost purposely going out of their way to make choice more difficult. I don't even care that the default is the new in-vogue spatial metaphor. Of course the user has the capability to accomplish his choice, but it's needlessly difficult to accomplish.
Haha.. Down, boy. I guess you must be one of those folks who likes to drive and chat on the phone huh?
... bad guess. I never make a call and hardly ever (once a year maybe) answer the phone while driving.
... misguided.
Actually, err
I'm a somewhat rarer bird - one who regards busy bodies with a compulsion to nanny everyone else as
Everyone who has had an accident while using a mobile phone has thought exactly the same thing: that they were able to chat ... on their phone and drive quite safely
Your denigrating what people use cell phones for ("chatting") is offensive. Many use them as part of their livelihood. But that's not the point here.
Since the rest of your post strongly indicates that you are in favor of ridiculously targeted legislation to cure this problem that you perceive (but in fact statistically is not a very significant cause of traffic accidents), let's take a look at where this big brother / nanny thinking would logically lead.
Consuming food and beverages while driving, yep, statistically a much more significant cause of traffic accidents.
Dealing with the kids - can be very dangerous.
Tuning the radio. Or hey, even LISTENING to the radio.
Talking to passengers - it's distracting.
And finally, you guessed it, THINKING about other things while driving. Distracting, man.
Do you really think targeted laws penalizing all of those activities will make the highways safer? I don't. But I KNOW it will make lawbreakers out of nearly every driver over and over again. Certainly trying to legislate against THINKING about other things is unenforceable (so far, anyway, thank goodness).
Legislating common sense and thoughtfulness. It doesn't work. Legislating to the least common denominator (just because YOU and your hypothetical others can't deal with a simple manual task, you penalize all the rest of us who can). It is wrong.
If the patent system was totally abolished, then few companies would bother to innovate.
BULL. That is what corporate shills would have you think. Are you pleased to have been taken in by them? Ever heard of trade secrets? Hmmmmmmmmmm?
Patents are EVIL and UNNATURAL. They go against the natural right to use the brain God gave you to create things. They are BRUTISH. I thought of that FIRST, NYAH NYAH. It makes no legal difference whether you copy my patented design, or think of it on your own, independently. Have you given any thought to how EVIL that is?
Implicit in many of the responses, which were all very helpful, is the assumption that you can't make a gun-type plutonium bomb work. And indeed, that was the consensus at the time. It was the first design they toyed with, and abandoned. But I'm not sure that I'm persuaded that a gun-type plutonium bomb really won't work. Maybe you would have to fire the projectuile with a higher velocity or make some other adjustment. Big deal.
And note that many users would be perfectly satisfied with even much less than 1.38% efficiency. Suppose Little Boy had only yielded 2 kilotons instead of 15. Methinks it wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference in achieving the desired effect.
So certainly I would never claim that the reasons cited are all invalid, but I'm still not persuaded that today - possibly, let's say - you couldn't do a lot with a few gun-type bombs, for not a lot of trouble.
Yes, but there's a flaw in that logic. If a third world country sponsors terrorist who "test" a nuclear weapon in a US city... even if it doesn't work (dirty bomb)... we might be tempted to show them how a real one works.
Oh? Suppose it does work. Then just how to you propose to figure out who "they" are, beyond a reasonable doubt? And if you do figure out who "they" are, how do you make an iron clad case that they have been sponsored at all? And most of all, iron clad case or not, how do you propose to "explain" that the US has destroyed a substantial part of some nation in response for what some criminal element (even if that includes the government, presumably in great secrecy so the citizens would not know it) has perpetrated?
The only way to know if a bomb will fission properly (i.e. it will blow up and not just very hot) is to test it.
Well, it's the only way to know 100%, but if competent engineers build a Little Boy (Hiroshima) gun-type bomb, they can be very, very confident without bothering to test it.
The Little Boy bomb design was never tested because it was such a no-brainer that it would work. Built as a back-up to the Fat Man (Nagasaki) implosion type bomb, it was always taken for granted that it would work, while no one was that confident about Fat Man, which was why the design was tested in the Trinity test.
In a gun-type bomb, you take a slug of fissile material with a hole in it, and build a gun into the bomb to literally shoot a fissile projectile into the hole. Nothing could be simpler in principle. You need precision and competence in the design, and you need to know that projectile will assemble into the slug, but not fly right through it, and you need to tend to some details I'm not going to enumerate, but that is pretty straightforward engineering.
Little Boy was not very efficient. It had an 85 lb slug of U-235 and a 55 lb projectile of U-235, with what IIRC was a modification of a common 3" gun to shoot it. Only 1.38% of the U-235 actually fissioned, but that was enough to produce an explosion equal to 15,000 tons of TNT.
Little Boy wasn't very "little" either (10 feet long, 9700 lb). But that isn't much of a package requirement to take out a city with a very high assurance factor.
It always escaped me why the US (or someone else) didn't simply mass produce gun-type bombs, rather than apply the tremendous amount of science and engineering to perfect the implosion assembly type, of which Fat Man was the first design of many.
Dude, if you can't spot it, is it really dead (effectively)? Think about it, really.
Which is why we'd be a lot better off with the Constitutional Party. I think it combines the best of the Libertarian (before they went off their rocker during the last decade) with an unwavering dedication to the Constitution.
Compare the Constitution Party platform
Good
with the Libertarian
A little over the top
For example, what are we supposed to make of this:
"We recognize the right to political secession by political entities, private groups, or individuals."
Or this:
"We oppose any abridgment of the freedom of speech through government censorship, regulation or control of communications media, including, but not limited to, laws concerning:"
Then going on to rule out any control whatsoever of obscenity.
Mind you, either party has more intelligence in their little finger than all the Demicans and Republocrats put together.
Actually, when prominent Libertarian candidates speak, they reveal FAR more simple minded and objectionable thoughts than anything in platform.
Face it, NT is not a real-time OS
Neither is any desktop OS. Nonetheless, in my experience it has had far better multimedia performance than, say, Linux, which was hardly suitable at all until quite recently.
and so there is no guarantee that random drivers won't hang the system for arbitrary periods of time.
If they do, they are crap drivers, or drivers catering unsuccessfully to crap hardware. Any OS is at the mercy of this kind of crap.
Doesn't Win32 have some sort of async I/O or select()?
Yes, and yes. Look up "overlapped io" and "completion ports".
Unfortunately many still operate on the principle that the end justifies the means.
Heaven knows I'm not singling you out, but catchphrases like this are devoid of meaningfulness. They are about as meaningful as "The gostak distims the doshes".
Some ends justify some means. Some ends justify more means than other ends do. News flash. There are shades of grey.
So let's say you think "it is wrong to kill" (humans, that is). So an innocent 6 year old girl is taken hostage and is about to be beheaded slowly and painfully, then the body abused. You know this from prior deeds, and because the perpetrator announces he will do it.
You have a clean shot, almost guaranteed to instantly kill the perpetrator and free the unharmed girl. Do you do what you say is wrong, "kill"?
For all I know you might be a Quaker or other pacifist. If you answer "no", that is your choice, but I am thinking here, chances are your answer will be "yes".
I think one means just became justified by one end.
'Luftschifftechnik' is a stretch (luft-shiff-tech-nick)
But not "uft" as in "cruft" - it's closer to halfway between short "u" and long "oo".
But for the life of me I don't know how to pronounce 'GmbH'
I have heard it pronounced pretty close to gay - em -bah - hah. Not by a native German speaker, but someone who was pretty savvy. Native speakers, please jump in here.
There is no conflict. What cost $2500 per cubic foot in 1915 (heyday of the Zeppelins) cost $0.05 per cubic foot in the 1930's. One figure is clearly prohibitive; the other is not. MACON (which was most certainly NOT an "early" Zeppelin, and certainly not German built by the Luftschiff Zeppelin GmbH) cost some $5 million to construct and about $0.3 million to fill.
The US had altogether 4 rigid airships (not counting the British built R.38, which crashed prior to delivery): SHENANDOAH, LOS ANGELES, AKRON, and MACON. Even into the 1930's, helium was in short enough supply that I am not aware of any period of time where more than one of them was inflated with helium concurrently. It is possible there were one or more brief periods of 2 - certainly no more - but I am not aware of it. When MACON was completed, it is likely AKRON would have been laid up due to not enough helium being available, but in the event this decision was obviated by the crash of AKRON.
On the other hand, Germany built over 100 Zeppelins during the period 1900-1937 (the vast bulk of them prior to the close of WW I). If you are talking about early Zeppelins, as the post replied to was, you have to be talking about German Zeppelins.
Nowadays, enough helium is available to fill dozens of MACON size airships and scarcely notice bthe drain.
Are there many industrial processes that use Helium that can't use something else besides making us talk funny?
... let's see ...
Ignoring the "many" part, which seems pointless
1) Supercooling, as in superconductivity. Nothing else will allow cooling as near to absolute zero.
2) Breathing mixture for very deep diving.
3) Lifting balloons and airships without extreme peril from fire.
Do you really need more examples of irreplaceability? I'd say a single significant example is enough.
That said, there's no difference whether we extract the helium, or leave it mixed in, when we extract all the natural gas in the planet and burn it up (as we are feverishly doing). Either way, the helium is gone. Might as well use it for something if the natural gas is to be expended anyway.
Just imagine what it would be like if all articles about Alan Turing were required to mention that he was gay, and how ironic that is since the nazis used to kill gays.
Had the Nazis in fact managed to kill this particular individual representative of their targeted class before he was instrumental in breaking the WW II German Naval enigma cipher, we might all perhaps be paying obeisance (or for some of us, some ruder gesture) to Berlin.
The Elements Of Style, if that is truly the case, is the hindquarters of a perissodactyl mammal.
Bzzzzt. Thank you for playing.
1. Wrong. Flammable is a perfectly good word. Inflammable is a redundant and misleading word, since it means flammable, but looks like it means non-flammable.
2. Correct.
3. Wrong, wrong, wrong. No Zeppelin until the 1990s used helium. When the first Zeppelin flew in 1900, there was not enough helium in the world to come close to putting a visible bubble in even one of its 17 gas cells. In 1915, by which time dozens of Zeppelins had flown, a single cubic foot cost $2500, and the cost to fill a single Zeppelin, even if enough were available in the entire world (which was not nearly the case by orders of magnitude), would have been more than the gross national product of Germany for the year.
1 out of 3.
By the way, couldn't agree more with your concluding remark.
Correct. U-235 is not a strong gamma ray emitter. It is mostly dangerous if inhaled in powder form. But the original claim was that the U-235 would be "spent" in short order. It will not. U-235 will stay potent, fuel or weapons grade, for practically an eternity.
The particular satellite class under discussion used U-235 reactors.
I think you do a good job with the language, and I think I came down like a ton of bricks. My head will be fine, and hope yours is too.
I do think that you're right about the future. Something like Star Trek. "Computer, analyze tactical situation". If we can figure out how to do it.
So a file finder that can on its own answer broad questions/commands like "where is my letter to Joe" and "go to the directory containing my accounting data for last year" would be very cool.
"Well here's a clue for the terminally short-sighted: Do you think maybe- just maybe -we'll have a better way to deal with it in several hundred years???"
Well, MAYBE (as you put it). Tell you what. You rely on a mystical faith that MAYBE our descendants will develop this capability, while I'll prefer that we don't trust the future of the race to MAYBE.
We may be terminally short-sighted (I hardly think so), but you have terminal faith in "I can't tell you how right now, but things will turn out OK somehow, trust me."
"...most dangerous radioactive components will probably be gone by that time. So you'll have a bunch of somewhat harmless spent uranium..."
Bad guess. The half life of U-235 is 17 million years. The U-235 will hardly be "spent" in a few hundred (or a few thousand) (or for that matter, a few million) years.
"there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for different tasks."
But from the context of your post, it is obvious that you really mean "there is nothing wrong with using different metaphors for the same task, depending on some arbitrary (and not really predictable, intuitive, or easily explicable) face-changing of the UI, chosen by the damned computer for the hapless user.
Ow, my head hurts just imagining how obstinate such a system would be to use.
When you see your idea explained the way it really would work, I humbly suggest you may have second thoughts.
Excellent! Do it! Anything that tosses even a little whiff of reality toward the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties gets my support (in spirit, of course).
Seriously, if/when you do find the citation, post it here - it would make a good read. Or, here's another idea. Why don't we citizens try to skim over ALL the bills filed each year. It would be an eye opener.
"Someone" should index all this crap and make it publically available (REALLY available, with a GOOD search engine).