"the people working on the projects aren't obliged to do anything either"
What if I'm using the software to run a heart bypass machine and it is malfunctioning and if the project would support me then I could save this person's life. But if they don't help me then the person will die. All they have to do is send me one email back with a one line answer to a question. They don't have an obligation to do this to help this person live? If someone is dying isn't there some amount of effort that people who can help are obliged to do? And if they are obliged to help this person live then it can't be true that they "aren't obliged to do anything" as you said.
They're not even obliged to read the mail in which you ask for help.
Also, I think you're criminally negligent by putting someone's life under control of unsupported software.
Open source projects that have both open source adn commercial support offerings are in a difficult position because they need to support the non-paying users to make sure they have a good experience and hope fully turn them into paying customers while providing better support for paying customers. So how do you support both without giving it all away?
By supporting the people who pay you money. People who don't pay you are free to ask questions, make suggestions, submit patches and help others, but people who pay money get your time. And all the other people will eventually benefit from that.
In the end, OSS is a community effort. It's not about supporting leeches, it's about creating a healthy project together in a way that everybody benefits from it.
The problem is that the Open Source community "sells" their product based on a zero price point. If this isn't true, then they should be making that explicit up front.
If they offer it for free download (on Sourceforce or something), then it is true. But you get what you pay for.
My previous employer, for example, has an OSS enterprise CMS downloadable for free. They sell support contracts. If you want real support, you'll be paying them quite a lot of money. But if you want, you can just download it and have cheap Indians support it and develop your own extensions for it. A major bank did this, for example. It's perfectly legal, but in their case not very smart. The Indians ended up hiring us to teach them how to work with it, and to develop the most complex parts that the bank needed.
This suited us perfectly because we got to do only the interesting stuff, it suited the Indians because they learned something new, and it suits the bank, because now there are two parties capable of supporting their website/ECMS/asset management monstrosity.
Actually there are more; my previous employer is part of a couple of OSS communities with lots of experts on the various related technologies, and they're in close cooperation/competition with a couple of other companies who could also do the same job (though not as good as my previous employer).
If you're a business and you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later, that can work out to be very expensive.
If you're a business that spent 100 hours installing a piece of software without checking its reliability or support, then you're a lot better off using OSS instead of proprietary software, because there you can at least do your own support.
And if you can't do your own support, then why the hell are you spending so much time on something that might not be of any use to you?
Likewise if you're a student and a paper is due but you can't complete it due to a bug/error and the support section for the program you've used no longer exists, it's a big issue.
But that's the same when you're using proprietary software.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
If the market is so small that neither competition nor support are viable, then yes, you're out of luck. Particularly because that market will also be unattractive to proprietary software developers.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software
Note that Open Source is not necessarily uncommercial. A lot of commercial companies peddle OSS.
and usually commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete
You're funny. The problem is that with proprietary software, you have no control over the lifespan of the software of over the decision when it's considered obsolete.
I agree. But don't argue that Redhat is not a commercial company.
Why would anyone argue that?
I see no difference from a commercial perspective between deploying RedHat Linux to my servers and deploying Windows to my servers.
Then I'll explain the difference to you. If Microsoft ever decides not to support the Windows version on your servers, you've got a problem. You're at their mercy. And don't think they'll never do that; Microsoft has abandoned services that people paid for. Those people are now out of luck, lost their money, and don't have any alternative.
If RedHat ever decides not to support the OS on your servers, chances are someone else is willing to do it. They might not be as good as RedHat, or they might be more expensive. Or maybe your own server administrator knows enough about it to do it. In any case, you've got options.
Depends. When you rely completely on proprietary software that suddenly becomes unsupported, switching can become very expensive. When it's Open Source, switching is a lot less expensive, since the software isn't a black box. And in fact, it may not even be necessary to switch, because someone else can take over support of the software.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anybody who says that a business can just hire someone to work on open source software if it becomes unsupported does not understand the first thing about the nature of business.
It's a lot easier than hiring someone to work on proprietary software that isn't yours.
OSS provides fallback solutions that proprietary software simply doesn't.
When an open source project is first released, there is rarely any talk of cost. In fact the reason businesses go with open source is because the cost is lower.
It often is, but the real advantage is in the freedom it provides.
Now you're saying that there is a cost, and potentially a huge one. The difference being that in open source you don't know the cost until after you've been using the software.
Depends on whether you negotiate your support contract up front or not.
And let's fact it, with proprietary software there's just as much chance of the developer abandoning the product, or going in a different direction than you want. There, you've been paying money and suddenly you're out of luck. With OSS, you can support the software yourself, or pay someone else to support it for you.
I know we joke about "the first one is always free", but is that really the sort of business model that we want? The same business model used by drug dealers and payday loans?
I don't know what kind of business model you want, but I'd like one where you're not tied by your hands and feet to a single vendor. That's something OSS can provide.
And before you bring out the tired old argument that the sopurce is available, you can just hire somebody, think about how much that costs. Maintaining software is expensive. Very expensive.
But that's no different from proprietary software. That's also expensive, and you get less control in return for your money.
Forking your own version of a major open source project would cost in the millions of a dollars per year. It's ludicrous to expect any commercial enterprise to do that.
A lot of commercial enterprises have done just that.
Given your and many other arguments regarding lack of support for OSS,
What lack of support? There's lots of support, exactly because there's more open competition for it.
I would have to say that OSS is still far too risky for any commercial uptake. Commercial software is still the better way to go.
If you like vendor lock-in, it is.
Enterprises that have critical systems depending on OSS really need to rethink their strategies if there is such a big risk that a key component of their systems will just evaporate overnight.
Software doesn't evaporate overnight. Not if you made backups, anyway. And any critical enterprise systems will have backups.
The software won't evaporate overnight exactly because it's open source. You've got equal access to it, and can keep using it when licenses or contracts expire. When the vendor goes belly up, you've got options that you wouldn't have had if it was proprietary software.
My previous employer used lots of software from abandoned OSS projects. Usually they didn't need much support, and when they did, we did it ourselves.
But if that's the case, then OSS becomes worse than useless for businesses.
Not at all. If there's profit in supporting OSS, then usually someone will step up and do it. Lots of business OSS projects are supported by the very businesses that make use of it.
If the software is a key component of my business it's got to continue to be available.
Then pay someone to make sure it is. It's open source. As a business, you can do with it as you like, and it will continue to be available if you make sure it is.
Attitudes like "it's not my problem if my software no longer works" can only hamper the uptake of OSS.
If nobody cares that it's no longer working, then clearly nobody is using it for anything meaningful.
This attitude is fine if you believe that OSS should be relegated to hobbyists but the Slashdot community tends to trumpet OSS as a business solution. If there are people depending on your software, then you've made a commitment.
They will have changed, just very slowly:) There will be lots of differences between them and the examples preserved in the fossil record, but its not easy to determine what they are.
But is that evolution, or just genetic drift?
If they change so little over such a long period of time, it seems to me that there's no evolutionary pressure for them to change, and possibly a lot of pressure to remain the way they are.
Why is it so unlikely that a population may be so well adapted to its environment that for millions of years no truly beneficial mutation occurs?
The fact that forms which function well are conserved does not mean that they have not evolved, it just means they've come up with a good design and forces are at play to preserve that design.
And is that different from what PE claims?
I admit I've never actually read Gould or Dawkins, but my impression of PE has always been exactly what you're describing here: evolution doesn't happen at the steady pace that Darwin expected. Sometimes it's really fast because the environment just changed dramatically and there's lots of new stuff to adapt to, and sometimes really slow because the population is as well adapted to its environment as is feasible.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and I've always assumed this is what PE was. If PE predicts some magical stop-and-go evolution whose pace is unrelated to changes in the environment, then PE would make no sense.
Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?
No.
A project itself is not obliged to do anything. In the case of non-commercial volunteer projects (which not all open source projects are), the people working on the projects aren't obliged to do anything either. And by the very nature of Open Source, even the users of the project aren't obliged to do anything (except when it's GPL and they want to distribute their own changes to the project).
Ofcourse successful Open Source projects are often very well supported. But that's because the people working on it want it to be big and not because they're under any kind of obligation.
Scientists working on Polio (See Andino) have long since detected that viruses always live on the verge of mutating themselves to death to allow for the maximum variance in the quasispecies.... Obviously its possible for multicellular organisms to adopt similar mechanisms, I mean sex in general is a method for generating non-lethal varience.
Those who believe in evolution should be ashamed there are people like you who are fighting for their cause.
Evolution isn't a belief or a cause. Science might be a cause, some principles underlying science might be considered belief. Evolution is a natural process that has been observed, and the theory of evolution is a scientific theory that explains this process very well.
Not all creationists are Christians. Also, there's quite a bit of discussion about what "literally" really means when you're talking about the bible.
6k years.
Only for Young Earth Creationists. Old Earth Creationists, as their label implies, believe (or at least keep the option open that) the Earth is quite a bit older.
If they believe otherwise, they're not a creationist.
That may be your definition of creationist, but quite a lot of people have different definitions. There are even people who consider me a creationist because I believe in God, despite the fact that I think YEC, OEC and ID are poppycock.
The fossil record is the problem, its patchy and difficult to interpret. Punctuated Equilibrium is essentially a non-starter as far as I'm concerned (unless something has changed since my departure from the field of evolutionary biology in favour of computing), its a theory that describes a process that most likely doesn't even happen (evolutionary stasis).
What about all those "living fossils", that have lived virtually unchanged for dozens or even hundreds of millions of years? Shark, crocodile, horseshoe crab, coelacanth, etc. That sounds like pretty convincing evidence of PE to me.
I was thinking exactly the same thing - I'm still sceptical, certainly, but the Scientific American story that's linked from the one above does say that "it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).". They're definitely trying to claim that they've found a way to use random waste as a fuel source, which would be a breakthrough if true.
Using random waste as fuel source has been done already. Using random waste as a clean fuel source, now that's really a breakthrough. And if this process works the way I think it does, it should be pretty clean, no matter what you throw in.
Except for CO2 probably, which is kinda hard to prevent, and rather a big issue lately. I hope they can capture it in something safe. And if they can't, well, CO2 is still quite a lot better than dioxins.
Aren't there plenty of simple molecules and elements that are toxic, not just metals?
Most elements are only toxic when part of specific molecules. They're toxic because they're highly reactive, and reaction means they're going to a lower energy state. At some point, the energy state should become low enough that they're pretty inert.
Ofcourse stuff that's toxic because of radioactivity instead of chemical properties is a different matter. But if you vaporize it and mix it with lots of inert material, you should end up with something that's about as radioactive as sea water.
We should focus on reuse and recycling, not vaporization.
Are you seriously talking about creation of energy in the "conservation of energy" sense? In that case, my reply would be: Duh. But for the sake of the argument I'll assume you just mean that the process requires more than the 60MW those turbines generate.
In fact, I doubt it will have any more efficiency than the current conventional methods of turning trash into useful components. Keep in mind that vaporization of any solids from room temperature it going to take a massive amount of energy.
That's exactly what surprised me in this article. I've heard of using a plasma torch to turn toxic garbage into inert waste, which in itself would be extremely useful. But as I've always understood, it was expensive and only cost energy. Getting some energy back out of the process is great ofcourse, but I have a hard time believing that it would provide more power than it uses.
So either the article is misleading for suggesting that, or this is really truly very spectacular, and we should do this with all our trash.
But I think this just means that safely getting rid of toxic waste has just gotten a bit cheaper or more practical. Which is still immensely useful.
Slashdot Mirror
"the people working on the projects aren't obliged to do anything either"
What if I'm using the software to run a heart bypass machine and it is malfunctioning and if the project would support me then I could save this person's life. But if they don't help me then the person will die. All they have to do is send me one email back with a one line answer to a question. They don't have an obligation to do this to help this person live? If someone is dying isn't there some amount of effort that people who can help are obliged to do? And if they are obliged to help this person live then it can't be true that they "aren't obliged to do anything" as you said.
They're not even obliged to read the mail in which you ask for help.
Also, I think you're criminally negligent by putting someone's life under control of unsupported software.
OSS is providing alternatives to closed source programs for those who are capable of supporting themselves. It's not for everyone.
This is not true. There is a lot of OSS software that can be used by anyone and doesn't require any support. Firefox is a pretty big example.
Open source projects that have both open source adn commercial support offerings are in a difficult position because they need to support the non-paying users to make sure they have a good experience and hope fully turn them into paying customers while providing better support for paying customers. So how do you support both without giving it all away?
By supporting the people who pay you money. People who don't pay you are free to ask questions, make suggestions, submit patches and help others, but people who pay money get your time. And all the other people will eventually benefit from that.
In the end, OSS is a community effort. It's not about supporting leeches, it's about creating a healthy project together in a way that everybody benefits from it.
The problem is that the Open Source community "sells" their product based on a zero price point. If this isn't true, then they should be making that explicit up front.
If they offer it for free download (on Sourceforce or something), then it is true. But you get what you pay for.
My previous employer, for example, has an OSS enterprise CMS downloadable for free. They sell support contracts. If you want real support, you'll be paying them quite a lot of money. But if you want, you can just download it and have cheap Indians support it and develop your own extensions for it. A major bank did this, for example. It's perfectly legal, but in their case not very smart. The Indians ended up hiring us to teach them how to work with it, and to develop the most complex parts that the bank needed.
This suited us perfectly because we got to do only the interesting stuff, it suited the Indians because they learned something new, and it suits the bank, because now there are two parties capable of supporting their website/ECMS/asset management monstrosity.
Actually there are more; my previous employer is part of a couple of OSS communities with lots of experts on the various related technologies, and they're in close cooperation/competition with a couple of other companies who could also do the same job (though not as good as my previous employer).
molecules are put together in specific sequences to create specific elements, not the other way around...
I think you need to ask your chemistry teacher to explain the difference between molecules and atoms again.
If you're a business and you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later, that can work out to be very expensive.
If you're a business that spent 100 hours installing a piece of software without checking its reliability or support, then you're a lot better off using OSS instead of proprietary software, because there you can at least do your own support.
And if you can't do your own support, then why the hell are you spending so much time on something that might not be of any use to you?
Likewise if you're a student and a paper is due but you can't complete it due to a bug/error and the support section for the program you've used no longer exists, it's a big issue.
But that's the same when you're using proprietary software.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
If the market is so small that neither competition nor support are viable, then yes, you're out of luck. Particularly because that market will also be unattractive to proprietary software developers.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software
Note that Open Source is not necessarily uncommercial. A lot of commercial companies peddle OSS.
and usually commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete
You're funny. The problem is that with proprietary software, you have no control over the lifespan of the software of over the decision when it's considered obsolete.
I agree. But don't argue that Redhat is not a commercial company.
Why would anyone argue that?
I see no difference from a commercial perspective between deploying RedHat Linux to my servers and deploying Windows to my servers.
Then I'll explain the difference to you. If Microsoft ever decides not to support the Windows version on your servers, you've got a problem. You're at their mercy. And don't think they'll never do that; Microsoft has abandoned services that people paid for. Those people are now out of luck, lost their money, and don't have any alternative.
If RedHat ever decides not to support the OS on your servers, chances are someone else is willing to do it. They might not be as good as RedHat, or they might be more expensive. Or maybe your own server administrator knows enough about it to do it. In any case, you've got options.
And how much does this cost?
Depends. When you rely completely on proprietary software that suddenly becomes unsupported, switching can become very expensive. When it's Open Source, switching is a lot less expensive, since the software isn't a black box. And in fact, it may not even be necessary to switch, because someone else can take over support of the software.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anybody who says that a business can just hire someone to work on open source software if it becomes unsupported does not understand the first thing about the nature of business.
It's a lot easier than hiring someone to work on proprietary software that isn't yours.
OSS provides fallback solutions that proprietary software simply doesn't.
When an open source project is first released, there is rarely any talk of cost. In fact the reason businesses go with open source is because the cost is lower.
It often is, but the real advantage is in the freedom it provides.
Now you're saying that there is a cost, and potentially a huge one. The difference being that in open source you don't know the cost until after you've been using the software.
Depends on whether you negotiate your support contract up front or not.
And let's fact it, with proprietary software there's just as much chance of the developer abandoning the product, or going in a different direction than you want. There, you've been paying money and suddenly you're out of luck. With OSS, you can support the software yourself, or pay someone else to support it for you.
I know we joke about "the first one is always free", but is that really the sort of business model that we want? The same business model used by drug dealers and payday loans?
I don't know what kind of business model you want, but I'd like one where you're not tied by your hands and feet to a single vendor. That's something OSS can provide.
And before you bring out the tired old argument that the sopurce is available, you can just hire somebody, think about how much that costs. Maintaining software is expensive. Very expensive.
But that's no different from proprietary software. That's also expensive, and you get less control in return for your money.
Forking your own version of a major open source project would cost in the millions of a dollars per year. It's ludicrous to expect any commercial enterprise to do that.
A lot of commercial enterprises have done just that.
Given your and many other arguments regarding lack of support for OSS,
What lack of support? There's lots of support, exactly because there's more open competition for it.
I would have to say that OSS is still far too risky for any commercial uptake. Commercial software is still the better way to go.
If you like vendor lock-in, it is.
Enterprises that have critical systems depending on OSS really need to rethink their strategies if there is such a big risk that a key component of their systems will just evaporate overnight.
Software doesn't evaporate overnight. Not if you made backups, anyway. And any critical enterprise systems will have backups.
The software won't evaporate overnight exactly because it's open source. You've got equal access to it, and can keep using it when licenses or contracts expire. When the vendor goes belly up, you've got options that you wouldn't have had if it was proprietary software.
My previous employer used lots of software from abandoned OSS projects. Usually they didn't need much support, and when they did, we did it ourselves.
So a watt is equal to a joule per hour?
1 Watt is equal to 3600 Joule per hour. Because 1 Watt is 1 Joule per second, and there's about 3600 seconds in an hour.
There's so much I don't know about electricity.
This is not just about electricity, it's about all kinds of energy. Or power.
But if that's the case, then OSS becomes worse than useless for businesses.
Not at all. If there's profit in supporting OSS, then usually someone will step up and do it. Lots of business OSS projects are supported by the very businesses that make use of it.
If the software is a key component of my business it's got to continue to be available.
Then pay someone to make sure it is. It's open source. As a business, you can do with it as you like, and it will continue to be available if you make sure it is.
Attitudes like "it's not my problem if my software no longer works" can only hamper the uptake of OSS.
If nobody cares that it's no longer working, then clearly nobody is using it for anything meaningful.
This attitude is fine if you believe that OSS should be relegated to hobbyists but the Slashdot community tends to trumpet OSS as a business solution. If there are people depending on your software, then you've made a commitment.
If they have a support contract, then yes.
They will have changed, just very slowly :) There will be lots of differences between them and the examples preserved in the fossil record, but its not easy to determine what they are.
But is that evolution, or just genetic drift?
If they change so little over such a long period of time, it seems to me that there's no evolutionary pressure for them to change, and possibly a lot of pressure to remain the way they are.
Why is it so unlikely that a population may be so well adapted to its environment that for millions of years no truly beneficial mutation occurs?
The fact that forms which function well are conserved does not mean that they have not evolved, it just means they've come up with a good design and forces are at play to preserve that design.
And is that different from what PE claims?
I admit I've never actually read Gould or Dawkins, but my impression of PE has always been exactly what you're describing here: evolution doesn't happen at the steady pace that Darwin expected. Sometimes it's really fast because the environment just changed dramatically and there's lots of new stuff to adapt to, and sometimes really slow because the population is as well adapted to its environment as is feasible.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and I've always assumed this is what PE was. If PE predicts some magical stop-and-go evolution whose pace is unrelated to changes in the environment, then PE would make no sense.
Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?
No.
A project itself is not obliged to do anything. In the case of non-commercial volunteer projects (which not all open source projects are), the people working on the projects aren't obliged to do anything either. And by the very nature of Open Source, even the users of the project aren't obliged to do anything (except when it's GPL and they want to distribute their own changes to the project).
Ofcourse successful Open Source projects are often very well supported. But that's because the people working on it want it to be big and not because they're under any kind of obligation.
Scientists working on Polio (See Andino) have long since detected that viruses always live on the verge of mutating themselves to death to allow for the maximum variance in the quasispecies. ... Obviously its possible for multicellular organisms to adopt similar mechanisms, I mean sex in general is a method for generating non-lethal varience.
And it's great for passing on viruses too!
Those who believe in evolution should be ashamed there are people like you who are fighting for their cause.
Evolution isn't a belief or a cause. Science might be a cause, some principles underlying science might be considered belief. Evolution is a natural process that has been observed, and the theory of evolution is a scientific theory that explains this process very well.
If you are a creationist then you believe the Bible is the word of God and God is never wrong.
Not true. Lots of creationists are not Christian.
Creationists believe the bible literally...
Not all creationists are Christians. Also, there's quite a bit of discussion about what "literally" really means when you're talking about the bible.
6k years.
Only for Young Earth Creationists. Old Earth Creationists, as their label implies, believe (or at least keep the option open that) the Earth is quite a bit older.
If they believe otherwise, they're not a creationist.
That may be your definition of creationist, but quite a lot of people have different definitions. There are even people who consider me a creationist because I believe in God, despite the fact that I think YEC, OEC and ID are poppycock.
The fossil record is the problem, its patchy and difficult to interpret. Punctuated Equilibrium is essentially a non-starter as far as I'm concerned (unless something has changed since my departure from the field of evolutionary biology in favour of computing), its a theory that describes a process that most likely doesn't even happen (evolutionary stasis).
What about all those "living fossils", that have lived virtually unchanged for dozens or even hundreds of millions of years? Shark, crocodile, horseshoe crab, coelacanth, etc. That sounds like pretty convincing evidence of PE to me.
Just because Darwin first observed the process of evolution does not mean he was right about the mechanics behind it.
Darwin wasn't the first to observe the process of evolution, he was the first to describe the mechanics behind it accurately.
They're claiming that darwin may have been wrong or at least incomplete in his theory explaining the process of evolution.
We've also known for quite some time that Darwin's theory wrong in some details, or at least incomplete.
It really isn't all that helpful to spend more energy to produce less energy.
It is if you've got nowhere to store your trash.
But apparently this process really does produce more energy than it consumes.
I was thinking exactly the same thing - I'm still sceptical, certainly, but the Scientific American story that's linked from the one above does say that "it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).". They're definitely trying to claim that they've found a way to use random waste as a fuel source, which would be a breakthrough if true.
Using random waste as fuel source has been done already. Using random waste as a clean fuel source, now that's really a breakthrough. And if this process works the way I think it does, it should be pretty clean, no matter what you throw in.
Except for CO2 probably, which is kinda hard to prevent, and rather a big issue lately. I hope they can capture it in something safe. And if they can't, well, CO2 is still quite a lot better than dioxins.
1.2 kW per household? A hair dryer eats more than this.
May I recommend turning your hair dryer off after you're done drying your hair?
Aren't there plenty of simple molecules and elements that are toxic, not just metals?
Most elements are only toxic when part of specific molecules. They're toxic because they're highly reactive, and reaction means they're going to a lower energy state. At some point, the energy state should become low enough that they're pretty inert.
Ofcourse stuff that's toxic because of radioactivity instead of chemical properties is a different matter. But if you vaporize it and mix it with lots of inert material, you should end up with something that's about as radioactive as sea water.
We should focus on reuse and recycling, not vaporization.
Of course, but recycling isn't always practical.
This process will NOT "create" energy.
Are you seriously talking about creation of energy in the "conservation of energy" sense? In that case, my reply would be: Duh. But for the sake of the argument I'll assume you just mean that the process requires more than the 60MW those turbines generate.
In fact, I doubt it will have any more efficiency than the current conventional methods of turning trash into useful components. Keep in mind that vaporization of any solids from room temperature it going to take a massive amount of energy.
That's exactly what surprised me in this article. I've heard of using a plasma torch to turn toxic garbage into inert waste, which in itself would be extremely useful. But as I've always understood, it was expensive and only cost energy. Getting some energy back out of the process is great ofcourse, but I have a hard time believing that it would provide more power than it uses.
So either the article is misleading for suggesting that, or this is really truly very spectacular, and we should do this with all our trash.
But I think this just means that safely getting rid of toxic waste has just gotten a bit cheaper or more practical. Which is still immensely useful.
Why is it that so many people do not understand the difference between "an open mind" and "a hole in the head"?
A relevant quote I once encountered is: "You need to have an open mind to let new ideas in, but not so open that your brain falls out."