You really have drunk the kool-aid uh? Capitalism (free enterprise and market) is IMO the best system, but even Adam Smith knew you had to regulate the economy otherwise you would get equally terrible results. He specifically mentioned monopolies and cartels as undesirable. You need regulation at some point. You may discuss how much needs to be regulated or not.
However one must also note command driven economies, such as the ones of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, managed to have economic growth rates superior to the capitalist democracies of the time, purges and all. You could arguably do even "better" than they did by having pervasive computing at your disposal.
You must really hate reading Asimov then. Probably one of those Heinlein fans. Guess what, this is what science fiction is all about. You get every political system under the sun. Military cliques (Starship Troopers), socialist utopias (too many Asimov stories to count), monarchies (Dune), totalitarian regimes (1984), capitalist dystopias (Neuromancer), theocracies (Dune), etc.
How does BSG not use plot devices? They resurrect characters (Starbuck), do a one shot "stealth" viper to fill a plot hole which is destroyed and never duplicated, Cylon resurrection ship etc.
I still remember the "motivational" speech Adama made when they started their exodus. That they all deserved to die. I was like WTF?! Is this what a motivational speech from a military commander passes for these days?
Then he disses B5. Just all the possibilities, socio-political effects B5 introduced from having telepaths was pretty amazing in of itself. Not to mention motivational speeches actually are motivational in B5...
If FOSS doesn't move beyond C, C++, and Perl/Python/Ruby, we might as well give up and cede the industry to Microsoft right now, because nobody in their right mind is going to continue developing applications in those languages in the years to come.
C will still be around after.NET is dead and buried. C# is actually less advanced than Python and Ruby because it does not have dynamic typing. Something that even Smalltalk had. C# is a clone of Java.
Was it not for his "attitude" towards Qt it would not have had a license change to GPL and then LGPL. I suspect Trolltech only licensed Qt as GPL in the first place because the KDE people were making their own reimplementation: Harmony toolkit. Which was LGPLed in the first place.
It actually makes a lot of sense. That way you get a copy of the web site in your e-mail archive. I have often found that links I kept around have disappeared after a couple of years. Either the linked to page vanished, or the entire website went kaput.
Chemical rockets history? Pray tell, does VASIMR even have a thrust-to-weight ratio over 1:1? There are chemical rockets with thrust-to-weight ratios over 100:1. The only non-chemical forms of propulsion that compare (theoretically) to chemical rockets in that regard are certain types of nuclear rockets (e.g. nuclear pulse propulsion) and beamed propulsion.
VASIMR is for in space propulsion only. Even then there are alternatives which require less outrageous amounts of energy to work in a reasonably efficient fashion such as ion engines.
I never got what was the big deal with Firefly. I watched the movie and one episode of the series. It is basically a western with spaceships... Meh. It is neither good as a western nor as scifi.
The only things my app uses are standard system libraries. The standards were defined over 20 years ago. Why do I need to constantly recompile my app and why do the subassemblies keep changing? It did not use to be like this before when I developed in the craptastic Visual Studio 6.0.
In Linux I can redistribute the source and people can recompile it. Linux also usually keeps old versions of libc for backwards compatibility. This does not seem to be the case here...
I really hate this side by side assembly stuff. I remember the first time I made a C++ binary executable with VS 2005. It worked fine on my PC, so it must work fine on any other Windows PC I thought. Wrong! Turned out I needed to install those redistributables... It did not use to be like this and I know no other closed source platform which works in this inane way.
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You can do that using a software emulator.
Mario from Nintendo. Yeah I know...
Actually the Israelis have used drones for a long time. There is hardly a US monopoly on the stuff.
That kind of thing is called Deus Ex Machina and has been considered a poor plot device since antiquity.
The Travels of Marco Polo, Gulliver's Travels.
However one must also note command driven economies, such as the ones of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, managed to have economic growth rates superior to the capitalist democracies of the time, purges and all. You could arguably do even "better" than they did by having pervasive computing at your disposal.
You must really hate reading Asimov then. Probably one of those Heinlein fans. Guess what, this is what science fiction is all about. You get every political system under the sun. Military cliques (Starship Troopers), socialist utopias (too many Asimov stories to count), monarchies (Dune), totalitarian regimes (1984), capitalist dystopias (Neuromancer), theocracies (Dune), etc.
I still remember the "motivational" speech Adama made when they started their exodus. That they all deserved to die. I was like WTF?! Is this what a motivational speech from a military commander passes for these days?
Then he disses B5. Just all the possibilities, socio-political effects B5 introduced from having telepaths was pretty amazing in of itself. Not to mention motivational speeches actually are motivational in B5...
Bullshit. Several weapon systems do just that, including the rocket assisted howitzer shells used in the M109 Paladin.
This is a light gas gun. It uses a chemical explosion to propel the payload.
Try reading about the envirowacko protests back when they where launching the Cassini probe.
There were no software patents then.
C will still be around after .NET is dead and buried. C# is actually less advanced than Python and Ruby because it does not have dynamic typing. Something that even Smalltalk had. C# is a clone of Java.
Even corporations can have a corporate culture and self-perpetuate through several generations of leadership. Take the Soviet Union for example.
That is because RMS's principles are actually based on rational arguments which he carefully exposes.
Was it not for his "attitude" towards Qt it would not have had a license change to GPL and then LGPL. I suspect Trolltech only licensed Qt as GPL in the first place because the KDE people were making their own reimplementation: Harmony toolkit. Which was LGPLed in the first place.
C patents? Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented C before Microsoft was even registered as a corporate entity.
It actually makes a lot of sense. That way you get a copy of the web site in your e-mail archive. I have often found that links I kept around have disappeared after a couple of years. Either the linked to page vanished, or the entire website went kaput.
Windows did not use to have DRM support and now it does.
VASIMR is for in space propulsion only. Even then there are alternatives which require less outrageous amounts of energy to work in a reasonably efficient fashion such as ion engines.
I never got what was the big deal with Firefly. I watched the movie and one episode of the series. It is basically a western with spaceships... Meh. It is neither good as a western nor as scifi.
In Linux I can redistribute the source and people can recompile it. Linux also usually keeps old versions of libc for backwards compatibility. This does not seem to be the case here...
Try writing graphics algorithms in managed code and then cringe at how slow it is.
I really hate this side by side assembly stuff. I remember the first time I made a C++ binary executable with VS 2005. It worked fine on my PC, so it must work fine on any other Windows PC I thought. Wrong! Turned out I needed to install those redistributables... It did not use to be like this and I know no other closed source platform which works in this inane way.
MacBooks, PC Laptops, they are all made by Compal and Quanta anyway.