I've long considered starting an internet radio station of only CC-by-* licensed music (and other copyleft licenses) for the express purpose of "sticking it to the RIAA". I've known about musicians who release their music under these type of licenses, and I think it is time to really stand up and take notice about stuff like this.
One bizzare issue that I don't know how it would play here is if some artist released some content under one of these copyleft licenses and then subsequently signed with the RIAA, would I still have to pay a royalty? Some licenses such as the GPL/GFDL explicitly prohibit such a 3rd party revokation of licensing, after the content has been granted, but I think this may be one of the weaknesses of the Creative Commons license suite.
This certainly would be a strong test case to really test copyleft principles, unless the RIAA can show that they hold a patent on the concept of internet radio (which I don't think they do... and that also opens yet another can of worms in terms of "IP rights").
Out of principle I would hope the EFF would themselves host such an internet radio station, begging the RIAA to sue the pants off of them. And do that in a public manner. I would donate money to their legal defense fund (and to help pay for the internet radio station too!) if they would decide to go this route. It would be the ultimate in 'net civil disobedience.
Or the FSF doing the same thing but with GPL'd/GFDL'd music. It almost sounds like something Stallman would love to do for the hell of it.
The only problem with the monopoly aspect of their business is that they are a government sanctioned monopoly, just like Major League Baseball or Amtrack. If you tried to set up an interstate passenger rail service without the express permission of Amtrack, just for an example, you will find out in a real hurry who has been granted the monopoly and you won't find a judge to overturn this law either.
And the same goes here for the RIAA and "SoundExchange". They are a government granted monopoly. The real trick here is to make the charge of being a "monopoly" stick in the mainstream public media and to demonstrate why this monopoly is such a bad deal, or even how the RIAA is gradually killing off the American music industry. Or how it is already dead. Most average people don't understand this concept, even thought it is obvious by now that the only realistic way for a young singer to break into the top tier of recording artists is through gimicks like "American Idol". If the RIAA didn't have such a stranglehold on the American music industry, you would find this TV show to be a total flop, as much better performers would already be performing the top songs. IMHO, "American Idol" is a symptom of how bad the music industry has become, and not a genuine showcase of talent.
Mind you, I like some of the performers that have come through that contest (Ruben Stoddard is one of my favorites), but it is unfortunate that this was the only avenue he had to be noticed. The days of the "garage band" being able to make it to the big leagues through hard work and determination are long over, except for those who have some exceptional luck. People with genuine talent are being ignored and not allowed to propser.
Perhaps not, but I've seen private scholar collections donated to public libraries that sometimes have information about a topic that previously wasn't available to the general public, and public disclosure of "classified" events that sometimes can change the historic viewpoint of a particular event. The opening of the Vatican archives, for instance, has changed the viewpoint of the Spanish Inquisition where the actual internal notes of the Catholic Church are now available for public review.
You also have in addition to new scholarship or previously unpublished sources of material, archaeological evidence which can sometimes cast new light on a very old topic like the Battle of Hastings.
And when it gets to articles about scientific topics, try to read the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article about Biology or the Solar System sometime. Knowledge about those topics has certainly changed in the past 100 years or so and should be updated as well. So when should an article in this context be considered "done"?
If you are really interested in having static HTML copies of Wikipedia pages (you can burn them onto DVD-Rs or even Blu-ray discs due to volume), try this URL instead:
Be warned that this is a huge download, but it may be what you are looking for instead. This is not the raw database, but actual articles put into static HTML format and only requires a standard web browser to view the articles. Cross-links and author attribution is also included.
As for the "Wikipedia 1.0" group, they are trying to identify articles that have been reviewed (subjectively) and can document sources of information, meeting other quality criteria as well. Primarily the "articles of the day", but it can include other relevant articles which are of similar quality.
All of the talk that Wikipedia doesn't care about the quality of their articles is silly when you see efforts like this where some real work is being done to follow up on quality writing.
I think you have nailed this down completely. I agree that those who would have such a spiritual experience would even be advised not to talk about it even in a circle of like-minded people open to the concept of a divine visit.
With people such as Joan of Arc being accused (in a modern context) of out right mental instability, I don't see how even an otherwise level headed individual having such an experience even being employable (including losing professional licenses) or to be considered a national security risk (aka losing security clearances), if they were public with such an experience.
Even based on such experiences recorded in formal scripture (being non-specific here and not just sticking to the Bible), such visits by angels, God himself, or even alien beings (aka modern UFO stories) tend to be very private matters and not a public event. The only possible exception to this was the Christian Pentecost, which has its own group of skeptics and is its own unique kind of event.
As far as the existance of God or not, it seems to be in the very nature of God that a plausable deniability is also evident in nearly all dealings of God with man. As such scientific analysis is nearly impossible other than to obtain your own theophany and have this god confirm or deny previous experiences.
Regarding alien visits: I consider this to be another form of religion in many ways, but with God replaced by some super-advanced race of technological beings. The idea of technological civilizations existing in places within our Solar System (other than on the Earth) seems to be easy to disprove, which would require such a civilization that visits the Earth to be capable of advanced interstellar flight. And not just some basic interstellar flight such as a generation ship, but something like Star Trek where this civilization can visit another planetary system for lunch and return home for supper. From my perspective, this is something so bizzare that a belief in God is much easier to accept even from a very skeptical viewpoint.
Even presuming that such alien beings might exist that are somehow capable of communication with us. Some have suggested that communication with such beings from another planet may not even be possible, although two groups of intelligent beings would, I believe, be able to eventually work out some sort of rudimentary communication system if they were committed to trying to exchange knowledge. What I would find interesting would be some comparative theology, which would have IMHO a tremendous impact if there were some similarities between this alien race and their spiritual beliefs and those of some particular religion that currently exists on the Earth. If they professed knowledge of Jesus or Muhammad, imagine the impact such a philosophy. Or even their own version of a Messianic figure like Kahless (from Klingon mythology).
I think the question is if the planet is covered by a shallow ocean (aka Earth and Mars) or by a deep ocean (aka Europa). If this planet is covered by an ocean as deep or deeper than Europa, there may be a rocky core but the entire surface is likely to be covered in water.
There is some suggestion that life requires some sort of shoreline in order to develop, as the intertidal zones of the Earth seem to be one of the areas of huge biodversity, and may have even been where the first single-cell organisms were created from even more primitive chemical processes. It is from this intertidal zone that animals have gone both from the sea to the land and the other way around, and it has been argued that the difference between primitive humans and modern humans can be attributed to gaining enough intelligence to be able to navigate across the ocean and establish settlements on islands.
Doing a back of the envelope calculation of sticking to basic Newtonian physics, and assuming a 1-g continuous acceleration for a distance of 20 light years, I get a figure of about 35 years to travel that distance. Obviously there is going to be some significant time dilation when traveling at that speed, but the subjective time for those making the trip is going to be close to this figure.
While that would still be a generation ship, it is possible for a younger individual born on the Earth to actually get to this place within their lifetime and be able to still savor the experience on this planet, although a return trip is out of the question. Of course, how you build a spacecraft that is capable of doing continuous acceleration for 35 years of subjective travel is something best left alone for science fiction novels, but at least raw physics other than the incredible energy source would allow something like this to at least be possible. Raw logistics would also be an issue in the sense that providing food and water to those involved in this trip would also be a problem, although a closed environment with heavy recycling may also be possible. Diverting some of the energy source to maintiaining this closed environment would be trivial in comparison to what is needed for continuous thrust.
In short, while certainly some significant scientific breakthroughs and engineering challenges would be required to make this trip, you don't have to throw out Einstein and Newton in order to get this accomplished.
This is also a much smaller star that produces significantly less radiation than a G2-type star (aka our Sun), so the same reason why being so close makes the temperatures very Earth-like would be balanced out by the radiation of the star. In other words, it would be pretty much a wash in terms of the quantity of radiation that would be produced by this star compared to the amount we receive from our Sun under similar temperature conditions.
What would be an issue is that the visible light coming from this star would be much stronger in the infrared end of the spectrum, and almost no blue light (hence the term "Red Dwarf" for stars like this). The impact of that on any native life forms on this world would be interesting to say the least.
Due to being 5x the mass of the Earth, I would expect very active geological forces within the crust of this planet. Mars and Venus both show substantial volcanic activity, and there is no reason to presume that it wouldn't have a strong magnetic field.
As for an atmosphere, being 5x the mass of the Earth would give a sufficient gravity well to keep most gaseous compounds at 40 C. I don't see this being a huge problem other than perhaps having too much of an atmosphere rather than too little. Not quite a gas giant, but hardly an airless asteroid either. Very likely to have a much more substantial atmosphere than even the Earth.
With 5x the mass of the Earth, the atmosphere would be something more akin to Venus than something more like the Earth or Mars. Still, this is something that would be interesting to try and speculate about in terms of a fictional story about going to this planet.
Unless this planet also had a collision with a similarly sized planetoid (such as is speculated with the Earth and the current favored theory of the creation of the Moon) that would have stripped much of the original atmosphere away, I don't see how this planet could have a lower pressure atmosphere than found on the Earth and likely would be much higher.
What would be interesting would be to find out what the density of this planet could be. A highly dense object (aka this huge mass and nearly the same size of the Earth) would have a huge surface gravity, but if this planet were mainly made up of water or other lighter compounds, it would be a "waterworld" that would be several times the size of the earth in terms of area and may even have Earth-like gravity on the surface.
Regardless, nearly any possible model you could come up with here would have sufficient atmosphere to allow water in a liquid state at these temperatures. The only exception would be if the atmosphere was so dense like Venus that run-away greenhouse gasses would make the surface temperatures far too hot. Venus doesn't get that much more additional sunlight (measured in watts/cm^3) than the Earth, but it is much hotter than even the surface of Mercury.
If memory serves me correct (you can reply if you disagree and refresh this thought), it was at the time of MS-DOS 4.0 that DR-DOS started to become very popular as well. I remember seeing DR-DOS sitting on retail software shelves and really being pushed as a viable alternative to MS-DOS, with a vague memory of some sort of lawsuit between MS and Digital Research because of the keyword and command similarities of the two operating systems.
It was just after this that the now infamous vendor lock-in tactics were employed by Microsoft and the updated versions of Windows (especially 5.0) was finally released that fixed the 4.0 problems.
This is hardly the first major stumble that Microsoft has made. I would argue that MS-DOS 4.0 was nearly as bad as it appears with Vista, and had similar kinds of adoption issues where many companies refused to upgrade from DOS 3.3 to 4.0 (which really did suck and did many things worse than the previous incarnation).
Also forgotten here is MS-Windows 2.0: This software nearly sank Microsoft as a company due to the huge investment that was placed into its development with nearly no ROI at all. It wasn't until version 3.0 that Microsoft actually had a product that was worth using for more than an experimental environment.
I'd also like to point out that the original Windows NT 3.5 was also a nearly disasterous roll-out with a similar kind of investment but nearly nobody who took up Microsoft on the offer. Even NT 4.0 had some serious problems until some of the later service packs fixed the critical issues, and Microsoft even gave away versions of that software to "loyal customers". I remember purchasing a version of Visual Basic that included a free copy of WinNT on an additional CD-ROM. And this was the "student edition" for $50.
The only version of Windows (or nearly any Microsoft operating system) that lived up to its hype was Windows 2000, which really was a huge improvement in terms of stability and security from the previous offerings. While bloated code in its own right, at least it did nearly everything you would care to have for any solid GUI operating system.
For me XP is a disappointment even though some security holes did get patched up. Vista seems to have favored for me the worst parts of XP (like the DRM and the attempt to redefine the GUI once again for style over substance) without really offering anything of meat in return that matters for independent (aka non-Microsoft) software applications.
While Microsoft can survive Vista being a flop, if they try this again with the next gen OS and that is also a huge flop, I don't see Microsoft being able to pull out of that nosedive. Fortunately (for Microsoft), when they have such a god-awful mess like Vista there is a tendancy to really sharpen the minds of some Microsoft engineers and come up with something simple and elegant. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can do that again in this situation as well.
In looking at the scales of the Bussard fusion reactor, I don't see it becoming a "Mr. Fusion" (aka Back to the Future) type device on an automobile, but I do see that it can be used in places like a Submarine, Aircraft Carrier, or perhaps in a locomotive. The age of steam-powered locomotives may yet come back in the 21st Century, but it won't look like the original "iron horse" that ran on wood cut from the hills the train ran through.
Bussard's suggestion that it could be a viable power source for a genuine spaceship (as opposed to a spacecraft) conducting interplanetary commerce is certainly something to pay strong attention to as well. With Dr. Bussard's design of the only real working interstellar spacecraft that can be built with modest technological improvements and not whole new discoveries in physics (such as a Star Trek warp core), his ideas certainly need to be examined in this realm as well. And yes, this is the same Dr. Bussard.
I wouldn't be too worried about this as there are some serious national security issues that are around with more than half of all oil used in the USA coming from abroad. In this situation the U.S. Navy is one who would want to be explicitly involved with the development of a fuel source they could use for their own ships and be able to continue to fight without having to invade an oil producing country in order to merely maintain their own ships.
A major world conflict involving the USA (Iraq is not a major world conflict from this viewpoint) could easily cut off needed petroleum reserves and nearly kill off the U.S. ability to fight.
And as I pointed out, the Navy is also very interested if this might become a replacement for their own nuclear fission plants, which have been nearly the only new construction of nuclear power of any kind in the USA over the past 30 years. If Bussard's research is accurate and can achieve the real breakthroughs he is suggesting, putting one of these on board a submarine is nearly a no-brainer. That just doesn't seem to even be a remote possibility if the Tokamak design even reaches the break-through numbers that are being claimed with that design.
Also, if there is even a marginal improvement over the Farnsworth/Hirsh Fusor technology (as it seems some huge gains have indeed been made over that design), there are already practical commercial applications for even that sort of technology. The ability to create a strong source of neutrons that can be controlled with a simple electronic switch may even be useful to enhance a fission reactor if nothing else. This as a radiation source for cancer treatment may be another huge application that has nothing to do with the ability to actually "break even" and actually generate power. Current sources of neutrons tend to be spent nuclear fission reactor fuel or other radioactive substances.
The information about these reactors is already "out there", so trying to bury the information is not going to do much good. The real issue is trying to convince prominent physicists that Bussard isn't off his rocker and to critically but fairly review the existing papers that have been published about the topic. Several have been published, including this article that was peer-reviewed and published in a respected international physics journal. The references in this paper alone are sufficient to request "Freedom of Information Act" request for the rest of the research if you really want to dig into it, as well as to dig up the patents that have been filed on behalf of this fusion method.
BTW, Breeder reactor technology does work and a working plant is just 200 miles north of where I'm at (in the Idaho National Engineering Lab). The problem with breeder reactors (and finally mentioned on the CBS - 60 minutes TV "newsmagazine" about nuclear power plants) is that they produce large quantities of Plutonium at concentrations that are sufficient to build nuclear bombs with the material. Bomb grade Plutonium works just fine in a nuclear reactor, but it is so easy to "accidentally" pull some out and build the bomb that the major nuclear powers don't want to see the technology be widespread among countries that currently don't have nuclear bomb programs of their own. This is also how North Korea got its bomb material in the first place. This gets rid of nuclear waste, but that is one heck of a social cost to worry about instead that General Electric can have their own private arsenal of nukes if they wanted them and had these sort of breeder reactors. That knowledge is enough to put your tin hat back on again.
You hit on a point here that really needs to be elaborated upon much more...
Many teachers, especially at the K-12 level have never left academia in their entire life and don't know anything else. Think about that carefully. And in many cases nearly all of the teachers at some schools all get their education from the very same university, so they even have the same teaching philosophies. It is entirely possible to go from kindergarten to being a school administrator and the only thing you have done is to attend a school or teach at one.
This is not to say that some teachers do spend some time in the "real world", but if you are talking about some young twenty-something that still has wet ink on their university diploma granting their degree, they are hardly in a position to really do much more than regurgitate the mantras that were given to them by their professors and teachers they had when they were children themselves. An experienced teacher acting as a mentor in this situation can help out, but in some school districts in rapidly growing areas (or inner cities where they can't keep teachers), this can be a huge problem.
I got into a long thread earlier about how universities were only about granting degrees and the educational aspect was only a secondary issue. It surprised me (but I shouldn't be) that the only people who even responded were themselves university students, and their replies were mostly "is not, stupid". That you can obtain a decent education in academia is true, but that is if you decide to seek it out for yourself. You can earn a diploma and degrees without really gaining much education.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. Microsoft has written a specific license granting you this permission.
The way the grandparent post was written, it seemed as though no license consideration was given. It was like this was a civil "right" that you could do with any old software... if you owned the current version, you were "legit" with any previous version.
BTW, I hate this abuse of the word "rights". A right is something which nobody can grant or take away. It is something that simply "is" rather than something which you are privileged somehow to be able to perform a certain action because of the benevolence of a certain god/king/president. You can acknowledge that rights do exist, and scream at or torture people if they exercise their rights, but it doesn't change the concept of if a certain action is a right or not.
Re:My predictions for Wndows over the next year...
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The End is Nigh for XP
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FYI, I think you are hitting this square on, and your comments about what made-to-order PC stores (non-Dell) are going to be doing is also quite solid.
The computer retailer that I have been using for the past 10 years is also going through the very same problems you are mentioning here. I picked up one system that he swapped out the motherboard and some memory for a newer model, and the store owner showed me a Vista system that he has spent the past week trying to get working. On supposedly all certified Vista equipment as well. He openly said that he expects the next six months to be a living hell for him in terms of technical support for Vista.
This retailer originally started as a Commodore Amiga vendor and went to PC sales when the Amiga sales went soft. He still is a certified Amiga repair center, although that isn't a major focus or even on his advertisements any more. While there are other vendors in my community, he is one of the major retailers for the local school district and several medium-sized (100-300 employee) businesses, many in the manufacturing sector. All that more surprising because his shop is only he, his wife, and about 5 other employees.
I would also have to agree that the move to Linux is more or less inevitable for these guys, although this particular retailer dismissed Linux as a viable option for most of his customers as not quite ready for prime time yet. I'll see what he thinks about that in six months or a year, and it isn't like this guy isn't willing to shift with the market if necessary.
As far as Microsoft playing games with hardware and vendors.... that is nothing new either. In fact, I would be surprised if they didn't favor the major players here.
I should have put this into the other reply, but I forgot to make this point:
If you have an ultracap I can purchase right now that has the energy density of 1/2 the equivalent of a Li-ion battery, give me the link or your phone number (or that of the business selling them) that I can go to and purchase the thing. Seriously. I've heard all kinds of bluster about this and I would like to see one. Better yet if I can get one in a form factor equivalent to one of my existing batteries, but I wouldn't mind just playing with one just to see what they are like. I also have business partners that would be very much interested in this for several products that have nothing to do with the automobile industry.
From what I've read and seen, this is not something that is available today here and now, but rather something that is in R&D mode. Some demos have been built, but not something an ordinary consumer can examine, or somebody critical to the researchers can independently test and verify the claims. As pointed out by another poster to my original comment on this thread, ultracaps simply don't have the energy density you are claiming and are a full order of magnitude below that of normal chemical batteries. This is also backed up by comments I've read in trade journals (primarily for UPS systems on computers and embedded systems) and other publications. Not just web sites. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Two huge things have hurt Apple Computer with the Max OS's:
Closed API's with little or no public documentation, or requiring draconian licensing requirements just to read the things in the first place
Lack of quality development tools available to ordinary users at modest cost.
As much as I hate the software and consider it to be something not worthy of lining the bottom of my garbage can, Visual Studio is phenomenally better than just about anything available on a Mac. And you can get other software development environments for a modest price or even free for Windows. The APIs for Windows may be bloated and bizzare, but you can get them for free from Microsoft where a culture of encouraging small start-ups and even students has prevailed in terms of customer support.
Apple Computer certainly has improved the picture with OS-X, and there are some changes which show some real hope from that company. But since the Apple/// was manufactured, they have been pretty closed lipped about the innards of their computer. The Apple ][ was incredibly open, and you could even get commented source code for the BIOS and other technical literature for a very modest price. If Apple Computer "went back to their roots" and gave a similar level of openness about their equipment and operating systems (it would not have to be "open source"... the Apple ][ stuff was all propritary copyright), they would make some real friends in the hacker community and be able to boast huge gains in their market share. Which they have and are doing after a fashion. Too bad they blew the opportunity back in 1980 to have made this a part of their basic corporate culture.
I do question the science, as people who I respect and do understand the technologies have strong questions about it as well. Fundamental research is needed here to improve ultracaps as an energy storage technology. I'm not saying a very bright person won't ever figure it out, but it is not something that is trivial to dismiss and presume that the breakthroughs needed will be found. I have been involved with enough engineering efforts of my own to know that sometimes you do fail on some ideas... and fail spectacularly. Even if you think you understand the technology completely but are pushing into new areas that have never been tried anywhere before.
And the reason I mention Diesel fuel explicitly is because that is what needs to be replaced. If you are going to be able to compete against conventional automobiles, you need to have the energy storage capacity of this kind of fuel. And that is not a trivial storage medium to beat either. There is a strong reason why even rockets use what is essentially refined jet fuel... it is a very high density energy storage medium. My gasoline-powered automobile can travel over 600 miles through mountains before I have to refuel, and I can perform that refueling in under 10 minutes. And I can leave the gasoline vehicle sitting in my driveway unattended for 3 months without having to do anything but put the key in the ignition if I want to go somewhere. When I can do the same thing with electric automobiles, that will have eliminated the need to use a petroleum-based vehicle completely.
I admit there are some applications for a vehicle that can do "local" travel of less than 100 miles between trips, and the requirement of having to plug in the car for a couple of hours after I do that runabout isn't too difficult of a task, but that is a fringe application and would only be useful as a second vehicle. Particularly in rural (or semi-rural) America, you will still have petroleum-based vehicles if you don't try to achieve these basic similarities to their operation. I know several families that have to travel more than 50 miles one way just to get groceries. They try to make that trip only once a week (maybe twice), but it still is a basic requirement that most electric vehicles won't be able to meet at the moment.
Or more important, you shouldn't have people adapt to the technology... the technology should adapt to the people. That is often something many engineers tend to forget.
One cool aspect of something like this is that you could in theory build 3-D chip instead of sticking with the normal 2-D masks (plus a couple of layers). That is a goal in silicon labs/fabs, but somehow it never really is accomplished. That gives you other kinds of problems too in terms of heat dissipation and other problems, but it would be certainly cool to have a home fab be able to make some of the basic 7400 series logic chip. A discrete NAND gate would be very exciting.
Is this written Microsoft policy for Vista? That sure isn't correct in terms of copyright law, if that is the excuse that you are using here. What you are talking about in this post is pure copyright violations on a grand order, and I would strongly suggest you don't do something this stupid unless you have at least consulted with an attorney to verify this idea as something specific to Microsoft and its licensing policies. The MS-EULA is not light reading and has so many vague areas that you need some strong legal background to understand the fine points.
There are programs which Microsoft does do on a contractural basis with some OEM companies where you can purchase older MS operating systems that are not publicly sold any more. My previous employer continued to purchase MS-DOS 6.22 until 2003 under such a license, due to some equipment and software which simply had to be used under that operating system. If you can find one of these OEMs under this program, I'm sure you can get some of these earlier Windows operating systems too. But presuming that you can pirate operating systems is simply a terrible idea, and very likely illegal.
For myself, I think Windows 2000 Pro is the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced, bar none. It was a huge improvement over both Win NT 4 and Windows 98, and didn't have as huge of an increase in bloatware over the previous operating systems either (which both XP and Vista are notorious for).
It isn't like Microsoft wasn't in this position before. Back in the MS-DOS days, version 3.3 was by far and away the most stable version of DOS until they finally got their act together on version 6.1. MS-DOS version 4 was a horrible joke and 5 wasn't much better. MS-DOS version 7 wasn't too bad either, but unfortunately Microsoft killed that version by refusing to unbundle it from Windows 95... even though you could create a separate independent bootable DOS "shell" that wasn't really a shell. It was a small OS that fit on a 3.5" floppy. Very nearly the last one that Microsoft produced.
I don't see Microsoft pulling a rabbit out of the hat this time because they have invested far too much into Vista, but the tactics here are hardly new. And killing off XP or 2000 makes little sense in terms of customer satisfaction and reliability, but MS doesn't always make sense in those situations.
I will never buy MS-Vista, ever, under any circumstances. And I feel like throwing away the version of XP that I'm using on the computer I'm using to write this message.
When I read this, I was thinking of Fab@Home with the idea that perhaps you could use this process to help build crude home-built ICs out of simple and cheap materials.
Cheap, like pure crystal silicon?:)
How cheap is pure silicon? That is hardly something that you can grow with a home fab.
Try to build your own chips with a bucket sand from a local beach, or from a quartz outcropping.
I promise that you will not succeed on the budget of a typical middle-class 1st world family.
As far as why I thought this might have been something worth looking at, you could do the equivalent of gate building if you could have a "pourable" conductor that could be layered with an insulator in a matrix. If you build a transistor with those materials, and perhaps a simple capacitor, you have complete chips. Sure, they may be very crude and single gate chips, but it is a place to start and perhaps refine the process. You won't get to VLSI chips doing this, but some fairly simple stuff and even perhaps a processor like a 4004 chip might be possible with very advanced jets pouring something like this down in a substrate.
I highly doubt that the value of the 2 grams of Indium used for a display is going to be a major factor in the overall cost of the display. You could use Gold or even Iridium and it wouldn't even be a factor. Californium, perhaps, but that element is sold by the gram. I just don't buy that as a serious argument.
Trust me when I say that it is the use of Indium compounds and their phosphorescence at bold primary colors that makes it so valuable, and is driving up the world market price of Indium. Compared to Gold, Indium is a lousy conductor. A Gold or Silver trace would be much easier to hide because you would not have to use as much material. The use of Indium as a wire is not the issue, although the amount of the Indium compounds could be reduced slightly in a matrix of this cement and other composite materials used in a display system. That would be something that would appeal to a CEO or bean counter that is really concerned about the expense of getting Indium on the world metals market, but the concern would be about simply getting bulk Indium in the first place.
I guess many of those posting havn't heard about Rubber cement, commonly used for building model vehicle kits. Or other kinds of cement like the solvent used in PVC pipes.
While making it cheaper may be true, the big problem that happens with displays is that you have wires which cross between pixels on any display.... simply to turn the pixel "on" or "off". These can be quite thin and are made of several different kinds of materials, but they do get into the way of the display. By making these wires transparent, you would have a huge increase in the throughput of the light coming from something like a back-lit light source (common for laptops).
As far as replacing Indium or other rare earth metals... I don't understand that at all. Those metals are used to floresce in a CRT (television picture tube) and produce color pixels. This is what makes the TV be in bright colors. This article on color televsion gets into some of the specific color properites of Indium compounds and how they enhance the color gamut that can faithfully reproduce color from electronic media. This cement is not going to have those same kind of properties.
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I've long considered starting an internet radio station of only CC-by-* licensed music (and other copyleft licenses) for the express purpose of "sticking it to the RIAA". I've known about musicians who release their music under these type of licenses, and I think it is time to really stand up and take notice about stuff like this.
One bizzare issue that I don't know how it would play here is if some artist released some content under one of these copyleft licenses and then subsequently signed with the RIAA, would I still have to pay a royalty? Some licenses such as the GPL/GFDL explicitly prohibit such a 3rd party revokation of licensing, after the content has been granted, but I think this may be one of the weaknesses of the Creative Commons license suite.
This certainly would be a strong test case to really test copyleft principles, unless the RIAA can show that they hold a patent on the concept of internet radio (which I don't think they do... and that also opens yet another can of worms in terms of "IP rights").
Out of principle I would hope the EFF would themselves host such an internet radio station, begging the RIAA to sue the pants off of them. And do that in a public manner. I would donate money to their legal defense fund (and to help pay for the internet radio station too!) if they would decide to go this route. It would be the ultimate in 'net civil disobedience.
Or the FSF doing the same thing but with GPL'd/GFDL'd music. It almost sounds like something Stallman would love to do for the hell of it.
The only problem with the monopoly aspect of their business is that they are a government sanctioned monopoly, just like Major League Baseball or Amtrack. If you tried to set up an interstate passenger rail service without the express permission of Amtrack, just for an example, you will find out in a real hurry who has been granted the monopoly and you won't find a judge to overturn this law either.
And the same goes here for the RIAA and "SoundExchange". They are a government granted monopoly. The real trick here is to make the charge of being a "monopoly" stick in the mainstream public media and to demonstrate why this monopoly is such a bad deal, or even how the RIAA is gradually killing off the American music industry. Or how it is already dead. Most average people don't understand this concept, even thought it is obvious by now that the only realistic way for a young singer to break into the top tier of recording artists is through gimicks like "American Idol". If the RIAA didn't have such a stranglehold on the American music industry, you would find this TV show to be a total flop, as much better performers would already be performing the top songs. IMHO, "American Idol" is a symptom of how bad the music industry has become, and not a genuine showcase of talent.
Mind you, I like some of the performers that have come through that contest (Ruben Stoddard is one of my favorites), but it is unfortunate that this was the only avenue he had to be noticed. The days of the "garage band" being able to make it to the big leagues through hard work and determination are long over, except for those who have some exceptional luck. People with genuine talent are being ignored and not allowed to propser.
Perhaps not, but I've seen private scholar collections donated to public libraries that sometimes have information about a topic that previously wasn't available to the general public, and public disclosure of "classified" events that sometimes can change the historic viewpoint of a particular event. The opening of the Vatican archives, for instance, has changed the viewpoint of the Spanish Inquisition where the actual internal notes of the Catholic Church are now available for public review.
You also have in addition to new scholarship or previously unpublished sources of material, archaeological evidence which can sometimes cast new light on a very old topic like the Battle of Hastings.
And when it gets to articles about scientific topics, try to read the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article about Biology or the Solar System sometime. Knowledge about those topics has certainly changed in the past 100 years or so and should be updated as well. So when should an article in this context be considered "done"?
If you are really interested in having static HTML copies of Wikipedia pages (you can burn them onto DVD-Rs or even Blu-ray discs due to volume), try this URL instead:
0 6/en/
http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/November_20
Be warned that this is a huge download, but it may be what you are looking for instead. This is not the raw database, but actual articles put into static HTML format and only requires a standard web browser to view the articles. Cross-links and author attribution is also included.
As for the "Wikipedia 1.0" group, they are trying to identify articles that have been reviewed (subjectively) and can document sources of information, meeting other quality criteria as well. Primarily the "articles of the day", but it can include other relevant articles which are of similar quality.
All of the talk that Wikipedia doesn't care about the quality of their articles is silly when you see efforts like this where some real work is being done to follow up on quality writing.
I think you have nailed this down completely. I agree that those who would have such a spiritual experience would even be advised not to talk about it even in a circle of like-minded people open to the concept of a divine visit.
With people such as Joan of Arc being accused (in a modern context) of out right mental instability, I don't see how even an otherwise level headed individual having such an experience even being employable (including losing professional licenses) or to be considered a national security risk (aka losing security clearances), if they were public with such an experience.
Even based on such experiences recorded in formal scripture (being non-specific here and not just sticking to the Bible), such visits by angels, God himself, or even alien beings (aka modern UFO stories) tend to be very private matters and not a public event. The only possible exception to this was the Christian Pentecost, which has its own group of skeptics and is its own unique kind of event.
As far as the existance of God or not, it seems to be in the very nature of God that a plausable deniability is also evident in nearly all dealings of God with man. As such scientific analysis is nearly impossible other than to obtain your own theophany and have this god confirm or deny previous experiences.
Regarding alien visits: I consider this to be another form of religion in many ways, but with God replaced by some super-advanced race of technological beings. The idea of technological civilizations existing in places within our Solar System (other than on the Earth) seems to be easy to disprove, which would require such a civilization that visits the Earth to be capable of advanced interstellar flight. And not just some basic interstellar flight such as a generation ship, but something like Star Trek where this civilization can visit another planetary system for lunch and return home for supper. From my perspective, this is something so bizzare that a belief in God is much easier to accept even from a very skeptical viewpoint.
Even presuming that such alien beings might exist that are somehow capable of communication with us. Some have suggested that communication with such beings from another planet may not even be possible, although two groups of intelligent beings would, I believe, be able to eventually work out some sort of rudimentary communication system if they were committed to trying to exchange knowledge. What I would find interesting would be some comparative theology, which would have IMHO a tremendous impact if there were some similarities between this alien race and their spiritual beliefs and those of some particular religion that currently exists on the Earth. If they professed knowledge of Jesus or Muhammad, imagine the impact such a philosophy. Or even their own version of a Messianic figure like Kahless (from Klingon mythology).
I think the question is if the planet is covered by a shallow ocean (aka Earth and Mars) or by a deep ocean (aka Europa). If this planet is covered by an ocean as deep or deeper than Europa, there may be a rocky core but the entire surface is likely to be covered in water.
There is some suggestion that life requires some sort of shoreline in order to develop, as the intertidal zones of the Earth seem to be one of the areas of huge biodversity, and may have even been where the first single-cell organisms were created from even more primitive chemical processes. It is from this intertidal zone that animals have gone both from the sea to the land and the other way around, and it has been argued that the difference between primitive humans and modern humans can be attributed to gaining enough intelligence to be able to navigate across the ocean and establish settlements on islands.
Doing a back of the envelope calculation of sticking to basic Newtonian physics, and assuming a 1-g continuous acceleration for a distance of 20 light years, I get a figure of about 35 years to travel that distance. Obviously there is going to be some significant time dilation when traveling at that speed, but the subjective time for those making the trip is going to be close to this figure.
While that would still be a generation ship, it is possible for a younger individual born on the Earth to actually get to this place within their lifetime and be able to still savor the experience on this planet, although a return trip is out of the question. Of course, how you build a spacecraft that is capable of doing continuous acceleration for 35 years of subjective travel is something best left alone for science fiction novels, but at least raw physics other than the incredible energy source would allow something like this to at least be possible. Raw logistics would also be an issue in the sense that providing food and water to those involved in this trip would also be a problem, although a closed environment with heavy recycling may also be possible. Diverting some of the energy source to maintiaining this closed environment would be trivial in comparison to what is needed for continuous thrust.
In short, while certainly some significant scientific breakthroughs and engineering challenges would be required to make this trip, you don't have to throw out Einstein and Newton in order to get this accomplished.
This is also a much smaller star that produces significantly less radiation than a G2-type star (aka our Sun), so the same reason why being so close makes the temperatures very Earth-like would be balanced out by the radiation of the star. In other words, it would be pretty much a wash in terms of the quantity of radiation that would be produced by this star compared to the amount we receive from our Sun under similar temperature conditions.
What would be an issue is that the visible light coming from this star would be much stronger in the infrared end of the spectrum, and almost no blue light (hence the term "Red Dwarf" for stars like this). The impact of that on any native life forms on this world would be interesting to say the least.
Due to being 5x the mass of the Earth, I would expect very active geological forces within the crust of this planet. Mars and Venus both show substantial volcanic activity, and there is no reason to presume that it wouldn't have a strong magnetic field.
As for an atmosphere, being 5x the mass of the Earth would give a sufficient gravity well to keep most gaseous compounds at 40 C. I don't see this being a huge problem other than perhaps having too much of an atmosphere rather than too little. Not quite a gas giant, but hardly an airless asteroid either. Very likely to have a much more substantial atmosphere than even the Earth.
With 5x the mass of the Earth, the atmosphere would be something more akin to Venus than something more like the Earth or Mars. Still, this is something that would be interesting to try and speculate about in terms of a fictional story about going to this planet.
Unless this planet also had a collision with a similarly sized planetoid (such as is speculated with the Earth and the current favored theory of the creation of the Moon) that would have stripped much of the original atmosphere away, I don't see how this planet could have a lower pressure atmosphere than found on the Earth and likely would be much higher.
What would be interesting would be to find out what the density of this planet could be. A highly dense object (aka this huge mass and nearly the same size of the Earth) would have a huge surface gravity, but if this planet were mainly made up of water or other lighter compounds, it would be a "waterworld" that would be several times the size of the earth in terms of area and may even have Earth-like gravity on the surface.
Regardless, nearly any possible model you could come up with here would have sufficient atmosphere to allow water in a liquid state at these temperatures. The only exception would be if the atmosphere was so dense like Venus that run-away greenhouse gasses would make the surface temperatures far too hot. Venus doesn't get that much more additional sunlight (measured in watts/cm^3) than the Earth, but it is much hotter than even the surface of Mercury.
If memory serves me correct (you can reply if you disagree and refresh this thought), it was at the time of MS-DOS 4.0 that DR-DOS started to become very popular as well. I remember seeing DR-DOS sitting on retail software shelves and really being pushed as a viable alternative to MS-DOS, with a vague memory of some sort of lawsuit between MS and Digital Research because of the keyword and command similarities of the two operating systems.
It was just after this that the now infamous vendor lock-in tactics were employed by Microsoft and the updated versions of Windows (especially 5.0) was finally released that fixed the 4.0 problems.
This is hardly the first major stumble that Microsoft has made. I would argue that MS-DOS 4.0 was nearly as bad as it appears with Vista, and had similar kinds of adoption issues where many companies refused to upgrade from DOS 3.3 to 4.0 (which really did suck and did many things worse than the previous incarnation).
Also forgotten here is MS-Windows 2.0: This software nearly sank Microsoft as a company due to the huge investment that was placed into its development with nearly no ROI at all. It wasn't until version 3.0 that Microsoft actually had a product that was worth using for more than an experimental environment.
I'd also like to point out that the original Windows NT 3.5 was also a nearly disasterous roll-out with a similar kind of investment but nearly nobody who took up Microsoft on the offer. Even NT 4.0 had some serious problems until some of the later service packs fixed the critical issues, and Microsoft even gave away versions of that software to "loyal customers". I remember purchasing a version of Visual Basic that included a free copy of WinNT on an additional CD-ROM. And this was the "student edition" for $50.
The only version of Windows (or nearly any Microsoft operating system) that lived up to its hype was Windows 2000, which really was a huge improvement in terms of stability and security from the previous offerings. While bloated code in its own right, at least it did nearly everything you would care to have for any solid GUI operating system.
For me XP is a disappointment even though some security holes did get patched up. Vista seems to have favored for me the worst parts of XP (like the DRM and the attempt to redefine the GUI once again for style over substance) without really offering anything of meat in return that matters for independent (aka non-Microsoft) software applications.
While Microsoft can survive Vista being a flop, if they try this again with the next gen OS and that is also a huge flop, I don't see Microsoft being able to pull out of that nosedive. Fortunately (for Microsoft), when they have such a god-awful mess like Vista there is a tendancy to really sharpen the minds of some Microsoft engineers and come up with something simple and elegant. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can do that again in this situation as well.
In looking at the scales of the Bussard fusion reactor, I don't see it becoming a "Mr. Fusion" (aka Back to the Future) type device on an automobile, but I do see that it can be used in places like a Submarine, Aircraft Carrier, or perhaps in a locomotive. The age of steam-powered locomotives may yet come back in the 21st Century, but it won't look like the original "iron horse" that ran on wood cut from the hills the train ran through.
Bussard's suggestion that it could be a viable power source for a genuine spaceship (as opposed to a spacecraft) conducting interplanetary commerce is certainly something to pay strong attention to as well. With Dr. Bussard's design of the only real working interstellar spacecraft that can be built with modest technological improvements and not whole new discoveries in physics (such as a Star Trek warp core), his ideas certainly need to be examined in this realm as well. And yes, this is the same Dr. Bussard.
I wouldn't be too worried about this as there are some serious national security issues that are around with more than half of all oil used in the USA coming from abroad. In this situation the U.S. Navy is one who would want to be explicitly involved with the development of a fuel source they could use for their own ships and be able to continue to fight without having to invade an oil producing country in order to merely maintain their own ships.
A major world conflict involving the USA (Iraq is not a major world conflict from this viewpoint) could easily cut off needed petroleum reserves and nearly kill off the U.S. ability to fight.
And as I pointed out, the Navy is also very interested if this might become a replacement for their own nuclear fission plants, which have been nearly the only new construction of nuclear power of any kind in the USA over the past 30 years. If Bussard's research is accurate and can achieve the real breakthroughs he is suggesting, putting one of these on board a submarine is nearly a no-brainer. That just doesn't seem to even be a remote possibility if the Tokamak design even reaches the break-through numbers that are being claimed with that design.
Also, if there is even a marginal improvement over the Farnsworth/Hirsh Fusor technology (as it seems some huge gains have indeed been made over that design), there are already practical commercial applications for even that sort of technology. The ability to create a strong source of neutrons that can be controlled with a simple electronic switch may even be useful to enhance a fission reactor if nothing else. This as a radiation source for cancer treatment may be another huge application that has nothing to do with the ability to actually "break even" and actually generate power. Current sources of neutrons tend to be spent nuclear fission reactor fuel or other radioactive substances.
The information about these reactors is already "out there", so trying to bury the information is not going to do much good. The real issue is trying to convince prominent physicists that Bussard isn't off his rocker and to critically but fairly review the existing papers that have been published about the topic. Several have been published, including this article that was peer-reviewed and published in a respected international physics journal. The references in this paper alone are sufficient to request "Freedom of Information Act" request for the rest of the research if you really want to dig into it, as well as to dig up the patents that have been filed on behalf of this fusion method.
BTW, Breeder reactor technology does work and a working plant is just 200 miles north of where I'm at (in the Idaho National Engineering Lab). The problem with breeder reactors (and finally mentioned on the CBS - 60 minutes TV "newsmagazine" about nuclear power plants) is that they produce large quantities of Plutonium at concentrations that are sufficient to build nuclear bombs with the material. Bomb grade Plutonium works just fine in a nuclear reactor, but it is so easy to "accidentally" pull some out and build the bomb that the major nuclear powers don't want to see the technology be widespread among countries that currently don't have nuclear bomb programs of their own. This is also how North Korea got its bomb material in the first place. This gets rid of nuclear waste, but that is one heck of a social cost to worry about instead that General Electric can have their own private arsenal of nukes if they wanted them and had these sort of breeder reactors. That knowledge is enough to put your tin hat back on again.
You hit on a point here that really needs to be elaborated upon much more...
Many teachers, especially at the K-12 level have never left academia in their entire life and don't know anything else. Think about that carefully. And in many cases nearly all of the teachers at some schools all get their education from the very same university, so they even have the same teaching philosophies. It is entirely possible to go from kindergarten to being a school administrator and the only thing you have done is to attend a school or teach at one.
This is not to say that some teachers do spend some time in the "real world", but if you are talking about some young twenty-something that still has wet ink on their university diploma granting their degree, they are hardly in a position to really do much more than regurgitate the mantras that were given to them by their professors and teachers they had when they were children themselves. An experienced teacher acting as a mentor in this situation can help out, but in some school districts in rapidly growing areas (or inner cities where they can't keep teachers), this can be a huge problem.
I got into a long thread earlier about how universities were only about granting degrees and the educational aspect was only a secondary issue. It surprised me (but I shouldn't be) that the only people who even responded were themselves university students, and their replies were mostly "is not, stupid". That you can obtain a decent education in academia is true, but that is if you decide to seek it out for yourself. You can earn a diploma and degrees without really gaining much education.
This is precisely what I'm talking about. Microsoft has written a specific license granting you this permission.
The way the grandparent post was written, it seemed as though no license consideration was given. It was like this was a civil "right" that you could do with any old software... if you owned the current version, you were "legit" with any previous version.
BTW, I hate this abuse of the word "rights". A right is something which nobody can grant or take away. It is something that simply "is" rather than something which you are privileged somehow to be able to perform a certain action because of the benevolence of a certain god/king/president. You can acknowledge that rights do exist, and scream at or torture people if they exercise their rights, but it doesn't change the concept of if a certain action is a right or not.
FYI, I think you are hitting this square on, and your comments about what made-to-order PC stores (non-Dell) are going to be doing is also quite solid.
The computer retailer that I have been using for the past 10 years is also going through the very same problems you are mentioning here. I picked up one system that he swapped out the motherboard and some memory for a newer model, and the store owner showed me a Vista system that he has spent the past week trying to get working. On supposedly all certified Vista equipment as well. He openly said that he expects the next six months to be a living hell for him in terms of technical support for Vista.
This retailer originally started as a Commodore Amiga vendor and went to PC sales when the Amiga sales went soft. He still is a certified Amiga repair center, although that isn't a major focus or even on his advertisements any more. While there are other vendors in my community, he is one of the major retailers for the local school district and several medium-sized (100-300 employee) businesses, many in the manufacturing sector. All that more surprising because his shop is only he, his wife, and about 5 other employees.
I would also have to agree that the move to Linux is more or less inevitable for these guys, although this particular retailer dismissed Linux as a viable option for most of his customers as not quite ready for prime time yet. I'll see what he thinks about that in six months or a year, and it isn't like this guy isn't willing to shift with the market if necessary.
As far as Microsoft playing games with hardware and vendors.... that is nothing new either. In fact, I would be surprised if they didn't favor the major players here.
I should have put this into the other reply, but I forgot to make this point:
If you have an ultracap I can purchase right now that has the energy density of 1/2 the equivalent of a Li-ion battery, give me the link or your phone number (or that of the business selling them) that I can go to and purchase the thing. Seriously. I've heard all kinds of bluster about this and I would like to see one. Better yet if I can get one in a form factor equivalent to one of my existing batteries, but I wouldn't mind just playing with one just to see what they are like. I also have business partners that would be very much interested in this for several products that have nothing to do with the automobile industry.
From what I've read and seen, this is not something that is available today here and now, but rather something that is in R&D mode. Some demos have been built, but not something an ordinary consumer can examine, or somebody critical to the researchers can independently test and verify the claims. As pointed out by another poster to my original comment on this thread, ultracaps simply don't have the energy density you are claiming and are a full order of magnitude below that of normal chemical batteries. This is also backed up by comments I've read in trade journals (primarily for UPS systems on computers and embedded systems) and other publications. Not just web sites. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
As much as I hate the software and consider it to be something not worthy of lining the bottom of my garbage can, Visual Studio is phenomenally better than just about anything available on a Mac. And you can get other software development environments for a modest price or even free for Windows. The APIs for Windows may be bloated and bizzare, but you can get them for free from Microsoft where a culture of encouraging small start-ups and even students has prevailed in terms of customer support.
Apple Computer certainly has improved the picture with OS-X, and there are some changes which show some real hope from that company. But since the Apple
I do question the science, as people who I respect and do understand the technologies have strong questions about it as well. Fundamental research is needed here to improve ultracaps as an energy storage technology. I'm not saying a very bright person won't ever figure it out, but it is not something that is trivial to dismiss and presume that the breakthroughs needed will be found. I have been involved with enough engineering efforts of my own to know that sometimes you do fail on some ideas... and fail spectacularly. Even if you think you understand the technology completely but are pushing into new areas that have never been tried anywhere before.
And the reason I mention Diesel fuel explicitly is because that is what needs to be replaced. If you are going to be able to compete against conventional automobiles, you need to have the energy storage capacity of this kind of fuel. And that is not a trivial storage medium to beat either. There is a strong reason why even rockets use what is essentially refined jet fuel... it is a very high density energy storage medium. My gasoline-powered automobile can travel over 600 miles through mountains before I have to refuel, and I can perform that refueling in under 10 minutes. And I can leave the gasoline vehicle sitting in my driveway unattended for 3 months without having to do anything but put the key in the ignition if I want to go somewhere. When I can do the same thing with electric automobiles, that will have eliminated the need to use a petroleum-based vehicle completely.
I admit there are some applications for a vehicle that can do "local" travel of less than 100 miles between trips, and the requirement of having to plug in the car for a couple of hours after I do that runabout isn't too difficult of a task, but that is a fringe application and would only be useful as a second vehicle. Particularly in rural (or semi-rural) America, you will still have petroleum-based vehicles if you don't try to achieve these basic similarities to their operation. I know several families that have to travel more than 50 miles one way just to get groceries. They try to make that trip only once a week (maybe twice), but it still is a basic requirement that most electric vehicles won't be able to meet at the moment.
Or more important, you shouldn't have people adapt to the technology... the technology should adapt to the people. That is often something many engineers tend to forget.
One cool aspect of something like this is that you could in theory build 3-D chip instead of sticking with the normal 2-D masks (plus a couple of layers). That is a goal in silicon labs/fabs, but somehow it never really is accomplished. That gives you other kinds of problems too in terms of heat dissipation and other problems, but it would be certainly cool to have a home fab be able to make some of the basic 7400 series logic chip. A discrete NAND gate would be very exciting.
Is this written Microsoft policy for Vista? That sure isn't correct in terms of copyright law, if that is the excuse that you are using here. What you are talking about in this post is pure copyright violations on a grand order, and I would strongly suggest you don't do something this stupid unless you have at least consulted with an attorney to verify this idea as something specific to Microsoft and its licensing policies. The MS-EULA is not light reading and has so many vague areas that you need some strong legal background to understand the fine points.
There are programs which Microsoft does do on a contractural basis with some OEM companies where you can purchase older MS operating systems that are not publicly sold any more. My previous employer continued to purchase MS-DOS 6.22 until 2003 under such a license, due to some equipment and software which simply had to be used under that operating system. If you can find one of these OEMs under this program, I'm sure you can get some of these earlier Windows operating systems too. But presuming that you can pirate operating systems is simply a terrible idea, and very likely illegal.
For myself, I think Windows 2000 Pro is the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced, bar none. It was a huge improvement over both Win NT 4 and Windows 98, and didn't have as huge of an increase in bloatware over the previous operating systems either (which both XP and Vista are notorious for).
It isn't like Microsoft wasn't in this position before. Back in the MS-DOS days, version 3.3 was by far and away the most stable version of DOS until they finally got their act together on version 6.1. MS-DOS version 4 was a horrible joke and 5 wasn't much better. MS-DOS version 7 wasn't too bad either, but unfortunately Microsoft killed that version by refusing to unbundle it from Windows 95... even though you could create a separate independent bootable DOS "shell" that wasn't really a shell. It was a small OS that fit on a 3.5" floppy. Very nearly the last one that Microsoft produced.
I don't see Microsoft pulling a rabbit out of the hat this time because they have invested far too much into Vista, but the tactics here are hardly new. And killing off XP or 2000 makes little sense in terms of customer satisfaction and reliability, but MS doesn't always make sense in those situations.
I will never buy MS-Vista, ever, under any circumstances. And I feel like throwing away the version of XP that I'm using on the computer I'm using to write this message.
How cheap is pure silicon? That is hardly something that you can grow with a home fab.
Try to build your own chips with a bucket sand from a local beach, or from a quartz outcropping.
I promise that you will not succeed on the budget of a typical middle-class 1st world family.
As far as why I thought this might have been something worth looking at, you could do the equivalent of gate building if you could have a "pourable" conductor that could be layered with an insulator in a matrix. If you build a transistor with those materials, and perhaps a simple capacitor, you have complete chips. Sure, they may be very crude and single gate chips, but it is a place to start and perhaps refine the process. You won't get to VLSI chips doing this, but some fairly simple stuff and even perhaps a processor like a 4004 chip might be possible with very advanced jets pouring something like this down in a substrate.
I highly doubt that the value of the 2 grams of Indium used for a display is going to be a major factor in the overall cost of the display. You could use Gold or even Iridium and it wouldn't even be a factor. Californium, perhaps, but that element is sold by the gram. I just don't buy that as a serious argument.
Trust me when I say that it is the use of Indium compounds and their phosphorescence at bold primary colors that makes it so valuable, and is driving up the world market price of Indium. Compared to Gold, Indium is a lousy conductor. A Gold or Silver trace would be much easier to hide because you would not have to use as much material. The use of Indium as a wire is not the issue, although the amount of the Indium compounds could be reduced slightly in a matrix of this cement and other composite materials used in a display system. That would be something that would appeal to a CEO or bean counter that is really concerned about the expense of getting Indium on the world metals market, but the concern would be about simply getting bulk Indium in the first place.
I guess many of those posting havn't heard about Rubber cement, commonly used for building model vehicle kits. Or other kinds of cement like the solvent used in PVC pipes.
While making it cheaper may be true, the big problem that happens with displays is that you have wires which cross between pixels on any display.... simply to turn the pixel "on" or "off". These can be quite thin and are made of several different kinds of materials, but they do get into the way of the display. By making these wires transparent, you would have a huge increase in the throughput of the light coming from something like a back-lit light source (common for laptops).
As far as replacing Indium or other rare earth metals... I don't understand that at all. Those metals are used to floresce in a CRT (television picture tube) and produce color pixels. This is what makes the TV be in bright colors. This article on color televsion gets into some of the specific color properites of Indium compounds and how they enhance the color gamut that can faithfully reproduce color from electronic media. This cement is not going to have those same kind of properties.