1) The config tools are better than Redhat's--nice for new users.
2) Equal support for KDE and Gnome.
3) [And this is the real winner] the urpmi tools for automated package management. The repositories are newer than debian-stable without being bleeding edge, and for packages not included (rare given the size of the repositories!) you can use it to stuff in rpm's you've found on your own, and still check and download their dependencies manually. Works pretty well flawlessly, and it's this command line program, not the pretty stuff, keeping me on Mandrake.
Is there something I'm missing here? Reiser, RAID-5, and Samba are most definitely ready for prime-time, and while I've no personal experience and the maintainability may not be great, I've heard of Gentoo in production environments. People still run Win2k in production, you know.
thought i'd break to you that PNTR is what Congress renamed MFN status when most nations achieved it. e.g., #2 is actually a consistency. i think there are plenty of flip-flops for Kerry, but one must be careful with one's facts.
this is silly. all of the qt-linux code is GPLd. thus, you may always use it for anything sans fee, and no of course you can't release it under a bsd license any more than you could do the same with the linux kernel.
all dual-licensing means is that you can do things that you wouldnt be able to do under the GPL (bsd, proprietary software) by paying a fee to the owners of the copyright.
the windows licensing is a separate issue. rather than being dual-licensed, this separate codebase is not released under the gpl. the kde-windows people are working on porting the gpl'd qt-nix framework to windows, if Trolltech were enforcing restrictions beyond the gpl they would not be able to do this.
that's what i drive:-). 93 2wd, purchased with 145k, now up to about 170k. i average about 44 highway, 37 all-around. and with only one person in it, the highway acceleration and performance really isn't too shabby. the stick-shift helps in that department of course, but i'd never want an auto anyway!
electricity pays little attention to temperature, and while the chemical reaction in a battery could be highly temperature sensitive, it isnt.
the reason cars start harder when its cold is that the oil is thicker, and therefore the battery has to turn the engine over with more difficulty and for a longer period of time to get it up to starting speed.
what the warmer does is warm the engine oil, not the battery.
the latter only works if exchange has IMAP turned on, which apparently most corporations turn off, and it doesnt support CAL integration. the ximian connector uses the OWA instead of IMAP, and fully supports CALs as long as you have the server license.
one of the basic techniques of internet2 is congestion-awareness so that transmission continues even without an ack if speed levels are substantially lower than the network is 'known good for' and when the traffic throughput approaches the bandwidth allowance, acks are interpolated so that the sending system looks at the acks coming at the expected round-trip time, taking the known latency into account. then as the latency increases or expected acks dont arrive, the transmission algorithm retransmits longer windows than tcp, but only throttles in -10%/+1% increments rather than -50%/+5% or whatever tcp uses. this sort of network-latency and congestion aware protocol is actually what they're testing here, not their oh-so-wonderful new fiber.
2) nfts_resize is still a bit experimental, i think mdk's implementation tries to be intelligent before farking your data (as one might hope) so this might just be telling you that it wont work.
3) you can try to partition-magic first, then install
4) last option (assuming ironclad backups), is to let mandrake from-scratch partition the whole drive, but allow the first partition to be fat32 or nothing or whatever, dont give it a mount point, and let it be the size you want your ntfs to be. then install windows, this will hopefully (not guaranteed) only find the first partition as the c: drive or whatever, and install there. it will overwrite the bootloader tho, so mandrake will be unbootable. now use the mandrake install cds to just install a bootloader, since your partitions should already be set up correctly. pacakges can be installed on the first or second pass, your choice.
thanks for the tip, i'll see if i can get used to it, tho i've found kword just less buggy to begin with. see my other two daughter posts in this thread for more details.
read my reply to your sister post (what's that make it...your post's nephew?) for more detail, but basically:
i deal with lots of mid length (~30p) documents with lots of moderately complicated formatting (header, footer, bulleting, blockquotes, indentations, outlining, interlocking footnote and endnote regimes). the formatting requirements for all these are fairly precise (tho not typesetting-precise) but vary from professor to professor. thus, it's not really worth my time to say, write a stylesheet for lyx, but neither is it time-efficient to insert, justify, etc everything manually (lord knows i have enough to do at the end of a term!).
i've found that WP is better than OOo at letting me delete certain tags without effecting others. or it could just be familiarity. i will try the f10 trick someone else suggested, i have on occasion opened the gzip manually before, but that's much more of a pain than the easy switching and mutual updating of wysiwyg and markup in wordperfect.
it is a fairly broad and powerful appeal to do that, i think; my mother insists on Frontpage instead of Quanta for that very reason right now. someone posted in another discussion about wishing that a gui file manager and terminal emulator good 'follow' each other when a command was passed to either--WP's implementation of 'view codes' is sortof like that. until wordprocessors are nearly bugfree, it's going to be necessary, and i'd suspect from past experience that's a long-time coming.
well, i havent downloaded 1.1.1 yet, but the mdk version of 1.1 doesnt do endnotes, just footnotes. WP allows me to auto-convert between two systems, and have several different setups for each (perhaps numbered endnotes for secondary sources, numbered footnotes for primary sources, * footnotes for textual notes, that sort of thing, all managed pretty well automatically.
also, speaking to both issues with one problem, i've been having a lot of difficulty with OOo (and Word's no better) lately with complex outline-type documents, especially when the tab and numbering scheme i'm using isnt one it recognizes, or there are, say, blockquotes which mess with the format. first off, OOo doesnt stop moving things around even when autoformat and autonumbering are unchecked, which is odd. i'll report that bug when i get the time. furthermore, however, WP both allows me to kill this behavior easily with reveal codes, and, because i'm only deleting the tag for the particular malfunctioning paragraph or whatever, the rest can still be managed automagically. oh, and WP also lets me define custom outline styles.
i'm not claiming this makes OOo a bad program, or one not well-suited for many/most users, but i have found it a bad fit for me--if i want something lightweight (tho the features are growing quickly!) i'll use kword, whereas if i'm doing a long, tricky document which needs precise setting i'll either break out scribus or head to the lab for wordperfect. thus OOo hasnt ended up being that useful for me, except for those wonderful import/export filters that are simply to die for. even better is that when kword goes to that format, presumably we'll be able to merge the filter projects as well. and kword development is progressing rapidly and i'm sure will meet and overtake WP even for long, complicated documents (graduate term papers bear a surprising similarity to legal briefs in some respects...i think i'm seeing why lawyers stay with WP...), but until then i'll heartily welcome WP to my mandrake desktop if it appears at an affordable price.
Seriously, WordPerfect has a number of functions with regard to advanced document formatting that Open Office.org, for all of its usefulness, lacks. Plus, there's the ever-wonderful option to actually view the document code, and manually correct the hidden formatting bugs that inflict themselves on my Word and OpenOffice.org use from time to time.
It will also be a boon as I ease my mother's business onto Linux, since they interface with a number of law offices who still use Word Perfect.
Finally, I've had good luck with the WP file format and KWord, my preferred word processor (because I use Qt and am a bit lacking in the ram dept for OOo's liking), easing both file exchange with my mother and providing a convenient power-formatting application for stuff i've sketched in Kword (no, it isnt framemaker, but i'm a college student who has to write 30 page papers, not a doc writer). So i'm all for it.
The worst that can happen is that it fails, and since Corel isnt exactly a huge F/OSS contributor these days, that's no major loss either.
presuming you're not trolling, email me and ask anything you want about mdk. should be able to give you a good answer. as for installing programs...rpms automatically install in/usr, but rather than like windows where each program gets its own folder which includes its graphics, executables, etc, there are folders which hold a particular kind of file for all the programs you have installed. programs can be installed many other ways, however. software management under the mandrake control center provides a way to visually uninstall.
supposedly debian turns it off because the rendering engine used by mozilla conflicts with that used by kde. i'm a mandrake guy myself, so i dont know how you'd go about fixing it, but supposedly the stuff works, its just a configuration issue. hope that helps.
1) you're right on, IBM and novell show that consulting/services is the future, and that's precisely the intersection of IT and other skills.
2) thanks for your work on the perseus project, as a Philosophy and Theology major at BC, and sometime struggling Greek student, the end of the green line thanks you:-).
the RIAA employs people, but using a business model that doesnt work. even if illegal downloading was stopped, the combination of services like itunes and i-rate will kill the need for large scale music publishing. most slashdotters hope that gnu/linux and f/oss will end the need for MS and its thousands of programmers. do you think redhat is going to hire all those people? no, but those with a bad business model deserve to go down. why doesnt the same apply to broader industries?
nonetheless, as the Cato paper points out, IT jobs are still nearly double now what they were in 95, despite being 5-10% off of the 2000 peak (not 2002, 2000, before so much complaining about outsourcing). the percentage of professional jobs is however increasing as a percentage of employment, being at its highest historical level at the present time, these are not declining and will only continue to improve. DOL statistics (also in the grandparent's link) further indicate that IT jobs will likely continue to grow.
given that, you are right to ask the question about what to train for. within IT, it seems like programming will continue to grow more efficient due to IDE's, and web design is also being more automated so that designers and salespersons can do their own work without knowing any html. the real area of growth seems to be in services--choosing, setting up, and configuring systems these professionals need to do their jobs without programming skills. this seems to be how IBM and Novell are positioning themselves, and both seem to be doing quite well.
any job that doesnt require customer interaction or creative insights is probably going to be lost to a combination of outsourcing and automation--it just makes sense, despite the pain in the individual case. so if you dont want to be in the wal-mart category, then best to find an area of IT where creative insights rather than routine (initech) processes are the bread and butter of the job. just as the service/consulting model is the place to make money with linux, this is likely to be the place to make money in IT in general.
nonetheless, my condolences to those who have lost good jobs, and happy hunting in finding a new one, hopefully the job market will turn around soon.
the radioshack's that i've been in, both in boston and pennsylvania, have fully working models of samsung, ericsson, and nokia phones, possibly others. perhaps there is a radioshack in your area which might also have working models as displays?
Here at Boston College I frequently hit around 10mbps on.iso downloads, especially from other internet2 sources. We do, however, use traffic shaping to throttle p2p apps, including bittorrent, to a tiny fraction of bandwidth such that it can take longer for people to get a song than on dialup. I'm rather in favor of this since nearly all legitimate sharing can be accomplished over the campus network at lightning speed.
Too bad RIAA smashed the lanscan/flatlan tool for localized samba search (flatlan.com now points to riaa stooge site musicunited.com), as those tools were amazing for finding anything on our network, not just mp3s, without sucking any external bandwidth. The university seems pretty fair, neither encouraging nor discouraging filesharing at an active level, merely taking the expected steps to protect their bandwidth, so that we have fast access with no caps. I'm a satisfied user!
well...i wouldnt say she's requested linux, but she seems equally afraid of xp, and 98 is just frustrating her to tears with dll hell, windows update constantly (we're in the country...28.8), and she seems unable to avoid spyware and virii..mind you i upped the security on IE, but she's willing to actually download and install things b/c a website or magazine tells her to and i havent been able to persuade her differently.
so linux seems worth a shot. given that i'm expert #10 on mandrakeexpert, i'm well aware of the community and the workability of mandrake, i'm not afraid of the installation. i have however found samba integration and wine performance to be iffy and tricky, and thats why i was considering xandros since it neatly integrates everything (or at least says it does).
I'm currently a Mandrake 9.2 user, solidly wedded to KDE, and trying to decide what to upgrade my mother to from Win98. She needs crossover, for sure, but I'm not sure if I should stick with what I know and love ('drake) and just add crossover for her or whether something more integrated like Xandros would be appropriate.
Does it just boil down to whether I want debian or redhat compatibility? (I cant say i'm at all dissatisfied with urpmi, so apt-get isnt all that exciting). Any thoughts?
since when can you patent a plot? patents are for technology, algorithms, and business methods. you and i may not agree with software patents, but it at least seemed clear that they applied to the methods used to generate results in software, not the 'plot'/user experience of the software. if driving a videogame taxi can be patented, why not writing a letter?
perhaps an overly similar videogame would be a derived work under copyright law or perhaps a trademark violation, but a _patent_???
next you'll be able to patent the plots of e-books, so that if anyone creates another with a similar plot, you can sue. imagine the proceeds Tolkien would have on fantasy!
1) 'most correct'? hardly correct at all. c4 doesnt 'leak' more than tnt, etc. purifying uranium (increasing density of u235) does not increase the energy leakage. there's just no sense at all in this supposed correlation.
2) the problem with battery technology isnt rechargability--as the article points out, charge/discharge cycles have increased for batteries, and charging is now faster and more efficient. what hasnt changed is the amount of energy stored in a unit of volume, that's the sticking point. an increase in the amount of energy used to recharge batteries wouldnt even be noticeable to the grid, whereas a difference in the amount of energy batteries can discharge would be very noticeable to the consumer.
3) there may or may not be net energy, depending on whose GUT you believe, but furthermore this effect isnt increased in areas with lower mass densities, proving that its got nothing to do with nature 'abhorring a vacuum'.
and i didnt mean the discipline was to blame, i merely meant that yes the principles (physics) of inorganic chemistry are responsible for the limit.
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Is this to imply that Gentoo includes a wallpaper of Gael naked? Do tell! On a more serious note, Mandrake is more than eye-candy, as I explain above.
1) The config tools are better than Redhat's--nice for new users.
2) Equal support for KDE and Gnome.
3) [And this is the real winner] the urpmi tools for automated package management. The repositories are newer than debian-stable without being bleeding edge, and for packages not included (rare given the size of the repositories!) you can use it to stuff in rpm's you've found on your own, and still check and download their dependencies manually. Works pretty well flawlessly, and it's this command line program, not the pretty stuff, keeping me on Mandrake.
Is there something I'm missing here? Reiser, RAID-5, and Samba are most definitely ready for prime-time, and while I've no personal experience and the maintainability may not be great, I've heard of Gentoo in production environments. People still run Win2k in production, you know.
thought i'd break to you that PNTR is what Congress renamed MFN status when most nations achieved it. e.g., #2 is actually a consistency. i think there are plenty of flip-flops for Kerry, but one must be careful with one's facts.
this is silly. all of the qt-linux code is GPLd. thus, you may always use it for anything sans fee, and no of course you can't release it under a bsd license any more than you could do the same with the linux kernel.
all dual-licensing means is that you can do things that you wouldnt be able to do under the GPL (bsd, proprietary software) by paying a fee to the owners of the copyright.
the windows licensing is a separate issue. rather than being dual-licensed, this separate codebase is not released under the gpl. the kde-windows people are working on porting the gpl'd qt-nix framework to windows, if Trolltech were enforcing restrictions beyond the gpl they would not be able to do this.
that's what i drive :-). 93 2wd, purchased with 145k, now up to about 170k. i average about 44 highway, 37 all-around. and with only one person in it, the highway acceleration and performance really isn't too shabby. the stick-shift helps in that department of course, but i'd never want an auto anyway!
electricity pays little attention to temperature, and while the chemical reaction in a battery could be highly temperature sensitive, it isnt.
the reason cars start harder when its cold is that the oil is thicker, and therefore the battery has to turn the engine over with more difficulty and for a longer period of time to get it up to starting speed.
what the warmer does is warm the engine oil, not the battery.
the latter only works if exchange has IMAP turned on, which apparently most corporations turn off, and it doesnt support CAL integration. the ximian connector uses the OWA instead of IMAP, and fully supports CALs as long as you have the server license.
one of the basic techniques of internet2 is congestion-awareness so that transmission continues even without an ack if speed levels are substantially lower than the network is 'known good for' and when the traffic throughput approaches the bandwidth allowance, acks are interpolated so that the sending system looks at the acks coming at the expected round-trip time, taking the known latency into account. then as the latency increases or expected acks dont arrive, the transmission algorithm retransmits longer windows than tcp, but only throttles in -10%/+1% increments rather than -50%/+5% or whatever tcp uses. this sort of network-latency and congestion aware protocol is actually what they're testing here, not their oh-so-wonderful new fiber.
1) you have to defrag first
2) nfts_resize is still a bit experimental, i think mdk's implementation tries to be intelligent before farking your data (as one might hope) so this might just be telling you that it wont work.
3) you can try to partition-magic first, then install
4) last option (assuming ironclad backups), is to let mandrake from-scratch partition the whole drive, but allow the first partition to be fat32 or nothing or whatever, dont give it a mount point, and let it be the size you want your ntfs to be. then install windows, this will hopefully (not guaranteed) only find the first partition as the c: drive or whatever, and install there. it will overwrite the bootloader tho, so mandrake will be unbootable. now use the mandrake install cds to just install a bootloader, since your partitions should already be set up correctly. pacakges can be installed on the first or second pass, your choice.
hope that helps.
thanks for the tip, i'll see if i can get used to it, tho i've found kword just less buggy to begin with. see my other two daughter posts in this thread for more details.
read my reply to your sister post (what's that make it...your post's nephew?) for more detail, but basically:
i deal with lots of mid length (~30p) documents with lots of moderately complicated formatting (header, footer, bulleting, blockquotes, indentations, outlining, interlocking footnote and endnote regimes). the formatting requirements for all these are fairly precise (tho not typesetting-precise) but vary from professor to professor. thus, it's not really worth my time to say, write a stylesheet for lyx, but neither is it time-efficient to insert, justify, etc everything manually (lord knows i have enough to do at the end of a term!).
i've found that WP is better than OOo at letting me delete certain tags without effecting others. or it could just be familiarity. i will try the f10 trick someone else suggested, i have on occasion opened the gzip manually before, but that's much more of a pain than the easy switching and mutual updating of wysiwyg and markup in wordperfect.
it is a fairly broad and powerful appeal to do that, i think; my mother insists on Frontpage instead of Quanta for that very reason right now. someone posted in another discussion about wishing that a gui file manager and terminal emulator good 'follow' each other when a command was passed to either--WP's implementation of 'view codes' is sortof like that. until wordprocessors are nearly bugfree, it's going to be necessary, and i'd suspect from past experience that's a long-time coming.
well, i havent downloaded 1.1.1 yet, but the mdk version of 1.1 doesnt do endnotes, just footnotes. WP allows me to auto-convert between two systems, and have several different setups for each (perhaps numbered endnotes for secondary sources, numbered footnotes for primary sources, * footnotes for textual notes, that sort of thing, all managed pretty well automatically.
also, speaking to both issues with one problem, i've been having a lot of difficulty with OOo (and Word's no better) lately with complex outline-type documents, especially when the tab and numbering scheme i'm using isnt one it recognizes, or there are, say, blockquotes which mess with the format. first off, OOo doesnt stop moving things around even when autoformat and autonumbering are unchecked, which is odd. i'll report that bug when i get the time. furthermore, however, WP both allows me to kill this behavior easily with reveal codes, and, because i'm only deleting the tag for the particular malfunctioning paragraph or whatever, the rest can still be managed automagically. oh, and WP also lets me define custom outline styles.
i'm not claiming this makes OOo a bad program, or one not well-suited for many/most users, but i have found it a bad fit for me--if i want something lightweight (tho the features are growing quickly!) i'll use kword, whereas if i'm doing a long, tricky document which needs precise setting i'll either break out scribus or head to the lab for wordperfect. thus OOo hasnt ended up being that useful for me, except for those wonderful import/export filters that are simply to die for. even better is that when kword goes to that format, presumably we'll be able to merge the filter projects as well. and kword development is progressing rapidly and i'm sure will meet and overtake WP even for long, complicated documents (graduate term papers bear a surprising similarity to legal briefs in some respects...i think i'm seeing why lawyers stay with WP...), but until then i'll heartily welcome WP to my mandrake desktop if it appears at an affordable price.
Seriously, WordPerfect has a number of functions with regard to advanced document formatting that Open Office.org, for all of its usefulness, lacks. Plus, there's the ever-wonderful option to actually view the document code, and manually correct the hidden formatting bugs that inflict themselves on my Word and OpenOffice.org use from time to time.
It will also be a boon as I ease my mother's business onto Linux, since they interface with a number of law offices who still use Word Perfect.
Finally, I've had good luck with the WP file format and KWord, my preferred word processor (because I use Qt and am a bit lacking in the ram dept for OOo's liking), easing both file exchange with my mother and providing a convenient power-formatting application for stuff i've sketched in Kword (no, it isnt framemaker, but i'm a college student who has to write 30 page papers, not a doc writer). So i'm all for it.
The worst that can happen is that it fails, and since Corel isnt exactly a huge F/OSS contributor these days, that's no major loss either.
presuming you're not trolling, email me and ask anything you want about mdk. should be able to give you a good answer. as for installing programs...rpms automatically install in /usr, but rather than like windows where each program gets its own folder which includes its graphics, executables, etc, there are folders which hold a particular kind of file for all the programs you have installed. programs can be installed many other ways, however. software management under the mandrake control center provides a way to visually uninstall.
supposedly debian turns it off because the rendering engine used by mozilla conflicts with that used by kde. i'm a mandrake guy myself, so i dont know how you'd go about fixing it, but supposedly the stuff works, its just a configuration issue. hope that helps.
1) you're right on, IBM and novell show that consulting/services is the future, and that's precisely the intersection of IT and other skills.
:-).
2) thanks for your work on the perseus project, as a Philosophy and Theology major at BC, and sometime struggling Greek student, the end of the green line thanks you
the RIAA employs people, but using a business model that doesnt work. even if illegal downloading was stopped, the combination of services like itunes and i-rate will kill the need for large scale music publishing. most slashdotters hope that gnu/linux and f/oss will end the need for MS and its thousands of programmers. do you think redhat is going to hire all those people? no, but those with a bad business model deserve to go down. why doesnt the same apply to broader industries?
nonetheless, as the Cato paper points out, IT jobs are still nearly double now what they were in 95, despite being 5-10% off of the 2000 peak (not 2002, 2000, before so much complaining about outsourcing). the percentage of professional jobs is however increasing as a percentage of employment, being at its highest historical level at the present time, these are not declining and will only continue to improve. DOL statistics (also in the grandparent's link) further indicate that IT jobs will likely continue to grow.
given that, you are right to ask the question about what to train for. within IT, it seems like programming will continue to grow more efficient due to IDE's, and web design is also being more automated so that designers and salespersons can do their own work without knowing any html. the real area of growth seems to be in services--choosing, setting up, and configuring systems these professionals need to do their jobs without programming skills. this seems to be how IBM and Novell are positioning themselves, and both seem to be doing quite well.
any job that doesnt require customer interaction or creative insights is probably going to be lost to a combination of outsourcing and automation--it just makes sense, despite the pain in the individual case. so if you dont want to be in the wal-mart category, then best to find an area of IT where creative insights rather than routine (initech) processes are the bread and butter of the job. just as the service/consulting model is the place to make money with linux, this is likely to be the place to make money in IT in general.
nonetheless, my condolences to those who have lost good jobs, and happy hunting in finding a new one, hopefully the job market will turn around soon.
the radioshack's that i've been in, both in boston and pennsylvania, have fully working models of samsung, ericsson, and nokia phones, possibly others. perhaps there is a radioshack in your area which might also have working models as displays?
Here at Boston College I frequently hit around 10mbps on .iso downloads, especially from other internet2 sources. We do, however, use traffic shaping to throttle p2p apps, including bittorrent, to a tiny fraction of bandwidth such that it can take longer for people to get a song than on dialup. I'm rather in favor of this since nearly all legitimate sharing can be accomplished over the campus network at lightning speed.
Too bad RIAA smashed the lanscan/flatlan tool for localized samba search (flatlan.com now points to riaa stooge site musicunited.com), as those tools were amazing for finding anything on our network, not just mp3s, without sucking any external bandwidth. The university seems pretty fair, neither encouraging nor discouraging filesharing at an active level, merely taking the expected steps to protect their bandwidth, so that we have fast access with no caps. I'm a satisfied user!
(1) amen! i think that would be an enormous help.
(2) what _is_ the best way to convert between mdir and mbox?
(3) since you offered, any chance you'd email me the code to convert the IE bookmarks?
thanks!
well...i wouldnt say she's requested linux, but she seems equally afraid of xp, and 98 is just frustrating her to tears with dll hell, windows update constantly (we're in the country...28.8), and she seems unable to avoid spyware and virii..mind you i upped the security on IE, but she's willing to actually download and install things b/c a website or magazine tells her to and i havent been able to persuade her differently.
so linux seems worth a shot. given that i'm expert #10 on mandrakeexpert, i'm well aware of the community and the workability of mandrake, i'm not afraid of the installation. i have however found samba integration and wine performance to be iffy and tricky, and thats why i was considering xandros since it neatly integrates everything (or at least says it does).
I'm currently a Mandrake 9.2 user, solidly wedded to KDE, and trying to decide what to upgrade my mother to from Win98. She needs crossover, for sure, but I'm not sure if I should stick with what I know and love ('drake) and just add crossover for her or whether something more integrated like Xandros would be appropriate.
Does it just boil down to whether I want debian or redhat compatibility? (I cant say i'm at all dissatisfied with urpmi, so apt-get isnt all that exciting). Any thoughts?
since when can you patent a plot? patents are for technology, algorithms, and business methods. you and i may not agree with software patents, but it at least seemed clear that they applied to the methods used to generate results in software, not the 'plot'/user experience of the software. if driving a videogame taxi can be patented, why not writing a letter?
perhaps an overly similar videogame would be a derived work under copyright law or perhaps a trademark violation, but a _patent_???
next you'll be able to patent the plots of e-books, so that if anyone creates another with a similar plot, you can sue. imagine the proceeds Tolkien would have on fantasy!
1) 'most correct'? hardly correct at all. c4 doesnt 'leak' more than tnt, etc. purifying uranium (increasing density of u235) does not increase the energy leakage. there's just no sense at all in this supposed correlation.
2) the problem with battery technology isnt rechargability--as the article points out, charge/discharge cycles have increased for batteries, and charging is now faster and more efficient. what hasnt changed is the amount of energy stored in a unit of volume, that's the sticking point. an increase in the amount of energy used to recharge batteries wouldnt even be noticeable to the grid, whereas a difference in the amount of energy batteries can discharge would be very noticeable to the consumer.
3) there may or may not be net energy, depending on whose GUT you believe, but furthermore this effect isnt increased in areas with lower mass densities, proving that its got nothing to do with nature 'abhorring a vacuum'.
and i didnt mean the discipline was to blame, i merely meant that yes the principles (physics) of inorganic chemistry are responsible for the limit.