If the EU isn't a country, then why do Germany and Britain have about the same degree of national autonomy within it as Iowa and Indiana? The only true counties on the continent are the Scandinavian nations and Switzerland, which remain independent and can write their own laws.
What the hell is a country anyway? The US is a country made up of 50 states, but the UK is a state made up of 4 countries. Just goes to show that judging one country by another's standards is a fool's errand.
Now, as for questions of autonomy within the US vs within the EU, the EU harmonises laws with one particular goal: to allow free movement of people and of trade. Am I supposed to be annoyed that my country doesn't have the right to have completely different workers' rights laws from (for example) Belgium? Why should I? Now I know roughly what my rights are everywhere, so I can travel for work without being at the mercy of employers who would exploit my ignorance. VAT (sales tax) harmonisation means that I may pay a little more at a certain time on a certain thing than otherwise, but for the most part it levels out and I don't really notice it in the end.
In short, while the EU treaty does cede sovereign power (all international treaties do), it's not actually taking any real power from the people, because we do not have that level of granularity of control over our politicians. What it creates by doing so is something both true capitalists and true communists want: an open market that's a level playing field for all parties.
An important big difference between the EU and the US is the lack of a two-party system. There are very few parties in the EU that exist across borders, and while there are alliances between parties with similar agendas, there is no all-powerful bloc like in most national politics. That means that decisions taken at the European level need to be thought through and discussed, and agreement and compromise established -- no more "win the election, push through all your pet policies as quick as possible".
There have been similar recent rumblings about Spotify, which will be resolved in the next year (the deadline is 2015). Without some form of concession to economic reality, such that the amount GEMA is attempting to grab for each instance of playback is less than the net profit to the company providing the service through which the playback occurs, there's zero incentive for companies to continue operations in Germany.
Or on the flipside, without some form of concession to economic reality, such as paying a reasonable royalty rate, digital services give zero incentive for artists to participate in the service.
I suggest that if Spotify can't afford to pay a decent rate, then the problem is in their model, not their suppliers'. Spotify's problem is either that their subscription fee is too low, or that they're taking too much as the middle man, or both. Spotify's shareholders include Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI, who are also their biggest content providers. For them, low royalties aren't that much of a problem, because it translates to extra profit that they get as capital gains from their shares rather than income from sales/licensing (I understand corporate capital gains are taxed less than profits, the same as with the domestic equivalents). Furthermore, the investment returns are the companies' to keep, whereas the royalties have to be split with the artist.
The Spotify model makes a mockery of the music business's claims to be representing the artists -- as they're no longer bound to percentage commission, they have no incentive to increase the profit for the artist.
I do not know if GEMA's demands are reasonable or not (the reports about the dispute tend to miss that level of detail), but I do feel it's good that someone's willing to make a stand and forego immediate profits in order to maintain the value of their product and protect the incomes of the people they represent.
Or maybe I should just accept "economic reality" and go and work for less than minimum wage...?
If the alignment of dead, washed-up whale carcasses is the same as that of living, washed-up whale bodies, it at the very least suggests that mass strandings are unintentional, and that the sea has overwhelmed the animals rather than them running themselves aground to escape predators, which was one the theory.
Hmm... on the one hand, we do get various posts here from people remaining anonymous because they work for the company in question, but on the other hand we also get rashes of anonymous racism and other abuse. The anonymous beta-bashing is pretty pointless, though: the one group who do know who you are is Slashdot....
No, the US Navy of course. This discovery pushes the first use of sonar back several million years.
Not to mention the invention of the United States.
Didn't you know that the United States has existed since the dawn of time, ruled by white people? Modern revisionists want to claim that them thar injuns is "native Americans", but we all know the truth....
Incidentally, the whales were presumably stranded when the Great Flood subsided. The Mountains of Ararat must therefore be in the Americas. That's how white men got there, see?
It's originally something that V. S. Ramachandran had been researching with mirrors. Ramachandran's results weren't perfect, but relieved the symptoms notably. Using VR/AR was a natural extension, as it addresses the limitations of the mirror (angles of view, size of field of view, reliance on a remaining limb for visual stimulus etc).
I think it funny that Mr. "Stop America Now" is Mr. "Pay Me Now". Not a truer American sentiment was ever spoken, and exactly why we are where we are at in every respect.
Completely agree -- the confederation was was right, and good ol' Dixie's been on a downhill since the gosh-darned cotton-pickin' abolitionists got their way.
I see no justification for this word "yet". I didn't suggest that any given computer program would allow the representation of any and all possible graphs.
Sorry, but that's what we call "development". The boundary between "development" and "programming" may be a fuzzy one, but that doesn't mean we should conflate the two. Writing the user manual is certainly not programming.
English is universally derided among them for being the easiest to learn.
English is easy to start learning, but very difficult to master. The first year of learning English is easy, whereas the first year of learning (eg) French is pretty difficult. But after that first year, you know the hard parts of French, and all that's left to learn is the easy stuff. English... well, the worst is yet to come.
The grammar is pathetic. The rules are arbitrary but easily picked up.
Rules that are truly arbitrary are never easy to pick up. Rules must maintain some internal logic.
The problem with English is that its simple syntax and lack of inflectional complexity means that grammatical complexity is transferred to word bundles. The stuff of nightmares for the Spanish learner-of-English is the "phrasal verb". "pick up" may use the words "pick" and "up", but the verb "pick" means "choose", whereas there's no implied choice-of-thing in "pick up". When we "pick up a ladder", we "pick it up". When we "set up a ladder", we "set it up". But when we "go up a ladder" we "go up it". This is internally logical, but despite that, it still trips learners up, because what looks like the same pattern superficially is actually two different ones.
The words all comes from Latin or Greek or Germanic originally.
That doesn't make it easy. German's vocabulary almost all comes from Germanic. French's vocabulary almost all comes from Latin. Modern Greek's vocabulary almost all comes from Ancient Greek. Whereas English has a hodge-podge of the three plus French, and it's difficult to predict which words we use, and which we don't. Our "kings" are Germanic, and when they act "regal" they are Latin, whereas their "royal" virtues are French.
The lack of clear shared roots in related nouns, adjectives and verbs makes the learning of English vocabulary a long and thankless task.
The job of high school is to prepare students for jobs upon graduation (not so much any more) and/or prepare students for college. How does one or two years of mandatory foreign language study do either?
If you can identify what a 12-year-old is going to do for a lifelong career, then you can use school as a work training camp. If you cannot (and I have yet to meet anyone who can) then school has to teach a broad base that covers two roles: understanding the world around you and giving you enough knowledge that you can learn more. Many of the most difficult hurdles in language learning are dealt with in the first two years. You encounter idiomatic differences like English's "I am X years old" vs Spanish/French/Italian "I have X years". You run up against differences in word order. You discover that foreign words don't map your native language one-to-one. You find out that there are sounds out there that you've never pronounced.
2 years in high school may not teach you a language, but people who have done high school language classes will find it a hell of a lot easier to study a language later in life than those who haven't.
Programming itself rarely includes more math than simple algebra. There are of course very specialized fields of software engineering that need quite a bit of math, such as data science or other research oriented fields. But at the risk of making up statistics, I doubt more than 5% of programmers use more than a 10th grade level of math in their entire career.
If your definition of maths is "algebra + calculus", then this is true. If your definition of "programmers" is script kiddies, then this is true. But any non-trivial program will rely heavily on graph theory.
Since in college I was hopeless in my foreign language class when listening/speaking were stressed. (And failed those classes multiple times.) When all I had to do was read it(at the same 4th semester level) I passed it the first time and I wasn't even close to failing. (Yes, I realize this is an anecdote but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a difference between reading and listening.)
There can be a difference between reading and speaking/listening, but there shouldn't be. In short, there are multiple possible ways to extract the information from a written text, but only one of them is the "correct" way. You need to read the words in order, from start to finish, and you need to associate the written word with the spoken sound. Any reading strategy that does not do that will interfere with your ability in the spoken mode.
Our education system places a heavy emphasis on reading and writing for practical reasons: in a class of over a dozen people, there isn't enough time for aural-heavy teaching -- if you have 15 students for an hour, that's 4 minutes per student, even assuming the teacher never says a word.
From that starting point, reading has become self-justifying and self-sustaining as the first thing: the fact that lots of people can read but not speak has led to reading being identified as "easy" and speaking being identified as "hard", and logic would suggest that we start with the easy stuff first.
There are, I believe, a number of people responsible for the development of programming languages whose formal credentials are in linguistics.
Sadly it's all Chomskian structuralists, though. Generative grammars (BNF etc) still plague modern linguistics to a very great extent (despite better models following about two years after Chomsky first published) and are still one of the first things a linguistics student will be introduced to (thus polluting their minds with out-of-date garbage).
And I think it's misguided to suggest that linguistics led computer programming, because it was really computers that started it. Chosmkian grammars were a computationally-based model, born out of the assumption that the brain was like a digital computer. So the grammars they designed to try to map human language were really only efficient for parsing formal computer languages, which is why compilers are built on those principles to this day.
What computer science needs is for someone to generate a parser based on modern linguistics. It wouldn't be efficient at compile time, but seriously -- I started coding C on computers that had 8 or 16 MB of RAM and processors at around 150MHz... I don't think compile-time efficiency is really as important as it was, compared to the amount of time wasted on having programming languages that aren't really human compatible.
However, in this case, they have a point. Here's an analogy for you.
Imagine they put a novelist in one of those machines when they were working. What would be the most active part of the brain? Probably the areas involved in language. Is this the area that is most important to writing a novel? It's certainly indispensable, but the unique skill involved in writing a book is the imagination, and the composition of events, consequences etc... you know, the story.
Or to put it into physical terms: even if it takes less time to design a building than to build it, it's still the design that makes that building that building -- the labour just makes it a building.
This may seem an abstract distinction, but in order to learn any type of language, you need to have something to say in it. With a human language, you already have the mental structures in place to conceptualise pretty much anything you want to say, but in order to express in computer code, you've got to learn the concepts of computing.
You missed the point by an enormous margin. Writing code is absolutely nothing like writing words because the act of writing has relatively little to do with the act of constructing the things to be written (and the former takes up much less time than the latter in most cases).
"Absolutely nothing" is a gross overstatement.
I've been doing a lot of coding recently, and it just so happens that what I'm coding is language learning software (I have degrees both in Comp Sci and in modern languages).
I would say that I reach what appears to be a "flow state" once I internally understand the logic of the task at hand completely. At that point, I am working linguistically -- I am expressing my thoughts in a codified form. The point where coding becomes non-linguistic is when I have to work out what the logic of the task is. That's a task that's carried out as I pace around in front of a window, as I chew on my lunch, as I soak in the bathtub....
That coding is in part linguistic should come as no surprise (I can't be the only guy who mentally says to himself "is equal to" to remind myself to use a double-equals sign rather than a single one), but the problem seems to be that they're only measuring part of the process and avoiding the difficult bit. Here's one of their comprehension tasks:
public static void main(String[] args) {
String word = "Hello";
String result = new String();
for (int j = word.length() - 1; j >= 0; j--)
result = result + word.charAt(j);
System.out.println(result);
}
Now I'm not sure whether that's C++ or Java (or could it be C#?) but I understand it, even though I do not program in any of those languages. It uses the most common constructs of the language, with explicit naming conventions. It doesn't call for understanding of tail recursions or analysing structures or any of the stuff that actually makes for useful software.
So they say this doesn't use the same bits of the brain that are involved in maths reasoning, but I doubt that they're comparing it with something as trivial as 2+2. Anyone who works with figures habitually doesn't have to "reason" or "calculate" 2+2 -- they know it automatically.
Not to mention margarine, which was invented because all those lovely tropical oils kept going rancid before the colonial powers shipped them home. So they converted them into a non-food state so that nothing on Earth would eat it. Except humans. (And we call ourselves an intelligent species!)
Its for MREs, combat rations, soldiers in the field.
Nobody is planning to serve it in restaurants.
With the way some of the right-wingers rally behind the military, you could actually market a fast food chain that sells this stuff as "supporting our guys".
Agreed on the license thing. I tend to view software development in terms of "raising the roof" vs "raising the floor". If something's new and unique, it's "raising the roof" and merits some protection. If something's old and not particularly special, it should be freely available (BSD/MIT free) so that it can form a new "base" level of performance that anyone and his dog can build on.
Plan 9 is not new by any stretch of the imagination, and by trying to keep it restricted by GPL terms they've made it unattractive to developers. It puts it on pretty even ground with Linux licensing-wise, but Linux is a lot more feature rich. Even if Plan 9 is more efficient in some ways, the development overhead to expand it is high, whereas with Linux, you can just roll your own distro out of the thousands of SourceForge and GitHub projects....
Slashdot Mirror
If the EU isn't a country, then why do Germany and Britain have about the same degree of national autonomy within it as Iowa and Indiana? The only true counties on the continent are the Scandinavian nations and Switzerland, which remain independent and can write their own laws.
What the hell is a country anyway? The US is a country made up of 50 states, but the UK is a state made up of 4 countries. Just goes to show that judging one country by another's standards is a fool's errand.
Now, as for questions of autonomy within the US vs within the EU, the EU harmonises laws with one particular goal: to allow free movement of people and of trade. Am I supposed to be annoyed that my country doesn't have the right to have completely different workers' rights laws from (for example) Belgium? Why should I? Now I know roughly what my rights are everywhere, so I can travel for work without being at the mercy of employers who would exploit my ignorance. VAT (sales tax) harmonisation means that I may pay a little more at a certain time on a certain thing than otherwise, but for the most part it levels out and I don't really notice it in the end.
In short, while the EU treaty does cede sovereign power (all international treaties do), it's not actually taking any real power from the people, because we do not have that level of granularity of control over our politicians. What it creates by doing so is something both true capitalists and true communists want: an open market that's a level playing field for all parties.
An important big difference between the EU and the US is the lack of a two-party system. There are very few parties in the EU that exist across borders, and while there are alliances between parties with similar agendas, there is no all-powerful bloc like in most national politics. That means that decisions taken at the European level need to be thought through and discussed, and agreement and compromise established -- no more "win the election, push through all your pet policies as quick as possible".
There have been similar recent rumblings about Spotify, which will be resolved in the next year (the deadline is 2015). Without some form of concession to economic reality, such that the amount GEMA is attempting to grab for each instance of playback is less than the net profit to the company providing the service through which the playback occurs, there's zero incentive for companies to continue operations in Germany.
Or on the flipside, without some form of concession to economic reality, such as paying a reasonable royalty rate, digital services give zero incentive for artists to participate in the service.
I suggest that if Spotify can't afford to pay a decent rate, then the problem is in their model, not their suppliers'. Spotify's problem is either that their subscription fee is too low, or that they're taking too much as the middle man, or both. Spotify's shareholders include Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI, who are also their biggest content providers. For them, low royalties aren't that much of a problem, because it translates to extra profit that they get as capital gains from their shares rather than income from sales/licensing (I understand corporate capital gains are taxed less than profits, the same as with the domestic equivalents). Furthermore, the investment returns are the companies' to keep, whereas the royalties have to be split with the artist.
The Spotify model makes a mockery of the music business's claims to be representing the artists -- as they're no longer bound to percentage commission, they have no incentive to increase the profit for the artist.
I do not know if GEMA's demands are reasonable or not (the reports about the dispute tend to miss that level of detail), but I do feel it's good that someone's willing to make a stand and forego immediate profits in order to maintain the value of their product and protect the incomes of the people they represent.
Or maybe I should just accept "economic reality" and go and work for less than minimum wage...?
(wondering whether the downvotes were failure to detect sarcasm, or just not liking the humour....)
If the alignment of dead, washed-up whale carcasses is the same as that of living, washed-up whale bodies, it at the very least suggests that mass strandings are unintentional, and that the sea has overwhelmed the animals rather than them running themselves aground to escape predators, which was one the theory.
George Lucas's fault. He thought he could do something with whales and time travel in the Star Wars franchise, and this is the result.
I knew he was running out of ideas, but ripping off Star Trek IV...?!?
Hmm... on the one hand, we do get various posts here from people remaining anonymous because they work for the company in question, but on the other hand we also get rashes of anonymous racism and other abuse. The anonymous beta-bashing is pretty pointless, though: the one group who do know who you are is Slashdot....
No, the US Navy of course. This discovery pushes the first use of sonar back several million years.
Not to mention the invention of the United States.
Didn't you know that the United States has existed since the dawn of time, ruled by white people? Modern revisionists want to claim that them thar injuns is "native Americans", but we all know the truth....
Incidentally, the whales were presumably stranded when the Great Flood subsided. The Mountains of Ararat must therefore be in the Americas. That's how white men got there, see?
His results were limited, and VR/AR was always the way forward, and I think he may have even said that himself on several occasions.
I just don't see what the VR is doing that the Mirror is not.
From the abstract:
Moreover, this strategy disregards the actual effort made by the patient to produce phantom motions.
IE. he thinks it; it doesn't happen; the mirror box illusion is broken.
It's originally something that V. S. Ramachandran had been researching with mirrors. Ramachandran's results weren't perfect, but relieved the symptoms notably. Using VR/AR was a natural extension, as it addresses the limitations of the mirror (angles of view, size of field of view, reliance on a remaining limb for visual stimulus etc).
I think it funny that Mr. "Stop America Now" is Mr. "Pay Me Now". Not a truer American sentiment was ever spoken, and exactly why we are where we are at in every respect.
Completely agree -- the confederation was was right, and good ol' Dixie's been on a downhill since the gosh-darned cotton-pickin' abolitionists got their way.
</sarcasm>
I see no justification for this word "yet". I didn't suggest that any given computer program would allow the representation of any and all possible graphs.
Sorry, but that's what we call "development". The boundary between "development" and "programming" may be a fuzzy one, but that doesn't mean we should conflate the two. Writing the user manual is certainly not programming.
Also, they used explicit variable names. Using simple tokens like a,b,c; i,j,k; x,y,z would allow more of an insight into how we see the structures.
English is universally derided among them for being the easiest to learn.
English is easy to start learning, but very difficult to master. The first year of learning English is easy, whereas the first year of learning (eg) French is pretty difficult. But after that first year, you know the hard parts of French, and all that's left to learn is the easy stuff. English... well, the worst is yet to come.
The grammar is pathetic. The rules are arbitrary but easily picked up.
Rules that are truly arbitrary are never easy to pick up. Rules must maintain some internal logic.
The problem with English is that its simple syntax and lack of inflectional complexity means that grammatical complexity is transferred to word bundles. The stuff of nightmares for the Spanish learner-of-English is the "phrasal verb". "pick up" may use the words "pick" and "up", but the verb "pick" means "choose", whereas there's no implied choice-of-thing in "pick up". When we "pick up a ladder", we "pick it up". When we "set up a ladder", we "set it up". But when we "go up a ladder" we "go up it". This is internally logical, but despite that, it still trips learners up, because what looks like the same pattern superficially is actually two different ones.
The words all comes from Latin or Greek or Germanic originally.
That doesn't make it easy. German's vocabulary almost all comes from Germanic. French's vocabulary almost all comes from Latin. Modern Greek's vocabulary almost all comes from Ancient Greek. Whereas English has a hodge-podge of the three plus French, and it's difficult to predict which words we use, and which we don't. Our "kings" are Germanic, and when they act "regal" they are Latin, whereas their "royal" virtues are French.
The lack of clear shared roots in related nouns, adjectives and verbs makes the learning of English vocabulary a long and thankless task.
The job of high school is to prepare students for jobs upon graduation (not so much any more) and/or prepare students for college. How does one or two years of mandatory foreign language study do either?
If you can identify what a 12-year-old is going to do for a lifelong career, then you can use school as a work training camp. If you cannot (and I have yet to meet anyone who can) then school has to teach a broad base that covers two roles: understanding the world around you and giving you enough knowledge that you can learn more. Many of the most difficult hurdles in language learning are dealt with in the first two years. You encounter idiomatic differences like English's "I am X years old" vs Spanish/French/Italian "I have X years". You run up against differences in word order. You discover that foreign words don't map your native language one-to-one. You find out that there are sounds out there that you've never pronounced.
2 years in high school may not teach you a language, but people who have done high school language classes will find it a hell of a lot easier to study a language later in life than those who haven't.
Programming itself rarely includes more math than simple algebra. There are of course very specialized fields of software engineering that need quite a bit of math, such as data science or other research oriented fields. But at the risk of making up statistics, I doubt more than 5% of programmers use more than a 10th grade level of math in their entire career.
If your definition of maths is "algebra + calculus", then this is true. If your definition of "programmers" is script kiddies, then this is true. But any non-trivial program will rely heavily on graph theory.
Since in college I was hopeless in my foreign language class when listening/speaking were stressed. (And failed those classes multiple times.) When all I had to do was read it(at the same 4th semester level) I passed it the first time and I wasn't even close to failing. (Yes, I realize this is an anecdote but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a difference between reading and listening.)
There can be a difference between reading and speaking/listening, but there shouldn't be. In short, there are multiple possible ways to extract the information from a written text, but only one of them is the "correct" way. You need to read the words in order, from start to finish, and you need to associate the written word with the spoken sound. Any reading strategy that does not do that will interfere with your ability in the spoken mode.
Our education system places a heavy emphasis on reading and writing for practical reasons: in a class of over a dozen people, there isn't enough time for aural-heavy teaching -- if you have 15 students for an hour, that's 4 minutes per student, even assuming the teacher never says a word.
From that starting point, reading has become self-justifying and self-sustaining as the first thing: the fact that lots of people can read but not speak has led to reading being identified as "easy" and speaking being identified as "hard", and logic would suggest that we start with the easy stuff first.
And so the poor teaching continues....
There are, I believe, a number of people responsible for the development of programming languages whose formal credentials are in linguistics.
Sadly it's all Chomskian structuralists, though. Generative grammars (BNF etc) still plague modern linguistics to a very great extent (despite better models following about two years after Chomsky first published) and are still one of the first things a linguistics student will be introduced to (thus polluting their minds with out-of-date garbage).
And I think it's misguided to suggest that linguistics led computer programming, because it was really computers that started it. Chosmkian grammars were a computationally-based model, born out of the assumption that the brain was like a digital computer. So the grammars they designed to try to map human language were really only efficient for parsing formal computer languages, which is why compilers are built on those principles to this day.
What computer science needs is for someone to generate a parser based on modern linguistics. It wouldn't be efficient at compile time, but seriously -- I started coding C on computers that had 8 or 16 MB of RAM and processors at around 150MHz... I don't think compile-time efficiency is really as important as it was, compared to the amount of time wasted on having programming languages that aren't really human compatible.
However, in this case, they have a point. Here's an analogy for you.
Imagine they put a novelist in one of those machines when they were working. What would be the most active part of the brain? Probably the areas involved in language. Is this the area that is most important to writing a novel? It's certainly indispensable, but the unique skill involved in writing a book is the imagination, and the composition of events, consequences etc... you know, the story.
Or to put it into physical terms: even if it takes less time to design a building than to build it, it's still the design that makes that building that building -- the labour just makes it a building.
This may seem an abstract distinction, but in order to learn any type of language, you need to have something to say in it. With a human language, you already have the mental structures in place to conceptualise pretty much anything you want to say, but in order to express in computer code, you've got to learn the concepts of computing.
You missed the point by an enormous margin. Writing code is absolutely nothing like writing words because the act of writing has relatively little to do with the act of constructing the things to be written (and the former takes up much less time than the latter in most cases).
"Absolutely nothing" is a gross overstatement.
I've been doing a lot of coding recently, and it just so happens that what I'm coding is language learning software (I have degrees both in Comp Sci and in modern languages).
I would say that I reach what appears to be a "flow state" once I internally understand the logic of the task at hand completely. At that point, I am working linguistically -- I am expressing my thoughts in a codified form. The point where coding becomes non-linguistic is when I have to work out what the logic of the task is. That's a task that's carried out as I pace around in front of a window, as I chew on my lunch, as I soak in the bathtub....
That coding is in part linguistic should come as no surprise (I can't be the only guy who mentally says to himself "is equal to" to remind myself to use a double-equals sign rather than a single one), but the problem seems to be that they're only measuring part of the process and avoiding the difficult bit. Here's one of their comprehension tasks:
public static void main(String[] args) { String word = "Hello"; String result = new String(); for (int j = word.length() - 1; j >= 0; j--) result = result + word.charAt(j); System.out.println(result); }
Now I'm not sure whether that's C++ or Java (or could it be C#?) but I understand it, even though I do not program in any of those languages. It uses the most common constructs of the language, with explicit naming conventions. It doesn't call for understanding of tail recursions or analysing structures or any of the stuff that actually makes for useful software.
So they say this doesn't use the same bits of the brain that are involved in maths reasoning, but I doubt that they're comparing it with something as trivial as 2+2. Anyone who works with figures habitually doesn't have to "reason" or "calculate" 2+2 -- they know it automatically.
Not to mention margarine, which was invented because all those lovely tropical oils kept going rancid before the colonial powers shipped them home. So they converted them into a non-food state so that nothing on Earth would eat it. Except humans. (And we call ourselves an intelligent species!)
Its for MREs, combat rations, soldiers in the field.
Nobody is planning to serve it in restaurants.
With the way some of the right-wingers rally behind the military, you could actually market a fast food chain that sells this stuff as "supporting our guys".
Agreed on the license thing. I tend to view software development in terms of "raising the roof" vs "raising the floor". If something's new and unique, it's "raising the roof" and merits some protection. If something's old and not particularly special, it should be freely available (BSD/MIT free) so that it can form a new "base" level of performance that anyone and his dog can build on.
Plan 9 is not new by any stretch of the imagination, and by trying to keep it restricted by GPL terms they've made it unattractive to developers. It puts it on pretty even ground with Linux licensing-wise, but Linux is a lot more feature rich. Even if Plan 9 is more efficient in some ways, the development overhead to expand it is high, whereas with Linux, you can just roll your own distro out of the thousands of SourceForge and GitHub projects....
What about an OS where everything is a potato?
I tried that once. Unfortunately when I ran it full multitasking on a multicore processor, the timeslicing just left me with a bag of chips....