Apparently she didn't understand the "Funny" mod. Almost all of those "jubilant" posts were obvious jokes. I think the majority of Slashdotters probably agree more-or-less with Perens, and certainly quite a few posts pretty much stated as much.
Sure, most of us aren't going to cry for SCO when they get DOSed, given that they have repeatedly threatened many of our livelihoods with lawsuits against our employers, and attempts to destroy the community we've built and undermine the legitimacy of the licenses we choose as individuals to use for our software. But most of us realize that the damage these DOS attacks do to the infrastructure and reliability of the Internet is more potentially damaging to our careers and livelihood in the long term than any childish glee you could get from watching a crappy company's website go down.
And I think it's pretty obvious that the SCO DDOS is probably just a cover for using compromised hosts as spam zombies.
Sorry, but I have about 10 close friends who are British and British expats in the US, and that is based on stories and anecdotes they have told me. I claimed no special "understanding" of the system, only made the factual statement that in the case of non-critical ailments, other factors are used to allocate scarce resources, such as waiting lists, which are longer in some locations than in others. That's not my understanding, it's just true - I didn't make a normative statement about whether this system was good or bad, whether it was effective at identifying the most serious problems, or whether people were generally more happy with that system than the system in the US.
I never claimed to "understand" Norweigian lawyers, I was merely asking a simple question about the economics of the legal profession in Norway, which was answered nicely by the explanation that legal education is paid for by the state, wages for lawyers are moderate and predictable, so the supply of lawyers trained is presumably fairly moderate and doesn't consist of people looking to earn lots of money. And the demand for lawyers is not huge since there is less use of the courts - I guess that means one rarely _needs_ a good lawyer. Presumably there is not as much difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer since the people who would be really good or really bad are probably driven to other professions. This might explain why other factors don't come into play in allocating the supply of legal services at fixed rates.
Anyway, it's a very interesting economic question, it's not rubbish, and you just make yourself look like a fuckhead for suggesting it is.
Nobody here would dispute there are problems with the US legal system. I didn't mean to lionize the American legal system, which produces outrageous tort awards and class action lawsuits that never seem to really give a penny back to the class. We also have problems with crazy excessive sentences in parts of our criminal justice system.
But outside of those issues, I think we have a bigger problem with our legislative system in the US which keeps passing the shitty laws the judiciary has to enforce.
How the hell do they get lawyers to work at government rates? I just don't understand Europe. How do you get a _good_ lawyer rather than just a lawyer? Wouldn't everybody want a good lawyer and nobody want a crappy one, and thus the competition to get a good lawyer (who is paid for by the gov't) be fierce? Or is there just much more supply than demand for legal services?
I honestly don't understand how that system could work well. It reminds me of the medical system in England where you get to wait with a bum knee for 2 years if you want an operation at a good hospital but can get it in 6 months at a shitty hospital, and get it immediately if you pay for it out of your own pocket. I have always assumed that is generally the way this kind of socialism works when put into practice with the providers of professional services.
The first 4-5 at least are pretty much exclusively about software and business method patents. I don't think those actually benefit anybody and I think they should be wiped out. But patents have been around since long before software existed, or anybody thought you could patent a business method. I have anecdotal evidence about other kinds of patents being beneficial shields for small businesses, but I'm too tired to go searching for macroeconomic data right now.:)
Write to your legislators. Join/setup organizations to raise funds from the community to campaign for these causes. I think the most important thing to do would be to get some high profile technology industry figures to come out in favor of patent reform. I think Jeff Bezos has done that, despite (because of?) his company's involvement in the infamous one-click patent. Let's convince more high profile business figures in the tech industry that reform and rationalization of the patent filing/award process could benefit business and lead to more innovation and entrepreneurship, while still allowing legitimate awarding of intellectual property protections.
Don't rant and rave about abolishing intellectual property - remember that patent protections do benefit a lot of businesses and create jobs. It's just that the system is too open to abusive use, submarining of patents, patenting of obvious non-inventions, patenting existing practices by use of obscuring and confusing language, patenting in the face of flagrant quantities of prior art and so on. These abuses hurt everybody, small businesses, individuals, and big businesses. Except for the lawyers who get to litigate the mess that results.
It sounds from their site like the DirecWay is a two-way system. While in theory that might sound more convenient than the older downstream-only satellite systems that used 56k dial-up for upstream, I'd imagine the latency would be substantially worse, with two satellite hops in the round-trip. Is this the case in practice? Honestly, how much upstream bandwidth do you really need for casual use, given that you aren't going to be doing any serving or gaming on a sat link anyway? Is the subjective experience better or worse with this system?
Right, "no person holding any office of profit or trust under them"... so you can't accept a title of nobility while in government office. However, if you have retired or completed a term in office, you can (as in Rudy Giuliani), and if you are just a private citizen, you definitely can.
I) Chemical precipitation - extensive near-surface water
1) Precipitation from ambient, Fe-rich water (oxide iron formations)
2) Precipitation from hydrothermal fluids
3) Low-temperature dissolution and precipitation through mobile groundwater leaching
4) Surface weathering and coatings
II) Thermal oxidation of magnetite-rich lava
I guess it's just that many of the possible mechanisms for hematite formation involve the presence of water. Though I guess thermal oxidation of magnetite in lava doesn't necessarily. Presumably they want to either rule that possibility out or identify whether the hematite in fact indicates recent or distant past presence of liquid water in the area.
Okay, what is the probability of developing vCJD based on exposure to BSE protein in contaminated meat? Clearly you know something I don't know, since you saying it is equivalent to the probability of dying in a terrorist act.
A better analogy might be the probability of dying in a terrorist attack GIVEN that you are in Manhattan and there is a bomb located somewhere in the city. Sure, it's a small probability, but you'd be pretty pissed if the city decided not to tell you because they didn't want to bother you.
Die miserable painful death from bovine spongiform encephalopathy... or have my privacy invaded. For once, I think the invasion is justified. When it comes to my health and well-being, I'd prefer they let me know - my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness definitely trumps whatever the hell I said when I signed up for that grocery store card.
600 bucks? I bought my Tivo for 99 bucks on eBay (and that was 2 years ago), popped in an 80 dollar 80 gig drive, and pay my 12 bucks a month. Sure the lifetime sub is expensive, but if you're just getting into the Tivo groove, the monthly is a better option. Also, I can upgrade to a new Tivo in a year or two if I feel like it and not feel like my lifetime sub is wasted.
Nah, Friendster has real chicks on it. That's the whole value of the friend-of-a-friend concept - you can be pretty sure that unless your friends are some real sick fucks, the 20 year old women they vouch for aren't actually balding 40 year old men.
X is not slow by design. Look at SGI machines, they all run X. Even the really old 30Mhz ones will provide a nice snappy GUI experience and they were made in 91! The linux implementation needs further refinement which is some of what this project looks to provide (finally).
Okay, I know this - I don't think X is fundamentally slow by design, but it IS slow when it's required to do the things that Qt and Gtk need it to do. In other words, it seems to not meet the requirements of a modern desktop environment - and that flow of information from the desktop environment developers to the infrastructure developers is what I was criticizing. I used to use old SGI boxen in the MIT student center all the time. They were quite snappy, with far less horsepower than a modern desktop. This isn't a horsepower/CPU utilization issue at all, as I said in my post. I know X is snappy with Xlib/Xaw whatever kind of old school widgets. That doesn't change the facts as I stated them that it's slow with KDE/Qt or GNOME/Gtk, compared to say Windows on comparable hardware. I attributed this to problems with communication of requirements between the desktop environment developers who are concerned with user-facing issues and the infrastructure developers at XFree86 who are not always providing the capabilities needed by the desktop environment developers to deliver a fast, modern, usable desktop environment.
As far as the eye-candy goes, you are right for many casual/home users. With regard to enterprise computing you are dead wrong. People are supposed to be working with their machines. The less that gets in the way of that, the better.
Do we need the work? For sure. Is any of this stuff work replacing X. Not a bloody chance. X plays hard in the enterprise computing space, saving money & time through central administration and effective use of avaliable computing resources. Buffers simply cannot compare.
Okay, I agree that network transparency is a critical feature in many business settings. And I never advocating getting rid of that. I never even advocated getting rid of X (an issue I am torn up on - there's a lot good there, and it's probably better to improve in a modular fashion at this point). I won't get into the question of whether X does remoting right for the most common modern cases of remote access (i.e. not dumb terminals, plenty of CPU resources all over, except in niche cases like wireless handheld devices), since my original criticism was not a technical one at all, more of a comment on development process and the organizations involved.
No, I get it that X+KDE or X+GNOME is slow. I am just assigning the blame where it's due. You seem to think the problem is sloppy coding by Qt/Gtk/KDE/GNOME programmers. I posit that the problem is the lack of communication between the people building the two primary widget sets and desktop environments and the people building the graphics, windowing and rendering infrastructure for them.
I think Keith Packard has been the one person listening to the desktop environment folks and bringing improvements they need back into the X infrastructure. Like a new text rendering extension, built around TrueType fonts, with native anti-aliasing to replace the godawful 1-bit font shit that has been around since the dawn of X. I think Keith is also responsible for the XRANDR extension, at least in part, and I know he's now working on true alpha compositing in the X infrastructure.
I blame the KDE and GNOME developers for not being better activists - instead of just coding within the bounds of X as it's given to them, they need to push back and say "our screen refreshes are slow because of..." and get X improved. I don't think it's that they are shitty coders, I think the lines of communication are just poor. They are just trying to implement the basic features that Windows and Mac OS X provide without a problem, and that users expect these days, and sometimes the infrastructure available makes this a big kludge.
Sorry, X is slow. Not slow in the sense that you are thinking of (CPU hog) but slow in the sense of screen refreshes, expose event handling, window resizes - all the basic GUI activities feel far less responsive on X than they do on Windows, for comparable hardware. Of course, this statement is loaded with assumptions - many people would say "that's because of that awful KDE or GNOME cruft, try running a real window manager and real apps". And they'd be right in the sense that older, non-Qt, non-Gtk apps, sans the KDE/GNOME desktop environments feel blazingly fast. It's just that's not exactly a useful solution for Linux on the desktop. And don't whine about people who want eye candy, eye candy is a necessary part of a successful modern desktop.
For me, I'd like to see Linux be something that can legitimately be perceived as a desktop alternative. That's going to require the ability to support the kind of eye candy, responsiveness, and aesthetically pleasing, generally meshing GUI widgets that we still don't have today. If this doesn't matter to you, fine, but don't come out with the old Slashbot response that X is fast, X is great, if you criticize X you are an idiot and you don't understand how wonderful and innovative network transparency was 20 years ago, and so on.
You're right you did, my bad, I didn't notice that you were the OP I responded to.:) Nonetheless, my point about net carbon neutrality of bioethanol production in a full lifecycle analysis still stands as a counterargument to those who get hot and bothered over the fact that they see CO2 come out when ethanol is burned.
Funny you mention it, in theory at least, ethanol production from cellulose is actually net carbon neutral in its impact on the environment. Remember, plants take carbon dioxide and produce cellulose, then you break down cellulose to ethanol, and produce carbon dioxide when you burn the ethanol.
Whereas with hydrogen production, assuming traditional fossil fuel production, you produce substantially more CO2 because you consume more energy with the aforementioned inefficiencies then you would just combusting the damn fossil fuel in the first place. Bioethanol is a far more environmentally sustainable product than pretty much any proposed hydrogen production methodology. What, you think the oil->hydrogen catalyzing process described here is any different? The article describes that it releases CO2 during the H2 production process. All that carbon has to go somewhere.
Now if you can make all that hydrogen from solar, hydro, nuclear power, there's an argument for it, sure. But that's just not even remotely feasible for obvious reasons.
As for the corrosiveness/dryness problems, they are pretty much conquered already. FFV engines can already run on E85 directly for only a couple hundred bucks (tops) extra manufacturing cost over a regular engine. In other words, alcohol is slightly more corrosive than gasoline, but the changes to storage and handling are pretty trivial. I don't know about the hard-to-keep-dry thing. Haven't heard that described as a major problem before.
Generally, the H20->H2+O2 process is at most 50% efficient in practice. There have been several crazy pseudoscientists who've come up with unreproducible results that claim 90%+ efficiency rates (these results are not repeatable by anybody else), but standard "cracking of water" is not a perfectly efficient process by any means.
Likewise, you need to get energy from some source to drive the hydrogen production process. Hopefully you don't plan on getting that from fossil fuel sources, since they you have the power generation inefficiencies, plus the hydrogen production inefficiencies. Given how hard and expensive to transport the resulting product (hydrogen) is, if you're going to go through all the effort of transforming your energy source into something, you'd think you might want to make ethanol (which can be relatively efficiently produced from cellulose, which we really do have in renewable, limitless supply) that is cheap and easy to transport and adapt to our existing infrastructure.
The problem is, how could that be? IANAL, but it's rather difficult to put your code in the public domain. With copyright law these days (since the 70s) you don't even need to SAY that it's Copyright Joe Schmoe 2004, it's implied. Even lacking a copyright notice, your code does not enter the public domain these days. And if it said nothing more than a copyright notice, it would definitely not be public domain - you would only have the standard rights to use, compile, fuck with, maybe even modify for educational purposes, but certainly not redistribute in original or modified form.
No, they couldn't really be hoping that all GPLed code will just magically become public domain. They are just hoping that a judge will come along and selectively strike certain key portions of the GPL license. This is always a possibility, no matter how small. However, to fundamentally change the terms under which thousands of people and companies have chosen, knowingly, to distribute their works seems unbelievable. I'm also not sure that one ruling in one case could lead to a general nullification of the GPL. It would set a negative precedent for interpreting the document, but another judge could come along and rule otherwise (one judicial ruling does not constitute a general affirmative defense for all other cases - so you'd expect such a decision to lead to a flurry of GPL violations and subsequent lawsuits).
When it comes down to it, it's all about the basic legal theory of contracts (sure, we can say it's a license, it's one way, it's not negotiated, etc. but fundamentally you are getting a set of additional rights in exchange for agreeing to a set of obligations). It's very difficult to prevent people from freely entering into contracts with each other. Unless the terms of a contract are explicitly in violation of existing laws, or the net result of a contract interferes with the basic human rights of one of the parties (like non-compete contracts in California), a court is pretty unlikely to render them all null and void.
But hey, you never know. The Supreme Court made a completely untenable decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft based on an entirely broken understanding of the Constitution. And this has led to a massive negative externality on all of us, with the loss of the public domain as a meaningful concept.
I agree with you. But hey, you gotta say that this is a huge improvement in the Bush administration. At least it's THEORETICALLY possible to get energy from H3 and deuterium. Compare this to plans to dump billions into the "hydrogen economy" by Bush et. al. Where apparently the energy will just spring forth out of the ground to create all that hydrogen.
I don't claim to know how much effort has really been put into He-3 fusion research, given how scarce He-3 is on Earth. The U Wisconsin guys seem to think it's an easier problem than traditional fusion research has tried to tackle (based on this document).
Frat houses can be truly awful. My friend's fraternity at MIT (which will not be named here since they are currently in some disciplinary trouble) has been condemned at least once, and is famous for the absolutely disgusting condition it's often in.
I remember once after a long midsummer night's party back in 1999, a couple of the brothers and myself drank ourselves silly on their terrace. I proceeded to puke all over the place. I somehow ended up home later that night. A couple days later I ran into my friend and apologized for not cleaning it up. He told me not to worry - nobody else was going to clean that up. It was still waiting for me over a week later.
I'll try not to remember the time somebody made a large boil of boiled shrimp (probably 100 shrimp in all) and left the entire thing sitting in kitchen. For two weeks. After a while it became a control issue - nobody wanted to be the one to give in and clean it up. Meanwhile, the entire building had an overpowering odor of dead rotting seafood all about it. Eventually somehow it got cleaned up but it took at least a month for the stench to go away.
Well, that solution is a bit extreme. You are essentially talking about removing completely the concept of the corporate veil, and the liability shield it provides. The problem is that without this, it's very hard to take lots of the day-to-day risks you must take in business. I know I wouldn't if I thought there was a realistic chance that instead of the company getting sued I would get sued personally.
No, there needs to be a shield from liability for the vast majority of interbusiness disputes. In general the system works well. The SCO and Enron cases are on totally different scales. They are inflicting massive negative externalities on innocent third parties through unrestrained fraud. In the case of Enron it was absurd financial constructs and 401(k) shenanigans that left thousands of employees without their life savings, and hundreds of thousands of shareholders in a world of financial hurt. And in the case of SCO it is trying to remove jobs and reduce commercial support for people who have generously donated their time, brains and energy to Open Source projects in general, destroy the legal basis for the fabulous community built around the Free and Open Source Software communities, and create a long lasting aura of FUD around Linux.
Sorry bud, the SPH-i500 dominates the Treo 600 for "balance". It does a good job as a PDA but doesn't feel really awkward to use as a phone. The Treo 600 is far better than a piece of turd like the SPH-i700 (which as far as I can tell looks like an iPAQ you hold next to your head), but it still doesn't match up to the sleek form factor and phone-like feel of the i500. I guess if you really need a thumb keyboard, then the Treo has that going for it.
I have used my friends' i500, and it rocks - he is always looking up a restaurant on Zagat's or finding a bar's address when we are out - it's actually useable to do stuff like that, unlike my shitty old Voicestream phone with supposed wireless web access. I have been waiting for the last year for the SGH-i500 (the GSM version) which has still yet to appear. I'm seriously considering ditching Voicestream for Sprint so I can get an i500 sooner rather than later.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, most of us aren't going to cry for SCO when they get DOSed, given that they have repeatedly threatened many of our livelihoods with lawsuits against our employers, and attempts to destroy the community we've built and undermine the legitimacy of the licenses we choose as individuals to use for our software. But most of us realize that the damage these DOS attacks do to the infrastructure and reliability of the Internet is more potentially damaging to our careers and livelihood in the long term than any childish glee you could get from watching a crappy company's website go down.
And I think it's pretty obvious that the SCO DDOS is probably just a cover for using compromised hosts as spam zombies.
I never claimed to "understand" Norweigian lawyers, I was merely asking a simple question about the economics of the legal profession in Norway, which was answered nicely by the explanation that legal education is paid for by the state, wages for lawyers are moderate and predictable, so the supply of lawyers trained is presumably fairly moderate and doesn't consist of people looking to earn lots of money. And the demand for lawyers is not huge since there is less use of the courts - I guess that means one rarely _needs_ a good lawyer. Presumably there is not as much difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer since the people who would be really good or really bad are probably driven to other professions. This might explain why other factors don't come into play in allocating the supply of legal services at fixed rates.
Anyway, it's a very interesting economic question, it's not rubbish, and you just make yourself look like a fuckhead for suggesting it is.
But outside of those issues, I think we have a bigger problem with our legislative system in the US which keeps passing the shitty laws the judiciary has to enforce.
I honestly don't understand how that system could work well. It reminds me of the medical system in England where you get to wait with a bum knee for 2 years if you want an operation at a good hospital but can get it in 6 months at a shitty hospital, and get it immediately if you pay for it out of your own pocket. I have always assumed that is generally the way this kind of socialism works when put into practice with the providers of professional services.
The first 4-5 at least are pretty much exclusively about software and business method patents. I don't think those actually benefit anybody and I think they should be wiped out. But patents have been around since long before software existed, or anybody thought you could patent a business method. I have anecdotal evidence about other kinds of patents being beneficial shields for small businesses, but I'm too tired to go searching for macroeconomic data right now. :)
Don't rant and rave about abolishing intellectual property - remember that patent protections do benefit a lot of businesses and create jobs. It's just that the system is too open to abusive use, submarining of patents, patenting of obvious non-inventions, patenting existing practices by use of obscuring and confusing language, patenting in the face of flagrant quantities of prior art and so on. These abuses hurt everybody, small businesses, individuals, and big businesses. Except for the lawyers who get to litigate the mess that results.
It sounds from their site like the DirecWay is a two-way system. While in theory that might sound more convenient than the older downstream-only satellite systems that used 56k dial-up for upstream, I'd imagine the latency would be substantially worse, with two satellite hops in the round-trip. Is this the case in practice? Honestly, how much upstream bandwidth do you really need for casual use, given that you aren't going to be doing any serving or gaming on a sat link anyway? Is the subjective experience better or worse with this system?
Right, "no person holding any office of profit or trust under them" ... so you can't accept a title of nobility while in government office. However, if you have retired or completed a term in office, you can (as in Rudy Giuliani), and if you are just a private citizen, you definitely can.
Google told me about this Powerpoint, from the horse's mouth. Apparently, the conceivable mechanisms for hematite formation are:
I) Chemical precipitation - extensive near-surface water
1) Precipitation from ambient, Fe-rich water (oxide iron formations)
2) Precipitation from hydrothermal fluids
3) Low-temperature dissolution and precipitation through mobile groundwater leaching
4) Surface weathering and coatings
II) Thermal oxidation of magnetite-rich lava
I guess it's just that many of the possible mechanisms for hematite formation involve the presence of water. Though I guess thermal oxidation of magnetite in lava doesn't necessarily. Presumably they want to either rule that possibility out or identify whether the hematite in fact indicates recent or distant past presence of liquid water in the area.
A better analogy might be the probability of dying in a terrorist attack GIVEN that you are in Manhattan and there is a bomb located somewhere in the city. Sure, it's a small probability, but you'd be pretty pissed if the city decided not to tell you because they didn't want to bother you.
Die miserable painful death from bovine spongiform encephalopathy... or have my privacy invaded. For once, I think the invasion is justified. When it comes to my health and well-being, I'd prefer they let me know - my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness definitely trumps whatever the hell I said when I signed up for that grocery store card.
600 bucks? I bought my Tivo for 99 bucks on eBay (and that was 2 years ago), popped in an 80 dollar 80 gig drive, and pay my 12 bucks a month. Sure the lifetime sub is expensive, but if you're just getting into the Tivo groove, the monthly is a better option. Also, I can upgrade to a new Tivo in a year or two if I feel like it and not feel like my lifetime sub is wasted.
Nah, Friendster has real chicks on it. That's the whole value of the friend-of-a-friend concept - you can be pretty sure that unless your friends are some real sick fucks, the 20 year old women they vouch for aren't actually balding 40 year old men.
Okay, I know this - I don't think X is fundamentally slow by design, but it IS slow when it's required to do the things that Qt and Gtk need it to do. In other words, it seems to not meet the requirements of a modern desktop environment - and that flow of information from the desktop environment developers to the infrastructure developers is what I was criticizing. I used to use old SGI boxen in the MIT student center all the time. They were quite snappy, with far less horsepower than a modern desktop. This isn't a horsepower/CPU utilization issue at all, as I said in my post. I know X is snappy with Xlib/Xaw whatever kind of old school widgets. That doesn't change the facts as I stated them that it's slow with KDE/Qt or GNOME/Gtk, compared to say Windows on comparable hardware. I attributed this to problems with communication of requirements between the desktop environment developers who are concerned with user-facing issues and the infrastructure developers at XFree86 who are not always providing the capabilities needed by the desktop environment developers to deliver a fast, modern, usable desktop environment.
As far as the eye-candy goes, you are right for many casual/home users. With regard to enterprise computing you are dead wrong. People are supposed to be working with their machines. The less that gets in the way of that, the better.
Do we need the work? For sure. Is any of this stuff work replacing X. Not a bloody chance. X plays hard in the enterprise computing space, saving money & time through central administration and effective use of avaliable computing resources. Buffers simply cannot compare.
Okay, I agree that network transparency is a critical feature in many business settings. And I never advocating getting rid of that. I never even advocated getting rid of X (an issue I am torn up on - there's a lot good there, and it's probably better to improve in a modular fashion at this point). I won't get into the question of whether X does remoting right for the most common modern cases of remote access (i.e. not dumb terminals, plenty of CPU resources all over, except in niche cases like wireless handheld devices), since my original criticism was not a technical one at all, more of a comment on development process and the organizations involved.
I think Keith Packard has been the one person listening to the desktop environment folks and bringing improvements they need back into the X infrastructure. Like a new text rendering extension, built around TrueType fonts, with native anti-aliasing to replace the godawful 1-bit font shit that has been around since the dawn of X. I think Keith is also responsible for the XRANDR extension, at least in part, and I know he's now working on true alpha compositing in the X infrastructure.
I blame the KDE and GNOME developers for not being better activists - instead of just coding within the bounds of X as it's given to them, they need to push back and say "our screen refreshes are slow because of
For me, I'd like to see Linux be something that can legitimately be perceived as a desktop alternative. That's going to require the ability to support the kind of eye candy, responsiveness, and aesthetically pleasing, generally meshing GUI widgets that we still don't have today. If this doesn't matter to you, fine, but don't come out with the old Slashbot response that X is fast, X is great, if you criticize X you are an idiot and you don't understand how wonderful and innovative network transparency was 20 years ago, and so on.
They also don't clarify whether "ocean" implies liquid water or whether a frozen ocean would do.
You're right you did, my bad, I didn't notice that you were the OP I responded to. :) Nonetheless, my point about net carbon neutrality of bioethanol production in a full lifecycle analysis still stands as a counterargument to those who get hot and bothered over the fact that they see CO2 come out when ethanol is burned.
Whereas with hydrogen production, assuming traditional fossil fuel production, you produce substantially more CO2 because you consume more energy with the aforementioned inefficiencies then you would just combusting the damn fossil fuel in the first place. Bioethanol is a far more environmentally sustainable product than pretty much any proposed hydrogen production methodology. What, you think the oil->hydrogen catalyzing process described here is any different? The article describes that it releases CO2 during the H2 production process. All that carbon has to go somewhere.
Now if you can make all that hydrogen from solar, hydro, nuclear power, there's an argument for it, sure. But that's just not even remotely feasible for obvious reasons.
As for the corrosiveness/dryness problems, they are pretty much conquered already. FFV engines can already run on E85 directly for only a couple hundred bucks (tops) extra manufacturing cost over a regular engine. In other words, alcohol is slightly more corrosive than gasoline, but the changes to storage and handling are pretty trivial. I don't know about the hard-to-keep-dry thing. Haven't heard that described as a major problem before.
Likewise, you need to get energy from some source to drive the hydrogen production process. Hopefully you don't plan on getting that from fossil fuel sources, since they you have the power generation inefficiencies, plus the hydrogen production inefficiencies. Given how hard and expensive to transport the resulting product (hydrogen) is, if you're going to go through all the effort of transforming your energy source into something, you'd think you might want to make ethanol (which can be relatively efficiently produced from cellulose, which we really do have in renewable, limitless supply) that is cheap and easy to transport and adapt to our existing infrastructure.
No, they couldn't really be hoping that all GPLed code will just magically become public domain. They are just hoping that a judge will come along and selectively strike certain key portions of the GPL license. This is always a possibility, no matter how small. However, to fundamentally change the terms under which thousands of people and companies have chosen, knowingly, to distribute their works seems unbelievable. I'm also not sure that one ruling in one case could lead to a general nullification of the GPL. It would set a negative precedent for interpreting the document, but another judge could come along and rule otherwise (one judicial ruling does not constitute a general affirmative defense for all other cases - so you'd expect such a decision to lead to a flurry of GPL violations and subsequent lawsuits).
When it comes down to it, it's all about the basic legal theory of contracts (sure, we can say it's a license, it's one way, it's not negotiated, etc. but fundamentally you are getting a set of additional rights in exchange for agreeing to a set of obligations). It's very difficult to prevent people from freely entering into contracts with each other. Unless the terms of a contract are explicitly in violation of existing laws, or the net result of a contract interferes with the basic human rights of one of the parties (like non-compete contracts in California), a court is pretty unlikely to render them all null and void.
But hey, you never know. The Supreme Court made a completely untenable decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft based on an entirely broken understanding of the Constitution. And this has led to a massive negative externality on all of us, with the loss of the public domain as a meaningful concept.
I don't claim to know how much effort has really been put into He-3 fusion research, given how scarce He-3 is on Earth. The U Wisconsin guys seem to think it's an easier problem than traditional fusion research has tried to tackle (based on this document).
I remember once after a long midsummer night's party back in 1999, a couple of the brothers and myself drank ourselves silly on their terrace. I proceeded to puke all over the place. I somehow ended up home later that night. A couple days later I ran into my friend and apologized for not cleaning it up. He told me not to worry - nobody else was going to clean that up. It was still waiting for me over a week later.
I'll try not to remember the time somebody made a large boil of boiled shrimp (probably 100 shrimp in all) and left the entire thing sitting in kitchen. For two weeks. After a while it became a control issue - nobody wanted to be the one to give in and clean it up. Meanwhile, the entire building had an overpowering odor of dead rotting seafood all about it. Eventually somehow it got cleaned up but it took at least a month for the stench to go away.
No, there needs to be a shield from liability for the vast majority of interbusiness disputes. In general the system works well. The SCO and Enron cases are on totally different scales. They are inflicting massive negative externalities on innocent third parties through unrestrained fraud. In the case of Enron it was absurd financial constructs and 401(k) shenanigans that left thousands of employees without their life savings, and hundreds of thousands of shareholders in a world of financial hurt. And in the case of SCO it is trying to remove jobs and reduce commercial support for people who have generously donated their time, brains and energy to Open Source projects in general, destroy the legal basis for the fabulous community built around the Free and Open Source Software communities, and create a long lasting aura of FUD around Linux.
I have used my friends' i500, and it rocks - he is always looking up a restaurant on Zagat's or finding a bar's address when we are out - it's actually useable to do stuff like that, unlike my shitty old Voicestream phone with supposed wireless web access. I have been waiting for the last year for the SGH-i500 (the GSM version) which has still yet to appear. I'm seriously considering ditching Voicestream for Sprint so I can get an i500 sooner rather than later.