Actually, Apple's announcements this time seemed more interesting than they have at other such events: changes to Objective C, more open source (including xnu for Intel), significant changes to desktop applications, the long-awaited Intel desktop machines, etc. Maybe the poster should be looking for substance instead of style.
Well, the garbage collector that ships with Sun Java is not all that good: it has a lot of overhead and it causes perceptible delays in interactive applications.
But the real problem with garbage collection in Java is the poor language and library design, which forces applications to generate huge amounts of garbage and leads to a lot of unnecessary memory management overhead. Java, unfortunately, gives garbage collection a bad name.
Garbage collection is only one part of what makes a language like Java safe, and Objective-C doesn't have any of the other parts.
Quite right. And that's why I pointed out in another thread that I think that adding garbage collection to Objective C is just a gimmick unless Apple has made substantial changes to other parts of Objective C as well.
Producing optimized code isn't easier with garbage collection, but producing slow code is. Meaning that the routine majority of your coding gets done sooner and you can focus your effort on the parts that actually need to be fast.
We don't have to guess: garbage collection has been available for C, C++, and Objective C for more than a decade. My experience on several projects has been that it simply doesn't help a lot for languages in the C family. There are several reasons for that: retrofitting gives you something that has a lot of intrinsic complexities and pitfalls, it's not very efficient, and most C libraries aren't designed for a garbage collector anyway. The one thing it would help with on Macintosh is that it frees people from having to learn the Cocoa memory management rules.
Objective C can be cleaned up, by separating the Smalltalk and C parts of the language more strictly, but merely adding garbage collection is insufficient. We'll have to see what Apple actually did. In any case, while this revision may not be enough, it's a step in the right direction.
Hmmm. I somehow get the feeling you're taking sides, dude.
Of course, I am taking sides, why wouldn't I? There are real political issues here, not the wishy-washy half-this-half-that that you seem to subscribe to.
The Republican PR machine has done grave damage to US politics by distracting people from the real issues with blabber about "values" and "family". And the administration that has come to power using that PR machine has done even graver damage to the nation, both economically and internationally.
I'm all for smaller federal government, more liberties, lower taxes, economic liberalization, states rights, and refraining from international activism. The Republicans keep promising yet keep doing the opposite of what they promise. It's ironic, but Clinton was more in line with stated Republican policies than any of the Bushes or Reagan.
And I detest it when a GUI pauses for no good reason, just because the manual storage allocator has needlessly held on to extra storage and the application is now forced to go to virtual memory.
Garbage collection can also lead to unpredictability.
There are different kinds of garbage collectors: some are intended for non-interactive programs and minimize long-term CPU overhead, while others give guaranteed real-time performance. There's also a middle ground of "near real-time" performance.
Furthermore, even with a non-real-time garbage collector, you can achieve real-time responsiveness if you know what you're doing. Of course, your comments suggests that you wouldn't know how, which is why you prefer sticking with manual storage mangaement.
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Take your own advice to heart and try to actually verify your claims about manual storage management and garbage collectors; you'll be surprised.
All the new graphics, 3D, animation, search, and video APIs, to name just a few.
(By "changing" I don't mean that they change existing APIs incompatibly, I mean what Microsoft has been doing: changing the preferred way of doing things.)
There is little reason to run Darwin if it didn't ship with your machine: it's a decent kernel, but kernels like Linux and BSD have more hardware support, more functionality, and somewhat better performance. However, the technical differences are not large enough for Apple to bother switching right now. On the other hand, if Apple wants to move to generic PCs, porting their user environment to a Linux or BSD kernel might make a lot of sense.
In any case, Apple's future is likely in hypervisors--small kernels that allow Linux, Darwin, BSD, and NT to run on top of them. In a sense, that's what Mach was supposed to be from the beginning, but it's being achieved using different technologies now.
Many people think that the purpose of garbage collection is to make programming easier. But that's not the purpose of garbage collection at all. Memory management in a garbage collected language is at least as much effort as memory management in a language with manual storage management, and it requires at least as much experience to use well.
The purpose of garbage collection is to make languages safer. If Objective C 2.0 has additional features to make it safer (variable initialization, pointer checks, etc.), then garbage collection will help it. Otherwise, it's just a gimmick.
Unfortunately, from Apple's web page, it's difficult to see what exactly they did; adding garbage collection to Objective C in a useful and correct way is a nearly intractable problem, and I won't believe that they succeeded until I see more data.
You're missing the point of garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't there to save your effort. In fact, garbage collection does not save you effort at all. The purpose of garbage collection is to make the language safe and isolate errors, something that no other storage management scheme can achieve.
Both manual storage management and garbage collection each require a lot of experience to use correctly. Your problem is likely that you underestimate both how much work it took to become proficient at manual storage management/reference counting, and how much work it would take you to become proficient in a garbage collected environment.
In addition to the obvious contribution to NeXTStep--gcc--GNU was also widely responsible for the fact that a UNIX-based workstation was a choice at all. If GNU hadn't paved the way and made a lot of improvements to the UNIX userland environment, UNIX workstations wouldn't have been as big a success as they were in the 80's.
At least Linus released something. HURD still isn't officially released and ready for production systems, and I suspect it never will be.
You're right: it may never be. But that's not because Linus is better than the people working on the Hurd, it's because Linux has attracted all the third party contributions and very few people are left to contribute to the Hurd.
Linus is a capable open source project leader and developer, but he is no better many other kernel developers; the reason he succeeded where others failed was that he had just the right product at just the right time and attracted all the contributions with his project.
But, in the end, we'd probably be better off if the community had waited a year or two for the first release of the Hurd or the first free BSD release. Still, one shouldn't complain too much: unlike DOS, Linux has grown and matured fairly well.
Both parties are full of shit. You "my party is better than mine" types make me fucking sick, because they're both pretty fucking bad.
No, they are not equally bad. Even if all your accusations against Democrats were true (which they aren't), they would be largely personal failings. Both parties have plenty of people with serious personal failings, and that's always been the case (it comes with being a politician).
What matters in elected representatives is whether they keep the economy running, preserve our liberties, and don't waste or divert taxpayer money. Clinton succeeded in those areas, while Bush and the Republican Congress has been failing miserably in all of them.
If you want an idea of whats going on, read/view as much as you can -- from as many sources as you can. From Fox to CNN, from the far left Pacifica to convervative talk radio. From The Standard to the NY Times. From LGF to DailyKos. My limited experience has suggested to me that the 'real story' is usually somewhere in the middle.
Unfortunately, that's not just an observation, it's a strategy many people adopt. The consequence? People can manipulate where "the middle" is by becoming ever more extreme. In particular, the right wing of the political spectrum has become masterful at this, pulling mainstream America way to the right with hyperbole and fear mongering.
i think it is gnustep that needs to become compatible with OSX and not the other way around.
Well, if Apple bothered to go through standardization of the APIs, then people could become compatible with it. Right now, Apple is clearly deliberately pulling a Microsoft: keep the APIs changing so fast that no third party implementation can catch up with them.
Of course, the whole thing is like beating a dead horse anyway: Objective-C, GNUStep, and Cocoa are 1980's technology. The only reason they have been competitive for so long is because Microsoft was shipping even more outdated technology (MFC, C++), but that's changing. What Apple really needs to do is to figure out how to move their platform into the 21st century. The Macintosh platform perhaps doesn't need standardization so much as it needs a major overhaul.
So far, this is simply an equation that reproduces the visual appearance of spots. That's not an "explanation", it's merely a hypothesis or a model. Proving it will require actually identifying the substances and their concentrations over time that appear in the model.
My point is that neither side has a monopoly on being good or being evil.
No, historically and over the long run, neither label, "Republican" or "Democrat", has had a monopoly on being good or evil: evil people, corrupt people, and incompetent people are attracted to power, whatever label it happens to fall under. It just happens to be that in 2006, they seem to have taken over the Republican party: incompetent foreign policy, abusing the tax system for social engineering, vast expansions of the federal bureaucracy, costly and ineffective wars, violations of human rights, intrusive government, bad economic policies, cronyism, and widespread instituionalized corruption, to name just a few. This administration and this Congress are one of the worst we have ever had in US history, and the damage they are doing to the US will be felt for decades to come.
And if you're saying "no, no, the other party doesn't agree with me on ____", you should find out why. If you can't find a reason why someone disagrees with you, save they're evil, you really need to open your mind.
I don't know about the GP, but it's no mystery why Republicans disagree with me: the party is dominated by people who are incompetent, power hungry, and, at times, simply corrupt. And since they have excellent PR people working for them, plus wealthy funders to pay for PR, they can convince enough people to vote for them to remain in power. The real problem isn't that there are evil Republicans or that they have power, but that people like you are stupid enough to vote for these kinds of people. I mean, assuming you're somewhere in the 40k-200k income bracket, you're so dumb that you let the current government talk out out of many thousands of dollars that they collect in taxes from you and funnel to their political buddies, and you don't even notice it.
Republicans brought an end to slavery in America.
Yeah, if only anybody could bring those Republicans back. Unfortunately, today's Republicans are the antithesis of that; they have simply latched on to the name in order to give their agenda an acceptable veneer.
But so far it's been Linus who's done the most to actually change the world.
No, he has not. All Linus did was write a kernel. If he hadn't done so, there were half a dozen alternatives about to become available. Most likely, if Linus had been run over by a truck, we'd be running the BSD kernel now, or some Mach derivative.
Proving once again the superiority of actually getting working technology out the door, versus spending a decade or so fine-tuning your philosophy about how to begin working on the great technology that you will eventually design when you have the philosophy just perfect (if everyone hasn't succumbed to old age first).
That charge is totally unfair. GNU released plenty of software long before the Linux kernel was created. And the reason development on the microkernel went slowly was not because of any "fine tuning of philosophy", it was because porting and cleaning up a large, existing microkernel codebase and giving it POSIX APIs was a big project that needed to be completed in one big development effort and required the PC industry to start delivering hardware capable of running it. Linus instead delivered a flaky and incomplete kernel that became popular because it ran on PCs right away, but that required many years to beat into shape.
I've had enough troubles in my own career directly traceable to wanting to Get Things Right at the expense of Getting Things Done to appreciate this particular point with some sensitivity, not to say bitterness. Feh.
You're right: getting code out the door, even if it is inferior quality, is clearly generally good for companies and developers. It's not good for users or the community. What happened with Linux vs. Mach was somewhat analogous to what happend with DOS vs. UNIX: the quick and dirty hack won, and users ended up paying the price. Fortunately, because Linux at least copied proven UNIX APIs, the Linux cleanup avoided most of the pain that have accompanied analogous evolutions at Microsoft and Apple.
But...I dunno. Until Linux came along, these things seemed a bit on the fringe to me, except for Emacs, which predates the FSF anyway.
GNU software was running on just about every UNIX workstation, was widely used with embedded systems, and was what made NeXTStep possible.
What I'm saying is that I think the future belongs more to people like Linus -- that they will have more lasting influence
The success of Linus is very much like the success of Gates: both succeeded by releasing inferior technology early and then patching it up. That's not just the future, it's always been that way. It's a great strategy to get rich and/or famous, it's just that your users pay the price.
But I don't think Linus will have much lasting influence; the Linux kernel is already having serious problems with maintenance and release, and I think Linus is not capable of delivering the next generation kernel that we need. The irony is that any successor operating system to Linux will probably still be called "Linux" even though it will have no software by Linus in it.
I suspect one reason the DA didn't want charges to go through is because he didn't want a precedent set.
It might be possible for the accused in this case to ask for the court to make a judgement even though the DA didn't press charges. That could set a precedent that will make it clear that the NH law cannot apply in these cases. I hope the ACLU or some other organization will support such an effort. Right now, the police can continue to use this law to hassle people.
But, there are loads of things for which Linux doesn't have any software to do certain things. And, I don't mean some broken POS 0.11 version of something open source. I mean functioning, supported, commercial software which I can actually use -- like my tax software for example.
Many of those things are becoming available as web applications. I don't use Windows for anything anymore except the occasional game.
Blackboard was garbage until GWU sold them Prometheus, which practically makes up their Blackboard software now. Can you patent something somebody made without patenting and sold to you?
No, you can only patent what you yourself have actually invented. Buying somebody's product and then patenting inventions contained in it is fraud.
The solution to the radioactive waste problem already exists: breeder reactors. The reason they aren't being used is politics, not technology.
Even if we could dispose of the current high-level radioactive waste using this technique, it would still be irresponsible. Non-breeder reactors use only a tiny fraction of the energy stored in the nuclear fuel and throw away the rest, and that's an unacceptable waste.
There is no imaginable catastrophe for which this kind of "backup" makes sense. There are events that could wipe out all human life on earth, but no off-world colony would be able to survive sufficiently long without support from earth to be useful. Any other catastrophes are going to leave more diversity on earth than anything we can store in an off-world colony.
Maybe things will be different in a few centuries, but for now, talk of off-world colonies is irrational escapism. For now, either we make it here on earth, or we die out as a species.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Apple's announcements this time seemed more interesting than they have at other such events: changes to Objective C, more open source (including xnu for Intel), significant changes to desktop applications, the long-awaited Intel desktop machines, etc. Maybe the poster should be looking for substance instead of style.
Well, the garbage collector that ships with Sun Java is not all that good: it has a lot of overhead and it causes perceptible delays in interactive applications.
But the real problem with garbage collection in Java is the poor language and library design, which forces applications to generate huge amounts of garbage and leads to a lot of unnecessary memory management overhead. Java, unfortunately, gives garbage collection a bad name.
Garbage collection is only one part of what makes a language like Java safe, and Objective-C doesn't have any of the other parts.
Quite right. And that's why I pointed out in another thread that I think that adding garbage collection to Objective C is just a gimmick unless Apple has made substantial changes to other parts of Objective C as well.
Producing optimized code isn't easier with garbage collection, but producing slow code is. Meaning that the routine majority of your coding gets done sooner and you can focus your effort on the parts that actually need to be fast.
We don't have to guess: garbage collection has been available for C, C++, and Objective C for more than a decade. My experience on several projects has been that it simply doesn't help a lot for languages in the C family. There are several reasons for that: retrofitting gives you something that has a lot of intrinsic complexities and pitfalls, it's not very efficient, and most C libraries aren't designed for a garbage collector anyway. The one thing it would help with on Macintosh is that it frees people from having to learn the Cocoa memory management rules.
Objective C can be cleaned up, by separating the Smalltalk and C parts of the language more strictly, but merely adding garbage collection is insufficient. We'll have to see what Apple actually did. In any case, while this revision may not be enough, it's a step in the right direction.
Hmmm. I somehow get the feeling you're taking sides, dude.
Of course, I am taking sides, why wouldn't I? There are real political issues here, not the wishy-washy half-this-half-that that you seem to subscribe to.
The Republican PR machine has done grave damage to US politics by distracting people from the real issues with blabber about "values" and "family". And the administration that has come to power using that PR machine has done even graver damage to the nation, both economically and internationally.
I'm all for smaller federal government, more liberties, lower taxes, economic liberalization, states rights, and refraining from international activism. The Republicans keep promising yet keep doing the opposite of what they promise. It's ironic, but Clinton was more in line with stated Republican policies than any of the Bushes or Reagan.
I detest it when a GUI pauses for no good reason,
And I detest it when a GUI pauses for no good reason, just because the manual storage allocator has needlessly held on to extra storage and the application is now forced to go to virtual memory.
Garbage collection can also lead to unpredictability.
There are different kinds of garbage collectors: some are intended for non-interactive programs and minimize long-term CPU overhead, while others give guaranteed real-time performance. There's also a middle ground of "near real-time" performance.
Furthermore, even with a non-real-time garbage collector, you can achieve real-time responsiveness if you know what you're doing. Of course, your comments suggests that you wouldn't know how, which is why you prefer sticking with manual storage mangaement.
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Take your own advice to heart and try to actually verify your claims about manual storage management and garbage collectors; you'll be surprised.
All the new graphics, 3D, animation, search, and video APIs, to name just a few.
(By "changing" I don't mean that they change existing APIs incompatibly, I mean what Microsoft has been doing: changing the preferred way of doing things.)
There is little reason to run Darwin if it didn't ship with your machine: it's a decent kernel, but kernels like Linux and BSD have more hardware support, more functionality, and somewhat better performance. However, the technical differences are not large enough for Apple to bother switching right now. On the other hand, if Apple wants to move to generic PCs, porting their user environment to a Linux or BSD kernel might make a lot of sense.
In any case, Apple's future is likely in hypervisors--small kernels that allow Linux, Darwin, BSD, and NT to run on top of them. In a sense, that's what Mach was supposed to be from the beginning, but it's being achieved using different technologies now.
No, it means that many people vote Republican because they have been manipulated to vote against their own best interests.
If people actually voted according to their economic and personal interests, Republicans would have a few percent of the vote.
Many people think that the purpose of garbage collection is to make programming easier. But that's not the purpose of garbage collection at all. Memory management in a garbage collected language is at least as much effort as memory management in a language with manual storage management, and it requires at least as much experience to use well.
The purpose of garbage collection is to make languages safer. If Objective C 2.0 has additional features to make it safer (variable initialization, pointer checks, etc.), then garbage collection will help it. Otherwise, it's just a gimmick.
Unfortunately, from Apple's web page, it's difficult to see what exactly they did; adding garbage collection to Objective C in a useful and correct way is a nearly intractable problem, and I won't believe that they succeeded until I see more data.
You're missing the point of garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't there to save your effort. In fact, garbage collection does not save you effort at all. The purpose of garbage collection is to make the language safe and isolate errors, something that no other storage management scheme can achieve.
Both manual storage management and garbage collection each require a lot of experience to use correctly. Your problem is likely that you underestimate both how much work it took to become proficient at manual storage management/reference counting, and how much work it would take you to become proficient in a garbage collected environment.
In addition to the obvious contribution to NeXTStep--gcc--GNU was also widely responsible for the fact that a UNIX-based workstation was a choice at all. If GNU hadn't paved the way and made a lot of improvements to the UNIX userland environment, UNIX workstations wouldn't have been as big a success as they were in the 80's.
At least Linus released something. HURD still isn't officially released and ready for production systems, and I suspect it never will be.
You're right: it may never be. But that's not because Linus is better than the people working on the Hurd, it's because Linux has attracted all the third party contributions and very few people are left to contribute to the Hurd.
Linus is a capable open source project leader and developer, but he is no better many other kernel developers; the reason he succeeded where others failed was that he had just the right product at just the right time and attracted all the contributions with his project.
But, in the end, we'd probably be better off if the community had waited a year or two for the first release of the Hurd or the first free BSD release. Still, one shouldn't complain too much: unlike DOS, Linux has grown and matured fairly well.
Both parties are full of shit. You "my party is better than mine" types make me fucking sick, because they're both pretty fucking bad.
No, they are not equally bad. Even if all your accusations against Democrats were true (which they aren't), they would be largely personal failings. Both parties have plenty of people with serious personal failings, and that's always been the case (it comes with being a politician).
What matters in elected representatives is whether they keep the economy running, preserve our liberties, and don't waste or divert taxpayer money. Clinton succeeded in those areas, while Bush and the Republican Congress has been failing miserably in all of them.
Unfortunately, that's not just an observation, it's a strategy many people adopt. The consequence? People can manipulate where "the middle" is by becoming ever more extreme. In particular, the right wing of the political spectrum has become masterful at this, pulling mainstream America way to the right with hyperbole and fear mongering.
Well, if Apple bothered to go through standardization of the APIs, then people could become compatible with it. Right now, Apple is clearly deliberately pulling a Microsoft: keep the APIs changing so fast that no third party implementation can catch up with them.
Of course, the whole thing is like beating a dead horse anyway: Objective-C, GNUStep, and Cocoa are 1980's technology. The only reason they have been competitive for so long is because Microsoft was shipping even more outdated technology (MFC, C++), but that's changing. What Apple really needs to do is to figure out how to move their platform into the 21st century. The Macintosh platform perhaps doesn't need standardization so much as it needs a major overhaul.
So far, this is simply an equation that reproduces the visual appearance of spots. That's not an "explanation", it's merely a hypothesis or a model. Proving it will require actually identifying the substances and their concentrations over time that appear in the model.
My point is that neither side has a monopoly on being good or being evil.
No, historically and over the long run, neither label, "Republican" or "Democrat", has had a monopoly on being good or evil: evil people, corrupt people, and incompetent people are attracted to power, whatever label it happens to fall under. It just happens to be that in 2006, they seem to have taken over the Republican party: incompetent foreign policy, abusing the tax system for social engineering, vast expansions of the federal bureaucracy, costly and ineffective wars, violations of human rights, intrusive government, bad economic policies, cronyism, and widespread instituionalized corruption, to name just a few. This administration and this Congress are one of the worst we have ever had in US history, and the damage they are doing to the US will be felt for decades to come.
And if you're saying "no, no, the other party doesn't agree with me on ____", you should find out why. If you can't find a reason why someone disagrees with you, save they're evil, you really need to open your mind.
I don't know about the GP, but it's no mystery why Republicans disagree with me: the party is dominated by people who are incompetent, power hungry, and, at times, simply corrupt. And since they have excellent PR people working for them, plus wealthy funders to pay for PR, they can convince enough people to vote for them to remain in power. The real problem isn't that there are evil Republicans or that they have power, but that people like you are stupid enough to vote for these kinds of people. I mean, assuming you're somewhere in the 40k-200k income bracket, you're so dumb that you let the current government talk out out of many thousands of dollars that they collect in taxes from you and funnel to their political buddies, and you don't even notice it.
Republicans brought an end to slavery in America.
Yeah, if only anybody could bring those Republicans back. Unfortunately, today's Republicans are the antithesis of that; they have simply latched on to the name in order to give their agenda an acceptable veneer.
But so far it's been Linus who's done the most to actually change the world.
No, he has not. All Linus did was write a kernel. If he hadn't done so, there were half a dozen alternatives about to become available. Most likely, if Linus had been run over by a truck, we'd be running the BSD kernel now, or some Mach derivative.
Proving once again the superiority of actually getting working technology out the door, versus spending a decade or so fine-tuning your philosophy about how to begin working on the great technology that you will eventually design when you have the philosophy just perfect (if everyone hasn't succumbed to old age first).
That charge is totally unfair. GNU released plenty of software long before the Linux kernel was created. And the reason development on the microkernel went slowly was not because of any "fine tuning of philosophy", it was because porting and cleaning up a large, existing microkernel codebase and giving it POSIX APIs was a big project that needed to be completed in one big development effort and required the PC industry to start delivering hardware capable of running it. Linus instead delivered a flaky and incomplete kernel that became popular because it ran on PCs right away, but that required many years to beat into shape.
I've had enough troubles in my own career directly traceable to wanting to Get Things Right at the expense of Getting Things Done to appreciate this particular point with some sensitivity, not to say bitterness. Feh.
You're right: getting code out the door, even if it is inferior quality, is clearly generally good for companies and developers. It's not good for users or the community. What happened with Linux vs. Mach was somewhat analogous to what happend with DOS vs. UNIX: the quick and dirty hack won, and users ended up paying the price. Fortunately, because Linux at least copied proven UNIX APIs, the Linux cleanup avoided most of the pain that have accompanied analogous evolutions at Microsoft and Apple.
But...I dunno. Until Linux came along, these things seemed a bit on the fringe to me, except for Emacs, which predates the FSF anyway.
GNU software was running on just about every UNIX workstation, was widely used with embedded systems, and was what made NeXTStep possible.
What I'm saying is that I think the future belongs more to people like Linus -- that they will have more lasting influence
The success of Linus is very much like the success of Gates: both succeeded by releasing inferior technology early and then patching it up. That's not just the future, it's always been that way. It's a great strategy to get rich and/or famous, it's just that your users pay the price.
But I don't think Linus will have much lasting influence; the Linux kernel is already having serious problems with maintenance and release, and I think Linus is not capable of delivering the next generation kernel that we need. The irony is that any successor operating system to Linux will probably still be called "Linux" even though it will have no software by Linus in it.
I suspect one reason the DA didn't want charges to go through is because he didn't want a precedent set.
It might be possible for the accused in this case to ask for the court to make a judgement even though the DA didn't press charges. That could set a precedent that will make it clear that the NH law cannot apply in these cases. I hope the ACLU or some other organization will support such an effort. Right now, the police can continue to use this law to hassle people.
But, there are loads of things for which Linux doesn't have any software to do certain things. And, I don't mean some broken POS 0.11 version of something open source. I mean functioning, supported, commercial software which I can actually use -- like my tax software for example.
Many of those things are becoming available as web applications. I don't use Windows for anything anymore except the occasional game.
Blackboard was garbage until GWU sold them Prometheus, which practically makes up their Blackboard software now. Can you patent something somebody made without patenting and sold to you?
No, you can only patent what you yourself have actually invented. Buying somebody's product and then patenting inventions contained in it is fraud.
You can't patent something as ubiquitous as a content managment system which is what blackboard is (Sure a special type of CMS but still it's a CMS)
Well, evidently, they can and they have.
The solution to the radioactive waste problem already exists: breeder reactors. The reason they aren't being used is politics, not technology.
Even if we could dispose of the current high-level radioactive waste using this technique, it would still be irresponsible. Non-breeder reactors use only a tiny fraction of the energy stored in the nuclear fuel and throw away the rest, and that's an unacceptable waste.
There is no imaginable catastrophe for which this kind of "backup" makes sense. There are events that could wipe out all human life on earth, but no off-world colony would be able to survive sufficiently long without support from earth to be useful. Any other catastrophes are going to leave more diversity on earth than anything we can store in an off-world colony.
Maybe things will be different in a few centuries, but for now, talk of off-world colonies is irrational escapism. For now, either we make it here on earth, or we die out as a species.