That was my first reaction as to how he should respond. But perhaps it would be better if he talked someone else into hosting the lists (and maintaining the server). Linus is probably quite busy with other business.

Still, Cannonical might take the job, or the FSF. Perhaps the OpenSuse people. I'm not really sure I'd want Red Hat to have that much leverage.

You are much too certain. They know the characteristics of designs that have been tried with the techniques and approaches previously tried. To go from this claim to the blanket claim that you are making is far overstepping both the evidence and what any reasonable expert would say. (Not to claim that there aren't unreasonable experts. Some will claim that things will work, but more will claim that they won't. Often they will turn out to be right, but not always. And very few of even the unreasonable experts would make as broad a claim as you did.)

OTOH, it *is* clear that many designs of what I was proposing would not work.

I. also, was thinking of an airbreathing lower stage, but what I was thinking of was using this same design, only having compressed air as the takeoff engine. You don't get quite as much lift as you do with Hydrogen, but you also don't need to carry it with you, if you can design the engine so that the microwaves can also pump the air into the aerospike chamber. Save the Hydrogen for when the air gets thinner. Not sure if this would work, though. Or maybe it's just too complex for a first model.

We haven't finished colonizing the ocean bottoms. We've barely started, and I'm not sure it's such a good idea. (It needs a lot more study than it's had so far before I'll say that. It could be an ecological nightmare. Space, OTOH, is only dangerous to the explorers....well, colonization of space is only dangerous to the explorers.)

So I consider the colonization of space to be a lot better. It's also true, however, that human occupancy of space is going to require a lot of technical development that hasn't happened. As long as the International Space Station reuires more than yearly service missions (including, especially, supplies) that we need more technical development. A permanent occupancy of space cannot be managed until one can derive all the necessities for life (and support of the habitat) by mining asteroids *occasionally*.

It's not a new idea. It's been kicking around for at least 3 decades. Is it a good idea? Maybe. I've no idea how practical it is. Is it brilliant? No. The design, the implementation, may be brilliant, but the idea is a bit long in the tooth.

Like many ideas, the trick is getting a good working implementation, not the idea.

The social policies are not a core component of fascism. They're a blend of fascism ans socialism. The Fascists were Italian, not German. The Germans were Nazis.

But you are right in that in Fascism the government is the dominant party even though working hand-in-glove with the corporations. Also that as time went on the Fascists adopted many of the policies of the Nazis (and, to a lesser extent, conversely).

That said, Mussolini didn't really like violence, he just considered his ends important enough to justify it.

Then there's Spain. Spain was also called Fascist, and under Franco and I don't know of any other reasonable term for it, but in effect it appears to have been mainly a dictatorship. I can't really take their claims of Syndicalism seriously. But, again, there the government was the dominant party (or, more precisely, the dictator was the dominant party).

That is not my understanding, and it was not implied by your quoted text. What is implied is that you are unlikely to be prosecuted. Which I had already stated. (though I was a bit more paranoid, given the number of intrusions into computers).

You have not shown anything saying that non-commercial use is legal (in the US), rather than just rarely prosecuted.

No. Lisp failed because the early versions were inefficient and then, during a critical period, the compilers were too expensive to afford. Around 1995 a decent Lisp compiler cost about $2,000 (depending on what utilities you needed). At this point I went looking for what it would cost today to purchase a copy of Allegro Common Lisp suitable for building GPL software. I couldn't readily find that information. This despite the fact that, e.g., Steel Bank Common Lisp is as free as gcc.

When developers are learning their trade, they need to learn of basic tools, and they depend on libraries being available. This was the basic advantage of both the GPL and of C. C compilers were cheap, Fortran compilers were expensive. So C won. (And the early C compilers didn't have any noticable advantages over the Fortran compilers of the day except that they were cheaper. That, of course, changed as people wrote libraries for use with them.)

OTOH, Lisp does have very different strengths than to C and Fortran. E.g., handling numbers is clumsier, but handling variable length strings of data is simpler. That may also have had an effect.

Read again the second and third paragraphs of your quoted text.

They appear, to me, to be what I was asserting.

You probably need to limit your metaphors a bit more strictly.

Reasoning by analogy, "Everybody should have nukes" is a truly terrible idea. Any one suicidal lunatic could destroy everyone. Therefore there should be no patents.

I feel this is an extreme position that is invalid. There are carefully delineated areas where patents actually serve a worthwhile purpose. They last too long, and they are too easy to abuse, but if there is a large up front cost inherent in making an invention, then patents are justifiable provided you submit a working model with the patent application.

It's actually worse than that. It's illegal for you to create an item that is covered by a patent whether or not you ever use it or sell it. Of course if you never use it or sell it, you can probably hide it, as long as it's only never on a device that's connected to the internet.

Not true. If there are large up front costs, then patents are valuable. This, however, is not true of software. Working software is either small scale or is developed incrementally from intermediate working forms. Rather like evolution. Patents are not needed.

You could, of course, claim that drugs (e.g.) should be developed the same way, but the damage that an unevaluated drug can do has lead to regulations that have caused there to be an expensive up front cost.

Just because communism had different problems than capitalism doesn't make it a better system. I'm quite skeptical of ANY system that centralizes power into the hands of a small group.

That said, actual communism (by which I do not mean Marxism or Lenninism) works quite well in groups small enough that everyone knows everyone else. Probably up to around 50 people. Even there it needs escape hatches, and it fails if applied dogmatically rather than as a natural result of the group's underlying philosophy. Usually, even for this kind of group you need a charasmatic leader to make it work. As the group size increases, it performs more and more poorly.

I'm not aware of any group at any size that works well under a capitalist internal philosophy. Unless you include treating people as disposable tools as a part of working well. That said, it has certain features which allow modified forms of it to scale much better than communism. (What is normally called Communism, i.e. Marx/Lennin/Stalin/Mao-ism is *not* communism. Lennin tried to make it one at an early stage of the revolution, but gave up the attempt quickly, because it didn't scale. So actually what that is is better called totalianism.)

Democracy also runs into scaling limits, though at a larger size limit. Athens was probably too large for optimal use.

Republicanism is better called inherited-oligarchy. It scales pretty well, as the Romans discovered, but also, as they discovered, it has a tendency towards dictatorship. Still, if you can put up with considering citizens to be chattel, then it can work well at a fairly large scale, depending on your transport and communications.

I dislike *ALL* of these forms. They all end up with someone who isn't affected making decisions for other people and using coercive power to cause those decisions to be enforced. This can occasionally lead to a golden age when you have a charismatic leader who actuall has the good of the country at heart, and has skilled advisors who do the same. This is, of course, quite rare. And usually even the charismatic leader has huge blind spots.

Note that the only one of these that scaled well was Republicanism. And as an external facing tool capitalism works well to allow the inner group to have and to hold power.

But I would truly like to encounter a well defined form of government that not only considered the needs of the citizenry (long term, not merely short term) but also scalled well. (This means it needs to be well enough defined that its scalability can be evaluated.) Even if I did, of course, the problem of getting from here to there would remain.

If I understand the paragraph you are "quoting" correctly, (and properly interpreting that you probably read a translation)...

Nietzsche here seems to be saying, in a very long winded way, "Might makes right". I can't quite tell whether or not he was being sarcastic, but from your paraphrase I believe he was. Or rather, it appears that he was being cynical enough to be saying "History is written by the victors, and they will define what will be remembered as the right action." I assume that this was clearer in the original text, but have slept over the required readings in a philosophy class I'm not sure that's true. (OTOH, the most reliable soporific wasn't Nietzsche, who I never had to read, but Leibnitz.)

A new ice age is, indeed, coming. But it comes AFTER the big melt. Quite awhile after, though the timing depends on volcanos.

This, of course, assumes no anthropogenic modifications of the climate.

That said, there *are* multiple solar cycles. But before I took this seriously I'd need to look at, among other things, his funding sources. Review in a professional journal is a reasonable substitute for that, provided you check the journal's sources of funding. (Drug companies have been known to hire everyone working for some professional journal in order to get the favorable reviews they desire.)

It's a pity that people aren't more reliably honarable, but enough aren't that blindly believing anything published is nearly as foolish as blindly disbelieving it.