Caution: Many of the experiments are only statistically reproducable. Many of them require that the experimenter be "skilled in the art" (and which art varies with the domain of the experiment).

So it's not as simple as school books try to make it seem. Check out "search image" to see one of the potentially confounding problems.

And this isn't even considering that some of the experiments are so exensive or so dangerous to perform that most people are prohibited from doing them.

That said, science, when well done, produces reliable results...within its applicable domain. E.g., don't ask science for moral guidance, it can't provide it. What is can provide is a statistical expectation of what the results of a particular action are likely to be. You provide the moral judgement. And, unfortunately, people who become deeply enmeshed in science are as apt to ignore morality as those who become too deeply enmeshed in finance or politics.

Because they can get away with it. And it works.

If they really thought you might shoot them if they scared you, they'd try not to scare you.

Especially when there is such repeated evidential validation.

Actually I think that when he wrote "the law" he was slangily speaking of police officers. In which case he seems generally correct.

No, because sometimes several different models will fit all the available information. E.g., I prever the EGW multi-world interpretation of quantum physics, but the Copenhagen interpretation fits all the data just as well, and so do a few others...including such useless ones as "SuperPredestinationsim", "Solipsism", and "God is doing at all, and fudges things whenever he notices you're doing an experiment".

Additionally, the argument being logical doesn't imply that it is true. It is based on some incorrect premises. For one thing the law is often illogical. For another the EULA cannot bind you to something that the law doesn't allow it to bind you to.

Additionally, being able to win a suit, even easily, doesn't prevent you from being sued.

That said, they might well be able to win the suit easily, at least in some jurisdictions.

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.