>For a guy with planck in his name you really need to read up on particle physics

ironically, that's the exact opposite of the advice given to Planck:

The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics.

And by firewalls, I mean secretaries, or at least someone to check and occasionally massage quite abrasive and personalizing correspondence. It's very simple: Linus was right. He had reason to be pissed. But Cox is important. ANYONE who knows who Cox is would have looked at Linus's letter and saw immediately that it needed some small changes, if nothing else to let Cox save face.

The problem is made even worse by drugs that leave important academic users super-focused (not saying Linus is on any) -- the more clearly you see "idiocy" the more important it is to have a firewall take out words like that.

Actually, Linus's e-mail includes the word "idiotic" explicitly.

I doubt what I'm saying will have many takers around here, but posting at +2 in case anyone has any interesting responses for me.

and the a bullet hitting it would stop like an arrow hitting a curtain.

wtf

>The term 'free' is an unfortunate consequence of there being no more specific word in English.

That might have been true 25 years ago, but today you can just call it "freedom software".

(with the added bonus that if it's not freedom software it's terrorist software -- a pretty good description of the crap a convicted monopolist pushes).

airplanes "fly" by making the air they're going through go through a longer route on their top side, /--\, than their bottom side, ___, but in the same amount of time, thereby creating lower pressure above them: the pressure difference raises them. Problem is you need to keep moving.

But imagine for a moment if instead of the airplane we turned to ... the dirigible.

Imagine if you could change the average density of the WHOLE body to be less than the surrounding "air" (water).

You would have to somehow find something that weighed less than water.

In a normal dirigible, where you have to find something lighter than the surrounding air, you fill it with helium/hydrogen/or hot air (which is less dense). But for an "underwater" dirigible?

Well since AIR is ligher than water, imagine if you had hollow sections filled with AIR!

You could have balloons of air, let's call these "ballasts". If you wanted to go lower in the water, you would fill these "ballasts", with seawater from "outside", and when you need to "ascend" again you could drive the water back out (filling the "ballast" from tanks of compressed air).

It might just be crazy enough to work!