It may not make any sense. (If it does, nobody has ever explained it to me.) But IIUC that's the way that patent law, unlike copyright law, reads.

Sorry, there ARE real differences between languages. It's not just a matter of taste. You don't use Python when you need speed. And handling unicode in C or C++ is a cast-iron drag. My favorite languages are Python and D (D for when I need speed). I don't like either C or C++ because of all the wild pointers and unchecked conversions. Ada has it's points, be it's extremely verbose...and hard to document decently. The language I'd like to use is often Vala, but the libraries are essentially undocumented. (The name of a routine doesn't count as documentation, even if you include the parameter list.) I've never found a good reason to use Scheme. (If I did, I'd probably choose Racket Scheme, because it seems well supported and decently documented...but it's also explicitly not parallel...which I could tell because it had decent documentation.)

What's really needed is a decent dataflow language, sort of like Prograf attempted to be back in the days of the Apple ][, But it needs to have a text representation, as graphics make understanding anything sizeable impossible (because they take up too much space). Perhaps a smarter editor could solve that problem. But dataflow seems to me to be the best way to handle multi-processors.

Still, libraries are EXTREMELY important. One of the big limitations of D is that there aren't very many libraries. (It can link with C libraries, but things aren't straightforwards, as it doesn't understand the macros in C header files....so you need to translate by hand. And this generally means you need to already know how to use the library in C. Compare this to Python or Ruby.)

The main problem with C++ is the template system. There are other problems (like unrestricted casting of pointers and variables), but compared to the template system they are trivial. And it probably can't ever be fixed, because fixing what's broken would break a huge amount of code.

This doesn't follow from the quotation, however:

I don't know about the Keys in particular, but many places where we have pumped either oil or water out of underground resivoirs are sinking. Usually, but not always, slowly. (Undergound coal mining has the same effect, but the collapses tend to be more sudden and dramatic.)

Now parts of the Gulf have had lots of oil pumped out of them. Probably not near the Keys, but I don't know for sure. (It certainly affected New Orleans.) Agriculture has also extracted lots of underground water from many areas. IIUC, this is a part of the reasons that the Everglades is drying up, but the aquifer could also extend a considerable distance underground...perhaps as far as the Keys.

Additionally, islands generally subside over time. Look at the sizes of the Hawaiian Islands, as you move backwards from the most recent (still building) island of Hawaii eastwards and northerly the islands grow older and smaller. This is because they have worn away over time. And the Hawaiian Islands are volcanic rock, not the mess of largely compacted sand that is the Florida Keys. (Not knowing, I suspect coral to have played a large part in the creation of the Florida Keys. But corals are having a hard time as the oceans become more acidic. Additionally invasive species (from the pacific) are destroying Atlantic corals. The Florida Keys may be too far North for that to be affecting them, but I'm not sure.

So there's LOTS of reasons to expect the Keys to be unstable. And none to speak of to expect them to be stable.

I must have misunderstood the damage caused by Lithium mining...unless it was the refining that I was remembering. (The alternative is that I was confusing it with Cadmium.)

I also seem to remember that Lithium is already in short supply, but I suppose this could also be wrong.

The GGP was talking about battery life, and that was what I was responding to. Yeah, electric motors can be pretty durable. Batteries, not so much so. Problems with the electrodes and recharging. And he was specificly saying that "High Quality LiON batteries" were sufficiently efficient. Those haven't been around long enough to say that they are durable, and similar batteries in the past have had problems with their electrodes corroding.

But think of the consequences of having to take immuno-suppressive drugs for the rest of your life. They aren't good.

OTOH, there was another article today (yesterday?) that proclaimed "Mouse cloned from blood cell!" (But I do wonder if they've solved the "Dolly" problems.)

FWIW, the backdoor would have been put it by Microsoft. Did they? I don't know. I have no reason to doubt it, given their general sleazy business ethics, but the only reason to believe it is that they titled a particular thing "NSAKey". (And the name was assigned by Microsoft, so NSAs sneakiness about such things doesn't apply.)

For all I know the name could have stood for "No Software Algorithm" and been documentation of something they needed to write. (And, no, I don't trust their public explanations. Not even enough to remember more than that they existed.) But I've no particular reason to believe that that particular "key" was anything special. My feeling at the time that I first heard about it was "Is somebody sabotaging MS attempt to cooperate with the NSA?", but, again, no evidence. Certainly no trustworthy evidence. Nor since.

The idea is that you DON'T have a trusted C compiler. You have two apparently good C compilers that were developed independant of each other. So you use one to compile the other's source code, and then you use that second one to compile the first ones source code. Then you can probably trust the first one. (If two steps doesn't suffice, use a chain of three.)

Note that this only works if the compilers are developed independantly of each other, and if they recognize particular chunks of code that the special case when recompiling themselves. Other backdoors would require other counters.

Do you have ANY idea of how much work you are asking to be repeated? Or how many of the contributors to Linux wouldn't really care?

How do you attract coders to the new rebooted FOSS OS?

Your answer is theoretically possible, but implausible. I would, however, expect people to be noisy about it. But already many people don't take even reasonably simple security steps. (I often can't explain to people why installing flash is a bad idea.) For that matter, I have been known to compile and install software from sites that aren't secure.

Having a separate implementation for communication between the military isn't believable. Too many boneheads. (The details wouldn't leak, but I would expect the fact of it's existence to leak.)

Having a separate implementation for communication between NSA and their allies *is* believable. I don't feel it's probable, but it's certainly possible. (Probably the easiest way to do this is to use a layered encryption, with different algorithms at the different layers. Perhaps use that elliptic thingy on the internal layer., a ROT-93 in an intermediate layer, and SSH (or equivalent) on the external layer. (The purpose of the ROT-93 is to make it more difficult to tell what kind of incryption is used on the internal layer.)

That said, if you're serious about security, and don't trust the encryption, and are only dealing with your allies, then you should use a one-time pad. That's not even theoretically breakable. So I still don't believe it...except, possibly, to agents in the field. And for that anything beyond SSH is just calling attention to them. So I still don't believe it. Agents in the field should just use some popular book as a one-time pad, so you don't need to expose the one you use for serious matters. And for most things you just limit your conversation to "harmless" topics. And remember how much meta-data mining is going on.

Coal won't run out for a very long time. High grade coal, however, has already become scarce and expensive. So power plants usually burn bituminous coal...and some even lower grades. These are less efficient, except in very carefully designed plants. (OTOH, efficiency is a cost reduction strategy at this point of the process, so easy ways to increase efficiency are eagerly sought after. Unfortunately emission reduction is guaranteed to increase costs, so effort is put into avoiding emission controls.)

The net result is that coal is already burned as efficiently as is easily possible, but emission controls are generally skimped on...or just avoided. (FWIW, I'm *really* skeptical about "Carbon Capture" techniques. Most of the one's I've seen look like "delay the release, and make it difficult to trace to us". I hope I'm being overly skeptical, but so far it doesn't matter, since even that approach will drastically increase costs, so everyone is avoiding it.)

At what stage of their service life? And what *is* their service life?

In neither the case of gasoline power vehicles nor of electric powered vehicles do we normally know the external costs. And electrics (as currently designed) are so new that we don't have a good handle on battery life. Also, Lithium is *quite* polluting to extract from ores. A carbon based battery would be quite desired. (Here I'm really thinking about graphene based super-capacitors, but I don't want to tie myself down, as anything based around Carbon, Hydorgen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen would be desireable if it were efficient enough, powerful enough, etc.)

FWIW, batteries are currently hazerdous waste for a reason. And the recycling of hazerdous waste is not done well (though MUCH better than it used to be). OTOH, recycling of car batteries will probably be much more thorough, if only because more will be recycled at a time. But there will need to be careful watching to ensure that corners aren't cut.

You were rather vague about just what you were complaining about, but from context I presume it to be GUI. Probably Gnome3. If so I certainly agree, but it doesn't have much to do with the kernel.

OTOH, there was a time when the scheduler varied a lot between releases. That seems to have stabilized, though, over a year ago. Otherwise, I can't guess what you are talking about.

(FWIW, there was a C library change a few years ago that broke some games I have installed. So I run them on a virtual machine. It's annoying, but what can you expect of proprietary software. ... It's not like Loki is around anymore for me to complain to.)

You clearly aren't an Ubuntu user. Neither am I anymore. (I went back to Debian.)