Any civilization that old would have left nothing to show its existance. Even the pyramids won't last that long.

A biosphere, however, leaves its mark on a world. You'd be able to tell easily if Mars or Venus was habitable by humans duing the time homo sapiens has existed.

There's tons of energy on the moon, if you're using solar and temperature differential sources.

As far as getting your spaceship off the moon, you throw it, although you'd probably throw individual modules and assemble them in orbit. Fueling the spacecraft would be more complicated, but hey, it's a lot cheaper to launch a few tanks of rocket fuel into space from Earth than a whole spaceship.

I did read the whole section. He said a whole lot of words and zero substance, other than that Obama's tactics were ineffective.

He gives the same old, "get rid of the regulators, invest in research" stuff we always hear. And that's fine, but that's pretty much what's been going on already, and it's not enough.

As far as the argument about China goes, it doesn't apply to energy policy (at least with reguards to electricity generation). You aren't going to run power lines from China. I get my electricity from coal. OG&E isn't going to stop generating my electricity with coal unless they have a very good reason to do so - and really, they shouldn't have to. Stopping them from building new coal plants is the ideal solution, but Romney doesn't seem willing and Obama doesn't seem able to stop that.

Has anybody told Sen. Inhofe that?

That fucker's my senator. Sometimes I wish there was a hell, just so that elitist holier-than-thou asshole could go there.

A good chunk of the Okies ended up in California doing migrant labor (both sides of my family were involved in that, so no, I'm not just basing it off of The Grapes of Wrath). If they hadn't been there, then they probably would have just had Mexican migrant labor doing it, so there wasn't really any advantage from the Okie influx.

There was a major disadvantage - Oklahoma had just acheived statehood some 30-40 years before the dust bowl. Towns were growing, and new businesses were being built up. A lot of that went away when farms failed, and there's a lot of ghost towns out that way. I've noticed a marked difference in western Oklahoma in my lifetime - it's still recovering. Had the dust bowl not happened, Oklahoma would have probably fared the depression fairly well.

The line isn't at rest - it's orbiting the earth.

The part of the line on the earth is essentially orbiting geosynchronously at sea level, so it tries to fall to the ground. The other end of the line is way out past geosynchronous orbit, so it's trying to escape Earth's gravity. The two balance each other out, but there's a lot of tension in the middle.

How, exactly?

Woodie wagons cost more than other cars of the time, and most people who know of them today associate them with the '60s surfer craze. They were never associated with any particular race, other than Frankie Avalon-type surfer dudes.

Easy way around that:

Go mudding. Coat the entire lower 2' of your car in mud (including the license plate) and the cameras can't track you by license number.

I used to do this in my youth when my tag expired - worked like a charm.

Granted, if you drive a dinky sedan, you might bring some buddies along to push you out of the mud once you get stuck :) A 6-pack of beer can usually hire you a guy with a tow chain.

Interesting that Romney actually states that he believes global warming is both occurring and partly due to human activity. That's a pretty big change from the standard Republican line. (Of course, he also says that he'll essentially do nothing about it, since China is worse than us and he doesn't want to threaten the coal industry...)

It does make me wonder though - Romney mentions putting more into nuclear power, but Obama doesn't mention it. Considering that Obama removed a lot of the red tape preventing nuclear plants being approved, you'd think he'd at least mention it considering that energy policy is a fairly big issue. It makes me wonder if Fukishima has changed the Democratic party line on nuclear power.

Just once though, I'd like to see some politicians give some straight answers instead of treating everything like a campaign ad. Their answers have a lot of words, but very little meaning.

There is a reason why companies pay people to do tech support. It sucks, users are clueless and abusive, and you end up hating everybody.

I know, I did tech support for a machine running Windows 95. It's amazing I didn't go around stabbing people.

You can get support for Linux if you need it, but you have to either a) be polite and patient and ask in the right place or b) pay for it.

That's true for a few applications, like office products and the like. Linux seems to have gotten those just fine without the unified desktop environment you keep going on about.

Netscape (and then later AOL) did host and direct early development on the Mozilla team, it's true. That lasted what, maybe two years? Most of that time was spent throwing out the codebase Netscape provided and starting from scratch. Firefox is self-funding now.

Firefox broke the IE monopoly because IE was a horrible, bug-ridden piece of crap. Website authors hated it because it never moved ahead with the standards. Sysadmins hated it because every week another worm targeted it. Users hated how their machines would fill up with spyware, and the people they had fix their machines would reccomend Firefox.

I'm sure the LibreOffice people would be surprised to learn that it's no longer advancing. Seems to me that the lack of advancement under the OpenOffice.org name was due to Oracle's mismanagement. Volunteers kept improving it, hence LibreOffice.

Permanent funding doesn't exist, unless you have a very strong lobby group and some money to throw at the politicians.

Um, no.

Ask developers why they work on Linux. I doubt more than 5% would even mention LAMP. They work on it because they want to.

There are some developers who work for companies like IBM who do, yes, primarily work on it because of LAMP. Those are the minority.

Look and feel is important for impressing the suits. Everyone else just uses whatever works.

Cut and paste got figured out a long time ago, as far as GNOME->KDE goes. OLE is a nice dream, but let's face it; 1% of people actually use it. Generally what gets linked is data, not an application, and data generally has tools to work with it on both the GNOME and KDE sides of the fence.

GNOME isn't aggressive. It's included in distributions by the distributors' choice. Obviously, the distributors had reasons for choosing GNOME over KDE.

Yeah, except the KDE team chose a non-free widget kit that they didn't have any control over. KDE couldn't get control over QT, because it was proprietary software owned by TrollTech. Yes, eventually an exemption was made, and nowdays QT is pretty much free, but it took a very long time for that to happen.

Which helps your idea of increasing marketshare... how?

You don't pay to write commercial MFC apps. You don't pay to write commercial Cocoa apps. You don't pay to write commercial Motif/CDE apps. You think people who write closed-source but free as in beer software would want to take the hit?

It was years before TrollTech made the GNU people happy. The GNU people aren't known for their willingness to compromise their principles.

Well, there I couldn't really say. I've written GTK+ software, and found the object model in it easy enough to work with. I've never written a line of C++ code in my life, and have no interest in learning (I'm not a programmer, but picking up some C is a good idea as a UNIX admin).

You seem to suffer from a grossly disfigured picture of how the free software world works, and you still haven't given me any good arguments for why GNOME shouldn't exist. UNIX is not, and never has been, a monoculture for development. You can't force developers who are volunteering their time and work. It's up to the distributions to make a coherent system, and most of them chose GNOME.

You are still free to use KDE. Nobody's stopping you. People will still continue to work on KDE. You're losing nothing. If people using GNOME bothers you that much, then perhaps free software just isn't for you.

Yes, I did forget about them. Not that it changes anything.

No, it couldn't. Look up OSF/1 for a good example of why. Good operating systems aren't created that way.

Had the sky rained caramel coating we'd all be a sundae.

They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.

No, it wasn't. There was no DE at the time which met free software guidelines. OpenLook was never fully implemented in free software (and was considered obsolete by many) and CDE was strictly commercial and wasn't even free as in beer. KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).

To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.

This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter? It's free software, and you can use what you want. Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.

Two points:
1) KDE has never been the clear winner. Before GNOME, it had license incompatabilities. By the time those were resolved, the differences in functionality and acceptance made either desktop a viable option.
2) Preventing fragmentation was never a goal of the GNOME project. Why should it be? Most people don't see fragmentation as a problem.

I don't remember him slinging mud, but it has been quite a few years since I paid attention to GNOME development, so I'll take your word on it. The "not invented here" crap has been flung by both sides, mostly by people who didn't know what they were talking about.

Cause? Seriously? Dude, it's software. I can understand RMS' cause, since he's concerned with the rights of developers and users, but your "cause" is simply wanting everyone to use the same desktop environment. That's not a cause, that's fanboyism.

Go out and get some fresh air.

Batch computing is still done, sure - no one is denying that. I would imagine that you're right that the absolute amount of batch processing has increased over the years, simply because computing is so much cheaper and ubiquitous. But it is obscure when you consider how many people who use computers actually understand what the term means.

A large company probably does its billing, mass mailing, and payroll by batch, but smaller companies generally use off the shelf software to accomplish pretty much everything. Scientific simulations and data crunching that once would have run via batch jobs are more often being done interactively - it's easier to change parameters and set up new data that way, and computers have enough power that interactive use is feasible for all but the largest data sets. Computers are simply more powerful and software is more flexible than it was in the days when batch was king. Also, you have to consider that most people using computers are not computer professionals - they're regular workers who just happen to use a computer to do their jobs. I would expect any tech worth his salt to understand the term, but certainly not a secretary, architect, or accountant.

I would certainly describe batch processing as obscure. Not extinct, certainly, but obscure nonetheless.

I'd agree, except this is Miguel de Icaza. He's not just some douchebag tech journalist or OS X shill - he was the top guy in GNOME development for ages, and is partially responsible for the lack of backwards compatability he mentions. He also headed the mono project to bring .NET compatability to UNIX.

I don't agree with his conclusion, but the guy has been involved in free software UI work for ages. His opinion should be taken into consideration.