you laugh but i've always thought it would be great to carry a kilo of pure hydrogen in my backpack - just burn it to obtain like 5 litres of water ... I mean why are we carrying all that oxygen in our backpacks when he atmosphere has a plentiful supply of it...
Do you mean that if I had invented a "machine for airborne transportation", such as, say, a hot-air balloon, I could collect royalties on jet airplanes?
Another claim seems to be that a collection of unread books serves as a personal reminder of ignorance, that the un-known always exceeds the known, a kind of "memento ignorantiae" that gives us the humility and motivation to always seek to learn more rather than remain complacently content with the knowledge we have already acquired.
And possibly the physicality of a dead-tree library carries this effect more forcibly than an online shopping list.
Should be "sensors" (used correctly a few sentences later). Is this a text-to-speech thing, or written by a non-native speaker, or just appalling editing?
> Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere.
Just curious, Australia being mostly desert, if the rest of the planet became similarly barren, would it still work out? I don't know how food-independent Australia is...
Theoretically at some point in the step-by-step process, the computers will be able to clear their own roadblocks by themselves, and faster than we can. And who knows what happens then. Maybe "singularity" isn't a great word, dunno if there's a better one...
While this is annoying to many of us, if it diminishes the general public expectation that that online services should be free and subsidised by advertising/marketing/related services, that would be good news.
I'm not particularly optimistic about Google though, as they can charge for their services and continue the whole data-gathering game...
I can submit a patch to an open-source project and everybody benefits ; but if I raise my own animals, the industrial-scale torture continues anyway. How many people need to raise their own animals before the abuse ends? It's not "weak-minded" or even melodramatic to conclude that an animal suffers when it is beaten.
> Even Buddhists in Tibet are perfectly happy to eat meat.
It is generally true that some adherents of religion X regularly do non-X things, in Tibet and elsewhere.
I suspect the "great" Britain distinguishes it from the other Britain which is a nearby French province, ie "Grande Bretagne" vs "Bretagne". Ireland is still not British! The "British Isles" was a useful term for a dominant power while it lasted.
If you don't have the skills to make the open-source changes you want yourself, but you have the money to make it happen, there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to build the patch that you need. I don't know of a reliable way to do that with proprietary software.
The Place Charles de Gaulle Étoile (Arc de Triomphe) in Paris is a gigantic roundabout, with the peculiar feature that traffic entering the system has priority ; traffic already on the roundabout must yield. This would lead to perpetual gridlock were there no traffic lights controlling access to the roundabout. This kind of junction used to be common in cities.
Out in the countryside roundabouts in France operate in the "normal" way : approaching traffic yields to traffic already in the system, with the usual triangular "yield" sign making priority clear.
It's possible that your experience of French roundabouts is related to driver confusion between these two systems.
It's a little bit more subtle. Assume that there is a finite number of primes, and P is the set of all primes p0, p1, p2... pn. If you multiply all these together and add 1, you have a number Q that's not divisible by any number in P. So P cannot be the set of all primes.