You’re talking the CEO of a company who sued Google on the premise that header files, a descriptor file for what commands can be used and what parameters they took, should be copyrighted? The CEO who poisoned the OpenOffice community so thoroughly that the fork, LibreOffice, was founded by the leaders of OpenOffice and became the de facto standard instead of the original, and it happened overnight? That guy?
We can do a number of things, but dealing with the root causes for a number of societal issues will lead to better results than sweeping actions to stop things that are only hurting a tiny minority in any significant way.
Here’s an example. Every study that has been done shows that alcohol use causes harm. People tend to enjoy it, however, to the point where they will break the law to have it. This makes it more difficult to diagnose and treat, and provides sources of income for organized crime if we ban it. So instead, we restrict its use to adults, heavily fine people who sell to minors, provide awareness campaigns, etc. Because sometimes a simple, heavy-handed solution creates new, larger problems.
The key issue seems to be people with poor mental health and/or critical thinking skills making poor decisions. The obvious answer would be to deal with their mental health or critical thinking issues, something which very few countries in the world are doing to any useful degree, but the US is doing worse than most developed countries.
Or we could regulate or ban AI. That seems easier.
If by strawman, you mean fundamental laws of physics, then yes, you’re correct. If we find ways to break basic laws of thermodynamics, then I won’t be worrying about ways to sterilize water, I’ll be worrying about how to make faster-than-light starship.
The part you’re studiously ignoring is plenty of people saying yes, you could do this, but that it’s wildly inefficient. You could also power a bike by getting the biggest rock you could throw, tying a rope to it, applying the brakes on your bike, throwing the rock, releasing the brakes, and then pulling on the rope until you’ve collected your rock, and repeating until you’ve reached your destination. This will always work. But as long as your bike is in earthlike conditions, there will always be easier ways to do it. This is also the case for your idea.
Distillation doesn’t have to be of water. Not all impurities are solid. And the evaporated water does go back into the water pool, just with steps we aren’t directly involved in.
This is simple math. We would need to increase our energy production by 1000 times to just treat water, maybe only 250 times if we used more efficient systems than simply heating it and letting the heat dissipate. If we doubled our energy production every year, it would still take a decade to do it (8 years if we were aiming at 250 times). That isn’t a realistic amount for a civilization at our tech level.
What exactly do you think evaporation ponds are doing, then?
While you aren’t wrong overall, heat exchangers and heat pumps could drastically reduce the energy requirements, perhaps getting the energy requirements down to 4 or even 2 times the national capacity. This doesn’t means that it’s impossible, it just changes how impossible. It also doesn’t change that there would be cheaper ways than just heating all the water, or that those ways would also be cheaper with more efficient heat management systems.
So? Numbers need to be human readable and entered by humans, too, and I’ve seen discussions about the proper pronunciation of 1.32. There are a number of ways that appear equally useful, but there is a convention that has been applied to remove ambiguity. And that convention is ignored in areas where other issues are more important. That convention is no more natural than writing itself, yet most people beyond a basic level of numeracy (and, perhaps, English fluency) know it. Moreover, filenames, just like numbers, need to be computer readable, as well, and conventions have been applied. Some of those conventions were constrained by the capabilities of computers of the time, just like with dates.
And people are very much case-aware. IF THEY WERENT, WHY ARE ALL CAPS COMMENTS INTERPRETED DIFFERENTLY?
How is it not data, usually key data, no less? It requires a unique path/filename combination, has to be human readable, is entered by a user. Not traditionally what one would think of as data entry, but is data that is entered and referenced. And unless you only use the recent view for finding files, knowing that the name is entered as intended seems rather important.
And perhaps I am also secretly a machine.
I prefer computers do what I tell them to rather than what it thinks I meant to tell it to. If I screw up, why isn’t it on me to fix it? And why aren’t you proofing data entry before accepting it?
Love that “disruptive” is a valid term for companies like that.
Reading this made me wonder how metallic lithium is stored and, guess what, it’s stored in oil. So, which label do you use for a container holding lithium and oil? I’m guessing you need two, one for the lithium and one for the oil. And here we are.
No, I don’t think this building is filled with lithium and covered in oil, but I suspect there is more than one container containing metallic lithium covered in oil.
And every time one runs into a wall at fatal speeds, two slower ones appear.
There are 4 main bottlenecks in computers, and they generally take turns being the most relevant. CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage. Bus speed can also be a bottleneck, but that is generally factored in and we know how to make faster buses for the most part, using parallelization if nothing else.
Right now, for home computer use, GPU is the biggest factor. Good thing, too, because CPUs are plateauing, and will probably require a fundamental change in architecture or programming techniques to get past it.
Yearning for the mines.
I’m not sure why you would buy an open-source company/product, particularly a GPLv3 one, if you didn’t understand or agree with the premise. It’s probably the stupidest decision he made. I’m not saying I agree with his other decisions, but most of them made some kind of business sense. With this one, he would have saved a lot of time and effort and received the same value if he’d just spun OO.o off ASAP. The linked timeline kind of says it all.