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The Rocket Equation gives us guidance on how to get around it. Increase exhaust velocity or reduce velocity increments. For lots more detail, see my book ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ), but here are a few ideas:

* Replace some of the bottom part of reaching orbit with higher efficiency engines. That can be anything from subsonic jets (Stratolaunch) to ramjets, to ground accelerators. Replace some of the top part of reaching orbit with electric thrusters transferring momentum to a fractional space elevator (only reaches part way to the ground. By reducing the velocity provided by chemical engines, and more by other methods, you lower the mass ratio.

* Mine for fuel everywhere: scoop mine our atmosphere from orbit, process asteroid rock in high orbit, mine Phobos for fuel, etc. By repeatedly fueling at each location, you reduce fuel needed to a series of linear steps, instead of an exponential. If fuel extraction has a large mass return on your capital equipment, how much you need to launch from Earth drops dramatically.

The ruling also said that, even if the evidence was obtained through an improper search of the phone, it's still admissible.

That is consistent with Canadian law on searches.

Unlike the USA, if you are illegally searched in Canada, the results of the illegal search might be admissible in court, provided that the illegal search doesn't "bring the administration of justice into disrepute":

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

> Maybe you hadn't heard, but there are people being paid to work out how to do all these things,

Yup, I'm one of them. I'm working on the idea of a "Seed Factory" ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ), which is a starter kit of machines which you expand by making parts for more machines. A 3D printer is likely to be part of the starter kit, but you need several others. The engineering R&D questions are what machines should be in the starter kit, what is the optimal growth path, and how do those vary with available raw materials and the desired end outputs.

The point here is sending a whole industrial plant into orbit to process an asteroid is much too massive. You want to bootstrap up from a minimal starter kit, and build the rest out of the asteroid itself, as much as possible. You won't reach 100%, some stuff will still need to come from Earth, but saving 85-98% of the launch weight (what we think is a reasonable goal) is still a huge advantage.

No, the burn times are 110-465 days to return 200-1000 tons of material, plus coast times between burns. You can find the calculations at

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/...

200-1000 tons is a reasonable goal for early mining missions. If your chosen asteroid is larger than that, you scrape loose surface material or grab a boulder off it. Entire larger asteroids would require bigger power supplies and thrusters, so are best left for later generations. 1000 tons is a lot, that's twice the mass of the ISS. And you can fetch that much back every few years with a single mining tug.

> There are things called lathes and other machine tools that can reproduce themselves.

Not unaided. Machine tools can indeed make parts for more machine tools, but they need a source of power, and a supply of stock metal shapes to do that (and eventually fresh cutting tools)

> The real question is how many of these kind of tools together with a good smelter do you need before you can be self-sufficient and keep making your own sets of tools out of raw materials?

We phrase the R&D question a little differently: What is the best starter kit, and best growth path from the kit to a fully expanded factory? We have a draft starter kit list at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/... , and it includes a lathe, mill, and press, which are basic machines, but there are several others in addition. The starter kit emphasizes flexibility by using attachments to do different tasks. The expanded factory can add more specialized machines as needed, since your starter machines can only do one thing at a time.

> it would be nice to get a set of these kind of tools into the hands of people in 3rd world countries

Providing starter kits for under-developed areas is one of the project goals.

> It is also something important to know about if you are planning on building a colony on Mars or the Moon,

If you can build 85-98% of your stuff from local materials, it dramatically reduces how much you have to bring from Earth. That has huge leverage on what projects are feasible. However, helping people on Earth is a more immediate and larger need. So space versions will be 3rd or 4th generation Seed Factories. The first generation design is for ordinary people right here on Earth.

> there is zero infrastructure, and that's going to be incredibly expensive to build in space.

Bootstrap from a small starter kit. Use local materials for the self-expansion. See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... for details.

> Imagine the utility of a programmable satellite factory.

I don't just imagine such things, I'm working on building them ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ). Instead of trying to launch a whole space refinery and chemical plant, you send a starter kit (a "seed"), and use it to progressively build the rest out of local energy and materials. Since the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the Seed Factory concept works just as well on Earth, so our first generation design is for here. Later versions will be for more hostile environments like the oceans, deserts, ice caps, and space. Where it gets really interesting is using an expanded factory to make new starter kits. This is very similar to how biological plants reproduce. An acorn doesn't make another acorn directly. It grows into an oak tree first, then produces more acorns.

> I don't know what technology could get a ticket to Mars from the Earth down to say $100 USD,

I do, but then I wrote a textbook about space systems engineering [ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ]. It's a combination of self-replicating automation, extracting local materials and energy everywhere, and a space elevator network.

* It would be very expensive to haul all the equipment you need to Mars in order to live there. Instead, what you want to send is a starter kit of basic machines, and use those to build other machines, until you grow big enough to make the final equipment (habitat domes, etc.). You prefer to make this starter kit as automated as possible, since you won't have the facilities to support people until later. You start on Earth, and build a starter kit that grows to a full factory. That factory builds a second starter kit that gets launched to orbit, where it grows to a full factory. In turn that one sends a starter kit to Phobos, and then finally the Phobos one sends one down to Mars.

* All of the factories run off of local solar energy and process local materials to make most of the new products. A few percent will need to be imported parts, because they are too hard to make, or use rare elements. At each location you build up greenhouses, habitat modules, and processing plants. One of the locations is a "Cycling Mars Transfer Orbit", which goes back and forth from Earth to Mars. So instead of sending 10,000 Mars Colonial Transports carrying 100 people each, you build up a mining colony/transit hub that makes multiple trips, carrying people each time.

* A rotating elevator (Skyhook or Rotovator) can provide about as much velocity change as a rocket stage. A series of them in Low Earth Orbit, High Earth Orbit, and Mars Orbit can provide the velocity changes to hook up with the mobile mining colony, and then put you down on Mars.

Such a system would be low cost to build and run, but you need enough traffic (like 10,000 passengers a year) to justify building it.

Really? You'd rather teach this pile of macros than Java?

The boilerplate's so bad they built Vala, a whole new C#-like programming language, to escape it.

If there's a good reason they didn't just go with C++, I'd be interested in hearing it.

That whole thing about 'necessary complexity'...

You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.

Then you're cheating; the rules [wikibooks.org] require players to build and sell improvements evenly. You'd either have four houses on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk, or a hotel on Park Place and four houses on Boardwalk.

Anyone playing monopoly entirely by the official rules is playing it wrong.

You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.

Then you're cheating; the rules require players to build and sell improvements evenly. You'd either have four houses on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk, or a hotel on Park Place and four houses on Boardwalk.

You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.

That is a violation of the rules. Houses and hotels must be as evenly distributed as possible across properties of the same group. So it is legal to have a hotel on Park Place, and four houses on Boardwalk, or four houses on each, or four on one and three on the other. But it is NOT legal to have three houses on one and a hotel on the other. Here are the official rules.

That's exactly the project we are working on. Automated self-expanding production from a starter kit.

Book: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S...

Project site: http://www.seed-factory.org/

Space systems book that led to the project: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S...

I'm about to put an offer on a 2.67 acre R&D location near Atlanta. Things like solar furnaces and greenhouses require some outdoor space for testing. We plan to work with the local "Maker" community and Georgia Tech to bootstrap the "self-expansion" tech. The project is open source, and we welcome people in other areas helping or doing parallel work. However since this project involves some big hardware, we need to be physically close to the people we will be working with, at least until we can be replicating starter kits and sending them out to people elsewhere.

That's exactly the project we are working on. Automated self-expanding production from a starter kit.

Book: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S...

Project site: http://www.seed-factory.org/

Space systems book that led to the project: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S...

I'm about to put an offer on a 2.67 acre R&D location near Atlanta. Things like solar furnaces and greenhouses require some outdoor space for testing. We plan to work with the local "Maker" community and Georgia Tech to bootstrap the "self-expansion" tech. The project is open source, and we welcome people in other areas helping or doing parallel work. However since this project involves some big hardware, we need to be physically close to the people we will be working with, at least until we can be replicating starter kits and sending them out to people elsewhere.

>If wikipedia didn't suck @$$ and instead provided a Tutorial and Example sections we wouldn't need textbooks.

That's the goal of Wikibooks (sister project of Wikipedia).

The NSS roadmap has a different focus, as does Dani Eder's Space Transport and Engineering Methods Wikibook. This wikibook is a good basic reference to the many technologies related to space, so we want to incorporate links to his work to allow folks on our website to learn more when desired. Dani supports our project, and has graciously allowed us to include references and links to his work in the Plan website. With permission, we can incorporate multiple roadmaps as part of the website or by reference, and provide useful links between roadmap elements and the projects that are related to them. This is just one way in which the website (which will be at the "thespaceplan.com", which presently points to the Kickstarter page), can become a comprehensive resource.

As an aside, every member of Space Finance Group is also a member of NSS including two or three past NSS officers, and I believe that NSS supports this effort though I haven't seen the paperwork myself.

> And that's without pondering whether we'll ever get a 3D printer that can print all those things that require so many different characteristics

You have missed the concept of distributed peer-to-peer commerce alluded to in the summary. You will not have a single machine that can make everything, but access to many different machines across a network, one of which might be yours. Shapeways (http://www.shapeways.com/) has the centralized version of this already. They have a building full of a bunch of 3D machines that can handle about a dozen different materials, but they only have one location.

Makerspaces are community organizations that have multiple tools and machines, shared among their users. There are more of those, in various cities. The end point will be many such local workshops, plus individuals who have their own machines, and all of it linked into a network that can produce whatever you need. I'm starting up such a project, where besides making end products, the factory also makes more of itself ( http://www.seed-factory.org/ ) ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ) . It's not fully self-replicating in the sci-fi sense, it requires people and outside supplies of parts and materials, but it is capable of growing.

Oh dear oh dear lol

What on earth is a "pure IDE based engine"?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/V...
eg: a engine which uses a IDE, either by .dll linkage, or, included .h .cpp files.

And what do you mean by "hashed job Java code"?

Shit code made in a shit language which runs like shit = Java.
Thats not to say all Java programmers are bad, but, the same code in C++ would run at least 10x faster.

Unity has Unityscript (which is like Javascript) and Boo (which is a little like Python),

Last time i checked, it supported Java or C#.

but I'd guess that most games are written in C#. And what does the language matter anyway?

No, most games are written in C++. For the performance (hence why the language matters).

Nope and nope. "I chicken at least have."

I actually first heard about bitcoin in mid-2011, during the first big price spike, right here on Slashdot. I started mining it back then with my wimpy graphics card. Then that got too hard, so I just started buying them directly. Then I did a crowdfunding campaign with bitcoin that raised 200% of the goal. It's been an amazing experience.

The crowdfunding is to support a project for self-expanding automation ( https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/SFP/Intro ), where the automated machines make parts to expand the collection of machines. If you set up a distributed network of such machines, doing different tasks, you can use something like bitcoin to automatically pay each other when things are done.

Machines like 3D printers are useful, but they can't do everything. You need a bunch of different ones that between them cover all the different processes for a finished item.

> What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try.

I'm not saying they shouldn't try, merely that they have a rational technical approach. I'm working on self-expanding automation ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories ) as an enabler for big space projects. We can't afford to haul entire factories to the asteroids or Mars, so it makes sense to bring a starter kit, and use that to build more equipment, until you have whatever industrial capacity you need.

But instead of trying to go to Mars as the first step, I'm planning to build prototypes for *Earth* production first. This would be self-financing, like most advanced automation will be. Then in steps you go to more difficult locations like the oceans, deserts, and ice caps, and finally you go into orbit. By that time you will have plenty of experience with the technology and worked out a lot of the bugs. Not only that, but each generation of factory helps you build the next generation.

I think my approach is more sensible in the long run.

As author of a space systems engineering textbook ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ) and formerly working for Boeing on the Space Station project, it's obvious to me they really have not thought through reliability and logistics.

For example, they want to land the modules 5-10 km away from the base location, because that's the landing error circle for current technology, and the landing rockets can do serious damage if you land too close. Then supposedly a rover will pick up this several ton module, and drive it over unimproved natural terrain to the base site. How do you test the route with an unloaded rover? You can't because you don't have a load heavy enough to make sure you don't fall into a sandpit. What if there is a ridge somewhere along the way bigger than the rover wheels? On Earth we send in a bulldozer and make a path. These rovers are too light to do serious earth moving even if you include a digging arm or front blade.

I could go on, but you get the idea. There's a whole lot of thinking needed to make a project like this work, and they haven't got enough of the right talent to even get started.

Canada can add a couple of years to the sentence. As it should. In fact it should be able to add more for problem prisoners. If there is no consequence of an escape what is the incentive to serve one's sentence exhibiting good behaviour? Believe it or not, these are people you can't just sit down and have an 'adult conversation' with. They have already shown they have no respect for civilized society. I personally think flogging and other corporal punishment should be added back in to encourage good behaviour in prison and incentive to not break the law in future... prison should be ugly enough that it is no longer a thing to aspire to, to give someone 'street cred'.

"certainly should run a fresh, clean linux install off a CD every time you start up, to reduce the chances your machine is compromised."

You can also boot an .iso image from a USB or other flash as well as CD and load it entirely to RAM with no persistent home.

Knoppix (nicely polished distro) has had the "toram" option for many years as do other distros it inspired.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Knowing_Knoppix/Advanced_startup_options#Transferring_to_RAM

Wikipedia is not a how-to guide; it is an encyclopedia. Wikipedia does, however, have a project page listing other outlets for this sort of thing. One of them is Wikibooks, which is more accepting of how-to information. There's a page about hosts that needs your input. Or find a specialized wiki about system administration and submit your hosts file instructions there.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/09/06/nsa_bullrun_manassas_why_is_the_nsa_naming_its_covert_programs_after_civil.html
They are way ahead of the "'own people" aspect.
The fun question is who is going to play the North, South, the role of the UK, France and will the Russians send ships again? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Modern_History/American_Civil_War/Wartime_Diplomacy/US-Russian_Relations

This sounds like the perfect application for a shader against a whole screen texture. See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Post-Processing

Or is there something I'm missing? After all there are a number of glide wrappers nGlide and glidos already.

What the author is complaining about is not the wiki, but rather the fact that those projects have no one who is responsible for maintaining the documentation. If no one is responsible for writing the docs and ensuring their completeness, the documentation will inevitably be half-finished, whether they use a wiki or some other mechanism. The wiki is not an alternative to writing documentation, but rather is a tool for creating documentation.

That does seem to be the standard method in which wikis are used for documentation.

I've felt the author's pain, and have learned to share his hatred of wiki-as-docs. Mostly thanks to this Blender tutorial and most of this Minecraft mod API.

Wiki docs seem like the perfect fit for things which are updated frequently, until you start to see that only half the information is accurate anymore, and half of it isn't accurate yet; because, say, you're using an older version since the new one isn't stable/compatible yet
(i.e. Blender w/niftools). Unless there's a way to view the historical version of a wiki as a whole, instead of popping through revision after revision trying to guess by date when 1.5.1 became 1.5.2 and finding the info you needed.

No thanks.

All very good points. Imo, the best office suite I've ever used, even including Microsoft Office, was KOffice back in the 3.5 days. Figured it might be relevant to say that since they're using KDE. I loved how the styles were more well-defined in particular.

That being said, I've never done much "advanced" stuff in any WYSIWYG word processor. Well, the closest I've come is Word 2010's SmartArt feature, and I'd bet that neither LibreOffice or KOffice have something like that, but I haven't given KOffice a spin since 4.0 lost me as a KDE user. It makes it a breeze to do things like simple hierarchy charts and snazzed-up lists. I have no talent for graphic design, so that feature has made my (simpler) documents a whole lot more visually appealing.

However, I've found that if I need to do anything moderately complex, I turn to LaTeX even at work. Microsoft Word can be downright frustrating at times. Even though I spend time Googleing how to do things and staring at the LaTeX Wikibook, it seems I always spend less time doing that than fighting with Word.

In a longer document I honestly don't want to think about font sizes or which typeface I'm using or whether I've got a style that's being overridden by something else I don't want. I just want to type in what I have to write and let the formatting figure itself out. LaTeX, while not perfect, is the best solution I've seen yet.

I suppose it's just a shame that with the advent of the WYSIWYG word processor, people are more concerned with indenting things with spaces rather than using tabstops and obsessing over whether Comic Sans MS or Tahoma is more appropriate for this paragraph and how neat it looks if the next paragraph is in a completely different font or color! It would be nice if the focus were more on the structure of the document. I feel LaTeX does that for me, but I suppose the overarching problem is that people in general are not structural thinkers. They understand indenting the first line of a paragraph by hitting the space bar a few times; they don't understand telling the computer that it's a paragraph in an article or in a letter and letting the computer worry about the details.

The main things with good functional code is you don't think in terms of "first thing the program does". You shouldn't care about order at all. What's important is the hierarchy. That's why Haskell introduced do notation to allow for imperative statements to be in imperatives if order matters

Visions of places like the Culture are part of what inspires me to work on post-scarcity machines:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

Think it's graphicsx. One of the packages, anyways, lets you include PNGs, JPGs, etc. ... I also don't like the fact that vector images require you to master Asymptote, Metapost and an armful of other systems. ... So, whilst I agree that TeX has crappy image handling, it's not nearly as bad as you depict.

It is also not nearly as bad as you depict. Vector drawing is handled nicely by pgf/tik. If you want meta-control of tikz, you can use the wonderful tikz backend for matplotlib. There are also beautiful ways to produce EPS or (better yet imho) PDF for LaTeX, with embedded TeX fonts, including Matplotlib and the amazingly powerful PyX. Btw, the graphics inclusion package is graphicx.

Uh guys... why start a new project? How about just contributing to something that already exists?

I tried to learn Blender a couple of times. My major gripe was not its interface, but rather that it's difficult to find written tutorials. All of them seem to be videos.

The Blender 3D: Noob to Pro wiki book has been around for years and does a very good job* of teaching basic and intermediate level Blender use.

If you search for "blender 3d tutorial" it's the second result on Google and the fourth on DuckDuckGo (e.g. Bing). Maybe try searching on Google instead of YouTube next time. (That's a joke, for any humour-impaired types reading)

* At least, it did when I first found it four or five years ago. It may not be fully updated to match the Blender 2.5 UI changes now.

That would be 2014 according to their launch manifest:

http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

And, no, I am not sick of him. I want to sell him a seed factory to put on Mars to produce necessities for colonists. Therefore I want his near-term projects to succeed:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/SFP/Report

From the summary: "So this is another step toward fully-useful home fabrication of... almost anything."

Well, a very small step. The Form 1 machine cannot make the polymer it consumes, or the metal enclosure for it's base. For those you need a flexible chemical plant to supply various polymers, and a hydraulic press to roll-form the sheet metal.

The Seed Factory Project ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Danielravennest/papers/Seed_Factory_Project ), which will be starting soon, is aimed at a more complete collection of machines that *can* fabricate "almost anything", including it's own parts. It will not be home-sized though. More community-sized, where you submit your "print job" and pick up the finished parts/items later. One feature of the seed concept is it does not have to do everything "out of the box". It can produce parts for additional types of machines to expand the range of things it can do. A design that includes a starter set + CAD files for additional machines saves money compared to including all the machines at the start.

Getting down to home-sized is not practical with current technology, nor it is efficient. How often do you need to print a new couch? It makes more sense to share the equipment over a larger group of people, so it is not sitting idle most of the time and reduces the cost.

Nuclear rockets have a much higher specific impulse than chemical rockets.

Solar Thermal has the exact same higher specific impulse, because both heat up Hydrogen to produce thrust. The only difference is the heat source. Solar Thermal is lighter than Nuclear Thermal (reactors are heavy, and require shielding), and completely avoids all the issues with Nuclear (protests, accidents). The only place to consider Nuclear Thermal these days is if you are going to Jupiter or beyond. Jupiter has intense radiation belts, so extra shielding is a moot point, and beyond that distance sunlight gets pretty weak.

Source: Me. I'm a rocket scientist, and writing a space systems engineering book: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods

There are nearly 10,000 known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and another 10,000 Near Mars Objects (NMOs) are expected (2 of which are known to orbit Mars). We have not found as many NMOs yet because they are farther away, but there is every reason to expect them to exist, and likely even more since they are closer to the source in the Main Belt.

No matter what orbit you choose, there will be some of these objects in nearby orbits. So I propose setting up "Transfer Habitats" in convenient orbits to get to and from Mars. You would start with some pressurized modules brought from Earth, then bring in asteroid rocks from nearby. This has numerous advantages:

* Solves the radiation problem, if you wrap a layer of rock shielding around your modules.
* Solves the boredom problem for the crew. They have more living space, and can spend their time growing food and extracting fuel from the rock.
* Reduces mass from Earth, because of the previously mentioned food and fuel you make yourself
* Eventually you can produce pure metals, glass, and other products to expand the habitat, and later ship to the next location (Phobos) where you repeat the process. Once the first of these shielded habitats is set up - in Earth orbit, the rest of them can come naturally over time.
* Producing fuel in Earth Orbit and at Phobos makes it easier to land on the Moon and Mars. It totally changes the economics from "hauling lots of fuel with expensive rockets from Earth" to "making fuel and other supplies wherever I am".

All of this is laid out in more detail in the book I'm working on (Section 4.12 in particular):

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods

Dani Eder
(ex Boeing, now independent designer of self-supporting communities)

My car isn't an open format either why is this different?

Apples and oranges, duh!

If .doc and .docx work without issue, and they do for most of the world

I would like to see the sources for your "most of the world" metrics for "no problems" with the file formats.

The company I work for recently moved from Office 2007 to 2010 and I had to spend a god awful amount of time fixing my documents and presentations to look 'proper' again and the hilarious thing is that the AD is setup to save the documents in legacy office formats that shouldn't have transitional problems such as these between versions!

Unfortunately, this is the format currently used in businesses so the company I work for won't use other formats. Tool wise - I consider Microsoft Office to be probably the best tool for our type of work, despite the file format hell we have on every version.

why is important to normal people?

Home work!

Unfortunately for you the world seems to not share your ideological position on file format openness.

I don't have an ideological position on file format openness. You are reading way too much into things, have you considered drinking a cup of tea and chilling out while reading Slashdot? You sound really tense.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Ada_2012

"I'm waiting for you to provide 'the better alternative' like you said you would."

There is no LabVIEW clone, however I already offered you the better alternative. It's called Linux. A skilled developer can set up a test environment that is far superior to LabVIEW's limited capabilities. As for the niche market I already conceded exists in a few scenarios you went there anyway in an attempt to create the illusion that you had a point with Solidworks (Again, 99% of people who use computers don't use the software you are citing) you still failed, since there is a fine alternative called Blender. If you learned how to Google, you could have checked that before offering up the red herring.

Wikibooks?

Almost anything you can do or use today has an open source option. You have open source options for everything from your operating system to your chat app. You can read open source textbooks, cookbooks and encyclopedias. You can even build an open source airplane or brew your own free beer (free beer as in free speech, not free beer as in free beer).

Given all these options, what part(s) of your life would you be unwilling to open source? Your children's education? Vaccines? A pacemaker? If so, what would your test be for deciding that a closed-source option is the only choice?

Check out OpenScad. I found it pretty nice, at least for a programmer. There are thread models and other libraries available here.

They could use the books already on Wikibooks ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page ) as a starting point.

I wonder if the open-source books they will produce will break away from the paper textbook paradigm (linear text+static images)? The one I am writing ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ) is heavily hyperlinked, I've included a spreadsheet and expect to include other media, am working on a resource library ( http://www.mediafire.com/?y1ko8gj5rouob ), and the concept of "class projects" (design studies) which become part of the book.

They could use the books already on Wikibooks ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page ) as a starting point.

I wonder if the open-source books they will produce will break away from the paper textbook paradigm (linear text+static images)? The one I am writing ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods ) is heavily hyperlinked, I've included a spreadsheet and expect to include other media, am working on a resource library ( http://www.mediafire.com/?y1ko8gj5rouob ), and the concept of "class projects" (design studies) which become part of the book.

My approach:

1. Write open-source rocket science textbook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods and give it away

2. Get hired by someone like Elon Musk or Richard Branson to help build their next space project.

3. Profit!

Free textbook is a nice side effect, since printed textbooks are too damn expensive, but the payoff is someone actually building one of the projects in the book. The book just serves as advertising for the ideas.

Yes. We (and Wikipedia) should be encrypting our communications from the start. A lot has been written about why we should use encryption, some of it from around 20 years ago. It's an uphill fight still these days and many won't become interested until it is too late. If you haven't already, consider throwing your own cryptoparty.

Port 22 is constantly attacked, but if you listen on port 45022 or pretty much any other port, except 22, nobody will bother. Don't change this on the server, let your router do it. Every router I've seen can, .... except some Netgears.

The other thing is to use fail2ban to firewall any failed attempts after 3 tries. Further, only allow key-based logins and prevent remote root ssh access completely. These are pretty basic ideas.

10 yrs using ssh? Seems that after 6 months, you'd learn about these things. You might want to check into the ~/.ssh/config file too.

There's a wikibooks book on ssh worth skimming. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Collections/OpenSSH ssh is one of those simple things that goes very deep. We just need to learn a little more.

We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient.

Sounds like what has been common in Erlang for decades.

Off topic: when I watch the /. homepage, I am logged in. As soon as I click on a story, I become an Anonymous Coward. Did anybody else experience this bug too?