Barring a downright thermonuclear change in procurement practices, the large number of contractors won't just be accessing it, they'll build it, run it, administer it, heck, probably own it and lease it back to the feds for some absurd fee calculated according to what a set of mainframes connected by leased lines would have cost in the 80's...
The trouble with the OS diversity argument is that it is really calibrated to the concerns of "low interest" targets. If my computer is worth maybe 25 cents as a low-reliability spam node, with perhaps a buck worth of credit card details cached somewhere, the fact that it is running the same OS as another $HUGE_NUMBER of machines is basically the only thing that makes it worth attacking. Writing a decent virus/worm/trojan and maybe doing some social engineering to get me to download it isn't free, nor does it take zero time. On the other side of the same coin, nuisances like spam are largely supported by the fact that huge swaths of homogeneous compromised boxes are available.
If you are a high interest target(either economically valuable, or because of some sort of cloak-and-dagger dickwaving) however, the argument changes. You, personally, could easily be economically or strategically viable as a target for your very own targeted attack, specifically crafted for whatever you are running. Unfortunately, the security of a lot of specialty systems is such utter shit that it makes a desktop windows box look ironclad(particularly if you are really mean and count vulnerabilities per unit features, rather than absolute number of vulnerabilities). "Many eyes make bugs shallow" isn't entirely true; but "no eyes makes bugs invisible" often is. It is rather like CAPTCHAs. If you are a low traffic/virtually no traffic site/forum/whatever, rolling your own CAPTCHA can actually be more secure than using an off the shelf one. Unless you are Real Serious, yours will be lousy; but what it guards is of such little worth that nobody is likely to take the time to tune their cracker to your unique, if probably flawed, system. A high value asset, on the other hand, can be assured that people will be tuning their systems against their CAPTCHA, so they are better off going with the best technology presently available for the purpose.
This certainly isn't an argument for monoculture, even extremely commonly used systems have flaws, and you can't risk having everything relying on them; but having obscure oddities around can make you less safe from the serious guys, even as it keeps the kiddies out(The specific Phillips programmable controllers targeted by the attack discussed earlier today, for example, probably aren't going to get turned into spam bots anytime soon; but somebody did some very specific legwork to hit those...)
The really big argument against monoculture, in high security type systems and environments(besides not making you a specific contractor's bitch forever) is probably institutional/cultural. Even if you start out with the best of intentions, and the most authoritative of admins, the fact that you are running some commodity system creates psychological and institutional pressures to start acting like everyone else. If, on the other hand, the distinction between Real Serious Systems and toy boxes is immediately visible as a difference in software, people are less likely to let their habits from one bleed over into the other(in fact, even if one were starting with a commodity OS like windows, linux, or BSD, one might consider deliberately breaking some convention good and hard, just to keep people from bringing their sloppy habits and software with them)...
If you aren't planning on connecting your tubes to the public ones you don't even need to bother with the private addresses. Address uniqueness only matters if the two are connected, which you are supposed to be avoiding anyway.
There aren't many natural sources of substantial radiation, unless you go digging up and concentrating the relevant elements or go far enough back in earth's history that plants hadn't been invented yet. There is virtually no call for the adaptation of radiation resistance, outside of a few man made regions.
However, as it happens, the biochemical adaptations required to survive severe dessication or extreme heat(which, like radiation, pretty much go all bull-in-a-china-shop on your genome and metabolically important molecules) happen to, in a number of cases, be pretty useful in radiation resistance as well. Bacteria like d. radiodurans, t. gammatolerans, and organisms like tardigrades are extremely radiation resistant; but as a side effect of their adaptations to heat and dessication.
Given the survival value, particularly for seeds, of being able to survive hard times and then germinate, or aggressively seize territory(and light) left open by forest fires, it wouldn't be a total surprise if plants had picked up a few adaptations in the same vein...
I realize that grocery stores actually operate on pretty thin margins; but I have a very hard time believing that the fairly elaborate(and deeply buggy and annoying) "theft prevention" mechanisms in the self checkouts actually work well enough to justify their existence.
Pretty much every item in the store is marked with the weight of its contents, and the packaging weights within classes of objects don't vary too much(ie pound of shitty store-brand coffee vs. pound of the good stuff). Even an amateur should be able to break the weight-based verification system without breaking a sweat; but it is inevitably either failing to register my small items or freaking out because I've accidentally left the corner of my bag of earlier purchases just slightly on the scale. I'd assume that, if you are one of the pros(stealing mass quantities of baby formula to cut your drugs with or whatever) it isn't rocket surgery to haul out a scale and work out precise weights for your UPC swap scheme. Never mind, of course, that the checkout system doesn't know that it exists if you don't scan it.
I have to imagine that it would be more efficient to have one loss prevention/old lady helper dude watching over 4 or 5 checkouts that focus on efficiency, rather than paranoia, instead of having zero humans watching a bank of paranoid but ineffectual self-checkout units...
As a game proper, this sucker is toast, unless Jackson fans are more rabid than they appear.
On the other hand, observe the gradual accretion of "casual" features(ie. screensaver-eque autoplay modes that basically make the game function as an MP3 player with visuals) in the Guitar Hero/Rhythm game genre, along with the move toward online digital distribution/marketplace models and the ability to aggregate songs from multiple games...
As a game in the more or less classic sense, the project seems as doomed as it is stupid. As a game-esque mixture of themed social networking and micropayment nickel an diming for Jackson themed digital "merchandise" I can imagine it at least breaking even.
China is only really notable because of the uniformity of their blackout-blackout. I strongly suspect, for instance, that Google's US totals do not refer to anything conducted through "National Security Letters" in any but the most oblique terms. It's just that there are dozens to hundreds of other parties using more public means, who do show up in the totals and keep them from being eerily empty.
Ironically, if China actually gave a fuck about world opinion(and if the parts of "world opinion" who mattered weren't jerking off behind the tinted windows of their up-armoured SUVs at the thought of being like China...), it would probably be a much better PR strategy to let, even encourage, Google to report takedown and request numbers for a broad swath of assorted petty crimes. No information available makes them look super creepy, regardless of exactly where on the creepy scale they fall, while a few thousand fully public; but wildly banal, info/takedown requests a year would just make them look a touch petty.
If you really want "punching above their weight"(given relative internet penetration rates) what is going on in Brazil? Is that all just because it is one of the few markets where Orkut ever went anywhere?
Singapore is also running pretty high, per capita; but they've always been very open about their 'Statist with a smile' policy...
Unless the plant design is some ghastly soviet relic(and possibly even then) it should be possible to force a shutdown without actually breaching the fuel containment or causing any appreciable contamination of the environment.
Cooling systems, for instance, tend to be big, and more or less have to be either aboveground(for massive air exchange) or next to a nice cool body of water. And, since they are cooling systems, hiding their IR output is going to be a trick. If you lose your cooling system, you have not that much time to drop the moderators into the core and shut the thing down, or get a nice pile of molten radioactive slag that has to be entombed more or less forever.
Any decent design will have a failsafe in place to deal with cooling failures in a recoverable way and a plant design has to be serious shit for the coolant failure to cause a meltdown that breaches containment.
Dropping a series of bunker busters right into the containment vessel of the reactor itself would, indeed; be deeply tactless and unlikely to win friends; but a nuclear plant has other vital systems...
The one saving grace for Wine, in its eternal game of catch-up, is that individual programs that people care about are either static targets, or relatively slow moving(depending on how often they see patches/updates and how compulsory those are).
Unless Wine reaches a userbase high enough that devs start targeting it that won't be much of a consolation to anybody trying to treat Linux as a cutting edge gamer's system; but (since Wine has no commercial "upgrade treadmill" incentives) there isn't much stopping it from maintaining support for $LEGACY_PROGRAM forever(especially since multiple Wine configs can coexist, with different ones for different programs)...
In addition to the LGPL 2 being substantially less GPL-like than its name suggests(as well as being a fairly logical choice if you want to extend maximal freedom to the user, while making the creation of incompatible forks that have to be reverse-engineered less likely), arguing over the license of the reference implementation of a specifically-designed-to-be-patent-unencumbered codec spec seems especially pointless.
Being able to use the reference implementation certainly is convenient and timesaving; but it is the codec itself that is the really important bit. Anybody is free to write a conformant implementation under their license of choice, or attempt to buy the right to use the code under some other license from its creator. Without patents, nobody can stop you from doing that, and there is nothing in the LGPL2 that prevents using the LGPL2 code as a reference when writing a new implementation, so long as you aren't just copying it.
Wow. Ordinarily I'm of the opinion that crying "Godwin's Law!" is a bit overused; but having someone describe the LGPL as "Nazi-like" is making me reconsider.
Somebody goes to the trouble of designing a novel, patent unencumbered(ie. if you don't like the software licence, you are perfectly free to write your own implementation), codec that fits an otherwise rather underserved niche. They have the temerity to release it under a license requiring you to release your modifications to their code if you distribute in binary form and this is somehow analogous to a particularly virulent flavor of genocidal fascism?
You are really messing up the BSD crowd's reputation for being ideologically mellow compared to team GPL...
The more interesting question is why the Vatican astronomer thinks that an alien would need baptism.
If we grant the fellow his premises(which I in no way agree with; but theism/atheism arguments are boring at this point), humans must be baptized in order to achieve salvation because of original sin and the resultant human concupiscence. That was a particular event that occurred somewhere in the ancient middle/near east on a small rocky planet orbiting a not especially distinguished star.
Why would an entity that was created or evolved on an entirely different rock, without the slightest connection whatsoever to humanity, be affected in the slightest by some human behavior in the early pre-lapsarian habitat?
Is the Vatican's official policy that humans managed to sin-ify everything in the entire universe that has a complex neural net(or analog thereof), or that a separate Fall occurred on all planets with sentient life?
I'm not at all surprised that the Vatican acknowledges the possibility of alien life. Not doing so would be placing limits on God's creative power(which would be a doctrinally unsound move) as well as ignoring the scientific fact that space is pretty fucking huge. I am rather surprised that they would view alien life as being in need of their attention(particularly when some fairly clever, if not exactly unequivocally sentient, terrestrial species are viewed as being wholly unaffected by human Fall and salvation. If the higher primates don't need baptisms, why would the xenofungus of Alpha-Centauri?
So, if my memory serves me, the CE4100 is basically a single core atom, fairly low clocked, paired with a GMA500-ish IGP for high definition video acceleration. Intel's driver support for the GMA500 absolutely sucks a mountain of ass through capillary tubing, since they didn't actually design the thing or get the rights to make an OSS driver for it on any reasonable timescale. The GMA950 and later are minimally capable; but at least X works.
At $229, The Boxee Box is starting to compare dangerously poorly with an EEE Top, or any of the other basic Atom Nettops, paired with a broadcom "crystalHD" video accelerator. Or, for just a bit more, you can get one of the dual core atom/CULV units, with a decent slab of RAM and have web browsing and modest multitasking actually work properly.
If they had stayed with the power-sipping ARM concept, they would have had something modestly interesting. The CE4100, though, makes them just another atom design, and there are already plenty of good ones out there.
Will more of the script kiddie hacking packages have "hardcore" venomous snake related names and graphics(ASCII for the l33t) or "hilarious" anal violation pun derived ones?
I agree that hiding from dystopias makes a lousy overall culture; but having some people specializing in it can be quite useful.
More to the point, in this case, the chap in TFA sounds optimistic to the point of utopian. He isn't railing about the imminent demise of all Haber-Process based agriculture, he is geeking out about the second coming of the vegetable garden. Given the percentage of the American population that basically lives on things that food chemists can turn corn into, and the percentage of the world population that spends a lot of time not actually eating, he is (arguably) proposing progress in line with your definition.
My point is not that the earth is running out of energy sources, there are a variety of interesting fission and fusionables, and the sun isn't going anywhere; but that getting stuck between really, really sucks and can, under the wrong circumstances, represent a trap from which escape is extremely difficult.
In the case of energy, for instance, a coal/petrochemical civilization has loads of surplus energy, food, and refined chemicals with which to produce physicists, engineers, plant designs, and actual nuclear plants. Plus, it has cool accessories like "law and order" "functioning credit markets" and "lots and lots of well greased supply chains". The trouble is not that nuclear doesn't work, the trouble is that, despite having all the advantages we are likely to have, we only have working nukes for a relatively small fraction of our present needs.
As long as the existing energy base is in good order, you are in the best shape you can possibly be to build the next one. If, however, strategy N stops working before strategy N+1 is built, you can find yourself stuck at strategy N-m, trying to get to strategy N+1, and with strategy N now played out. That has the potential to really suck.
I have little patience for environmentalism that is purely about self-flagellation; but having a plan in place to make sure that you can move from plan A to plan B without chaos that will leave observers grasping for adequate superlatives seems like plain good sense.
I suspect that there are two basic factors at work:
1. Algae are just this guy's Thing. Many people, nerd types not the least, have some weird hobby that they are passionate about. His is, presumably, algae farming.
2. All systems, any combination of knowledge and hardware and live cultures and whatnot, take time to establish and disseminate. If you want to have them available when you need them, it is best to have them set up before you need them.(Particularly with a technology like this, where development is cheap and there are potential applications right now, as well as in the future)
The advantage of "progress" that makes life worse, or at least having access to the technology and engineering needed to institute it on short notice, really depends on how optimistic you are about the alternative.
If you are of the optimistic "steady-state-or-even-better" school, giving up long hot showers, giant pieces of perfectly cooked cow corpse, and 85 degree buildings all winter for its own sake is a rather curious and masochistic hobby. Fine if that is your thing; but not really for general consumption, much less compulsory introduction.
The great utility of "worse progress" comes in the event of some sort of nasty supply shock. The basic problem is this: "progress"(R&D, engineering, building infrastructure, educating people, etc.) requires that a civilization be able to run a surplus in energy, food, and other useful materials. If civilization falls short of that, it generally falls back on eating its own infrastructure to survive(just consider the amount of european masonry that was just pilfered from roman stuff; because that was easier than mining it, and they couldn't make concrete anymore). Worst case, you not only get infrastructure degradation(both material and human capital) from lack of maintenance and training; but further destruction as people fight over the scraps.
In our case, hydrocarbons have essentially allowed us to, for the past century or two, run massive surpluses. If we have to get off that particular train, we have to hope that the fusion/solar/orbiting microwave satellite/thorium breeder reactor/etc. guys have it together by that time, or things are going to get ugly. The nightmare scenario is that we lose the ability to run surpluses before we perfect the next energy source. If that happens, we might never have another shot at it. "Worse" technologies have the potential to be a useful delaying tactic, allowing us to run an R&D and infrastructure construction surplus long enough to get something else in place. Also handy in extreme environments, like space colonies or antarctic bases or what have you.
In the developed world, we prefer the euphemism "biosolids".
Dealing with the leftovers of sewage treatment is so much more cost effective when they can be classified as fertilizer. Luckily, absolutely nobody would dream of dumping heavy metals or some of the nastier organics into the general sewage system, so soil application is entirely safe...
Unshockingly enough, Sony crushed a commercial seller of a PS3 mod device like a bug. Even if the law weren't probably unfavorable to the sellers, Sony probably could have just tied them up in injunctions forever anyway. Shocking.
Equally unsurprisingly, halting the distribution of some OSS software is going about as well as the fight against DVD Jon's little toy did. It's totally unwinnable, and Sony hasn't shown many clear signs of even trying. Shocking.
However, it isn't clear how much this matters. This isn't CSS, where the system was set in stone, millions of un-patchable, non-internet-connected hardware units were already in the wild, and team DRM pretty much just had to suck it up. Those were the good old days.
Sony controls the Playstation Network, and can enforce minimum software versions for access, or punitively lock out units. Even for offline users, individual game disks can mandate, and include, upgrades to a higher version. Sony has, certainly, lost the game against anyone content to just pick up an old PS3 fat on ebay and enjoy a pirated copy of every PS3 game to date, all for ~$200. You'll have to stay offline, and avoid games with mandatory upgrades; but not a bad deal on the whole, I can certainly see a fair few takers.
However, unless this USB hack is seriously powerful, exploiting some basically unblockable fundamental flaw in the PS3's design, all PS3s that ship more than a few weeks from now, are updated(manually or automatically) to the next firmware revision, or wish to play newer games or use newer peripherals, or play online, are back in Sony's camp. And, unlike a DVD or Blu-ray disk, where the plaintext copy, once created, is eminently playable on all sorts of 3rd party devices, general purpose computers, and whatnot, PS3 games are pretty much only playable on PS3s, pending substantial advances in computing power that will allow emulation. This isn't "hack once, run anywhere." Each individual PS3 is controlled separately, and the success of the hacking device depends on how many hackable PS3s remain in the wild, a variable over which Sony has substantial control...
Oh, I agree that the alternatives were either pretty dire(you must have suppressed your memories of IRQ juggling to get the proprietary ISA interface card for your scanner to work, just to add one more to the list of bad or severely limited options...) or pretty expensive; but I think that it is a fairly useful example of the power of having a tiny marginal BOM cost to overpower the otherwise difficult chicken-and-egg adopter problem.
USB had the advantage of being worth adopting, once things settled down(which the current crop of 3D stuff has a much more tenuous claim to); but there was a pretty decent period where computers were shipped with USB basically only because it was cheap to add. Many went to the scrap heap without ever even running an OS that supported it. It became worth it, and demand sprung up(as proven by the market for add-on cards and hubs); but its initial growth wasn't demand driven.
In the case of 3D, I'd suspect a similar phenomenon. The tech isn't good enough for there to be substantial demand for home TVs, and a lot of the contender technologies actively degrade the 2D performance of the TV, as well as adding pretty substantial cost to the unit(anything that involves adding additional optical layers to the panel just isn't going to do your contrast ratio or sharpness any favors, plus it'll be a special order from the OEM...)
By contrast, Active shutter requires goofy glasses(that need recharging or battery changing, and aren't terribly cheap); but requires no changes to the panel and very minimal additional hardware over what you would be putting in a decent TV/monitor anyway. If 3D were demand driven, it would be the loser. Anybody buying for 3D would pay more for the TV and skip the glasses(or get the one that only requires $2 passives). Since it seems likely to be a push thing, I'd be more inclined to favor active shutter, or some other technology with similar characteristics; because it allows the manufacturers to push for almost nothing/unit, with the peripherals and content becoming available later(if anybody turns out to actually care...)
I suspect that "victory" if there is one, in 3D displays will take one of two forms:
Either R&D will grind along, driven by a mixture of long term optimism and the occasional big simulator/data-visualization/etc. contract, until they eventually hit on something genuinely Good which will then be accepted. Or(and I suspect this is more likely):
Victory will, eventually, be conceded to whatever 3D tech's panel, interconnect, and data storage requirements are most similar to those of the 2D market, and which imposes the smallest additional component cost to mark a device "3D Capable!!!". For instance, the active shutter glass stuff requires active shutter glasses(which sucks majorly); but otherwise works very well with the trends that are being driven by the existing 2D market: It throws away half your frame rate, so it can alternate eyes; but twitch gamers and action/sports enthusiasts hate blur anyway, so LCD refresh rates have been getting a lot better. It requires high speed interconnects, because of those high frame rates; but so do high resolutions displays, which are what keep the pros and CAD dudes happy, so all the display connection standards have very high speeds on the roadmap. Additional components cost? You basically just need to blink a few IR LEDs so that the glasses can sync. Maybe a few bucks on top of the existing stuff.
This doesn't actually mean that buyers of such "3D Capable!!!" TVs will bother to buy shutter glasses, or 3D movies, or even turn the option on; but the additional cost would be low enough to get very broad penetration without any real active consumer acceptance.
Think back to the early days of USB: Slow, virtually nothing to plug in to it and what there was was buggy, not even supported by the OSes that most people were running; but Intel put it in their chipsets, so it cost the motherboard maker peanuts to drop the passives and the connector on the board. Everybody had it before anybody cared.
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Barring a downright thermonuclear change in procurement practices, the large number of contractors won't just be accessing it, they'll build it, run it, administer it, heck, probably own it and lease it back to the feds for some absurd fee calculated according to what a set of mainframes connected by leased lines would have cost in the 80's...
The trouble with the OS diversity argument is that it is really calibrated to the concerns of "low interest" targets. If my computer is worth maybe 25 cents as a low-reliability spam node, with perhaps a buck worth of credit card details cached somewhere, the fact that it is running the same OS as another $HUGE_NUMBER of machines is basically the only thing that makes it worth attacking. Writing a decent virus/worm/trojan and maybe doing some social engineering to get me to download it isn't free, nor does it take zero time. On the other side of the same coin, nuisances like spam are largely supported by the fact that huge swaths of homogeneous compromised boxes are available.
If you are a high interest target(either economically valuable, or because of some sort of cloak-and-dagger dickwaving) however, the argument changes. You, personally, could easily be economically or strategically viable as a target for your very own targeted attack, specifically crafted for whatever you are running. Unfortunately, the security of a lot of specialty systems is such utter shit that it makes a desktop windows box look ironclad(particularly if you are really mean and count vulnerabilities per unit features, rather than absolute number of vulnerabilities). "Many eyes make bugs shallow" isn't entirely true; but "no eyes makes bugs invisible" often is. It is rather like CAPTCHAs. If you are a low traffic/virtually no traffic site/forum/whatever, rolling your own CAPTCHA can actually be more secure than using an off the shelf one. Unless you are Real Serious, yours will be lousy; but what it guards is of such little worth that nobody is likely to take the time to tune their cracker to your unique, if probably flawed, system. A high value asset, on the other hand, can be assured that people will be tuning their systems against their CAPTCHA, so they are better off going with the best technology presently available for the purpose.
This certainly isn't an argument for monoculture, even extremely commonly used systems have flaws, and you can't risk having everything relying on them; but having obscure oddities around can make you less safe from the serious guys, even as it keeps the kiddies out(The specific Phillips programmable controllers targeted by the attack discussed earlier today, for example, probably aren't going to get turned into spam bots anytime soon; but somebody did some very specific legwork to hit those...)
The really big argument against monoculture, in high security type systems and environments(besides not making you a specific contractor's bitch forever) is probably institutional/cultural. Even if you start out with the best of intentions, and the most authoritative of admins, the fact that you are running some commodity system creates psychological and institutional pressures to start acting like everyone else. If, on the other hand, the distinction between Real Serious Systems and toy boxes is immediately visible as a difference in software, people are less likely to let their habits from one bleed over into the other(in fact, even if one were starting with a commodity OS like windows, linux, or BSD, one might consider deliberately breaking some convention good and hard, just to keep people from bringing their sloppy habits and software with them)...
If you aren't planning on connecting your tubes to the public ones you don't even need to bother with the private addresses. Address uniqueness only matters if the two are connected, which you are supposed to be avoiding anyway.
There aren't many natural sources of substantial radiation, unless you go digging up and concentrating the relevant elements or go far enough back in earth's history that plants hadn't been invented yet. There is virtually no call for the adaptation of radiation resistance, outside of a few man made regions.
However, as it happens, the biochemical adaptations required to survive severe dessication or extreme heat(which, like radiation, pretty much go all bull-in-a-china-shop on your genome and metabolically important molecules) happen to, in a number of cases, be pretty useful in radiation resistance as well. Bacteria like d. radiodurans, t. gammatolerans, and organisms like tardigrades are extremely radiation resistant; but as a side effect of their adaptations to heat and dessication.
Given the survival value, particularly for seeds, of being able to survive hard times and then germinate, or aggressively seize territory(and light) left open by forest fires, it wouldn't be a total surprise if plants had picked up a few adaptations in the same vein...
I realize that grocery stores actually operate on pretty thin margins; but I have a very hard time believing that the fairly elaborate(and deeply buggy and annoying) "theft prevention" mechanisms in the self checkouts actually work well enough to justify their existence.
Pretty much every item in the store is marked with the weight of its contents, and the packaging weights within classes of objects don't vary too much(ie pound of shitty store-brand coffee vs. pound of the good stuff). Even an amateur should be able to break the weight-based verification system without breaking a sweat; but it is inevitably either failing to register my small items or freaking out because I've accidentally left the corner of my bag of earlier purchases just slightly on the scale. I'd assume that, if you are one of the pros(stealing mass quantities of baby formula to cut your drugs with or whatever) it isn't rocket surgery to haul out a scale and work out precise weights for your UPC swap scheme. Never mind, of course, that the checkout system doesn't know that it exists if you don't scan it.
I have to imagine that it would be more efficient to have one loss prevention/old lady helper dude watching over 4 or 5 checkouts that focus on efficiency, rather than paranoia, instead of having zero humans watching a bank of paranoid but ineffectual self-checkout units...
As a game proper, this sucker is toast, unless Jackson fans are more rabid than they appear.
On the other hand, observe the gradual accretion of "casual" features(ie. screensaver-eque autoplay modes that basically make the game function as an MP3 player with visuals) in the Guitar Hero/Rhythm game genre, along with the move toward online digital distribution/marketplace models and the ability to aggregate songs from multiple games...
As a game in the more or less classic sense, the project seems as doomed as it is stupid. As a game-esque mixture of themed social networking and micropayment nickel an diming for Jackson themed digital "merchandise" I can imagine it at least breaking even.
Some memories are too profitable to die...
Invisibility is the ultimate refinement of transparency, comrade!
China is only really notable because of the uniformity of their blackout-blackout. I strongly suspect, for instance, that Google's US totals do not refer to anything conducted through "National Security Letters" in any but the most oblique terms. It's just that there are dozens to hundreds of other parties using more public means, who do show up in the totals and keep them from being eerily empty.
Ironically, if China actually gave a fuck about world opinion(and if the parts of "world opinion" who mattered weren't jerking off behind the tinted windows of their up-armoured SUVs at the thought of being like China...), it would probably be a much better PR strategy to let, even encourage, Google to report takedown and request numbers for a broad swath of assorted petty crimes. No information available makes them look super creepy, regardless of exactly where on the creepy scale they fall, while a few thousand fully public; but wildly banal, info/takedown requests a year would just make them look a touch petty.
If you really want "punching above their weight"(given relative internet penetration rates) what is going on in Brazil? Is that all just because it is one of the few markets where Orkut ever went anywhere?
Singapore is also running pretty high, per capita; but they've always been very open about their 'Statist with a smile' policy...
Unless the plant design is some ghastly soviet relic(and possibly even then) it should be possible to force a shutdown without actually breaching the fuel containment or causing any appreciable contamination of the environment.
Cooling systems, for instance, tend to be big, and more or less have to be either aboveground(for massive air exchange) or next to a nice cool body of water. And, since they are cooling systems, hiding their IR output is going to be a trick. If you lose your cooling system, you have not that much time to drop the moderators into the core and shut the thing down, or get a nice pile of molten radioactive slag that has to be entombed more or less forever.
Any decent design will have a failsafe in place to deal with cooling failures in a recoverable way and a plant design has to be serious shit for the coolant failure to cause a meltdown that breaches containment.
Dropping a series of bunker busters right into the containment vessel of the reactor itself would, indeed; be deeply tactless and unlikely to win friends; but a nuclear plant has other vital systems...
The one saving grace for Wine, in its eternal game of catch-up, is that individual programs that people care about are either static targets, or relatively slow moving(depending on how often they see patches/updates and how compulsory those are).
Unless Wine reaches a userbase high enough that devs start targeting it that won't be much of a consolation to anybody trying to treat Linux as a cutting edge gamer's system; but (since Wine has no commercial "upgrade treadmill" incentives) there isn't much stopping it from maintaining support for $LEGACY_PROGRAM forever(especially since multiple Wine configs can coexist, with different ones for different programs)...
In addition to the LGPL 2 being substantially less GPL-like than its name suggests(as well as being a fairly logical choice if you want to extend maximal freedom to the user, while making the creation of incompatible forks that have to be reverse-engineered less likely), arguing over the license of the reference implementation of a specifically-designed-to-be-patent-unencumbered codec spec seems especially pointless.
Being able to use the reference implementation certainly is convenient and timesaving; but it is the codec itself that is the really important bit. Anybody is free to write a conformant implementation under their license of choice, or attempt to buy the right to use the code under some other license from its creator. Without patents, nobody can stop you from doing that, and there is nothing in the LGPL2 that prevents using the LGPL2 code as a reference when writing a new implementation, so long as you aren't just copying it.
Wow. Ordinarily I'm of the opinion that crying "Godwin's Law!" is a bit overused; but having someone describe the LGPL as "Nazi-like" is making me reconsider.
Somebody goes to the trouble of designing a novel, patent unencumbered(ie. if you don't like the software licence, you are perfectly free to write your own implementation), codec that fits an otherwise rather underserved niche. They have the temerity to release it under a license requiring you to release your modifications to their code if you distribute in binary form and this is somehow analogous to a particularly virulent flavor of genocidal fascism?
You are really messing up the BSD crowd's reputation for being ideologically mellow compared to team GPL...
The more interesting question is why the Vatican astronomer thinks that an alien would need baptism.
If we grant the fellow his premises(which I in no way agree with; but theism/atheism arguments are boring at this point), humans must be baptized in order to achieve salvation because of original sin and the resultant human concupiscence. That was a particular event that occurred somewhere in the ancient middle/near east on a small rocky planet orbiting a not especially distinguished star.
Why would an entity that was created or evolved on an entirely different rock, without the slightest connection whatsoever to humanity, be affected in the slightest by some human behavior in the early pre-lapsarian habitat?
Is the Vatican's official policy that humans managed to sin-ify everything in the entire universe that has a complex neural net(or analog thereof), or that a separate Fall occurred on all planets with sentient life?
I'm not at all surprised that the Vatican acknowledges the possibility of alien life. Not doing so would be placing limits on God's creative power(which would be a doctrinally unsound move) as well as ignoring the scientific fact that space is pretty fucking huge. I am rather surprised that they would view alien life as being in need of their attention(particularly when some fairly clever, if not exactly unequivocally sentient, terrestrial species are viewed as being wholly unaffected by human Fall and salvation. If the higher primates don't need baptisms, why would the xenofungus of Alpha-Centauri?
So, if my memory serves me, the CE4100 is basically a single core atom, fairly low clocked, paired with a GMA500-ish IGP for high definition video acceleration. Intel's driver support for the GMA500 absolutely sucks a mountain of ass through capillary tubing, since they didn't actually design the thing or get the rights to make an OSS driver for it on any reasonable timescale. The GMA950 and later are minimally capable; but at least X works.
At $229, The Boxee Box is starting to compare dangerously poorly with an EEE Top, or any of the other basic Atom Nettops, paired with a broadcom "crystalHD" video accelerator. Or, for just a bit more, you can get one of the dual core atom/CULV units, with a decent slab of RAM and have web browsing and modest multitasking actually work properly.
If they had stayed with the power-sipping ARM concept, they would have had something modestly interesting. The CE4100, though, makes them just another atom design, and there are already plenty of good ones out there.
Will more of the script kiddie hacking packages have "hardcore" venomous snake related names and graphics(ASCII for the l33t) or "hilarious" anal violation pun derived ones?
I agree that hiding from dystopias makes a lousy overall culture; but having some people specializing in it can be quite useful.
More to the point, in this case, the chap in TFA sounds optimistic to the point of utopian. He isn't railing about the imminent demise of all Haber-Process based agriculture, he is geeking out about the second coming of the vegetable garden. Given the percentage of the American population that basically lives on things that food chemists can turn corn into, and the percentage of the world population that spends a lot of time not actually eating, he is (arguably) proposing progress in line with your definition.
My point is not that the earth is running out of energy sources, there are a variety of interesting fission and fusionables, and the sun isn't going anywhere; but that getting stuck between really, really sucks and can, under the wrong circumstances, represent a trap from which escape is extremely difficult.
In the case of energy, for instance, a coal/petrochemical civilization has loads of surplus energy, food, and refined chemicals with which to produce physicists, engineers, plant designs, and actual nuclear plants. Plus, it has cool accessories like "law and order" "functioning credit markets" and "lots and lots of well greased supply chains". The trouble is not that nuclear doesn't work, the trouble is that, despite having all the advantages we are likely to have, we only have working nukes for a relatively small fraction of our present needs.
As long as the existing energy base is in good order, you are in the best shape you can possibly be to build the next one. If, however, strategy N stops working before strategy N+1 is built, you can find yourself stuck at strategy N-m, trying to get to strategy N+1, and with strategy N now played out. That has the potential to really suck.
I have little patience for environmentalism that is purely about self-flagellation; but having a plan in place to make sure that you can move from plan A to plan B without chaos that will leave observers grasping for adequate superlatives seems like plain good sense.
I suspect that there are two basic factors at work:
1. Algae are just this guy's Thing. Many people, nerd types not the least, have some weird hobby that they are passionate about. His is, presumably, algae farming.
2. All systems, any combination of knowledge and hardware and live cultures and whatnot, take time to establish and disseminate. If you want to have them available when you need them, it is best to have them set up before you need them.(Particularly with a technology like this, where development is cheap and there are potential applications right now, as well as in the future)
The advantage of "progress" that makes life worse, or at least having access to the technology and engineering needed to institute it on short notice, really depends on how optimistic you are about the alternative.
If you are of the optimistic "steady-state-or-even-better" school, giving up long hot showers, giant pieces of perfectly cooked cow corpse, and 85 degree buildings all winter for its own sake is a rather curious and masochistic hobby. Fine if that is your thing; but not really for general consumption, much less compulsory introduction.
The great utility of "worse progress" comes in the event of some sort of nasty supply shock. The basic problem is this: "progress"(R&D, engineering, building infrastructure, educating people, etc.) requires that a civilization be able to run a surplus in energy, food, and other useful materials. If civilization falls short of that, it generally falls back on eating its own infrastructure to survive(just consider the amount of european masonry that was just pilfered from roman stuff; because that was easier than mining it, and they couldn't make concrete anymore). Worst case, you not only get infrastructure degradation(both material and human capital) from lack of maintenance and training; but further destruction as people fight over the scraps.
In our case, hydrocarbons have essentially allowed us to, for the past century or two, run massive surpluses. If we have to get off that particular train, we have to hope that the fusion/solar/orbiting microwave satellite/thorium breeder reactor/etc. guys have it together by that time, or things are going to get ugly. The nightmare scenario is that we lose the ability to run surpluses before we perfect the next energy source. If that happens, we might never have another shot at it. "Worse" technologies have the potential to be a useful delaying tactic, allowing us to run an R&D and infrastructure construction surplus long enough to get something else in place. Also handy in extreme environments, like space colonies or antarctic bases or what have you.
In the developed world, we prefer the euphemism "biosolids".
Dealing with the leftovers of sewage treatment is so much more cost effective when they can be classified as fertilizer. Luckily, absolutely nobody would dream of dumping heavy metals or some of the nastier organics into the general sewage system, so soil application is entirely safe...
Unshockingly enough, Sony crushed a commercial seller of a PS3 mod device like a bug. Even if the law weren't probably unfavorable to the sellers, Sony probably could have just tied them up in injunctions forever anyway. Shocking.
Equally unsurprisingly, halting the distribution of some OSS software is going about as well as the fight against DVD Jon's little toy did. It's totally unwinnable, and Sony hasn't shown many clear signs of even trying. Shocking.
However, it isn't clear how much this matters. This isn't CSS, where the system was set in stone, millions of un-patchable, non-internet-connected hardware units were already in the wild, and team DRM pretty much just had to suck it up. Those were the good old days.
Sony controls the Playstation Network, and can enforce minimum software versions for access, or punitively lock out units. Even for offline users, individual game disks can mandate, and include, upgrades to a higher version. Sony has, certainly, lost the game against anyone content to just pick up an old PS3 fat on ebay and enjoy a pirated copy of every PS3 game to date, all for ~$200. You'll have to stay offline, and avoid games with mandatory upgrades; but not a bad deal on the whole, I can certainly see a fair few takers.
However, unless this USB hack is seriously powerful, exploiting some basically unblockable fundamental flaw in the PS3's design, all PS3s that ship more than a few weeks from now, are updated(manually or automatically) to the next firmware revision, or wish to play newer games or use newer peripherals, or play online, are back in Sony's camp. And, unlike a DVD or Blu-ray disk, where the plaintext copy, once created, is eminently playable on all sorts of 3rd party devices, general purpose computers, and whatnot, PS3 games are pretty much only playable on PS3s, pending substantial advances in computing power that will allow emulation. This isn't "hack once, run anywhere." Each individual PS3 is controlled separately, and the success of the hacking device depends on how many hackable PS3s remain in the wild, a variable over which Sony has substantial control...
Oh, I agree that the alternatives were either pretty dire(you must have suppressed your memories of IRQ juggling to get the proprietary ISA interface card for your scanner to work, just to add one more to the list of bad or severely limited options...) or pretty expensive; but I think that it is a fairly useful example of the power of having a tiny marginal BOM cost to overpower the otherwise difficult chicken-and-egg adopter problem.
USB had the advantage of being worth adopting, once things settled down(which the current crop of 3D stuff has a much more tenuous claim to); but there was a pretty decent period where computers were shipped with USB basically only because it was cheap to add. Many went to the scrap heap without ever even running an OS that supported it. It became worth it, and demand sprung up(as proven by the market for add-on cards and hubs); but its initial growth wasn't demand driven. In the case of 3D, I'd suspect a similar phenomenon. The tech isn't good enough for there to be substantial demand for home TVs, and a lot of the contender technologies actively degrade the 2D performance of the TV, as well as adding pretty substantial cost to the unit(anything that involves adding additional optical layers to the panel just isn't going to do your contrast ratio or sharpness any favors, plus it'll be a special order from the OEM...)
By contrast, Active shutter requires goofy glasses(that need recharging or battery changing, and aren't terribly cheap); but requires no changes to the panel and very minimal additional hardware over what you would be putting in a decent TV/monitor anyway. If 3D were demand driven, it would be the loser. Anybody buying for 3D would pay more for the TV and skip the glasses(or get the one that only requires $2 passives). Since it seems likely to be a push thing, I'd be more inclined to favor active shutter, or some other technology with similar characteristics; because it allows the manufacturers to push for almost nothing/unit, with the peripherals and content becoming available later(if anybody turns out to actually care...)
I suspect that "victory" if there is one, in 3D displays will take one of two forms:
Either R&D will grind along, driven by a mixture of long term optimism and the occasional big simulator/data-visualization/etc. contract, until they eventually hit on something genuinely Good which will then be accepted. Or(and I suspect this is more likely):
Victory will, eventually, be conceded to whatever 3D tech's panel, interconnect, and data storage requirements are most similar to those of the 2D market, and which imposes the smallest additional component cost to mark a device "3D Capable!!!". For instance, the active shutter glass stuff requires active shutter glasses(which sucks majorly); but otherwise works very well with the trends that are being driven by the existing 2D market: It throws away half your frame rate, so it can alternate eyes; but twitch gamers and action/sports enthusiasts hate blur anyway, so LCD refresh rates have been getting a lot better. It requires high speed interconnects, because of those high frame rates; but so do high resolutions displays, which are what keep the pros and CAD dudes happy, so all the display connection standards have very high speeds on the roadmap. Additional components cost? You basically just need to blink a few IR LEDs so that the glasses can sync. Maybe a few bucks on top of the existing stuff.
This doesn't actually mean that buyers of such "3D Capable!!!" TVs will bother to buy shutter glasses, or 3D movies, or even turn the option on; but the additional cost would be low enough to get very broad penetration without any real active consumer acceptance.
Think back to the early days of USB: Slow, virtually nothing to plug in to it and what there was was buggy, not even supported by the OSes that most people were running; but Intel put it in their chipsets, so it cost the motherboard maker peanuts to drop the passives and the connector on the board. Everybody had it before anybody cared.