It takes more than just free time to obtain (and retain!) a profitable job skill, especially when the eligible pool is being continually eroded.
It takes money, and aggressive ambition.
Ultimately, only the most ruthless of the wealthy will be able to afford the training and education to claim a profitable job skill, under this kind of pressure.
Your suggestion is not workable. The option for people to simply consume HAS to remain on the table, simply because it will ultimately become the ONLY choice, especially as automation further encroaches, and completely eclipses all human labor roles. The alternative is a non-economy, where nobody has money.
To circumvent this problem, you need to pick one of the following 3 solutions.
1) forbid automation preemptively, citing that it erodes human employ-ability, and thus total human economic activity. (Enjoy your 19th century standard of living!)
2) Embrace automation fully, and give up profit-motive as the driving goal of human endeavor. (Yay, startrek)
3) Accept that automation will ultimately result in a market that cannot stand on its own, and introduce a basic income, supported through currency inflation from the government coupled with taxation of agencies and individuals exceeding the basic income per anum. (OMG, the commies won!)
Those are literally the only three viable solutions.
I doubt basic income will ever be instituted, except via close range threat of shotgun blast. (and then only a maybe.)
What most ideologues of the basic income seem unable (or unwilling) to grasp, is that service and goods providers do not service or provide from the goodness of their hearts. They do it for profit. In order for a basic income to work, then a very large tax must be levied against these agencies, as they are going to be the ones with all the capital. (It makes precisely zero sense to bill the general public, since a good portion will be getting said basic income-- That would just be absurd. At best, the money just moves around, and in the real world, money will be lost from the system over time. To make this workable, the bill has to come from outside the pool being subsidized. That just leaves banks (who create money at will using the fractional reserve system) and for profit businesses who engage in for profit enterprise; especially those that conduct business internationally.) This means that the tax system has to be seriously overhauled for anything like this to work, and the people who would need to be on board to make it happen would be openly opposed to it (because they would be voting against their own profiteering.)
The only way I see this ever gaining traction, is when there is simply no alternative-- The economy is so unhealthy from the loss of liquidity in the general public's financial engine, that there is simply no hope for future business growth without it. That wont happen unless the entire planet suffers such a financial crisis, since as-is, large actors can leverage different local economies and give a big fat "fuck you" to others, and thus continue being profitable. (See for instance, the H1B fiasco, or just outsourcing IT to India in general.)
If you think the word "Wellfare" is tainted now in conservative political circles, just wait until something like THAT comes to bear. I would expect tax dodging to take on epic new extremes, even greater than the infamous "Double Irish" trick, as these actors all scramble to avoid being the ones having to finance the growth of all other actors. (Since the one that finances the least, gains all the benefits of the revitalized economy, without as much of the cost, and thus is most poised for market dominance. As such, NONE of them will be willing benefactors.)
Given the degree that big business already controls world government (Shit, just look at how fucked up the MPAA and RIAA make things, just by themselves.), I think a functional basic income is about as realistic a prospect as expecting Jesus/God to suddenly appear tomorrow.
It would definitely be nice; the problem is, when you are dealing with greedy fuckholes, you cant have nice things.
The submitter is looking for a technological solution to replace one of the primary functions of nurse aid staff members.
The PRIMARY job responsibility of nurse aids in a senior skilled care facility is:
Assist the resident with activities of daily living.
This is everything from helping them to take their medication, to getting dressed every morning, to taking regular showers to stay healthy, to brushing their teeth, to ensuring that their asses dont have shit on them, and everything in between.
Quite literally, IT IS THEIR JOB to help the resident DO ANYTHING that they have difficulty with. If the resident wants to color in a coloring book, but has difficulty holding the crayons, the nurse aids are to help the resident with that task. For real.
24/7 assistance is EXACTLY what an adult care facility provides. It is what you pay for when you put a family member there.
As NASA put it, human beings are the most inexpensive general purpose robot that money can buy. Nurse aids do exactly this function. It is their job. Just pay for your family member to have the nursing care they need. Problem solved.
There is a reason why the FSF does not like broadcomm chipsets, and considers them FOSS un-friendly.
The drivers for these chips requires a closed binary blob, that must be harvested from a windows driver. On linux, this process is automated with a bash script which downloads a suitable driver package directly from an OEM's support site, then rips the binary blob out and places it into a special folder in/usr, iirc.(might be/etc.... been awhile.)
The point is that while those SoCs have very well defined CPU implementations, there is voodoo black magic under the hood. The same chip that handles the radio firmware also does the CPU implementation. That radio firmware is physically set up as a section of highly privileged RAM, into which the binary blob gets loaded. The radio then configures itself based on the contents of that blob. The blob's structure is not documented by broadcomm without a seriously large NDA, which is against the functional scope of the GPL, and the FSF. The driver for the 'then-configured' radio is fully FOSS-- but the radio will not operate without the configuration blob-- Literally CANNOT operate without it.
There's a reason why the FSF prefers wifi chips like say-- Ralink's offerings. In those, the radio is hardware controlled, straight up. The radio comes pre-configured, and the interfaces to interact with the radio are public. This means that the hardware can be used with pure FOSS drivers, without the need for a closed binary blob, which complicates licensing.
I realize your question was rhetorical, but it exposed a serious lack of knowledge.
There is the router's OS package, which contains the radio firmware.
It has become (alarmingly) commonplace for the firmware to be stored in volatile memory inside the radio device-- Such is the case with basically *ALL* Broadcomm radios. There is a binary blob that even on linux, must be harvested from closed source driver packages. This blob is what Brannon is talking about. The FOSS linux driver harvests this firmware (which is extracted on consumer linux boxes using a package called fwcutter)
The FCC is worried that because it is so easy to put a modified blob into the radio's memory, that these devices could be easily switched into a nefarious mode of operation. This behavior would be wholly independent of the router's OS, or even the radio's OS driver-- the radio itself would simply configure itself into the nefarious operating mode, blindly following the configuration supplied by the modified binary blob.
The real solution here is for the FCC to tell broadcomm and pals that they have to make the General Purpose CPU implementation and boot loader in their chipsets logically separate from the radio. That way the radio can be locked down the way the FCC wants-- and the rest of the router can be completely open.
However, broadcomm and pals WONT do that without a serious legal threat being leveled at them, as their current solution is one of practical cost savings. The kind of separation needed to properly secure the radio against tampering of this kind while retaining the ability to clean up the horrid mess that retailers make of the OS and driver stack side (which enable hackers to coopt the router as zombie notes for a wide assortment of purposes) would make the cost per unit for these SoC based systems prohibitive-- at the very least, it would seriously impact profitability.
The real problem here is that the binary blob has no checksum or digital signature check before being accepted by the radio. If you were stupid enough to do so, you could feed it the contents of/dev/urandom and watch the sparks fly.
Simply using a good digital signature on the blob for validation before being accepted by the device radio would go a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG way to fixing this issue without killing projects like openwrt-- You dont need to lock the bootloader to secure the radio.
In a good deal of the consumer crap devices I have looked under the hood of, the device runs a crippled version of openwrt.
In such cases, the router and AP functionality comes about entirely through software, since the core OS treats both the wired interface and the wireless interface as discrete network interface cards. The wired interface is usually the one that is more interesting, as the multiple ports are treated as VIFs.
Considering the pricing point of between 50 and 100$ for most consumer grade PoS devices out there, there's a pretty good featureset under there if you can just get past the ABYSMAL driver and config script stack that the manufacturers often push on the poor things.
Often times, the "stock" firmware for these devices use drivers that have been hacked up seven ways to sunday so that they expose certain behaviors-- and have config scripts that do loopy loops to try and get the system into a state that the device maker wants it to be in. (Things like having the root password be set via script every bootup, because the stock firmware does not have a JFFS partition to store actual root credentials, and instead stores the user-defined password in the NVRAM so it can be easily reset with the reset button. On bootup, the script grabs the value from NVRAM and sets the root password. Nevermind the DUMBSHITNESS of exposing the root user this way, since it runs all the services under root.) Looking at it, it is the script equivalent of a Rube-Goldberg contraption.
OpenWRT (the REAL deal, not the hacked up dog and pony show that netgear and pals puts under the hood of their devices) boots in a fraction of the time (Stock firmwares often take over a full 2 minutes to fully finish the init script!! Open WRT becomes fully functional in typically under 30 seconds.) allows PROPER device administration (like, allowing you to set up proper service user and group accounts on the router to segregate process access requirements, set up and use jails, give you your choice of what routing and wifi supplicant package to use, what HTTP daemon to use-- if any-- etc.)
Consumer grade crap can become quite useful with a firmware update. Just that you have to treat it like what it actually is--- a small, general purpose computing platform-- and set it and configure it appropriately.
One possible use for the energy, would be to blast material off of a gas giant.
This would enable somewhat efficient (ahem. Big grain of salt taken.) collection of material, because the collection vessels do not need to go deep into the giant's gravity well. They just need to be leeward of the high energy stream being shot at the planet.
I think 20% of a star's output would be more than enough to blow atmosphere off such a thing for more easy collection.
That poses a chicken and egg type problem though. If you can build a dyson sphere, why do you need to use such a trick just to get light gasses? The construction of the sphere would require similar levels of energy investiture.....
But if we are going for radical, unsubstantiated wild speculations---
Perturbations in local light trajectories caused by use of very large Alcubiere warp drives. Depending on the direction of travel of the object going to warp, and the requisite size of the warp distortion, light from the star would be bent in directions that prevent that light from reaching the earth (massive occultation) without producing any local IR re-emission, since the light never gets absorbed-- just redirected from the spacial curvature of the warp metric. This would neatly explain the irregular shape, and the lack of IR.
The inhabitants of that system need not be constructing a dyson swarm-- they may merely be FTL capable.
I cant see if the CPU in this thing supports THUMB, NEON, and real floating point or not-- If it does, then it could conceivably run Exagear dekstop on it.
It's assembly optimized for arm CPUs with those features, and is fast enough to run x86 emulation at useful speeds. (they claim more than 10x faster than QEMU.) It can be used to run WINE on an ARM platform, meaning that if CHIP supports those CPU features, then CHIP could possibly run commodity desktop software.
Adnroid lives on top of linux kernel. Dalvik, the Google fork of Java that Oracle is crying to mommy over, still has this problem. Thankfully, the OS underneath android is very powerful and useful, and it can be tamed for use by the user if they get root access to it.
I disagree, for a very simple, but very fundamental reason.
Most people wanting to sell their mods, want to get jobs in game development-- Either as asset creators, scripters, coders, level designers, etc.
They use the mod community as the springboard. The easy-access publishing stream through which they are able to shine, and show off their talents to potential employers, who are looking for such premium talent.
When you introduce the paid mods element, the community stops being easy access. People who are supremely talented, but not financially empowered, are unable to showcase that talent effectively.
Additionally, it turns the community into competition to the game designers and publishers, unless draconian IP payouts happen. (like the 75% payout to bethesda that valve had in mind.)
In terms of being able to allow a starry eyed, but highly talented person to get exposure, and thus stand out, and eventually become a professional (by being gainfully employed doing that kind of work), paid mods murder the baby in the cradle.
Most mods out there leverage properties produced by other modders. This is because talent takes all kinds of forms. A person who makes gorgeous models may be shit at level design, or may be shit at story telling, or shit at voice acting, or shit at [Insert FOO].
The mod community gets around these individual failings by allowing "Good Story Guy" to leverage "Good script guy" and "Good model guy" and "Good level design guy" to create a mod that tells his epic story, and does so with quality components.
The same is likewise true for good model guy-- who can show off his awesome models with a mod that is worth playing, because it has good story guy's story-- etc...
What happens, fundamentally, when people start planting the:"I WANNA BE PAID!!" flag?
Several things. The obvious one, to me, is this:
In order to successfully monetize a property, then that property must be licensed, and actively policed and controlled. That means that if Good Model Guy says "Hold up, My models are so clearly awesome, that you have to pay me $BAR percentage of your gross if you sell your mod, and it features my models." Suddenly, Good Story Guy can no longer get his epic story out in a presentable container. His talent dies on the vine, because once he has done the math, and computed all the nickles and dimes he has to pay everyone to satisfy all their egos (which is really what this is about.) he either has nothing left, or worse, is actually in the hole, financially. This is simply due to all the overhead costs needed to properly attempt to license the properties, the costs of utilizing an IP lawyer to assure legitimacy of the licenses, etc. The ability of Good Story Guy to shine vaporize.
The same is true for Good Model Guy, who now has to license the level design skills of Good Level Design Guy, and the story of Good Story Guy, etc.
To me, wishing to be able to monetize your hobby/labor of love is like wishing that you had a magical castle. Boy, it sure would be nice to have, but when you look into it, you find that it just isn't really possible, and still have the community. You take what was once something with practically no barrier to entry other than your own talent that you can bring to the table, and overnight, you end up with a byzantine network of licenses so complex that you WILL need a lawyer to keep it all straight.
So, let me ask you-- Can you afford the services of a lawyer? All the time?
That's what going outside the "handouts" model *WILL* necessitate.
Either to help you draft your license to that it is sane and useful by other people (so you dont shoot yourself in the food), and just to make sure that any project that you arent the 100% rights holder to has properly licensed all of the properties that it leverages.
Paid mods outside of the donations-based model are simply, and fundamentally incompatible with the foundational bedrock of the mod community: The ability to leverage one's own talents with the combined talent pool of all other modders, to make something new and awesome, and do so without excessive barrier to entry.
At "best", "License based" mods would splinter the community into closely knit consortia, where you have "elite" (with HUGE barrier to entry) individuals that routinely license each other's properties at reduced, or even free rates, to produce community mods that they then share the proceeds from, based on some internal agreements. Such pools will stagnate, since no new blood can easily enter (because they cant showcase their own talent easily, due to the barrier to entry caused by the licensing model itself) and so such communities are doomed to slow death from entropy. (People change careers, get married and or have kids, anything that takes them away from their group, without ready replacements to take over.)
So, as harsh as it sounds, I equate "I WANNA BE PAID!" with "I WANT A MAGIC CASTLE!"
Today, there is no shortage of SBCs out there, and intel has released some pretty powerful x86 based ones, like the minnowboard max 2.
On the market at this very moment, Western Digital is offering an external hard drive that has an interesting enclosure. (See Western Digital MyBook 3TB and 4TB models) This is basically just a little triangle shaped USB to SATA adapter attached to a standard 3.5 inch SATA HDD, which is itself mounted on 4 little rubberized pegs, held into the enclosure via some little receptacles for the rubberized pegs.
Now, the hardware hack.
I bought one of these late one night (way after midnight after all more reputable sources of computer parts had closed) just to get the HDD inside, as I needed a replacement RIGHT NOW. (Got the 4TB version. 3Tb drives have terrible failure rates. It was a 4TB WD Green series SATA drive. Not splendid, but it serviced.)
That left me with the shell. For awhile I left it to sit around and ignored it, but the more I looked at it, the more it just screamed to have something done with it.
The drive kit came with a 12vdc wall wart that can put out about 30W of juice. The enclosure has cutouts for the 12v barrel connector, the "USB3.0 HDD style" connector, and a lockstrap hole.
Minor modifications with a dremel tool made the USB slot into a standard USB sized opening, and the lockstrap hole large enough to accomodate a mini HDMI port.
Inside, I took a 2.5in to 3.5in bay adapter, put the rubberized pegs on, then marked mounting points for a minnowboard max 2 with a sharpie marker, drilled them out, then attached standoffs using a combination of small back-facing nuts and washers. In the 2.5in bay, I installed a 2.5 inch SATA HDD.
The minnowboard is unique among SBCs, because it has a real SATA interface on it. It is a dual core intel atom system with intel integrated video. Whoopy freaking do, except for the fact that it's total TDP is around 6 watts. That's low enough to run without a fan, and well within the 30W the DC supply that came with the drive can deliver. The problem is that it needs 5vdc, not 12vdc. Easily fixed with a DC-DC power converter.
Long story short, I found that there was enough room inside the enclosure for the HDD, the minnowboard, extender cables going to the port openings from the minnoboard, an interal USB2.0 hub for things like WiFi and Bluetooth, the DC-DC power converter, and all that jazz.
You can boot UEFI bios systems into legacy OSes pretty easily with a second stage loader scheme.
Such as GRUB2.
It works in the reverse too-- allowing UEFI expecting OSes to boot on BIOS systems. Since upgrading to a 4tb drive, I had to switch to GPT instead of MBR. I use GRUB2 on the "fake" MBR of the GPT table as the primary loader to satisfy my legacy BIOS's need for a primary boot sector and MBR partition table, and since GRUB2 is GPT aware, it can read the GPT partition table and then chainload the proper bootloader.
Works like a charm.
The real challenge would be getting UEFI expecting OSes that make use of UEFI features after bootup to run on legacy BIOS systems. For that, you need software implementations of UEFI, and those are a pain in the ass.
One way that windows 7 (in particular) slows down, comes from the use of the winSXS folder.
Basically, because the windows software ecosystem is so... Plagued.. with legacy software that expect older versions of system libraries, Microsoft invented a solution to detect those dependencies and satisfy them with those older libaries in a sandbox-- the WinSXS folder.
As time passes, and updates happen, system libraries get updated-- instead of being replaced, they get moved to the winsxs folder and archived. This is so when your bitchy internal-only legacy application that is oh-so-mission-critical that it simply cant be rewritten for a modern OS gets run, it can continue to run.
The downside is that as this treasure trove of old libraries grows, the penalty of the checking routine becomes more and more apparent. (also, it consumes more and more disk space.)
Other forms of slowdown are not specific to windows 7 and newer however.
The registry is a binary file that must be parsed to find entries inside it, and it too can become fragmented. As changes are CONSTANTLY happening to the registry, the (actual) structure of the registry can become more and more byzantine. Since such changes are completely unavoidable with daily use, the slow degradation of this system is also unavoidable unless you boot from a golden image each and every time. This has been a problem since at least the 9x days. Back then, you could automate registry defragmentation with a bootup script because of the complete lack of filesystem security on FAT-- (Tell regedit to dump the registry in its totality into an exported text file, then tell it to rebuild the registry from scratch using that text file dump, then cleanup the temporary files afterwards.) You cant do that with modern flavors of windows because 1) you cant invoke scripts that easily on bootup anymore 2) the registry files are protected with NTFS security descriptors, 3) the OS locks the registry basically as soon as NTLDR finishes, so you cant replace the registry files while live.
There are of course, the other causes of slowdown that come from cumulative misconfigurations that happen from automated updates, but meh.
Even with disk cleanup removing redundancies in the winSXS folder, it can still swell to be over 12gb in size.
A better solution is to turn NTFS compression on for the folder, then defragment the living shit out of it. (NTFS compression causes epic fragmentation.)
You dont want compression turned on as a rule, but when windows is basically warehousing data against an uncertain future, you might as well treat it like a "rarely used, if ever" archival store. The space is more valuable than the access speed in this case.
Just be wary! the compression cycle is very harmful to SSDs, but once compressed, the files dont change, so its fine afterward. Better to do with a disk image on a spinny disk, then port the whole image to the SSD.
Part of the issue is also that newer versions of windows want to move away from just being an OS, and toward being an entertainment venue all of its own.
That's MS marketing and the UI graphic designers faults though.
Fun little thing to do:
Take a weak kneed intel Atom board, and do some simple office use tests with it with various older versions of windows. Start with NT4, then use Win2k, the XP, then 7, then 8.1. See how the ability to do simple things degrades as the OS expects more and more hardware just to draw the damned UI.
Now, realize that the biggest selling point for new windows versions is NOT a new shiny UI-- but continued security updates. Now you will understand why corporations get bitchy. They have something that works, on the hardware they already have-- but are going to be forced to buy a whole new iteration of hardware, to get updated software that gets updates against security threats-- because otherwise MS does not get money.
If it werent for the lack of security updates, win2k would be ideal for nearly all corporate drone installations.
(Note, there are other useful features that were added with each version of windows, and I am not discounting that. What I am saying is that even with those kernel space and user space feature enhancements, they could have been rolled into service packs for the older products, and you would have had more responsive product overall. The need to reinvent the OS constantly drives the need to constantly make it look different, (to set it apart from its predecessor), which constantly increases the HW requirements. It is pathological.)
That's probably because somewhere in the google complex, there are some crusty old bureaucrats that just cant let go of the notion that "Proprietary == Profit!", and that "Control" takes many forms other than just "Stop all competition at all costs!"
Things like, "Look, we design and maintain the freaking OS. Here's how the location service API works, and how to make calls. Our location service package in Google Apps is purpose tailored for the Android platform, and we provide support for it-- however, if you want to have your device provide location services using a different library, it needs to conform to this API, and you are on your own if it breaks. We wish you luck, but if it breaks, dont come crying to us over it. Likewise, if you are linking against our location service software in your app using some method OTHER than the published API (Such as hooking some of our secret sauce inside that isn't normally exposed, hijacking some unanticipated feature of our location service daemon, or using some magic ID string for some other purpose that will then break if some 3rd party location service daemon is installed-) you are not developing for the android platform correctly, and if we catch you doing it, we will boot you from the playstore for not following best practices."
You still have market dominance. You still have control over the playstore. You still have control over quality of software on offically supported devices (so you dont look bad),AND you get to have a powerful shield against regulatory oppression.
BUT-- Somewhere in corporate la-la land, there is that cadre of old fucks who see an open platform and shit themselves because they dont have a strangle-hold death-grip on every little thing involved.
Which is PRECISELY why the corporations MUST be controlled via strong force of law, NOT relaxed pampering and pandering.
Since a corporations fiduciary obligation is the center of the corporation's universe, and all other considerations take second or even third stage (if at all!), then some other agency MUST step in to intercede to protect the system from the otherwise inevitable collapse. THAT IS THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT.
The problem is that government panders to the corporations and gives them whatever they want, (and what they want is less legal restrictions on their ability to meet their fiduciary obligations, at the expense of all other concerns and practices) instead of busting their chops and holding their asses to the fire so they have to fly right.
Going "But think of the poor corporations, just doing what they are forced to do by their evil share holders!" is bullshit. Instead, you should be demanding that government do its fucking job, instead of whoring itself out for career re-election dollars.
virtual machines might still hold a valuable feature in the future, since they would more strongly compartmentalize running code against exploit based escalation of privileges. Using chroot blocks processes from accessing files outside the jail, but does not prevent a running process from attacking the shared kernel space, and gaining access to the real root filesystem. An honest to goodness virtual machine offers additional layers of protection.
Given the increasing value in gaining unauthorized exclusive access (for criminals anyway-- That includes the spying antics of governments) to systems that host data for many different customers, the incentive to bust such jails and run amok on the server is only going to increase as the bean counters press more and more for "data based economy" models.
So while less sophisticated jails are faster and easier to deploy, they are also necessarily less secure than a fully blown VM with a full hypervisor monitoring them between them and the real server OS kernel, and thus more vulnerable, and thus more prone to being attacked-- That means that as the "Professional data criminal" element grows, the viability of these less sophisticated jails will diminish, and the viability of more sophisticated (but slower) jails will increase.
Homeopathic-- Made of two root words. Homeo == Same, Pathos == causes illness.
Homeopathy is a very strongly disproven notion from ancient days that if you consumed small quantities of a pathogen, your body would be strengthened against it.
Apothicary is radically different. Apothicaries (western ones anyway) ammased remedies that were ancient even in the dark ages, because they had proven to be effective at treating illnesses, and some theories as to the mechanisms of their action were created, and new remedies compounded based on those theories. They lacked modern science, and lacked the modern understanding of germs, but apothicary medicine was a pretty rigorous discipline, as opposed to the philosophical wishy-washiness of homeopathy.
[Eastern apothicaries however, developed a kind of magical hoodoo nonsense, which still lingers to this day. There is no medicinal value in tiger penis. No. There. isnt. It's just meat.]
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It takes more than just free time to obtain (and retain!) a profitable job skill, especially when the eligible pool is being continually eroded.
It takes money, and aggressive ambition.
Ultimately, only the most ruthless of the wealthy will be able to afford the training and education to claim a profitable job skill, under this kind of pressure.
Your suggestion is not workable. The option for people to simply consume HAS to remain on the table, simply because it will ultimately become the ONLY choice, especially as automation further encroaches, and completely eclipses all human labor roles. The alternative is a non-economy, where nobody has money.
To circumvent this problem, you need to pick one of the following 3 solutions.
1) forbid automation preemptively, citing that it erodes human employ-ability, and thus total human economic activity. (Enjoy your 19th century standard of living!)
2) Embrace automation fully, and give up profit-motive as the driving goal of human endeavor. (Yay, startrek)
3) Accept that automation will ultimately result in a market that cannot stand on its own, and introduce a basic income, supported through currency inflation from the government coupled with taxation of agencies and individuals exceeding the basic income per anum. (OMG, the commies won!)
Those are literally the only three viable solutions.
I doubt basic income will ever be instituted, except via close range threat of shotgun blast. (and then only a maybe.)
What most ideologues of the basic income seem unable (or unwilling) to grasp, is that service and goods providers do not service or provide from the goodness of their hearts. They do it for profit. In order for a basic income to work, then a very large tax must be levied against these agencies, as they are going to be the ones with all the capital. (It makes precisely zero sense to bill the general public, since a good portion will be getting said basic income-- That would just be absurd. At best, the money just moves around, and in the real world, money will be lost from the system over time. To make this workable, the bill has to come from outside the pool being subsidized. That just leaves banks (who create money at will using the fractional reserve system) and for profit businesses who engage in for profit enterprise; especially those that conduct business internationally.) This means that the tax system has to be seriously overhauled for anything like this to work, and the people who would need to be on board to make it happen would be openly opposed to it (because they would be voting against their own profiteering.)
The only way I see this ever gaining traction, is when there is simply no alternative-- The economy is so unhealthy from the loss of liquidity in the general public's financial engine, that there is simply no hope for future business growth without it. That wont happen unless the entire planet suffers such a financial crisis, since as-is, large actors can leverage different local economies and give a big fat "fuck you" to others, and thus continue being profitable. (See for instance, the H1B fiasco, or just outsourcing IT to India in general.)
If you think the word "Wellfare" is tainted now in conservative political circles, just wait until something like THAT comes to bear. I would expect tax dodging to take on epic new extremes, even greater than the infamous "Double Irish" trick, as these actors all scramble to avoid being the ones having to finance the growth of all other actors. (Since the one that finances the least, gains all the benefits of the revitalized economy, without as much of the cost, and thus is most poised for market dominance. As such, NONE of them will be willing benefactors.)
Given the degree that big business already controls world government (Shit, just look at how fucked up the MPAA and RIAA make things, just by themselves.), I think a functional basic income is about as realistic a prospect as expecting Jesus/God to suddenly appear tomorrow.
It would definitely be nice; the problem is, when you are dealing with greedy fuckholes, you cant have nice things.
The submitter is looking for a technological solution to replace one of the primary functions of nurse aid staff members.
The PRIMARY job responsibility of nurse aids in a senior skilled care facility is:
Assist the resident with activities of daily living.
This is everything from helping them to take their medication, to getting dressed every morning, to taking regular showers to stay healthy, to brushing their teeth, to ensuring that their asses dont have shit on them, and everything in between.
Quite literally, IT IS THEIR JOB to help the resident DO ANYTHING that they have difficulty with. If the resident wants to color in a coloring book, but has difficulty holding the crayons, the nurse aids are to help the resident with that task. For real.
24/7 assistance is EXACTLY what an adult care facility provides. It is what you pay for when you put a family member there.
As NASA put it, human beings are the most inexpensive general purpose robot that money can buy. Nurse aids do exactly this function. It is their job. Just pay for your family member to have the nursing care they need. Problem solved.
These ones match his requirements for certain.
bcm53xx
brcm2708
brcm47xx
brcm63xx
There is a reason why the FSF does not like broadcomm chipsets, and considers them FOSS un-friendly.
The drivers for these chips requires a closed binary blob, that must be harvested from a windows driver. On linux, this process is automated with a bash script which downloads a suitable driver package directly from an OEM's support site, then rips the binary blob out and places it into a special folder in /usr, iirc.(might be /etc.... been awhile.)
The point is that while those SoCs have very well defined CPU implementations, there is voodoo black magic under the hood. The same chip that handles the radio firmware also does the CPU implementation. That radio firmware is physically set up as a section of highly privileged RAM, into which the binary blob gets loaded. The radio then configures itself based on the contents of that blob. The blob's structure is not documented by broadcomm without a seriously large NDA, which is against the functional scope of the GPL, and the FSF. The driver for the 'then-configured' radio is fully FOSS-- but the radio will not operate without the configuration blob-- Literally CANNOT operate without it.
There's a reason why the FSF prefers wifi chips like say-- Ralink's offerings. In those, the radio is hardware controlled, straight up. The radio comes pre-configured, and the interfaces to interact with the radio are public. This means that the hardware can be used with pure FOSS drivers, without the need for a closed binary blob, which complicates licensing.
I realize your question was rhetorical, but it exposed a serious lack of knowledge.
Not exactly.
There is the router's OS package, which contains the radio firmware.
It has become (alarmingly) commonplace for the firmware to be stored in volatile memory inside the radio device-- Such is the case with basically *ALL* Broadcomm radios. There is a binary blob that even on linux, must be harvested from closed source driver packages. This blob is what Brannon is talking about. The FOSS linux driver harvests this firmware (which is extracted on consumer linux boxes using a package called fwcutter)
The FCC is worried that because it is so easy to put a modified blob into the radio's memory, that these devices could be easily switched into a nefarious mode of operation. This behavior would be wholly independent of the router's OS, or even the radio's OS driver-- the radio itself would simply configure itself into the nefarious operating mode, blindly following the configuration supplied by the modified binary blob.
The real solution here is for the FCC to tell broadcomm and pals that they have to make the General Purpose CPU implementation and boot loader in their chipsets logically separate from the radio. That way the radio can be locked down the way the FCC wants-- and the rest of the router can be completely open.
However, broadcomm and pals WONT do that without a serious legal threat being leveled at them, as their current solution is one of practical cost savings. The kind of separation needed to properly secure the radio against tampering of this kind while retaining the ability to clean up the horrid mess that retailers make of the OS and driver stack side (which enable hackers to coopt the router as zombie notes for a wide assortment of purposes) would make the cost per unit for these SoC based systems prohibitive-- at the very least, it would seriously impact profitability.
The real problem here is that the binary blob has no checksum or digital signature check before being accepted by the radio. If you were stupid enough to do so, you could feed it the contents of /dev/urandom and watch the sparks fly.
Simply using a good digital signature on the blob for validation before being accepted by the device radio would go a LOOOOOOOOOOOONG way to fixing this issue without killing projects like openwrt-- You dont need to lock the bootloader to secure the radio.
In a good deal of the consumer crap devices I have looked under the hood of, the device runs a crippled version of openwrt.
In such cases, the router and AP functionality comes about entirely through software, since the core OS treats both the wired interface and the wireless interface as discrete network interface cards. The wired interface is usually the one that is more interesting, as the multiple ports are treated as VIFs.
Considering the pricing point of between 50 and 100$ for most consumer grade PoS devices out there, there's a pretty good featureset under there if you can just get past the ABYSMAL driver and config script stack that the manufacturers often push on the poor things.
Often times, the "stock" firmware for these devices use drivers that have been hacked up seven ways to sunday so that they expose certain behaviors-- and have config scripts that do loopy loops to try and get the system into a state that the device maker wants it to be in. (Things like having the root password be set via script every bootup, because the stock firmware does not have a JFFS partition to store actual root credentials, and instead stores the user-defined password in the NVRAM so it can be easily reset with the reset button. On bootup, the script grabs the value from NVRAM and sets the root password. Nevermind the DUMBSHITNESS of exposing the root user this way, since it runs all the services under root.) Looking at it, it is the script equivalent of a Rube-Goldberg contraption.
OpenWRT (the REAL deal, not the hacked up dog and pony show that netgear and pals puts under the hood of their devices) boots in a fraction of the time (Stock firmwares often take over a full 2 minutes to fully finish the init script!! Open WRT becomes fully functional in typically under 30 seconds.) allows PROPER device administration (like, allowing you to set up proper service user and group accounts on the router to segregate process access requirements, set up and use jails, give you your choice of what routing and wifi supplicant package to use, what HTTP daemon to use-- if any-- etc.)
Consumer grade crap can become quite useful with a firmware update. Just that you have to treat it like what it actually is--- a small, general purpose computing platform-- and set it and configure it appropriately.
No no no.
More like:
"That's no moon-- It's the bill from Oracle!"
One possible use for the energy, would be to blast material off of a gas giant.
This would enable somewhat efficient (ahem. Big grain of salt taken.) collection of material, because the collection vessels do not need to go deep into the giant's gravity well. They just need to be leeward of the high energy stream being shot at the planet.
I think 20% of a star's output would be more than enough to blow atmosphere off such a thing for more easy collection.
That poses a chicken and egg type problem though. If you can build a dyson sphere, why do you need to use such a trick just to get light gasses? The construction of the sphere would require similar levels of energy investiture.....
But if we are going for radical, unsubstantiated wild speculations---
Perturbations in local light trajectories caused by use of very large Alcubiere warp drives. Depending on the direction of travel of the object going to warp, and the requisite size of the warp distortion, light from the star would be bent in directions that prevent that light from reaching the earth (massive occultation) without producing any local IR re-emission, since the light never gets absorbed-- just redirected from the spacial curvature of the warp metric. This would neatly explain the irregular shape, and the lack of IR.
The inhabitants of that system need not be constructing a dyson swarm-- they may merely be FTL capable.
Yes and no.
I cant see if the CPU in this thing supports THUMB, NEON, and real floating point or not-- If it does, then it could conceivably run Exagear dekstop on it.
http://eltechs.com/product/exa...
It's assembly optimized for arm CPUs with those features, and is fast enough to run x86 emulation at useful speeds. (they claim more than 10x faster than QEMU.) It can be used to run WINE on an ARM platform, meaning that if CHIP supports those CPU features, then CHIP could possibly run commodity desktop software.
Adnroid lives on top of linux kernel. Dalvik, the Google fork of Java that Oracle is crying to mommy over, still has this problem. Thankfully, the OS underneath android is very powerful and useful, and it can be tamed for use by the user if they get root access to it.
If it comes too close, a can of silly string would gum up the propellers quite nicely, even on large drones.
Water cannon is cheaper though.
I disagree, for a very simple, but very fundamental reason.
Most people wanting to sell their mods, want to get jobs in game development-- Either as asset creators, scripters, coders, level designers, etc.
They use the mod community as the springboard. The easy-access publishing stream through which they are able to shine, and show off their talents to potential employers, who are looking for such premium talent.
When you introduce the paid mods element, the community stops being easy access. People who are supremely talented, but not financially empowered, are unable to showcase that talent effectively.
Additionally, it turns the community into competition to the game designers and publishers, unless draconian IP payouts happen. (like the 75% payout to bethesda that valve had in mind.)
In terms of being able to allow a starry eyed, but highly talented person to get exposure, and thus stand out, and eventually become a professional (by being gainfully employed doing that kind of work), paid mods murder the baby in the cradle.
Most mods out there leverage properties produced by other modders. This is because talent takes all kinds of forms. A person who makes gorgeous models may be shit at level design, or may be shit at story telling, or shit at voice acting, or shit at [Insert FOO].
The mod community gets around these individual failings by allowing "Good Story Guy" to leverage "Good script guy" and "Good model guy" and "Good level design guy" to create a mod that tells his epic story, and does so with quality components.
The same is likewise true for good model guy-- who can show off his awesome models with a mod that is worth playing, because it has good story guy's story-- etc...
What happens, fundamentally, when people start planting the :"I WANNA BE PAID!!" flag?
Several things. The obvious one, to me, is this:
In order to successfully monetize a property, then that property must be licensed, and actively policed and controlled. That means that if Good Model Guy says "Hold up, My models are so clearly awesome, that you have to pay me $BAR percentage of your gross if you sell your mod, and it features my models." Suddenly, Good Story Guy can no longer get his epic story out in a presentable container. His talent dies on the vine, because once he has done the math, and computed all the nickles and dimes he has to pay everyone to satisfy all their egos (which is really what this is about.) he either has nothing left, or worse, is actually in the hole, financially. This is simply due to all the overhead costs needed to properly attempt to license the properties, the costs of utilizing an IP lawyer to assure legitimacy of the licenses, etc. The ability of Good Story Guy to shine vaporize.
The same is true for Good Model Guy, who now has to license the level design skills of Good Level Design Guy, and the story of Good Story Guy, etc.
To me, wishing to be able to monetize your hobby/labor of love is like wishing that you had a magical castle. Boy, it sure would be nice to have, but when you look into it, you find that it just isn't really possible, and still have the community. You take what was once something with practically no barrier to entry other than your own talent that you can bring to the table, and overnight, you end up with a byzantine network of licenses so complex that you WILL need a lawyer to keep it all straight.
So, let me ask you-- Can you afford the services of a lawyer? All the time?
That's what going outside the "handouts" model *WILL* necessitate.
Either to help you draft your license to that it is sane and useful by other people (so you dont shoot yourself in the food), and just to make sure that any project that you arent the 100% rights holder to has properly licensed all of the properties that it leverages.
Paid mods outside of the donations-based model are simply, and fundamentally incompatible with the foundational bedrock of the mod community: The ability to leverage one's own talents with the combined talent pool of all other modders, to make something new and awesome, and do so without excessive barrier to entry.
At "best", "License based" mods would splinter the community into closely knit consortia, where you have "elite" (with HUGE barrier to entry) individuals that routinely license each other's properties at reduced, or even free rates, to produce community mods that they then share the proceeds from, based on some internal agreements. Such pools will stagnate, since no new blood can easily enter (because they cant showcase their own talent easily, due to the barrier to entry caused by the licensing model itself) and so such communities are doomed to slow death from entropy. (People change careers, get married and or have kids, anything that takes them away from their group, without ready replacements to take over.)
So, as harsh as it sounds, I equate "I WANNA BE PAID!" with "I WANT A MAGIC CASTLE!"
Blocking Windows Update at the firewall, then running your own windows update local server with vetted updates would work around the problem.
Today, there is no shortage of SBCs out there, and intel has released some pretty powerful x86 based ones, like the minnowboard max 2.
On the market at this very moment, Western Digital is offering an external hard drive that has an interesting enclosure. (See Western Digital MyBook 3TB and 4TB models) This is basically just a little triangle shaped USB to SATA adapter attached to a standard 3.5 inch SATA HDD, which is itself mounted on 4 little rubberized pegs, held into the enclosure via some little receptacles for the rubberized pegs.
Now, the hardware hack.
I bought one of these late one night (way after midnight after all more reputable sources of computer parts had closed) just to get the HDD inside, as I needed a replacement RIGHT NOW. (Got the 4TB version. 3Tb drives have terrible failure rates. It was a 4TB WD Green series SATA drive. Not splendid, but it serviced.)
That left me with the shell. For awhile I left it to sit around and ignored it, but the more I looked at it, the more it just screamed to have something done with it.
The drive kit came with a 12vdc wall wart that can put out about 30W of juice. The enclosure has cutouts for the 12v barrel connector, the "USB3.0 HDD style" connector, and a lockstrap hole.
Minor modifications with a dremel tool made the USB slot into a standard USB sized opening, and the lockstrap hole large enough to accomodate a mini HDMI port.
Inside, I took a 2.5in to 3.5in bay adapter, put the rubberized pegs on, then marked mounting points for a minnowboard max 2 with a sharpie marker, drilled them out, then attached standoffs using a combination of small back-facing nuts and washers. In the 2.5in bay, I installed a 2.5 inch SATA HDD.
The minnowboard is unique among SBCs, because it has a real SATA interface on it. It is a dual core intel atom system with intel integrated video. Whoopy freaking do, except for the fact that it's total TDP is around 6 watts. That's low enough to run without a fan, and well within the 30W the DC supply that came with the drive can deliver. The problem is that it needs 5vdc, not 12vdc. Easily fixed with a DC-DC power converter.
Long story short, I found that there was enough room inside the enclosure for the HDD, the minnowboard, extender cables going to the port openings from the minnoboard, an interal USB2.0 hub for things like WiFi and Bluetooth, the DC-DC power converter, and all that jazz.
It makes a very snazzy looking HTPC box.
Hey AC, dont worry too much.
You can boot UEFI bios systems into legacy OSes pretty easily with a second stage loader scheme.
Such as GRUB2.
It works in the reverse too-- allowing UEFI expecting OSes to boot on BIOS systems. Since upgrading to a 4tb drive, I had to switch to GPT instead of MBR. I use GRUB2 on the "fake" MBR of the GPT table as the primary loader to satisfy my legacy BIOS's need for a primary boot sector and MBR partition table, and since GRUB2 is GPT aware, it can read the GPT partition table and then chainload the proper bootloader.
Works like a charm.
The real challenge would be getting UEFI expecting OSes that make use of UEFI features after bootup to run on legacy BIOS systems. For that, you need software implementations of UEFI, and those are a pain in the ass.
One way that windows 7 (in particular) slows down, comes from the use of the winSXS folder.
Basically, because the windows software ecosystem is so... Plagued.. with legacy software that expect older versions of system libraries, Microsoft invented a solution to detect those dependencies and satisfy them with those older libaries in a sandbox-- the WinSXS folder.
As time passes, and updates happen, system libraries get updated-- instead of being replaced, they get moved to the winsxs folder and archived. This is so when your bitchy internal-only legacy application that is oh-so-mission-critical that it simply cant be rewritten for a modern OS gets run, it can continue to run.
The downside is that as this treasure trove of old libraries grows, the penalty of the checking routine becomes more and more apparent. (also, it consumes more and more disk space.)
Other forms of slowdown are not specific to windows 7 and newer however.
The registry is a binary file that must be parsed to find entries inside it, and it too can become fragmented. As changes are CONSTANTLY happening to the registry, the (actual) structure of the registry can become more and more byzantine. Since such changes are completely unavoidable with daily use, the slow degradation of this system is also unavoidable unless you boot from a golden image each and every time. This has been a problem since at least the 9x days. Back then, you could automate registry defragmentation with a bootup script because of the complete lack of filesystem security on FAT-- (Tell regedit to dump the registry in its totality into an exported text file, then tell it to rebuild the registry from scratch using that text file dump, then cleanup the temporary files afterwards.) You cant do that with modern flavors of windows because 1) you cant invoke scripts that easily on bootup anymore 2) the registry files are protected with NTFS security descriptors, 3) the OS locks the registry basically as soon as NTLDR finishes, so you cant replace the registry files while live.
There are of course, the other causes of slowdown that come from cumulative misconfigurations that happen from automated updates, but meh.
Even with disk cleanup removing redundancies in the winSXS folder, it can still swell to be over 12gb in size.
A better solution is to turn NTFS compression on for the folder, then defragment the living shit out of it. (NTFS compression causes epic fragmentation.)
You dont want compression turned on as a rule, but when windows is basically warehousing data against an uncertain future, you might as well treat it like a "rarely used, if ever" archival store. The space is more valuable than the access speed in this case.
Just be wary! the compression cycle is very harmful to SSDs, but once compressed, the files dont change, so its fine afterward. Better to do with a disk image on a spinny disk, then port the whole image to the SSD.
Does your other OS hold on to outdated versions of system files for compatibility reasons, like windows 7+ does?
(Note, research the purpose of the WINSXS folder.)
Part of the issue is also that newer versions of windows want to move away from just being an OS, and toward being an entertainment venue all of its own.
That's MS marketing and the UI graphic designers faults though.
Fun little thing to do:
Take a weak kneed intel Atom board, and do some simple office use tests with it with various older versions of windows. Start with NT4, then use Win2k, the XP, then 7, then 8.1. See how the ability to do simple things degrades as the OS expects more and more hardware just to draw the damned UI.
Now, realize that the biggest selling point for new windows versions is NOT a new shiny UI-- but continued security updates. Now you will understand why corporations get bitchy. They have something that works, on the hardware they already have-- but are going to be forced to buy a whole new iteration of hardware, to get updated software that gets updates against security threats-- because otherwise MS does not get money.
If it werent for the lack of security updates, win2k would be ideal for nearly all corporate drone installations.
(Note, there are other useful features that were added with each version of windows, and I am not discounting that. What I am saying is that even with those kernel space and user space feature enhancements, they could have been rolled into service packs for the older products, and you would have had more responsive product overall. The need to reinvent the OS constantly drives the need to constantly make it look different, (to set it apart from its predecessor), which constantly increases the HW requirements. It is pathological.)
That's probably because somewhere in the google complex, there are some crusty old bureaucrats that just cant let go of the notion that "Proprietary == Profit!", and that "Control" takes many forms other than just "Stop all competition at all costs!"
Things like, "Look, we design and maintain the freaking OS. Here's how the location service API works, and how to make calls. Our location service package in Google Apps is purpose tailored for the Android platform, and we provide support for it-- however, if you want to have your device provide location services using a different library, it needs to conform to this API, and you are on your own if it breaks. We wish you luck, but if it breaks, dont come crying to us over it. Likewise, if you are linking against our location service software in your app using some method OTHER than the published API (Such as hooking some of our secret sauce inside that isn't normally exposed, hijacking some unanticipated feature of our location service daemon, or using some magic ID string for some other purpose that will then break if some 3rd party location service daemon is installed-) you are not developing for the android platform correctly, and if we catch you doing it, we will boot you from the playstore for not following best practices."
You still have market dominance. You still have control over the playstore. You still have control over quality of software on offically supported devices (so you dont look bad) ,AND you get to have a powerful shield against regulatory oppression.
BUT-- Somewhere in corporate la-la land, there is that cadre of old fucks who see an open platform and shit themselves because they dont have a strangle-hold death-grip on every little thing involved.
low RPM wind turbines can make use of graphite dust. Graphite is a mineral, and is geologically stable over time.
Alternatively, "lead bearings" are also a potential solution to that problem. Not everything needs to be made from oil.
Which is PRECISELY why the corporations MUST be controlled via strong force of law, NOT relaxed pampering and pandering.
Since a corporations fiduciary obligation is the center of the corporation's universe, and all other considerations take second or even third stage (if at all!), then some other agency MUST step in to intercede to protect the system from the otherwise inevitable collapse. THAT IS THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT.
The problem is that government panders to the corporations and gives them whatever they want, (and what they want is less legal restrictions on their ability to meet their fiduciary obligations, at the expense of all other concerns and practices) instead of busting their chops and holding their asses to the fire so they have to fly right.
Going "But think of the poor corporations, just doing what they are forced to do by their evil share holders!" is bullshit. Instead, you should be demanding that government do its fucking job, instead of whoring itself out for career re-election dollars.
virtual machines might still hold a valuable feature in the future, since they would more strongly compartmentalize running code against exploit based escalation of privileges. Using chroot blocks processes from accessing files outside the jail, but does not prevent a running process from attacking the shared kernel space, and gaining access to the real root filesystem. An honest to goodness virtual machine offers additional layers of protection.
Given the increasing value in gaining unauthorized exclusive access (for criminals anyway-- That includes the spying antics of governments) to systems that host data for many different customers, the incentive to bust such jails and run amok on the server is only going to increase as the bean counters press more and more for "data based economy" models.
So while less sophisticated jails are faster and easier to deploy, they are also necessarily less secure than a fully blown VM with a full hypervisor monitoring them between them and the real server OS kernel, and thus more vulnerable, and thus more prone to being attacked-- That means that as the "Professional data criminal" element grows, the viability of these less sophisticated jails will diminish, and the viability of more sophisticated (but slower) jails will increase.
NOT homeopathic!! This is apothicary!
Homeopathic-- Made of two root words. Homeo == Same, Pathos == causes illness.
Homeopathy is a very strongly disproven notion from ancient days that if you consumed small quantities of a pathogen, your body would be strengthened against it.
Apothicary is radically different. Apothicaries (western ones anyway) ammased remedies that were ancient even in the dark ages, because they had proven to be effective at treating illnesses, and some theories as to the mechanisms of their action were created, and new remedies compounded based on those theories. They lacked modern science, and lacked the modern understanding of germs, but apothicary medicine was a pretty rigorous discipline, as opposed to the philosophical wishy-washiness of homeopathy.
[Eastern apothicaries however, developed a kind of magical hoodoo nonsense, which still lingers to this day. There is no medicinal value in tiger penis. No. There. isnt. It's just meat.]