FWIW, I have a WIN95 game that I occasionally run under Wine, so while you are technically correct (the CD won't last forever), you aren't correct in your implication.
The problem is selection. I'd buy steam if Civilization III or IV was available for Linux. (I'm a *bit* less picky about DRM on games than on other applications....though I still don't like it. But Steam has over the years built up a decent reputation. I'm still willing to pay a LOT less for something that requires internet accessibility...like almost nothing. Registration is different. That's reasonable, I guess.)
OTOH, what I really want is CDs of games that I can play on virtual machines with NO internet connection. The things I been hearing recently make me nearly totally unwilling to trust the gaming companies. If a constant internet connection is required, or even a periodic one, as opposed to registration, then that item has a negative value.
Burning hydrogen, except in an Oxygen stream, produces LOTS of nitrous and nitric pollutants. It's also at a remarkably high temperature, which means you need exotic materials for engine components, and they STILL wear out fast.
This is why hydorgen is normally used via fuel cells. But I believe that all currently available fuel cells use platinum based catalysts. (There are more recent catalysts, but IIUC they are still only used in prototypes.)
FWIW, we already have theives stealing mufflers for the platinum catalyst that they contain to process the exhaust. Platinum is hideously expensive, so we want to avoid using it whenever possible.
OTOH, it's quite possible that non-platinum fuel cells will be available soon. Probably before this process is commercially available. Or perhaps super-capacitors will experience a breakthrough, and make it reasonable to power the cars electrically. (Dependance on batteries is the current weak spot of electric cars. Capacitors can be charged quickly and repeatedly.) In that case the hydorgen could be converted to electricty at a stationary installation, with the higher efficiency that that would permit.
Hydrogen as a fuel has many features that make it unsatisfactory. It's low energy per cc, e.g. So you either need to liquify it or store it under immense pressure, both of which are expensive to deal with, or put up with a need to refuel frequently. And it tends to leak...which can be dangerous as well as decreasing efficiency.
A third possibility is to use it as the input to making a synthetic liquid fuel. This, again, would be done at a stationary site, so wouldn't have the same constraints as would a mobile platform. I'm not sure what the current efficiencies are, or what improvements can be expected in the near term future.
So I don't see this as some "magic bullet", but rather as a useful component of a more complex solution.
IIUC that "more than 100%" means that they're getting more (measured) energy out than they are putting in. (They talk about using low temperature process heat in the next sentence...so they are adding energy to make the reaction go.)
In other words, I don't think it's unbelievable, I just don't think it means what you imply that you think it means. My guess is that they aren't measuring the energy stored in the xylose, only the energy that they are adding to make the reaction go.
My main wonder is how long does the "enzyme cocktail" last. Also the article is full of cautionary words indicating that the process is not yet practical outside of a laboratory.
So I find it interesting and promissing, but it's not clear that it will be commercially feasible. They project commercial release within 3 years, which seems to mean that some problems remain. If we don't see this being marketed within 8 years I would guess that they ran into some problem that they haven't solved.
FWIW, perhaps a version of the original "Project Orion" which propelled the ship by exploding nuclear explosives behind it could be built, but that would be a lot easier to design with fusion explosives than with fusion explosives. Gramted that fusion explosives would probably be less polluting, and thus could be used closer to an inhabited planet (or space station?).
Even if ground based fusion reactors turn out to be cheap and simple in the near term, I have severe doubts about thier suitablitity for powering a spaceship until a LOT more development is done. Before the end of the century wouldn't surprise me. Before 2030 would.
That said, I disagree with the basic premise, that such capabilities are necessary (though they would certainly be advantageous). From my viewpoiint we need to be doing work on long-term closed cycle ecologies. With that capability we wouldn't need fast transport. So ion-rockets would be perfectly suitable for orbit-to-orbit movement, and some kind of skyhook (probably not a space-elevator, but something much simpler, like a pinwheel) for orbit to near planet movement, with the final step made by either a high-flying airplane or a electro-magnetic catapult, depending on the thickness of the atmosphere. This requires some fancy timing for the transfers, but it's something that we could actually build now if we had the commitment...except for the long-term sustainable closed cycle ecology.
All of the fusion projects that I'm aware of are not only heavy, they're also delicate, and require lots of skilled technical attention.
I'd say we're *at least* two decades from a fusion engine that's practical in a spaceship. Three or four wouldn't surprise me. And I also wouldn't be totally surprised if it is one of those things that can just never be made practical (though I'd be very disappoiinted).
For that matter, while several of the fusion projects appear to be near the technical "break even" point, I can't think of one of them that's even approaching the economic break even point. Even fission is a bit dubious about that, when you count in all if the expenses. (E.g., government providing "insurance" against massive problems [in the form of saying "you won't be held liable"], and what to do with spent reactors and fuel.) That said, one mussn't forget that coal also gets massive subsidies, if only in the form of permission to engage in environmental degradation and pollution.
Note that all mining is environmentally destructive, and it is rare for the costs of that destructuion to be included in the cost of the products of the mining. So it's quite difficult to come to a rational balance of which technology is more expensive. Fusion has the problem that it's less dependant on mining, so it doesn't get the benefit of free pollution of the environment. This makes it more difficult for it to compete with established technologies. But it's not even nearly ready yet anyway. None of the existing projects have passed the technological break even point, which is a lot easier than the economic break even point.
What we really need to do is put up TWO such telescopes at opposite poles of Neptunes orbit. That would give us a significant parallax for things that are sufficiently close. (What sufficiently would mean would depend on how carefully direction could be determined.) They'd probably need to synchronize their clocks based on some pulsar...one that has an occasional glitch. If it could be done right, this would give us the resolving power (though not the light collection capability) of a telescope the size of the solar system.
Sorry, but that's not quite right. Time has a negative sign in the calculation of distance. There's also a factor of c in there, but you could say that's just for unit conversion. However, because of that negative sign on a squared term, moving backwards in time is fundamentally different from moving forwards in time.
That said, different frames of reference *do* convert one into the other (which is Special Relativity) and accelerated frames of reference (General Relativity) act even stranger. Special Relativity only deals with cases that are essentially neutral with respect to viewpoint, but with General Relativity, you get things like the twin paradox, with different clock moving at different rates. (Actually this usually involved variable rates if you want to get a "paradox" out of it. And that means changing accelerations rather than constantly accelerated frames of reference.)
Has Trinity become usable? The last time I tried to test it it required removing multiple packages, and then after I bit the bullet and did that, it didn't add itself to the login choices. So I've been reluctant to try it again.
Well, FWIW, I still prefer Gnome2 to KDE4, but, to be fair, I also preferred KDE3 to Gnome2.
Currently I'm using KDE4, but if MATE has gotten past it's teething problems (it was very slow the last time I installed it, but that's nearly a year ago now), I may switch to it. That would mean, however, downloading a live CD to test, so I may give it some more time.
OTOH, my suspicion is that ElectricSheep still won't work on MATE, and that is one of my wife's requriements for my computer.
That is a terrible script to use on a testing machine. It isn't that infrequent for testing debs to not have a full list of ever dependency, so autoclean can break your system.
On a stabe repository, though, it should work fine. (But I prefer to use "apt-get dist-upgrade" and look things over before I decide to proceed.)
FWIW, many theoretic models that would lead to FTL won't allow you to communicate back to before the first such machine is built.
Mind you, those theories are probably wrong (and are certainly incomplete), but since several different approaches have the same limitation, it may well be that this reflects the actual nature of the universe.
Also, FWIW, the current theories on how to build a to-the-past communicator all require some variety or other of unobtainium. So it may actually to theoretically possible to build the thing, but perhaps all possible designs require substances that can't exist in the universe. E.g., a material with high structural strenght and negetive energy might allow you to build one form of "communicator to the past". This is needed to stabilize the worm-holes so that they don't collapse. (But it's not really clear that this would lead to communication with the past unless you got one end moving at relitivistic speed WRT the the other. A specialized cyclotronish device might work...if wormholes aren't distrubed by having one end twisted, and you could do the accelerations without collapsing it (which may mean more internal bracing with material containing a negative amount of energy). Unfortunately, the only "material" I'm aware of that has negative energy is the space in between two thin sheets of material (metal?) that are VERY close together, but don't touch. (See Casimir effect. And note I'm talking about the space in between the walls. You can't include the walls and still have negative energy.)
N.B.: There are other designs that require different varieties of unobtainium.
No. Current theories don't allow for FTL communication.
Note that this DOES NOT mean that it's impossible, just that it's not theoretically possible. But it's also true that the theories are known to be at minimum incomplete, and possibly just wrong. The problem is coming up with a replacement that will match the current theories in all the places that they are right. (Or, actually, in even almost all the places.)
But since the theories are wrong (in the sense, at least, of incomplete) it may be possible to communicate FTL without adverse effects.
FWIW, it IS true that entanglement requires corresponding reactiosn to occur either instantaneously (whatever that means in an Einsteinian universe) or FTL (which is another bag of worms), but this doesn't appear to allow information to be transferred, so I can't call it communication.
It's not that you've been lucky. Most people get through fine most of the time. Some people have to deal with a bastard, and there are no reprecussions for the bastard acting like a bastard. But people who experience that treatment are much more likely to make a noise than people who are treated normally.
So the question is, "Are you willing to be subjected to vile treatment for no reason at the whim of someone that you have no choice over and no control over?" Some people are willing to take the chance. Some people deny that the chance exists. Some people refuse to go through the procedure. My sister, Anglo, US citizen, was only mildly abused by the TSA, but she's avoided flying ever since. (She was flying from San Francisco to Las Vegas. They detained here on the return flight. It was quite inconvenient. They didn't give a flying fuck how much trouble they were causing, or that they had no valid reason to bother her.) Now when she goes to a professional conference, she drives or takes the train. (Recent news makes taking the train a questionable way of avoiding the TSA, but so far I haven't heard any horror stories.)
I think that this depends on how you define information. ISTR that while data is available, calling it information is questionable. E,g,, you may measure somthing and measure it as, say, spinning up, and this will allow you to assert that whenever you opposite number performs the equivalent measurement it won't say spinning down...and that the time could be either before when you measured or after in some particular reference frame. But calling this a tranfer of information is a bit questionable. E.g., you don't know who measured first, and thus determined the signal...or if that's even a meaningful statement.
You are making a perhaps invalid presumption as to his reasoning. It could well be that he's just used to MySQL and doesn't want to think of changing. He could have a lot of code that's dependent on incompatible features, and doesn't want to believe that this was a bad choice. Money isn't the reason for everything.
That said, I'm not really convinced that PostGreSQL is superior in all use cases to the MySQL family of databases. I do tend to think that it's generally superior, but I'm not expert in either.
I don't think there's anything wrong with posting this to Slashdot. Everybody already knows that any complex software will have bugs in it. This doesn't gvie any clue as to what the bug is. And anybody serious about doing a malicious penetration will already have read the announcement.
Further, this gives people warning to not start any new installs of PostGreSQL right now, because you'll just need to re-install it in a week or so.
The "religious war" thing that's going on under this story is just loud-mouthed shallow thinkers, who aren't dangerous anyway. (Because they're shallow thinkers.)
Now if the actual bug were highlighted, I'd agree with you, but I'd also blame the project for highlighting it. As it is, it looks to me as if they took a reasonable path. It's true an optimal path might have been to work off a fork of the code, and not let anyone know until the fix had been applied and tested, but there's also much to be said for warning people as soon as possible, so that they could avoid making databases currently private, accessible. Or so that they could close down access to anything really sensitive, and make sure they have good backups NOW.
I question that a robot inherently has a high density. (FWIW, I believe that even a ship is lighter than water.)
The important thing here is that it can adjust it's depth in the water in an energy efficient manner. This would seem tailor made to trace the flow of ocean currents at varying depths. But they need to get the efficiency up a bit. I don't think a few months is sufficient...not for the use-case I'm imagining. And it would need to rise to the surface occasionally to transmit to a receiver (possibly a satellite) what it's position was, and anything else it was monitoring.
That said, this is just the first idea off the top of my head. There are probably other uses. Many of them would probably require a longer explanation, i.e. be more specialized, and not obvious why they were important to those outside whatever field they applied to.
For that matter, do you remember how long everyone considered the laser a remarkable tool that had no uses? (I think it was over a decade.) This is not only less remarkable, it also has a couple of plausible uses...once it's a bit more developed.
OK. "process" components seems a decent reason for the design, even though it's not something I'd use. (I'd thought they only stored source code, not processes.)
For me PostGreSQL, and MySql too, have the disadvantage that you can't have project specific databases. I want the database to be in a file (or directory) under the project, so it's easy to distribute. So that means Firebird, SQLite, H2, HSQLDB, a few others, but *neither* PostGreSQL nor MySQL. Relocating ALL the databases isn't an option, I need it to be project specific.
What's annoying is that I can't figure out *why* they choose to make this either difficult or impossible. (To be honest, I don't know either of them well enough to say that it's impossible. Just that there's no obvious way to do it, and a simple Google doesn't return any answers.)
What you're missing is that every week a new field of expertise is automated. Those jobs go away and never come back, bar the kind of crash that leaves large numbers of people dead (as in 50% of the population). New jobs open up, but not in nearly the same numbers. And they need to be trained for, so it takes time to fill them. (Usually there's an acceptance of sub-par skills at the beginning, but I remember advertisements for programmers with 5 years of Java experience the week after it was first released.)
This means that an economic bubble can't translate into jobs for the people who were displaced, no matter what approach you take.
That said, I would have supported government expenditures to build infrastructure. It wouldn't have solved the job loss problem, but it would have helped. Dumping money into the banks was of really dubious value. A big project to repair the countries roads, bridges, and telecommunications system would have had actual value. (Just don't give a bunch of companies lots of money under a vague promise that they don't need to live up to...like the last time the government paid to upgrade the telecommunicaitons.)
O, and also when the government buys something, that something is owned by the government. If they pay you to put in some wires and run telecommunications on them, THEY own the wires. Similarly, if they pay a company to put in some wires and run telecommunications on them, THEY own the wires. And land acquired through eminent domain should be property of the government, not some third party. (I know the courts have approved the transfer to a third party, and I consider the courts that agreed to that to be ipso facto corrupt. No further evidence is required.)
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FWIW, I have a WIN95 game that I occasionally run under Wine, so while you are technically correct (the CD won't last forever), you aren't correct in your implication.
The problem is selection. I'd buy steam if Civilization III or IV was available for Linux. (I'm a *bit* less picky about DRM on games than on other applications....though I still don't like it. But Steam has over the years built up a decent reputation. I'm still willing to pay a LOT less for something that requires internet accessibility...like almost nothing. Registration is different. That's reasonable, I guess.)
OTOH, what I really want is CDs of games that I can play on virtual machines with NO internet connection. The things I been hearing recently make me nearly totally unwilling to trust the gaming companies. If a constant internet connection is required, or even a periodic one, as opposed to registration, then that item has a negative value.
But currently that means using Platinum. Which is unsustainable, except perhaps for stationary installations.
Burning hydrogen, except in an Oxygen stream, produces LOTS of nitrous and nitric pollutants. It's also at a remarkably high temperature, which means you need exotic materials for engine components, and they STILL wear out fast.
This is why hydorgen is normally used via fuel cells. But I believe that all currently available fuel cells use platinum based catalysts. (There are more recent catalysts, but IIUC they are still only used in prototypes.)
FWIW, we already have theives stealing mufflers for the platinum catalyst that they contain to process the exhaust. Platinum is hideously expensive, so we want to avoid using it whenever possible.
OTOH, it's quite possible that non-platinum fuel cells will be available soon. Probably before this process is commercially available. Or perhaps super-capacitors will experience a breakthrough, and make it reasonable to power the cars electrically. (Dependance on batteries is the current weak spot of electric cars. Capacitors can be charged quickly and repeatedly.) In that case the hydorgen could be converted to electricty at a stationary installation, with the higher efficiency that that would permit.
Hydrogen as a fuel has many features that make it unsatisfactory. It's low energy per cc, e.g. So you either need to liquify it or store it under immense pressure, both of which are expensive to deal with, or put up with a need to refuel frequently. And it tends to leak...which can be dangerous as well as decreasing efficiency.
A third possibility is to use it as the input to making a synthetic liquid fuel. This, again, would be done at a stationary site, so wouldn't have the same constraints as would a mobile platform. I'm not sure what the current efficiencies are, or what improvements can be expected in the near term future.
So I don't see this as some "magic bullet", but rather as a useful component of a more complex solution.
IIUC that "more than 100%" means that they're getting more (measured) energy out than they are putting in. (They talk about using low temperature process heat in the next sentence...so they are adding energy to make the reaction go.)
In other words, I don't think it's unbelievable, I just don't think it means what you imply that you think it means. My guess is that they aren't measuring the energy stored in the xylose, only the energy that they are adding to make the reaction go.
My main wonder is how long does the "enzyme cocktail" last. Also the article is full of cautionary words indicating that the process is not yet practical outside of a laboratory.
So I find it interesting and promissing, but it's not clear that it will be commercially feasible. They project commercial release within 3 years, which seems to mean that some problems remain. If we don't see this being marketed within 8 years I would guess that they ran into some problem that they haven't solved.
FWIW, perhaps a version of the original "Project Orion" which propelled the ship by exploding nuclear explosives behind it could be built, but that would be a lot easier to design with fusion explosives than with fusion explosives. Gramted that fusion explosives would probably be less polluting, and thus could be used closer to an inhabited planet (or space station?).
Even if ground based fusion reactors turn out to be cheap and simple in the near term, I have severe doubts about thier suitablitity for powering a spaceship until a LOT more development is done. Before the end of the century wouldn't surprise me. Before 2030 would.
That said, I disagree with the basic premise, that such capabilities are necessary (though they would certainly be advantageous). From my viewpoiint we need to be doing work on long-term closed cycle ecologies. With that capability we wouldn't need fast transport. So ion-rockets would be perfectly suitable for orbit-to-orbit movement, and some kind of skyhook (probably not a space-elevator, but something much simpler, like a pinwheel) for orbit to near planet movement, with the final step made by either a high-flying airplane or a electro-magnetic catapult, depending on the thickness of the atmosphere. This requires some fancy timing for the transfers, but it's something that we could actually build now if we had the commitment...except for the long-term sustainable closed cycle ecology.
All of the fusion projects that I'm aware of are not only heavy, they're also delicate, and require lots of skilled technical attention.
I'd say we're *at least* two decades from a fusion engine that's practical in a spaceship. Three or four wouldn't surprise me. And I also wouldn't be totally surprised if it is one of those things that can just never be made practical (though I'd be very disappoiinted).
For that matter, while several of the fusion projects appear to be near the technical "break even" point, I can't think of one of them that's even approaching the economic break even point. Even fission is a bit dubious about that, when you count in all if the expenses. (E.g., government providing "insurance" against massive problems [in the form of saying "you won't be held liable"], and what to do with spent reactors and fuel.) That said, one mussn't forget that coal also gets massive subsidies, if only in the form of permission to engage in environmental degradation and pollution.
Note that all mining is environmentally destructive, and it is rare for the costs of that destructuion to be included in the cost of the products of the mining. So it's quite difficult to come to a rational balance of which technology is more expensive. Fusion has the problem that it's less dependant on mining, so it doesn't get the benefit of free pollution of the environment. This makes it more difficult for it to compete with established technologies. But it's not even nearly ready yet anyway. None of the existing projects have passed the technological break even point, which is a lot easier than the economic break even point.
What we really need to do is put up TWO such telescopes at opposite poles of Neptunes orbit. That would give us a significant parallax for things that are sufficiently close. (What sufficiently would mean would depend on how carefully direction could be determined.) They'd probably need to synchronize their clocks based on some pulsar...one that has an occasional glitch. If it could be done right, this would give us the resolving power (though not the light collection capability) of a telescope the size of the solar system.
Sorry, but that's not quite right. Time has a negative sign in the calculation of distance. There's also a factor of c in there, but you could say that's just for unit conversion. However, because of that negative sign on a squared term, moving backwards in time is fundamentally different from moving forwards in time.
That said, different frames of reference *do* convert one into the other (which is Special Relativity) and accelerated frames of reference (General Relativity) act even stranger. Special Relativity only deals with cases that are essentially neutral with respect to viewpoint, but with General Relativity, you get things like the twin paradox, with different clock moving at different rates. (Actually this usually involved variable rates if you want to get a "paradox" out of it. And that means changing accelerations rather than constantly accelerated frames of reference.)
Has Trinity become usable? The last time I tried to test it it required removing multiple packages, and then after I bit the bullet and did that, it didn't add itself to the login choices. So I've been reluctant to try it again.
Well, FWIW, I still prefer Gnome2 to KDE4, but, to be fair, I also preferred KDE3 to Gnome2.
Currently I'm using KDE4, but if MATE has gotten past it's teething problems (it was very slow the last time I installed it, but that's nearly a year ago now), I may switch to it. That would mean, however, downloading a live CD to test, so I may give it some more time.
OTOH, my suspicion is that ElectricSheep still won't work on MATE, and that is one of my wife's requriements for my computer.
That is a terrible script to use on a testing machine. It isn't that infrequent for testing debs to not have a full list of ever dependency, so autoclean can break your system.
On a stabe repository, though, it should work fine. (But I prefer to use "apt-get dist-upgrade" and look things over before I decide to proceed.)
FWIW, many theoretic models that would lead to FTL won't allow you to communicate back to before the first such machine is built.
Mind you, those theories are probably wrong (and are certainly incomplete), but since several different approaches have the same limitation, it may well be that this reflects the actual nature of the universe.
Also, FWIW, the current theories on how to build a to-the-past communicator all require some variety or other of unobtainium. So it may actually to theoretically possible to build the thing, but perhaps all possible designs require substances that can't exist in the universe. E.g., a material with high structural strenght and negetive energy might allow you to build one form of "communicator to the past". This is needed to stabilize the worm-holes so that they don't collapse. (But it's not really clear that this would lead to communication with the past unless you got one end moving at relitivistic speed WRT the the other. A specialized cyclotronish device might work...if wormholes aren't distrubed by having one end twisted, and you could do the accelerations without collapsing it (which may mean more internal bracing with material containing a negative amount of energy). Unfortunately, the only "material" I'm aware of that has negative energy is the space in between two thin sheets of material (metal?) that are VERY close together, but don't touch. (See Casimir effect. And note I'm talking about the space in between the walls. You can't include the walls and still have negative energy.)
N.B.: There are other designs that require different varieties of unobtainium.
No. Current theories don't allow for FTL communication.
Note that this DOES NOT mean that it's impossible, just that it's not theoretically possible. But it's also true that the theories are known to be at minimum incomplete, and possibly just wrong. The problem is coming up with a replacement that will match the current theories in all the places that they are right. (Or, actually, in even almost all the places.)
But since the theories are wrong (in the sense, at least, of incomplete) it may be possible to communicate FTL without adverse effects.
FWIW, it IS true that entanglement requires corresponding reactiosn to occur either instantaneously (whatever that means in an Einsteinian universe) or FTL (which is another bag of worms), but this doesn't appear to allow information to be transferred, so I can't call it communication.
It's not that you've been lucky. Most people get through fine most of the time. Some people have to deal with a bastard, and there are no reprecussions for the bastard acting like a bastard. But people who experience that treatment are much more likely to make a noise than people who are treated normally.
So the question is, "Are you willing to be subjected to vile treatment for no reason at the whim of someone that you have no choice over and no control over?" Some people are willing to take the chance. Some people deny that the chance exists. Some people refuse to go through the procedure. My sister, Anglo, US citizen, was only mildly abused by the TSA, but she's avoided flying ever since. (She was flying from San Francisco to Las Vegas. They detained here on the return flight. It was quite inconvenient. They didn't give a flying fuck how much trouble they were causing, or that they had no valid reason to bother her.) Now when she goes to a professional conference, she drives or takes the train. (Recent news makes taking the train a questionable way of avoiding the TSA, but so far I haven't heard any horror stories.)
Sorry, but EVERYONE uses that option. Check out old bugs in some open source projects. So you can't reasonably single out MS for that one.
I think that this depends on how you define information. ISTR that while data is available, calling it information is questionable. E,g,, you may measure somthing and measure it as, say, spinning up, and this will allow you to assert that whenever you opposite number performs the equivalent measurement it won't say spinning down...and that the time could be either before when you measured or after in some particular reference frame. But calling this a tranfer of information is a bit questionable. E.g., you don't know who measured first, and thus determined the signal...or if that's even a meaningful statement.
You are making a perhaps invalid presumption as to his reasoning. It could well be that he's just used to MySQL and doesn't want to think of changing. He could have a lot of code that's dependent on incompatible features, and doesn't want to believe that this was a bad choice. Money isn't the reason for everything.
That said, I'm not really convinced that PostGreSQL is superior in all use cases to the MySQL family of databases. I do tend to think that it's generally superior, but I'm not expert in either.
I don't think there's anything wrong with posting this to Slashdot. Everybody already knows that any complex software will have bugs in it. This doesn't gvie any clue as to what the bug is. And anybody serious about doing a malicious penetration will already have read the announcement.
Further, this gives people warning to not start any new installs of PostGreSQL right now, because you'll just need to re-install it in a week or so.
The "religious war" thing that's going on under this story is just loud-mouthed shallow thinkers, who aren't dangerous anyway. (Because they're shallow thinkers.)
Now if the actual bug were highlighted, I'd agree with you, but I'd also blame the project for highlighting it. As it is, it looks to me as if they took a reasonable path. It's true an optimal path might have been to work off a fork of the code, and not let anyone know until the fix had been applied and tested, but there's also much to be said for warning people as soon as possible, so that they could avoid making databases currently private, accessible. Or so that they could close down access to anything really sensitive, and make sure they have good backups NOW.
You left out option C:
C) Don't tell anyone there's a problem, and pretend that there isn't one until you have a new version to sell.
MAYBE MS doesn't do that anymore. I stopped using their products, so I don't know. They certainly used to.
Solar power doesn't work well at any depth. (I doubt that it would be practical 10 m. down, much less 300 m.
I question that a robot inherently has a high density. (FWIW, I believe that even a ship is lighter than water.)
The important thing here is that it can adjust it's depth in the water in an energy efficient manner. This would seem tailor made to trace the flow of ocean currents at varying depths. But they need to get the efficiency up a bit. I don't think a few months is sufficient...not for the use-case I'm imagining. And it would need to rise to the surface occasionally to transmit to a receiver (possibly a satellite) what it's position was, and anything else it was monitoring.
That said, this is just the first idea off the top of my head. There are probably other uses. Many of them would probably require a longer explanation, i.e. be more specialized, and not obvious why they were important to those outside whatever field they applied to.
For that matter, do you remember how long everyone considered the laser a remarkable tool that had no uses? (I think it was over a decade.) This is not only less remarkable, it also has a couple of plausible uses...once it's a bit more developed.
OK. "process" components seems a decent reason for the design, even though it's not something I'd use. (I'd thought they only stored source code, not processes.)
For me PostGreSQL, and MySql too, have the disadvantage that you can't have project specific databases. I want the database to be in a file (or directory) under the project, so it's easy to distribute. So that means Firebird, SQLite, H2, HSQLDB, a few others, but *neither* PostGreSQL nor MySQL. Relocating ALL the databases isn't an option, I need it to be project specific.
What's annoying is that I can't figure out *why* they choose to make this either difficult or impossible. (To be honest, I don't know either of them well enough to say that it's impossible. Just that there's no obvious way to do it, and a simple Google doesn't return any answers.)
What you're missing is that every week a new field of expertise is automated. Those jobs go away and never come back, bar the kind of crash that leaves large numbers of people dead (as in 50% of the population). New jobs open up, but not in nearly the same numbers. And they need to be trained for, so it takes time to fill them. (Usually there's an acceptance of sub-par skills at the beginning, but I remember advertisements for programmers with 5 years of Java experience the week after it was first released.)
This means that an economic bubble can't translate into jobs for the people who were displaced, no matter what approach you take.
That said, I would have supported government expenditures to build infrastructure. It wouldn't have solved the job loss problem, but it would have helped. Dumping money into the banks was of really dubious value. A big project to repair the countries roads, bridges, and telecommunications system would have had actual value. (Just don't give a bunch of companies lots of money under a vague promise that they don't need to live up to...like the last time the government paid to upgrade the telecommunicaitons.)
O, and also when the government buys something, that something is owned by the government. If they pay you to put in some wires and run telecommunications on them, THEY own the wires. Similarly, if they pay a company to put in some wires and run telecommunications on them, THEY own the wires. And land acquired through eminent domain should be property of the government, not some third party. (I know the courts have approved the transfer to a third party, and I consider the courts that agreed to that to be ipso facto corrupt. No further evidence is required.)