Lame indeed. I just took a look at Messenger's supposed First Color Image of Mercury from Orbit. I thought I'd gone color blind. It looked so gray. Trying to reproduce the subtle shades in a color printer would be a terrible waste of ink or toner, as you'd be forced to go Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) to print out something not quite Black (K) or gray.
The mission may yet turn up some astounding scientific discovery, but Mercury isn't a very photogenic planet, as far as celestial bodies go.
That's why I said "expect". However, I'd still expect a dentist to have good teeth, even in a two- or one- dentist town. I expect a dentist to know all the tricks of having good teeth, like flossing, brushing after every meal, etc. If he sees a nasty cavity that could lead to bad teeth, I expect him to go and visit (even to the point of going out of town) another dentist who's just as good or a just a wee bit worse than him. Unless he's a self-schooled dentist who doesn't belong to any medical association, you'd expect him to have some contacts. Barbers probably are different since it's not the sort of profession where you have to pass an exam to get licensed, "high-end" hair "stylists" excepted.
Similarly I'd "expect" the MySql site to be free from, at the very least, exploitable security holes in their "star" product, even if that can never be true in practice. Image counts for a lot.
Unlike the reserved words of a computer program, words in a natural language have a wide latitude of uses, from the strict to the colloquial. Here, I see the "irony" in how a site designed to promote some type of "SQL" turns out to suffer from an SQL flaw, in effect negating the product's virtues in the eyes of those who like to skim through IT news headlines. It's similar to the way you expect a dentist to have good teeth.
Ironic is when one's words say one thing and one's actions another that contradict it.
I think you're thinking of another word: hypocrisy, e.g., a politician who claims to stand for morality but goes out with a hooker.
That's essentially illegal in most of the world. There's all sorts of bureaucratic stuff you have to go through if you want to drive on public roads. Not to mention the hassle of getting the thing licensed and probably emission tested as well.
Sadly, in most of the (3rd) world, most manufacturers only pay lip service (or a small bribe) to get the environmental license or whatnot they need to get their product out into the street.
You can also find books and websites about how to build your own car, but hardly anybody does that, statistically speaking.
Well, there's a big price difference between a car and a Nook, so I won't be surprised that fewer people are into car building vs. Nook modding. In the First World, that is.
In the developing world, all sorts of "car-like" vehicles get "built" out of used car parts imported or sneaked in through a country's ports. A good example would be the "jeepney" of the Philippines or the songthaew of Thailand. There are also variants of three-wheeled vehicles (tricycles) that adapt the motorcycle into the equivalent of a taxicab or, incredible as that might seem to Westerners, a mini-bus!
In those countries, assembling a vehicle might just be a bit more expensive than buying then modding an eBook reader but way more profitable since the product can be used for business and not just to stoke the hardware hacker's ego.
TFA shows only a model dressed in, well, a dress that looks little different from a bed sheet draped on by an actress in a PG-rated love scene. I mean, this is the sort of fashion that you can do with a little skill but lots of chutzpah. I'm sure a teen-aged girl with plenty of time but short on her mommy money can do a much, much better job.
I'd be more impressed if the app can do pants and a proper shirt that, even if it won't make the pages of GQ, I at least won't be ashamed to wear to work.
I doubt Ubuntu would be competing with Debian on the same things since Ubuntu's focus is user-friendliness with projects like the Unity desktop interface while Debian's focus is on building a stable system on more different architectures than any other free software distribution (other than NetBSD).
To be pedantic, not necessarily. IANAL but there's a good chance that the contributor of a kernel patch submitted it as part of his/her job. So there's a slim chance that the (GPL'ed) copyright belongs to the Company not the contributor as a person. There's also the matter of copyright assignment, but I've read that Linus (or the Linux Foundation) isn't as strict about that, as, say the GNU Project.
Not trying to start a troll war but is there any particular reason why Ubuntu was omitted. There seems to be far too many slots open (not that it's a bad thing), why can't they have squeezed in one more?
Daniel Holbach's blog post doesn't say much.
To be sure, all my favorite apps (!store) are represented, including Blender, Abiword, Scribus, GnuCash, and VLC (as Videolan). Aside from Fedora, other distros represented include Debian, OpenSuSa, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and NetBSD (but not OpenBSD unless my eyes have deceived me).
Besides the fact that few movies are still actually being made in Hollywood (California), the recorded entertainment market (to group all things that can be squished into optical media, and subsequently streamed, broadcast or file-shared) has expanded greatly since the turn of the millenium. So now you can get hit movies whose only or main connection to the large US entertainment companies is the distribution rights. And, hey, there are also large markets in other territories like India and Pacific Asia (Japan, Korea, etc), where actors, writers, and directors live, get rich, famous, laid, and die without having once had a successful US production.
Sounds like a synonym for mediocre but hey it's free. I have yet to watch TFE (the fine episode) because my torrent download rate is surprisingly slow. But reading through the comments at the VODO download page, assuming they aren't anonymous astroturfers, I get the feeling that it's actually good enough for broadcast TV. They'd probably be right if by such quality you mean either Paranormal Activity or the Blair Witch Project, a threshold you can easily reach with a well-written script, a good director and a dedicated cast.
Sadly the better free beer movies I've watched appear to be fan-made movies (or movies produced without explicit permission from materials copyrighted by other people), e.g. The Hunt for Gollum.
Also try the Mutopia Project, which has user-contributed sheet music in Lilypond format. Ready-to-print PDF output, as well as computer-generated MIDI format previews of the music, are also available on the site. (The last time I tried to mirror its music files resulted in a 1.4 GB file dump. It had some Bach, although I'm not sure if the Goldberg Variations was among them.)
All this while open source projects would be the perfect place to really shine with innovation and with something new. Why just copy, why not create something new?
First of all, I don't think few things are really new in terms of technological development. Most technology, if not all, is built upon a layer of old technology. The wheel was probably an evolution of the rolling log, a technology that nature invented. Famous computing technology examples: the Macintosh, which "innovated" on top of technologies developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and Windows, which... (you get the point).
But if by "new", you mean fairly new, then it's easy to trace the apparent lack of innovation to the shortage or more often absence of designers in open source projects. (This is something Canonical has been trying to address with projects like Unity with I'm not sure what level of success.) Designers are a necessity when dealing with graphical programs which are spatial, as against the more sequential nature of programming.
You can find lots of innovation on the console, which includes software like emacs (an innovation against the line editors of the time), the object-oriented scripting language Python, and even Unix itself. These are "old" examples of innovation, which I mention only because they are pretty well known.
On top of that the shooter games are all based on ID's engines that are many years old.
Not all open-source games are based on the ID engine. Here's one that isn't.
IGP's are sufficient for most games. Yes, you read that right. IGP's with good drivers are sufficient for playing the games that most people play. These include Flash games (Farmville) and the "demo" games that come with a typical OS installation (Solitaire).
I hate how supposed "gamers" dominate any discussion that remotely has anything to do with computer graphics. Not everybody wants to play Crysis (and I don't even know what that is, without a quick peek at Wikipedia).
No, not really. All of the planets are interesting in their own right, including the one under your feet. However, I'd nominate Mercury as the most boring of the bunch. It has no thick atmosphere to hide what's underneath (Venus), isn't Earth-like enough to be humanity's putative second home (Mars), a mini-solar system (Jupiter, Saturn and the other gas giants), nor a former double planet (Pluto and Charon).
The Japanese seem to have this reverential attitude toward business cards. Typically, a Japanese businessman will hand his card to you with both hands, as if it were a plaque or a ceremonial sword. I remember this well because of a massive faux pax I committed years ago. I made the error of scribbling my phone number on a slip of paper, after I received the business card of a Japanese guest to a semi-formal social function (yes, I sometimes attend one of those). He was quite polite, even smiling as he slipped the slip of paper into his wallet, but to my horror, I would see later how other people did their self-introduction properly, bowing slightly while holding out their own business cards with both hands.
Well, who knows, maybe now they'll be exchanging e-cards by holding out their cellphones at arm's length like two samurai warriors about to do battle.
My bet's on a couple of UAV missions. But, yes, expect this to be a long-range, remote-controlled war on the part of the Western powers that have signed up for the no-fly-zone.
I hate to be pessimistic about the no-fly-zone. But it seems to me that the Arab governments that backed calls for the UN to impose a no-fly-zone will simply use any foreign military action in Libya as justification for their own plans to intervene in the affairs of other states.
Witness the way Saudi Arabia sent its troops to Bahrain, presumably at the invitation of Bahrain's royal family. The governments in power in those two countries belong to a branch of Islam (Sunni) different from those that dominate the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain and some parts of Saudi Arabia (Shia Muslims).
So here we see foreign military intervention being used in support of an unpopular regime as against the possibility of foreign military intervention in Libya being used to support the removal of an unpopular regime.
Sci-fi is very, very difficult to translate to the screen.
You could probably say the same thing of every novel or short story. The story must be pruned to what can fit within the two hours or less attention-span of the typical movie-goer. Conversely, short stories must be expanded. Most of the characters' thoughts can't be revealed, except as occasional voice-over narration.
There is, however, nothing special (or specially difficult) about sci-fi novels or stories, especially now that we have CGI. (Before the '70s, showing a rocket in flight or a herd of dinosaurs would have been a big problem.) The question is knowing when to use CGI, and when not. Too much, and you eliminate all suspense or expectation on the viewers' part. Do you show the alien predator in all its horrific glory or do you show only its shadow until the climax?
Aside from their shock-resistance, I'm interested in SSD's for their reported energy efficiency compared to traditional platter-based magnetic disks. The power consumption part of the tests has interesting numbers on power usage that show traditional mobile hard drives being competitive to SSD's.
The most energy efficient 128 GB Kingston SSDNow draws a mere 0.2 watt when idle, but not much higher is the 750GB WD Scorpio Blue, which draws 0.4. On load, the numbers go up to 1.1 and 2.0 watts respectively, less than a watt of difference.
Are smaller (-1.8") SSD's more efficient than notebook-sized (2.5") SSD's? Besides the shock resistance, does an SSD offer that much of an advantage over a traditional HD when packed inside a tablet or smaller form factor computing device?
Employees are almost always courteous and do a consistently good job. They don't need managers breathing down their necks, but they also know that management isn't going to tolerate bullshit. Walk into a supermarket in the States and employees are routinely whining that they've had to work 5 minutes late.
Maybe it's because the focus of Americans isn't the workplace but somewhere else? Maybe this so-called courtesy is simply part of that work ethic. Maybe the Japanese are polite and diligent with their work because if they aren't someone could report them to the boss and they would lose face?
On the other hand, maybe that whining, moping, and chatting American store employee isn't deliberately being a jerk but has simply realized that it's much more likely that if the going gets tough it's not the Company that will stand up for him but his little circle (union) of fellow loafers and incidental jerks. I'm neither American nor Japanese, so I'm not sure. But there are two sides to a coin.
I don't think Japan actually refused help. The first BBC video I watched of the nuclear accident was news about the US military airlifting (not just offering) coolant to the overheating reactor. I'm pretty sure the Japanese would be more than willing to accept aid that comes with no strings attached.
Besides, as another poster implied, this is a story about rotating blackouts ("offered to beam their electrons"). Portable generators are at best a stop-gap measure that begs the question of where you get the fuel to power it up. More practical would be food, tents, first aid, portable toilets, used clothing, and maybe search-and-rescue robots.
The mythical Atlantis represented Athens in the play and was sunk to show that the result of such political arrogance resulted in destruction.
That's not exactly correct. Atlantis is set up as the anti-thesis, or opposite, of Athens, an anti-Athens, if you will. The second paragraph of the Wikipedia article[*] on Atlantis states:
In Plato's account, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune".
Of course, one could still mean that Atlantis, by being the opposite of Athens, actually represents Athens! But that's a semantic subtlety best reserved for a philosophical forum, not a social tech news site.
[*]I know. Not the most trustworthy resource. But the basic details appear to be borne out by a simple GSearch (keywords: "Atlantis" "Athens") showing the clear distinction being made between two advanced ancient states.
But then again, over the years I have heard similar feedback from GNOME Mobile participants, and people in Nokia --so it's not all Mark's fault. As Jono says here: GNOME does have a reputation of being hard to work with for companies -- no point in denying it (then again, so does the kernel, and they seem to get along fine).
Leaving aside the question of whether it's good for an open source project to have macho leadership, I think the comparison with Linux (the kernel) isn't valid. Linux, as every slashgeek well knows, is ruled by benevolent dictator. What Linus wants, Linux gets. Or you fork the kernel, which is what most everybody does. I think the last Gnome BD was a guy named Miguel, who has since gone on to other interests.
But perhaps more substantively, Linux differs from Gnome in that Gnome tends to be modular, while Linux is modular only in the sense you can do "modprobe fu ; rmmod bar". So even if Linux didn't have Linus, people are forced by the monolithic nature of the kernel to be more careful with the bits they insert or remove from the kernel. Modifying the kernel is a more surgical operation when compared to the more Lego-like nature of Gnome.
Gnome's modular nature thus makes casual forking (as practiced by Canonical, et al) easier than it is in projects of a more monolithic nature like Linux and, to a lesser extent, KDE.
Do you really really believe that a 5000 year old civilization with nearly 1.5 billion people, the highest average IQ in the world and lead by engineers, won't figure out how to design a CPU?
China indeed appears to be led by engineers rather than lawyers (maybe being a champion debater or orator isn't that useful in a single party state). As for "highest average IQ", I doubt that China's average IQ score would be much higher than the US since China has a greater base, where low scorers could pull down national average.
Results of my casual googling has turned up lists topped by countries in north-east Asia that include Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, countries whose average income per person is much higher than China's (which can imply, among other things, better nutrition and education).
Slashdot Mirror
Lame indeed. I just took a look at Messenger's supposed First Color Image of Mercury from Orbit. I thought I'd gone color blind. It looked so gray. Trying to reproduce the subtle shades in a color printer would be a terrible waste of ink or toner, as you'd be forced to go Cyan-Magenta-Yellow (CMY) to print out something not quite Black (K) or gray.
The mission may yet turn up some astounding scientific discovery, but Mercury isn't a very photogenic planet, as far as celestial bodies go.
That's why I said "expect". However, I'd still expect a dentist to have good teeth, even in a two- or one- dentist town. I expect a dentist to know all the tricks of having good teeth, like flossing, brushing after every meal, etc. If he sees a nasty cavity that could lead to bad teeth, I expect him to go and visit (even to the point of going out of town) another dentist who's just as good or a just a wee bit worse than him. Unless he's a self-schooled dentist who doesn't belong to any medical association, you'd expect him to have some contacts. Barbers probably are different since it's not the sort of profession where you have to pass an exam to get licensed, "high-end" hair "stylists" excepted.
Similarly I'd "expect" the MySql site to be free from, at the very least, exploitable security holes in their "star" product, even if that can never be true in practice. Image counts for a lot.
Unlike the reserved words of a computer program, words in a natural language have a wide latitude of uses, from the strict to the colloquial. Here, I see the "irony" in how a site designed to promote some type of "SQL" turns out to suffer from an SQL flaw, in effect negating the product's virtues in the eyes of those who like to skim through IT news headlines. It's similar to the way you expect a dentist to have good teeth.
Ironic is when one's words say one thing and one's actions another that contradict it.
I think you're thinking of another word: hypocrisy, e.g., a politician who claims to stand for morality but goes out with a hooker.
That's essentially illegal in most of the world. There's all sorts of bureaucratic stuff you have to go through if you want to drive on public roads. Not to mention the hassle of getting the thing licensed and probably emission tested as well.
Sadly, in most of the (3rd) world, most manufacturers only pay lip service (or a small bribe) to get the environmental license or whatnot they need to get their product out into the street.
You can also find books and websites about how to build your own car, but hardly anybody does that, statistically speaking.
Well, there's a big price difference between a car and a Nook, so I won't be surprised that fewer people are into car building vs. Nook modding. In the First World, that is.
In the developing world, all sorts of "car-like" vehicles get "built" out of used car parts imported or sneaked in through a country's ports. A good example would be the "jeepney" of the Philippines or the songthaew of Thailand. There are also variants of three-wheeled vehicles (tricycles) that adapt the motorcycle into the equivalent of a taxicab or, incredible as that might seem to Westerners, a mini-bus!
In those countries, assembling a vehicle might just be a bit more expensive than buying then modding an eBook reader but way more profitable since the product can be used for business and not just to stoke the hardware hacker's ego.
TFA shows only a model dressed in, well, a dress that looks little different from a bed sheet draped on by an actress in a PG-rated love scene. I mean, this is the sort of fashion that you can do with a little skill but lots of chutzpah. I'm sure a teen-aged girl with plenty of time but short on her mommy money can do a much, much better job.
I'd be more impressed if the app can do pants and a proper shirt that, even if it won't make the pages of GQ, I at least won't be ashamed to wear to work.
I doubt Ubuntu would be competing with Debian on the same things since Ubuntu's focus is user-friendliness with projects like the Unity desktop interface while Debian's focus is on building a stable system on more different architectures than any other free software distribution (other than NetBSD).
To be pedantic, not necessarily. IANAL but there's a good chance that the contributor of a kernel patch submitted it as part of his/her job. So there's a slim chance that the (GPL'ed) copyright belongs to the Company not the contributor as a person. There's also the matter of copyright assignment, but I've read that Linus (or the Linux Foundation) isn't as strict about that, as, say the GNU Project.
Not trying to start a troll war but is there any particular reason why Ubuntu was omitted. There seems to be far too many slots open (not that it's a bad thing), why can't they have squeezed in one more?
Daniel Holbach's blog post doesn't say much. To be sure, all my favorite apps (!store) are represented, including Blender, Abiword, Scribus, GnuCash, and VLC (as Videolan). Aside from Fedora, other distros represented include Debian, OpenSuSa, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and NetBSD (but not OpenBSD unless my eyes have deceived me).
Besides the fact that few movies are still actually being made in Hollywood (California), the recorded entertainment market (to group all things that can be squished into optical media, and subsequently streamed, broadcast or file-shared) has expanded greatly since the turn of the millenium. So now you can get hit movies whose only or main connection to the large US entertainment companies is the distribution rights. And, hey, there are also large markets in other territories like India and Pacific Asia (Japan, Korea, etc), where actors, writers, and directors live, get rich, famous, laid, and die without having once had a successful US production.
Sounds like a synonym for mediocre but hey it's free. I have yet to watch TFE (the fine episode) because my torrent download rate is surprisingly slow. But reading through the comments at the VODO download page, assuming they aren't anonymous astroturfers, I get the feeling that it's actually good enough for broadcast TV. They'd probably be right if by such quality you mean either Paranormal Activity or the Blair Witch Project, a threshold you can easily reach with a well-written script, a good director and a dedicated cast.
Sadly the better free beer movies I've watched appear to be fan-made movies (or movies produced without explicit permission from materials copyrighted by other people), e.g. The Hunt for Gollum.
Also try the Mutopia Project, which has user-contributed sheet music in Lilypond format. Ready-to-print PDF output, as well as computer-generated MIDI format previews of the music, are also available on the site. (The last time I tried to mirror its music files resulted in a 1.4 GB file dump. It had some Bach, although I'm not sure if the Goldberg Variations was among them.)
First of all, I don't think few things are really new in terms of technological development. Most technology, if not all, is built upon a layer of old technology. The wheel was probably an evolution of the rolling log, a technology that nature invented. Famous computing technology examples: the Macintosh, which "innovated" on top of technologies developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and Windows, which ... (you get the point).
But if by "new", you mean fairly new, then it's easy to trace the apparent lack of innovation to the shortage or more often absence of designers in open source projects. (This is something Canonical has been trying to address with projects like Unity with I'm not sure what level of success.) Designers are a necessity when dealing with graphical programs which are spatial, as against the more sequential nature of programming.
You can find lots of innovation on the console, which includes software like emacs (an innovation against the line editors of the time), the object-oriented scripting language Python, and even Unix itself. These are "old" examples of innovation, which I mention only because they are pretty well known.
Not all open-source games are based on the ID engine. Here's one that isn't.
IGP's are sufficient for most games. Yes, you read that right. IGP's with good drivers are sufficient for playing the games that most people play. These include Flash games (Farmville) and the "demo" games that come with a typical OS installation (Solitaire).
I hate how supposed "gamers" dominate any discussion that remotely has anything to do with computer graphics. Not everybody wants to play Crysis (and I don't even know what that is, without a quick peek at Wikipedia).
No, not really. All of the planets are interesting in their own right, including the one under your feet. However, I'd nominate Mercury as the most boring of the bunch. It has no thick atmosphere to hide what's underneath (Venus), isn't Earth-like enough to be humanity's putative second home (Mars), a mini-solar system (Jupiter, Saturn and the other gas giants), nor a former double planet (Pluto and Charon).
The Japanese seem to have this reverential attitude toward business cards. Typically, a Japanese businessman will hand his card to you with both hands, as if it were a plaque or a ceremonial sword. I remember this well because of a massive faux pax I committed years ago. I made the error of scribbling my phone number on a slip of paper, after I received the business card of a Japanese guest to a semi-formal social function (yes, I sometimes attend one of those). He was quite polite, even smiling as he slipped the slip of paper into his wallet, but to my horror, I would see later how other people did their self-introduction properly, bowing slightly while holding out their own business cards with both hands.
Well, who knows, maybe now they'll be exchanging e-cards by holding out their cellphones at arm's length like two samurai warriors about to do battle.
My bet's on a couple of UAV missions. But, yes, expect this to be a long-range, remote-controlled war on the part of the Western powers that have signed up for the no-fly-zone.
I hate to be pessimistic about the no-fly-zone. But it seems to me that the Arab governments that backed calls for the UN to impose a no-fly-zone will simply use any foreign military action in Libya as justification for their own plans to intervene in the affairs of other states.
Witness the way Saudi Arabia sent its troops to Bahrain, presumably at the invitation of Bahrain's royal family. The governments in power in those two countries belong to a branch of Islam (Sunni) different from those that dominate the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain and some parts of Saudi Arabia (Shia Muslims). So here we see foreign military intervention being used in support of an unpopular regime as against the possibility of foreign military intervention in Libya being used to support the removal of an unpopular regime.
You could probably say the same thing of every novel or short story. The story must be pruned to what can fit within the two hours or less attention-span of the typical movie-goer. Conversely, short stories must be expanded. Most of the characters' thoughts can't be revealed, except as occasional voice-over narration.
There is, however, nothing special (or specially difficult) about sci-fi novels or stories, especially now that we have CGI. (Before the '70s, showing a rocket in flight or a herd of dinosaurs would have been a big problem.) The question is knowing when to use CGI, and when not. Too much, and you eliminate all suspense or expectation on the viewers' part. Do you show the alien predator in all its horrific glory or do you show only its shadow until the climax?
Aside from their shock-resistance, I'm interested in SSD's for their reported energy efficiency compared to traditional platter-based magnetic disks. The power consumption part of the tests has interesting numbers on power usage that show traditional mobile hard drives being competitive to SSD's.
The most energy efficient 128 GB Kingston SSDNow draws a mere 0.2 watt when idle, but not much higher is the 750GB WD Scorpio Blue, which draws 0.4. On load, the numbers go up to 1.1 and 2.0 watts respectively, less than a watt of difference.
Are smaller (-1.8") SSD's more efficient than notebook-sized (2.5") SSD's? Besides the shock resistance, does an SSD offer that much of an advantage over a traditional HD when packed inside a tablet or smaller form factor computing device?
Employees are almost always courteous and do a consistently good job. They don't need managers breathing down their necks, but they also know that management isn't going to tolerate bullshit. Walk into a supermarket in the States and employees are routinely whining that they've had to work 5 minutes late.
Maybe it's because the focus of Americans isn't the workplace but somewhere else? Maybe this so-called courtesy is simply part of that work ethic. Maybe the Japanese are polite and diligent with their work because if they aren't someone could report them to the boss and they would lose face?
On the other hand, maybe that whining, moping, and chatting American store employee isn't deliberately being a jerk but has simply realized that it's much more likely that if the going gets tough it's not the Company that will stand up for him but his little circle (union) of fellow loafers and incidental jerks. I'm neither American nor Japanese, so I'm not sure. But there are two sides to a coin.
I don't think Japan actually refused help. The first BBC video I watched of the nuclear accident was news about the US military airlifting (not just offering) coolant to the overheating reactor. I'm pretty sure the Japanese would be more than willing to accept aid that comes with no strings attached.
Besides, as another poster implied, this is a story about rotating blackouts ("offered to beam their electrons"). Portable generators are at best a stop-gap measure that begs the question of where you get the fuel to power it up. More practical would be food, tents, first aid, portable toilets, used clothing, and maybe search-and-rescue robots.
That's not exactly correct. Atlantis is set up as the anti-thesis, or opposite, of Athens, an anti-Athens, if you will. The second paragraph of the Wikipedia article[*] on Atlantis states:
Of course, one could still mean that Atlantis, by being the opposite of Athens, actually represents Athens! But that's a semantic subtlety best reserved for a philosophical forum, not a social tech news site.
[*]I know. Not the most trustworthy resource. But the basic details appear to be borne out by a simple GSearch (keywords: "Atlantis" "Athens") showing the clear distinction being made between two advanced ancient states.
Leaving aside the question of whether it's good for an open source project to have macho leadership, I think the comparison with Linux (the kernel) isn't valid. Linux, as every slashgeek well knows, is ruled by benevolent dictator. What Linus wants, Linux gets. Or you fork the kernel, which is what most everybody does. I think the last Gnome BD was a guy named Miguel, who has since gone on to other interests.
But perhaps more substantively, Linux differs from Gnome in that Gnome tends to be modular, while Linux is modular only in the sense you can do "modprobe fu ; rmmod bar". So even if Linux didn't have Linus, people are forced by the monolithic nature of the kernel to be more careful with the bits they insert or remove from the kernel. Modifying the kernel is a more surgical operation when compared to the more Lego-like nature of Gnome.
Gnome's modular nature thus makes casual forking (as practiced by Canonical, et al) easier than it is in projects of a more monolithic nature like Linux and, to a lesser extent, KDE.
China indeed appears to be led by engineers rather than lawyers (maybe being a champion debater or orator isn't that useful in a single party state). As for "highest average IQ", I doubt that China's average IQ score would be much higher than the US since China has a greater base, where low scorers could pull down national average.
Results of my casual googling has turned up lists topped by countries in north-east Asia that include Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, countries whose average income per person is much higher than China's (which can imply, among other things, better nutrition and education).