Typically with stories tagged askslashdot you need only read the submission itself. Or do you mean you have that esoteric abillity to answer questions you don't know?
I prefer a hardware solution. Different devices for different users, preferably with some sort of hardware locking mechanism for the NC stuff. I'm rather suspicious of software-only solutions since they're either a joke or too expensive or complex for the task at hand unless you're a bum willing to tweak all day.
No, blame Hollywood. This sounds like the plot of some kiddie adventure movie where the kids have to sneak out of the house/dorm to save the world. Put the clueless/unsympathetic adults to bed with drugs or the Harry Potter equivalent of such. That, or she's a big Bart Simpson fan.
I see the inevitable humor of saying year X is the the year of Y. But I suspect there are similarities between the year of Linux on the Desktop and the year of Private Flight to Space. It either won't happen or it would just happen because someone we know has just won a raffle ticket to the ISS and beyond. For that matter was there ever a year of Linux on the Server or in the Pocket? I'm still hedging my bets on 2013 being the year of 3D Printing on Desktop.
Agreed, except that the Soviets have been history for over two decades now.
Even the current $3 billion budget would be more than enough for a private space company to develop a new launch system, provided the amount is focused on the right projects. I suspect a good part of the amount is taken up by the bureaucracy and deep space missions that fail.
While interplanetary research is good, I'd prefer a focus on near-Earth missions geared toward the exploitation of space or at least the development of a more self-sustaining space economy as far as fuel and life-support systems are concerned. That could involve the usual back-to-Moon-to-stay scenarios or something more esoteric like building solar arrays in Earth orbit.
"Those are seriously your only two MORAL choices. Everything else is equivocation about how cheap a bastard you are."
In most cases, especially for useless stuff like iPhone games, yes. But I can imagine a case where violating a person or a company's so-called "intellectual property" is the MORE moral thing to do.
Imagine someone has developed a drug that can cure a zombie epidemic, and imagine that that person charged $1M for the cure. Would you pay up? Or would you just acquire one sample by foul means or fair and reverse engineer the formula? A less frivolous, more realistic scenario: some 3rd World countries, such as India, have passed laws allowing for the manufacture of "generic" versions of drugs for common diseases like high-blood pressure. Not all of these drugs are based on lapsed patents.
I don't have a Google link for examples of such technically "illegal" drugs, but just look back at last year's anti-ACTA protests. IIRC, one of the provisions of the proposed treaty dealed with the confiscation of "counterfeit" drugs simply because they were not manufactured by the company that owned or had a license to the relevant drug patents. The provision covered shipment of drugs that were merely in transit to a third country and not destined for the market of the country that seized the shipment.
But the cheaper version of the board doesn't have an Ethernet connector. So your choice for an Ethernet or whatever net connection for those boards will still be a USB dongle.
*Funny but I just noticed that my Android cheapad which has no Ethernet connector, has an Ethernet option in addition to the usual BT and Wifi.
"Intel probably have the processors that are 'coming out' in 2017 already laying on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere by the millions."
In the off chance you meant this literally, no. It would be extremely stupid to stock up real hardware that far ahead. I do suspect however that Intel has the technology already in the labs, which I suppose is what they base their so-called "roadmaps" on. The future is already here, it just hasn't been stress-tested yet.
Mod parent up. A hopefully not woefully wrong layman's explanation for the program's advantages over plain dd: ddrescue or gddrescue can skip unreadable sectors based on some parameter like number of retries.
By default ddrescue also doesn't zero out or truncate its output. So if during one pass you sucessfully copied parts 1 to 10, you can resume copying from parts 11 to N. This is a nice feature because a sector that's unreadable during one pass may turn out to be readable during the next pass. I've not used ddrescue yet on magnetic media, but it has saved the data off quite a few DVD/CDs I used for backups before I decided to just dump all my data off several cheap external hard drives.
There are probably a few other tools similar to ddrescue, available via the Debian/Ubuntu repositories: apt-cache search is your friend.
The bulkiness of the PDA-like hackware makes me wonder why the RasPeople didn't design a sleeker board. I mean something as slim as an iPod touch or a Palm Pilot.
It's not as if there are significant design issues with a flatter board. "Only" the I/O connectors appear to be needlessly sticking out. How much more would it cost to substitute tinier versions of the USB and HDMI ports in the unit? Since feature/smartphones are already outselling PCS, I can only assume that the micro/mini versions of these standard ports have already achieved economies of scale.
If some Indian company can produce an el cheapo $50 tablet complete with LCD, rechargeable battery, and case, and there are full-featured phones that are cheaper than that, why can't there be a RasPi that one can hack into a homebrew eReader?
Jeesh, people, where are your priorities? We already know that Win 8 sucks, Apple is a walled garden, and the Raspi is a great platform for doing nothing. How about some "news" for nerds?
"I'd say Russian, Japanese, or German; those three countries seem to have a pretty big focus on technology."
The birth rates of the three countries are going down and their populations are greying. Beyond the near term, it might make sense to learn their languages not because of their technological prowess but because they would soon need more warm bodies to take care of their old folks. Or robots. Innovation is likely to drift to Asia southeast of China, South America, or even Africa once it fixes its Hunger Games.
Best language to learn? Probably still English, with a focus on understanding the way non-native speakers mangle the language, that, is learn the local dialects. Otherwise, you're better off investing your time in stuff that would help you survive the singularity or the crash of technology. Learn robotics, personal fabrication, genetic engineeering, even agriculture.
While the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth so we can't directly observe much of the far side, the Moon has no permanently "dark side" that receives no sunlight. The more obvious difference between the two hemispheres is that the far side, probably because it's more exposed to incoming space debris, is more cratered than the near side.
While crashing the space probes on the far side is much like throwing tear gas in a gas chamber, I wonder whether the far side is actually the more valuable side from a scientific standpoint. While life on the Moon is extremely unlikely, the craters themselves could contain traces of organic and other alien compounds deposited from wayward comets or meteors.
The only "authors" who would benefit from this would be undercover agents and trolls. What would be the point of mutating the way you write so that you can no longer be identified or linked as the author of what you wrote before?
An example to make my point clear. Suppose you're an Islamic fundamentalist ranting about US cultural imperialism. Using the tools you gradually change what you write, under a sequence of aliases, until soon you have the online opinions of a Neocon!
It would have been easier if you simply wrote less and didn't take strong opinions on everything under the sun.
Pretty useless maneuver against a group that wants to spread their hate message. All that Anonymous have done is give even more publicity to these real life trolls. Well, I guess I'm guilty of that too.
Not stupid but too long. The most succesfull new companies or products tend to be have names that are short visually or when pronounced:
Facebook or even just FB Twitter Google iPhone Android XBox PS3/PSP YouTube
YouTube is a stupid, grammatically incorrect name. But it the internal vowel "rhyme" between "you" and "tube" gives it more impact than "YourTube".
I'd prefer something vsually more creative for the name of a 3D printer though. How about "3Doodle" with the logo resembling something l33tish like 3D00DL3, or a visual palindrome like 3DOODE with the last two characters being a left-facing "D" and a curvy "E" made to look like a right-facing "3".
Assuming there's a difference between will and intelligence, that motive and knowledge aren't just different aspects of the same thing, any self-improving superhuman AI need only be given one command for the whole world to end in chaos. "Do No Evil" will probably end in mere paralysis, the AI shutting itself down. I shudder to think of the consequences of commanding the AI to "Do GOOD".
"...indeed since we'll be having a very large pool of otherwise idle people, it should be easy to recruit far more teachers per class, increasing the quality of education in all subjects."
No, the only way the march toward relentless automation can end well is for people to become more and more self-reliant, that is by adopting the space colonist/survivalist ethic. Think 3D printing and extrapolate to molecular assemblers. The only way increasing automation will not lead to dystopia is when everybody owns the means of production, not in the Communist but in the BitTorrent-distributed sense.
There's no need to deploy more teachers. People can learn by themselves by downloading their lessons off the Internet and having advanced AI check their homework.
"24 fps with low-speed shutter (older analog cameras), where there is motion blur is ok; motion blur approaches what we see with a naked eye."
I'm not sure if it was one of Brendan Frasers's Mummy movies, but I remember watching a sword-and-sorcerers fantasy some years back. What I found jarring was the way the swords slashed the air. Their motion wasn't smooth but "jumped" in a quantum kind of way, as if I was looking at a rapid "sequence of stills". Was this because the CGI swords weren't rendered with enough motion blur? Or was this a side effect of the crappy film to video transfer of the DVD I watched?
"Given that the average person is 2 meters tall (give or take), and adding the bulk of hard-vacuum capable work gear, making maintenance access shafts smaller than 2 meters would cause a lot more problems. I'd recommend, instead, putting a locking/securable cover or grate over entrances and exits of access shafts."
I find your comment confusing. Are you measuring the width or the length of the access shaft. A 2-meter wide shaft (slightly over six feet) should be more than enough for the average astronaut who doesn't eat 25 kg of hamburgers a day. Perhaps you're thinking of the shaft as a tunnel that you would walk through, your body perpendicular to the walls of the shaft? But in space, which I presume is where we'll build the Death Star, you should be able to glide thru the shaft, your body parallel to the walls.
This is on a different level from the Onion spoofs of world leaders like Obama or Kim Jung'Un. This is the real Australian Prime Minister doing the spoof. US presidents have been known to pardon Thanksgiving turkeys and part of running for public office in any democratic country is to show your "lighter side" in front of the media, but Gillard's "speech" goes beyond the realm of a simple practical joke. That or the producers of the show have done some nifty CGI work worthy of a Hollywood disaster movie.
Unless you really need it, then choose something more modest than a honking 1000W PSU. Not a frag-fracking gamer? A 90W DC PSU should have enough juice for your 65W CPU. As PSU efficiency is measured in percentage, even a 50% inefficient 90W PSU will beat a 95% efficient 1000W PSU.
I'd want to know if the knowledge would allow for sufficient preparation. If scientists found out about the impactor only hours before impact, I'd treat it as an unexpectedly massive earthquake. Neither would I want to know if the astral body is a wandering black hole and cannot be deflected even if its approach was known years in advance. Better die in peace.
I'd want to know if the asteroid is of manageable size and there's a rat's ass chance that we can petition our respective governments to stop all their goddamn wars and spend the global defense budget diverting the asteroid with multiple space missions that provide for back-up plans in case mission A fails.
Not counting the usual border "exchanges", a war with North Korea is extremely unlikely unless NK accidentally or deliberately launches an actual nuclear warhead. China and Russia wouldn't want a war so close to home because conflict leads to chaos, what with refugees, disruption of supply routes, and even the possibility of local dissidents taking advantage of the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
"In trad slashdot style, I didn't read."
Typically with stories tagged askslashdot you need only read the submission itself. Or do you mean you have that esoteric abillity to answer questions you don't know?
I prefer a hardware solution. Different devices for different users, preferably with some sort of hardware locking mechanism for the NC stuff. I'm rather suspicious of software-only solutions since they're either a joke or too expensive or complex for the task at hand unless you're a bum willing to tweak all day.
No, blame Hollywood. This sounds like the plot of some kiddie adventure movie where the kids have to sneak out of the house/dorm to save the world. Put the clueless/unsympathetic adults to bed with drugs or the Harry Potter equivalent of such. That, or she's a big Bart Simpson fan.
I see the inevitable humor of saying year X is the the year of Y. But I suspect there are similarities between the year of Linux on the Desktop and the year of Private Flight to Space. It either won't happen or it would just happen because someone we know has just won a raffle ticket to the ISS and beyond. For that matter was there ever a year of Linux on the Server or in the Pocket? I'm still hedging my bets on 2013 being the year of 3D Printing on Desktop.
Agreed, except that the Soviets have been history for over two decades now.
Even the current $3 billion budget would be more than enough for a private space company to develop a new launch system, provided the amount is focused on the right projects. I suspect a good part of the amount is taken up by the bureaucracy and deep space missions that fail.
While interplanetary research is good, I'd prefer a focus on near-Earth missions geared toward the exploitation of space or at least the development of a more self-sustaining space economy as far as fuel and life-support systems are concerned. That could involve the usual back-to-Moon-to-stay scenarios or something more esoteric like building solar arrays in Earth orbit.
"Those are seriously your only two MORAL choices. Everything else is equivocation about how cheap a bastard you are."
In most cases, especially for useless stuff like iPhone games, yes. But I can imagine a case where violating a person or a company's so-called "intellectual property" is the MORE moral thing to do.
Imagine someone has developed a drug that can cure a zombie epidemic, and imagine that that person charged $1M for the cure. Would you pay up? Or would you just acquire one sample by foul means or fair and reverse engineer the formula? A less frivolous, more realistic scenario: some 3rd World countries, such as India, have passed laws allowing for the manufacture of "generic" versions of drugs for common diseases like high-blood pressure. Not all of these drugs are based on lapsed patents.
I don't have a Google link for examples of such technically "illegal" drugs, but just look back at last year's anti-ACTA protests. IIRC, one of the provisions of the proposed treaty dealed with the confiscation of "counterfeit" drugs simply because they were not manufactured by the company that owned or had a license to the relevant drug patents. The provision covered shipment of drugs that were merely in transit to a third country and not destined for the market of the country that seized the shipment.
But the cheaper version of the board doesn't have an Ethernet connector. So your choice for an Ethernet or whatever net connection for those boards will still be a USB dongle.
*Funny but I just noticed that my Android cheapad which has no Ethernet connector, has an Ethernet option in addition to the usual BT and Wifi.
"Intel probably have the processors that are 'coming out' in 2017 already laying on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere by the millions."
In the off chance you meant this literally, no. It would be extremely stupid to stock up real hardware that far ahead. I do suspect however that Intel has the technology already in the labs, which I suppose is what they base their so-called "roadmaps" on. The future is already here, it just hasn't been stress-tested yet.
Mod parent up. A hopefully not woefully wrong layman's explanation for the program's advantages over plain dd: ddrescue or gddrescue can skip unreadable sectors based on some parameter like number of retries.
By default ddrescue also doesn't zero out or truncate its output. So if during one pass you sucessfully copied parts 1 to 10, you can resume copying from parts 11 to N. This is a nice feature because a sector that's unreadable during one pass may turn out to be readable during the next pass. I've not used ddrescue yet on magnetic media, but it has saved the data off quite a few DVD/CDs I used for backups before I decided to just dump all my data off several cheap external hard drives.
There are probably a few other tools similar to ddrescue, available via the Debian/Ubuntu repositories: apt-cache search is your friend.
The bulkiness of the PDA-like hackware makes me wonder why the RasPeople didn't design a sleeker board. I mean something as slim as an iPod touch or a Palm Pilot.
It's not as if there are significant design issues with a flatter board. "Only" the I/O connectors appear to be needlessly sticking out. How much more would it cost to substitute tinier versions of the USB and HDMI ports in the unit? Since feature/smartphones are already outselling PCS, I can only assume that the micro/mini versions of these standard ports have already achieved economies of scale.
If some Indian company can produce an el cheapo $50 tablet complete with LCD, rechargeable battery, and case, and there are full-featured phones that are cheaper than that, why can't there be a RasPi that one can hack into a homebrew eReader?
"I think there are better things to rant about than Windows 8 to be honest."
Absolutely. It's been a few hours and still no story on this truly monumental event:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20812870
Jeesh, people, where are your priorities? We already know that Win 8 sucks, Apple is a walled garden, and the Raspi is a great platform for doing nothing. How about some "news" for nerds?
"I'd say Russian, Japanese, or German; those three countries seem to have a pretty big focus on technology."
The birth rates of the three countries are going down and their populations are greying. Beyond the near term, it might make sense to learn their languages not because of their technological prowess but because they would soon need more warm bodies to take care of their old folks. Or robots. Innovation is likely to drift to Asia southeast of China, South America, or even Africa once it fixes its Hunger Games.
Best language to learn? Probably still English, with a focus on understanding the way non-native speakers mangle the language, that, is learn the local dialects. Otherwise, you're better off investing your time in stuff that would help you survive the singularity or the crash of technology. Learn robotics, personal fabrication, genetic engineeering, even agriculture.
While the Moon is tidally locked to the Earth so we can't directly observe much of the far side, the Moon has no permanently "dark side" that receives no sunlight. The more obvious difference between the two hemispheres is that the far side, probably because it's more exposed to incoming space debris, is more cratered than the near side.
While crashing the space probes on the far side is much like throwing tear gas in a gas chamber, I wonder whether the far side is actually the more valuable side from a scientific standpoint. While life on the Moon is extremely unlikely, the craters themselves could contain traces of organic and other alien compounds deposited from wayward comets or meteors.
The only "authors" who would benefit from this would be undercover agents and trolls. What would be the point of mutating the way you write so that you can no longer be identified or linked as the author of what you wrote before?
An example to make my point clear. Suppose you're an Islamic fundamentalist ranting about US cultural imperialism. Using the tools you gradually change what you write, under a sequence of aliases, until soon you have the online opinions of a Neocon!
It would have been easier if you simply wrote less and didn't take strong opinions on everything under the sun.
Pretty useless maneuver against a group that wants to spread their hate message. All that Anonymous have done is give even more publicity to these real life trolls. Well, I guess I'm guilty of that too.
"The Cloud will always die."
Old clouds never die. They just fade away. Might as well be consistent with the meteorological metaphor.
Not stupid but too long. The most succesfull new companies or products tend to be have names that are short visually or when pronounced:
Facebook or even just FB
Twitter
Google
iPhone
Android
XBox
PS3/PSP
YouTube
YouTube is a stupid, grammatically incorrect name. But it the internal vowel "rhyme" between "you" and "tube" gives it more impact than "YourTube".
I'd prefer something vsually more creative for the name of a 3D printer though. How about "3Doodle" with the logo resembling something l33tish like 3D00DL3, or a visual palindrome like 3DOODE with the last two characters being a left-facing "D" and a curvy "E" made to look like a right-facing "3".
Assuming there's a difference between will and intelligence, that motive and knowledge aren't just different aspects of the same thing, any self-improving superhuman AI need only be given one command for the whole world to end in chaos. "Do No Evil" will probably end in mere paralysis, the AI shutting itself down. I shudder to think of the consequences of commanding the AI to "Do GOOD".
"...indeed since we'll be having a very large pool of otherwise idle people, it should be easy to recruit far more teachers per class, increasing the quality of education in all subjects."
No, the only way the march toward relentless automation can end well is for people to become more and more self-reliant, that is by adopting the space colonist/survivalist ethic. Think 3D printing and extrapolate to molecular assemblers. The only way increasing automation will not lead to dystopia is when everybody owns the means of production, not in the Communist but in the BitTorrent-distributed sense.
There's no need to deploy more teachers. People can learn by themselves by downloading their lessons off the Internet and having advanced AI check their homework.
"24 fps with low-speed shutter (older analog cameras), where there is motion blur is ok; motion blur approaches what we see with a naked eye."
I'm not sure if it was one of Brendan Frasers's Mummy movies, but I remember watching a sword-and-sorcerers fantasy some years back. What I found jarring was the way the swords slashed the air. Their motion wasn't smooth but "jumped" in a quantum kind of way, as if I was looking at a rapid "sequence of stills". Was this because the CGI swords weren't rendered with enough motion blur? Or was this a side effect of the crappy film to video transfer of the DVD I watched?
Indeed, the title makes you think that BTRFS was trojaned or worse is malware.
'Access shafts smaller than 2 meters'
"Given that the average person is 2 meters tall (give or take), and adding the bulk of hard-vacuum capable work gear, making maintenance access shafts smaller than 2 meters would cause a lot more problems. I'd recommend, instead, putting a locking/securable cover or grate over entrances and exits of access shafts."
I find your comment confusing. Are you measuring the width or the length of the access shaft. A 2-meter wide shaft (slightly over six feet) should be more than enough for the average astronaut who doesn't eat 25 kg of hamburgers a day. Perhaps you're thinking of the shaft as a tunnel that you would walk through, your body perpendicular to the walls of the shaft? But in space, which I presume is where we'll build the Death Star, you should be able to glide thru the shaft, your body parallel to the walls.
This is on a different level from the Onion spoofs of world leaders like Obama or Kim Jung'Un. This is the real Australian Prime Minister doing the spoof. US presidents have been known to pardon Thanksgiving turkeys and part of running for public office in any democratic country is to show your "lighter side" in front of the media, but Gillard's "speech" goes beyond the realm of a simple practical joke. That or the producers of the show have done some nifty CGI work worthy of a Hollywood disaster movie.
Unless you really need it, then choose something more modest than a honking 1000W PSU. Not a frag-fracking gamer? A 90W DC PSU should have enough juice for your 65W CPU. As PSU efficiency is measured in percentage, even a 50% inefficient 90W PSU will beat a 95% efficient 1000W PSU.
I'd want to know if the knowledge would allow for sufficient preparation. If scientists found out about the impactor only hours before impact, I'd treat it as an unexpectedly massive earthquake. Neither would I want to know if the astral body is a wandering black hole and cannot be deflected even if its approach was known years in advance. Better die in peace.
I'd want to know if the asteroid is of manageable size and there's a rat's ass chance that we can petition our respective governments to stop all their goddamn wars and spend the global defense budget diverting the asteroid with multiple space missions that provide for back-up plans in case mission A fails.
Not counting the usual border "exchanges", a war with North Korea is extremely unlikely unless NK accidentally or deliberately launches an actual nuclear warhead. China and Russia wouldn't want a war so close to home because conflict leads to chaos, what with refugees, disruption of supply routes, and even the possibility of local dissidents taking advantage of the situation.