Well, we do need a good OTV (Orbital Transfer Vehicle). You could use it to move stuff from orbit to orbit as needed.
So, how much fuel is this robot going to have on board? How or why would you refuel it?
The reason you put tiny fuel tanks on satellites is that it cost a lot to launch anything on a rocket. If it didn't then the engineers would put huge tanks on things sitting in orbit. Tanks designed to last as long as the next part expected to fail.
At there aren't that many kinds of propellant in use but you'd still be out of luck if you had something using hydrazine while the only thing left on the repair 'bot is nitrogen.
Orbital transfers aren't free or cheap (ask any Kerbel Space fan.) It will be interesting to see what propulsion system is proposed. There's interest in tethers for 'propelentless station keeping or orbital transfers.
Would you send up refuel cans for the robot? Would you de-orbit the robot once it ran out of fuel? Could you recover the robot to save costs, then?
Except for the Hubble Space Telescope most satellites are not designed to be serviced. What can a hypothetical servicing robot do about dead batteries or shorted out control systems or hole solar arrays on the existing fleet in orbit?
Finally, while space is pretty big, sending something on a 'soft' collision course with a dead satellite in the prime geosync orbit sounds like a great way to create more debris just where you don't want it. But it's Loral. They will have the best people Congressional pork spending can buy on staff to ask and answer these questions.
It would also be nice to get a long term study of humans in rotating space habitats to see if it has any issues not detectable by ground models. Theory says the vestibular system shouldn't be impacted by long duration in an fast "inverse" rotating frame. It evolved on a large rotating planet after all. But Yogi Beara and any astronomer will tell you that in theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they are different.
We have lots of experience with space craft that shuttle things off or to ground. There needs to be operational experience with vehicles that are designed to permanently remain in space. If you built your space stations strong enough and big enough you only need to attach an big engine to turn them into space ships.
Also, how hard is it to cut through an existing solar roof to add things like plumbing vents or to move a flue for a stove in a major kitchen remodel.
One advantage tar shingles, a very popular option in America, is that adding a roof vent is an hour long affair. Punch a nail up from underneath so you miss the rafters then just pull back the shingles, cut a hole, and apply the fascia kit for your vent. The tar shingles get layered right back on.
I presume these will be more like a terracotta roof but much less friendly to modification. Particularly when the shingle is generating power while exposed to light.
Still, if this is at least as durable as a class 4 "hurricane/tornado" shingle they might qualify for the common home owner insurance discounts on top of the price.
The home owner game is a market of long-term thinking. If you are only interested in next quarter or uncomfortable with 5 year break-even on your investments, just keep renting. From someone who owns a house.
These file in/sbin were system binaries. That is why/sbin directories are usually not on the default path for users.
Now,/usr/sbin, that one is confusing unless you know the sorrid history of/usr as a shared NFS mount. Files in/bin and/sbin may be statically linked or not even on real UNIX. For boot-time on Linux like Debian, static linking is for stuff in your initrd, rescue images or really really badly written software (*cough* Zabbix *cough*).
The changes directly impact two groups. Power users are going to need to know about/bin,/sbin,/usr, etc. as they are going to mess with their system directly. Package Maintainers are going to have another thing to pull hair out over when converting the raw sewage seeping out of poor developers into functional shipping things to end-users.
Until this impacts regular users or Joe X Windows who runs SteamOS it's like the mechanic changing the brand of shocks in your car. Someone who knows better will be using the correct tools to do the correct thing. Or everyone will hang them out to dry when your transmission drops out of the car on the highway.
So what am I missing? What is the actual benefit to separating heavy industry and people?
That it is really really easy to get things down into a gravity well.
In orbit? Just toss the package out the back fast enough and it comes down all on it's own. Take care to not hit anything on the way down.
Also, space colonization for real will the subject to huge limitations. Suppose you manufacture stuff in orbit and have the technology to ship it down to the ground. The landing process is the same technology for dropping a bomb anywhere with minutes notice from an effectively unreachable location. You don't even need bombs. Rods from God are a thing.
Governments have a long-term interest to ensure colonization - not industrial development - is slow, limited and guaranteed to align with their purposes. Space is the ultimate anti-government, anti-anyone position. Literally the high ground. Otherwise you'll get the plot of Heinlein's book, Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
But if you put heavy industry in space and most people still live on the ground, it takes an incredible amount of energy to get the raw resources into orbit and bring the finish products back down
Lifting anything into space to bring it back is a fool's errand. Look at how much of the Saturn V that went to the moon came back. Plenty of resources exist in space already to mine locally.
And without on-site captive customers...err, colonists, the economics dominate the situation. Industrialization is most likely to happen around the time that industrial jobs finish being taken by robots. That way you don't even need to ship messy old people with their huge life support systems. With enough resource scarcity to make market-wide recycling economic this would only be done for selected items anyway. Anything that can't be automated would be telepresence, keeping your workers and citizens safely in reach of the police and military.
You would always build wood stuff on the Earth. But if I could drop 10,000 custom-yet-completely-prefab concrete and aluminum houses, white goods and all, anywhere in 10 minutes (with clearance from traffic control) that could be a game changer for disaster relief or interesting for urban development.
But with any factory in a new area the problem is getting the first one up. Then you have the infrastructure to get many more much cheaper and quicker. Just look at how industrialization happened everywhere on the Earth.
BioSphere II was a poorly planned theme-park garden now owned by the University of Arizona.
Want to see what can be done if you really understand ecology and not just theme park construction? Look at Ascension Island. Joseph Hooker, with the aid of Charles Darwin and Kew gardens, built the ecosystem on the island out of completely foreign species. This cloud rainforest was built whole cloth on a bare lump of clinker sticking out of the ocean long before electrification.
The key difference is ocean.
Biosphere II was designed with almost no significant bodies of water containing phytoplankton, which produce up to 85% of all the oxygen. The facility has a glorified wake pool that would have fit in a large cities' water park. The planners put in 50% more grassland than synthetic ocean. Much of that 850m "ocean" is dedicated to a coral reef. Unsurprisingly, the oxygen levels crashed soon after closing the doors. Both times.
If one thing was unrealistic about O'Neil Colonies it was the sheer lack of mixing oceans in all the designs. Water is one of the most abundant substances outside the dry line in the Solar system. It's also a good radiation shield and has high thermal mass. The giant magic space windows that somehow didn't let in vast amounts of cosmic radiation were more realistic.
O'Neil also wrote about Bernal Spheres. These are slightly better, but have their own engineering challenges. Artists still show the interiors as if they were a cutout of a heavily populated Italian riverside. More relaistic would be 70-80% ocean with islands or peninsula. But in Bezo's case it's probably a matter of go big or go home. And the Island Three plans are certainly Big Homes.
The space departments clean these landers quite well. But exploding on impact was either effective at sterilizing the craft in a final way or spread the contamination over the maximal area.
In both cases Mars maintains a reputation as the place that robots go to die.
The study is actually important. They showed that the brains didn't recover from the damage as expected. The radiation treatment did not trigger the plastic repair behavior expected from an injured brain.
Yes, the particles used don't resemble background Solar radiation. It doesn't even resemble the stream of lightweight charged particles from a Coronal Mass ejection. However, the model is similar to the burst of Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). Like the kind you get on an unplanned spacewalk to fix something on the outside of your spaceship. Or if your shielding fails.
It is very hard to make a usable spacesuit for a human that shields against individual sometimes neutral particles with the energy of a fastball thrown by a world record setting baseball pitcher. It is also hard to build a light enough and thick enough shield against CBR when your astronauts insist on hanging out on the edges of your rotating spacecraft to avoid losing bone mass.
This lack of repair response is the kind of thing you have to learn about to be a space faring species. It's the science part of science and engineering.
Fixing it is the engineering part. You'll have to use better shielding. Or you can genetically engineer people to trigger the plastic response to damage like Water Bears use. Or just make all repairs outside the CBR shielding involve robots and drones.
Is the problem of cheap blue LEDs News worthy? The conversation certainly is. News can inform but need not always be just current events, particularly on the Internet where nothing is paper.
Slashdot is a news aggregation site. Ostensibly for 'News for nerds, stuff that matters' at founding. In practice is was a blog for Rob Malda, CmdrTaco. It was also a website with an accidentally really good commenting technology.
Been around long enough to see the jokes about not reading the article? Then you have probably been around long enough to see the argument that a lot of the people still visiting the site do so for the conversation in the articles. They provide everything from group-think arguments, good counter-arguments and funny jokes about the topic to warnings about click-bait, pay-wall free options and corrected sources.
If Slashdot had ever depended upon the quality of the articles it would have failed when it was still Chips-n-Dips hosted on a university student account. The commenting system is more than a chance to keep up your HTML skillz. People in the know are really providing the value. (Queue complaints about Facebook's model, etc.) However, getting quality articles is important to attracting the readership that does not know about the site.
For instance, this article currently doesn't shows up in Google search for annoying LEDs, being a day old. But the top link is for lifehacks.stackexchange.com for whatever reason. Stackechange and Amazon dominate the front page. I almost feel sorry for companies with products on that page. Even with no such thing as bad marketing, being known for having annoying lights on your non-party-joke product is not a good thing.
The Blue LED backlash article on McConnell's blog is page three. And he discusses a vendor that sells low intensity LEDs for computer products. But I expect - or at least hope - this slashdot article to make it to at least page three with McConnell's blog if not higher.
Does it work? No. But that depends on your definition of "work."
But Drug dogs work perfectly for law enforcement: they provide whatever answer the police want and the gullible public believe the dogs are infallible.
I fear you might not know just how accurate some critter's sense of smell is.
You might just not know how dogs behave.
If search dogs work then the dog should be fine to hunt these without the handler there at all. Just let the dog search on his or her own.
Search and rescue dogs work this way just fine every day. You let them go and they hunt down people easily that you or I cannot see or hear or smell.
But any person who raises and breeds and trains dogs professionally knows the first and only thing a well trained dog wants is to please the handler. That's the definition of well and trained for a dog. Drug sniffing dogs are very well trained.
In the hands of their handler a dog is just a dowsing rod for the man with the leash. Combine that with objects that conveniently fit in an officer's pocket and the long history of corrupt government officials. You shouldn't have plausible evidence. You should have plausible deniability. Yes, dogs are great at finding skunks or burnt joints you might be able to smell yourself. Not so much for things in air-tight closed containers on in piles of stuff that smells exactly like it.
But like you demonstrate, most people don't know how dogs behave. (Or how to spot magical thinking.)
Keep the handler away from the dog. Let it search on its own. Otherwise he or she is just a furry four-legged lie detector.
Human factors and industrial engineering turns out to be important when working on systems used by humans.
I spent 15 years developing and writing password / pass phrase security tools used on a huge number of web site
This is the biggest argument for open source software. Security software is important software. It should work, do so correctly and be able to survive audit or exposure. Do you re-implement printf(3) to write a web page? (Usually no, but I've seen some interesting stuff. Ask a veteran C programmer to do HTML and you might get a new web server with the pages statically encoded in the binary.) But we re-implement user space stuff all the time that is really infrastructure in disguise.
The amount of time wasted re-writing stuff that should be written once and well is I guess a useful tax on the stupid. And too often that's how business works. The waste certainly keeps a lot of people employed.
In my professional opinion, where strength meters and password policies most often fail is that they greatly underestimate the importance of length. I recently encountered a site which required:
Requirements are funny things. Required fields on passwords actually reduce the strength of passwords. I don't need to guess or search the entire alphabet if I know that I only need combinations of unique characters. The result is a much smaller space to brute force. Sadly, without any requirements on variety most people just pick familiar and public information, which is even worse.
Even with the American insane focus on the rush to get "there" the station doesn't make money off the gas. The profit is in the junk food, services and garbage for sale inside.
and it still won't be anywhere near as fast as refilling a liquid fuel tank.
And that is fine by this gas station logic.
There is money to be made in slowing down the pace of life. Just like making people queue a long time right next to the junk food stands at a Best Buy store. You might see restaurant style waiting tables inside more convenience stores with cellphone charging stations. Perhaps even possibly better bathroom cleaning schedules.
Well, one can hope about the cleaning schedules.
If you go places to do something longer than minute it fits with the EV lifestyle. This may sound like a retirement community approach instead of a high schooler's idealized speed-demon lifestyle. But the money is in gas stations that operate more like restaurants or rest stops. This is the reason charging stations pop up at malls, parks and recreational locations. Like a coffee shop with power for you in a cup and your car in a plug.
The real problem boils down to infrastructure.
For infrastructure we are only talking about the last few inch problem here. You already need a power tap to run the pumps. This just cuts out the pump between your car and the grid. Most of the remodel will be in getting those tables and chairs.
If only that blackbaze pods were even remotely like other datacenter equipment. As far as vibration is concerned they are still pretty much a torture test for anything with a spinning motor. Minimal vibration protection while being mechanically coupled to a weak foundation while crammed in as tightly as geometry allows.
A temperature-controlled environment, clean power, low shock and vibration, and 1 out of 5 still fails
The density and structure of a pod is only temperature-controlled in that it is going to get hot, quickly.
Remind me never to buy Seagate.
The numbers from Backblaze you'll actually see that you shouldn't buy one particular desktop model of hard drive for your "datacenter." Numbers like Backblaze releases are quite fascinating in that you can analyze them. You can find which models at any vendor to prefer or avoid.
Oh, wait, I already vowed never to buy another Seagate- about 10 years ago after experiencing their unequaled propensity to die fast and hard.
Sorry to hear about your loss. I hope you kept backup copies. If not, I hope it taught you that if you don't have a copy then you don't have a backup.
It is certainly reasonable to avoid a vendor when a lot of their products from many lines have defects at a given time. Seagate's desktop line certainly took a hit from the initial Backblaze numbers. The DM1000's huge failure rate is almost as legendary as the IBM Death Star line or Maxtor click-of-death. But stuff from before or after a given run may have better or worse quality. And of course even manufactures can get batches of bad parts. (Hidden variables like that are one of the reasons why the singular of data isn't anecdote.)
I also wonder if we'll ever get numbers from Backblaze on things like the actual temperature, decibels and power these drives lived through. More than just avoiding a particular model. It would be nice to know how hot, loud and nasty you can get before your commodity-class storage starts pooping out.
I hope this thing is happy being fueled by cheap polluting sources and doesn't clog much. Just with clean water the current politics of 3rd world nations makes access to fuel sources difficult. But it could be very useful to roof-top first-world herb gardens and space travel.
One common plan to colonize Mars, the Moon or various science fiction worlds starts with dropping of robots and letting them build the infrastructure. Then all you need to send humans is a fancy taxi with some really good entertainment for the long trip. One problem facing these plans is that the cost estimates. One NASA plan to research, develop and implement the robotic parts of a farm on the Moon has a literal Moon-shot price.
Yet here we are in the age of Kickstarter and Indiegogo funding where the key parts of a space colony are being invented one piece at a time.
Let's just hope that nobody decides to take the money and go build a house with it instead. That would be just Peachy.
I defy you to find a single person in a company who cannot comprehend something other than profit.
Investors.
Also the implied definition of profit it very limited. There are other kinds of profit than 'make as much money as possible.' But the investors are always taking on some of the risk and responsibility for a profit.
Large investors like Venture Capitalists or Mutual Funds may only be interested in how to generate money since they don't really have any other value they can derive from a random business.
It is sad today that any company created who doesn't have the express purpose of making more money is called a non-profit. It reflects our current narrow thinking in Western culture and a lack of knowledge of our history. Originally a company was a kind of business that a group of people formed legally to achieve some end of some kind. There were many kinds of charters. Often expected social benefits were required for granting the recognition of a company as a thing.
A company was once practical tool for a practical world. If openness was not harmful it might even make the achievement of that goal easier by enabling other companies to work together to achieve that goal. A perfect example is Universities creating the Internet long before the private dial-up networks created their closed captive markets.
But in lassie-fare market economics secrecy can give your for-money-profit-only company a competitive edge. Deny others access to your market and force them to spend time developing their own trade secrets. There is little advantage in the for-money-profit-only world to you letting government regulators or customers in on your super secret formula. Best to do away with the FDA and BSA, too.Your product or process could be a ball full of crap, kill kittens to make pop-tarts or power ancient evil with pollution. Openness would be harmful to that business model.
Every country in the world is trying to put their wealth in dollars.
Because to buy oil for heating, making gasoline to drive cars, making diesel to drive trucks or persecutors for plastics you need dollars. US dollars.
The US governments, both one for the rich and the one for the poor, have been mighty stable compared to many poorly managed governments. But that's only because its economy moves in lockstep with most everybody's economy now. Thanks to international trade the US economy can feel any Chinese slow down or European Union financial stress. But to get or sell that fuel oil you need greenbacks even when your petro-nation is circling the $20-a-barrel toilet.
And every time some uppity nation of non-white people tries to sell oil for Russian Rubles or Chinese Renminbi guns and bombs with American flags painted on the side go raining down on them until they change their mind.
Any "solution" that is premised on changing human nature is not a solution at all.
Human nature is just an implmentation detail. With germ-line and retrovirus treatments improving your crops and pets it is only a matter of time until that gun is turned back on us.
After all, GMO people are safe people. Does your neighboor come with a Monstanto Pedophile Free(tm) garuntee?
yes, I, who grew up here in the US, demand to have first right of jobs over some foreigner who did nothing for the US, and in fact, won't do anything for the US once they take their money away and return home, later on.
The solution to this is very simple: end the H1-B visa program. Replace it with a program that lets you import a worker temporarily to do work only if (a) the employeer cannot find someone with the skills to do that job (b) willing-to-work-for-ramen level pay cannot be a consideration as a skill (c) that employee must actively train a native or green card holder in that skill. Set a deadline for replacing that worker with the native worker. Make the employeer pay both people at the same time.
When you are in business for the money that's the only thing you'll care about. Tariffs aren't just for products. Making that the H1-B "replacement" always costs much more than just hiring and training a citizen then your government is actively protecting and investing in the people that created that government to protect and invest in them. As long as your elected government creates and supports a system of cheap labor importation those employers who can take advantage of the cheap price will.
If you read the filing the desktop market is tanking but the money is in storage for cloud providers. So these newly unemployed don't need to buy drives anymore just play Pokeymon Go! on their phones and keep uploading selfies on their data plans.
. Air travel already involves sitting in a seat for too long.
Sit in a car. Stand in a line. Sit in chair. Stand in another line. Sit in a tiny, cramped seat. Sit in another car.
For shorter trips a high cost of air travel today isn't money, it's the long lead time and frustration. You can get in your own car and start driving to your destination in minutes or seconds. Trip on an airplane? That's a car, train or bus trip plus waiting in several lines for upwards of hours just to sit in a "lounge" for your aircraft.
What people *actually* want are revolutionary new concepts that cut the cost of air travel
I want to know: what does the USA's TSA thinks about people getting into pods?
I doubt that a pod would be pleasant after the bean counters come around and ask how tightly can you pack people into them.
16-bit Windows software can be run through Wine. Linux has never had a 16-bit implementation.
Some business software is run through Wine. But it is heavily used for Windows games on Linux Mostly just 32-bit Blizzard titles and a few 32-bit or 64-bit MMOs like Eve Online.
For these applications Windows-on-Windows (WoW) is something Wine should handle. Wow is a subsystem specific to Windows. Both the 16-bit and 32-bit versions. Thunks to Linux 32-bit compat libraries may not always be appropriate when WoW behavior is expected.
64-bit Wine prefixes are considered experimental.
But I would expect them to be very common. Ubuntu, MagiOS, openSUSE and Fedora provide it. Gamers playing on Linux likely will be using it the way from their distribution built it. That will be on 64-bit if their OS is 64-bit. On the flip side, competitive gamers looking for as much performance as possible are likely to try every combination to eke out that extra few fps. I have met people who dual box Windows and Linux for extra FPS on Linux when possible.
At the worst, 32-bit compat libraries will have to remain around. Wine can use those instead of providing internal narrowing support. The compat libraries are needed anyway for closed-source applications. Things like Oracle products, random indie developer apps and any number of long gone companies that farted out a single Linux edition in the 90s.
Nope. In an unregulated economy, the only way to make a monopoly is by offering your products or services at a better price than your competition
Don't confuse an econ 101 market with the real economy as a whole. In a completely unregulated economy my business can purchase the ability to burn your company to the ground or purchase the ability to prevent you from having shop space to sell your goods. If I can keep people from knowing your products exist your prices do not matter. I can do that by slander with advertising or buying you out.
Instead we have a government - a designated group of people with the monopoly on the business of violence - to prevent the former. And that government also has anti-trust regulations to prevent the latter cases.
More to the point, natural monopolies form in any market where there is huge advantages of scale, first mover advantages or large infrastructure outlays required. The services provided by water, gas, electric and gasoline distribution follow these laws. These are all heavily regulated because if they don't start with a monopoly the eventual consolidation of businesses for efficiency creates them.
In the case of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft on Internet services they have a long-tail market with network effects and high cost of entry (largely a sunk cost today between the Free/Open Source Software and piracy movements.) In this you have all the features to create a natural monopoly. Except in Microsoft's case, the cost of switching is the only risk. In that case it is usually easier to create an oglopoly - a group of companies who work lock out competition - with low switching costs but the benefits of a monopoly and an illusion of choice. I can raise prices since the oligopoly can use undersell you temporarily at unsustainable levels to prevent competition. (Again, there are anti-trust regulations required to prevent that.)
Oddly enough, this is similar to the Democratic verses Republican party system. You have the illusion of choice but you are forced to buy something you don't want at a price you shouldn't have to pay.
What are your views on version control systems like git and modern development practices around them?
Early F/OSS development practices started with tarballs and patches, moved to packages and VCSes then to (a)social coding with DVCS like Mercurial or git. You've been there for most if not all of that.
git can be described as a distributed content management system for patches. Linux Torvals' git --am workflow can be likened to playing chess via email but with kernel development the end game and patches as moves.
And thank you for patch, by the way. The diff command outputs the difference between two files. You wrote the patch command to take diff output and turn one file into another, including the ability to even go backwards and undo that change later. As someone who's had to package software for a Linux distribution this is critically important tool. Patch lets me preserve the original author's work. But patch (and quilt) lets me still apply needed changes and store those changes in obvious discrete packets of standard format that are diff files.
Ehrlich is simply wrong when he says "[the study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event"; that would require 75% or more of all species to disappear; the paper only looks at a small subset of species, those most affected by humans.
I wondered if the extinction record could be used as evidence of past intelligent species on Earth. If there were any kind of prior top-shelf minds spreading across the globe one unmistakable evidence would be in how they shaped the foreign ecology they spread into.
Tools and buildings may not survive deep geological time. We may not even recognize something created by a very different kind of intelligence as a tool. Ancient hearth and midden piles on the Amazon are mined today for rich soil and charcoal but really hide the enormous human presence on the river that disappeared overnight to mostly likely European diseases. It took a surprising amount of time for someone to figure out that stuff came from us just a few centuries ago. But a sudden biodiversity decrease without a volcanic or meteoric crater and a change in seafloor sediments might be a smoking gun.
I would think humanity is almost a best case for leaving behind a detectable legacy. Outside of a pathogen we are the ultimate bad neighbors for a tasty species. Humans are aggressive territorial omnivores with very poor hygiene as a group. We may leave behind just enough trash to tell someone we were here long after our radio and radar signals are lost to the background noise. But what about our paleontology record?
If we cannot even kill most of the vertebrate species then that argues against using the extinction record to track prior intelligence that may have arose here. A technological species that develops green ethics before hitting the shoot-it-if-it-moves level may leave little change at the level we can detect.
Or is reminding people that humans have sexual organs somehow denigrating women?
I mean, it is sexist by definition. Being based on sex and all that. But when can we, in a world of transgender and homosexual people, stop abusing sexism to mean 'only hurtful to women?'
Really, can we at least get a show of hands of the number of gay men offended by this low-brow dick joke project?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we do need a good OTV (Orbital Transfer Vehicle). You could use it to move stuff from orbit to orbit as needed.
So, how much fuel is this robot going to have on board? How or why would you refuel it?
The reason you put tiny fuel tanks on satellites is that it cost a lot to launch anything on a rocket. If it didn't then the engineers would put huge tanks on things sitting in orbit. Tanks designed to last as long as the next part expected to fail.
At there aren't that many kinds of propellant in use but you'd still be out of luck if you had something using hydrazine while the only thing left on the repair 'bot is nitrogen.
Orbital transfers aren't free or cheap (ask any Kerbel Space fan.) It will be interesting to see what propulsion system is proposed. There's interest in tethers for 'propelentless station keeping or orbital transfers.
Would you send up refuel cans for the robot? Would you de-orbit the robot once it ran out of fuel? Could you recover the robot to save costs, then?
Except for the Hubble Space Telescope most satellites are not designed to be serviced. What can a hypothetical servicing robot do about dead batteries or shorted out control systems or hole solar arrays on the existing fleet in orbit?
Finally, while space is pretty big, sending something on a 'soft' collision course with a dead satellite in the prime geosync orbit sounds like a great way to create more debris just where you don't want it. But it's Loral. They will have the best people Congressional pork spending can buy on staff to ask and answer these questions.
It would also be nice to get a long term study of humans in rotating space habitats to see if it has any issues not detectable by ground models. Theory says the vestibular system shouldn't be impacted by long duration in an fast "inverse" rotating frame. It evolved on a large rotating planet after all. But Yogi Beara and any astronomer will tell you that in theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they are different.
We have lots of experience with space craft that shuttle things off or to ground. There needs to be operational experience with vehicles that are designed to permanently remain in space. If you built your space stations strong enough and big enough you only need to attach an big engine to turn them into space ships.
Also, how hard is it to cut through an existing solar roof to add things like plumbing vents or to move a flue for a stove in a major kitchen remodel.
One advantage tar shingles, a very popular option in America, is that adding a roof vent is an hour long affair. Punch a nail up from underneath so you miss the rafters then just pull back the shingles, cut a hole, and apply the fascia kit for your vent. The tar shingles get layered right back on.
I presume these will be more like a terracotta roof but much less friendly to modification. Particularly when the shingle is generating power while exposed to light.
Still, if this is at least as durable as a class 4 "hurricane/tornado" shingle they might qualify for the common home owner insurance discounts on top of the price.
The home owner game is a market of long-term thinking. If you are only interested in next quarter or uncomfortable with 5 year break-even on your investments, just keep renting. From someone who owns a house.
I beg to differ: http://www.linfo.org/sbin.html
These file in /sbin were system binaries. That is why /sbin directories are usually not on the default path for users.
Now, /usr/sbin, that one is confusing unless you know the sorrid history of /usr as a shared NFS mount. Files in /bin and /sbin may be statically linked or not even on real UNIX. For boot-time on Linux like Debian, static linking is for stuff in your initrd, rescue images or really really badly written software (*cough* Zabbix *cough*).
The changes directly impact two groups. Power users are going to need to know about /bin, /sbin, /usr, etc. as they are going to mess with their system directly. Package Maintainers are going to have another thing to pull hair out over when converting the raw sewage seeping out of poor developers into functional shipping things to end-users.
Until this impacts regular users or Joe X Windows who runs SteamOS it's like the mechanic changing the brand of shocks in your car. Someone who knows better will be using the correct tools to do the correct thing. Or everyone will hang them out to dry when your transmission drops out of the car on the highway.
That it is really really easy to get things down into a gravity well.
In orbit? Just toss the package out the back fast enough and it comes down all on it's own. Take care to not hit anything on the way down.
Also, space colonization for real will the subject to huge limitations. Suppose you manufacture stuff in orbit and have the technology to ship it down to the ground. The landing process is the same technology for dropping a bomb anywhere with minutes notice from an effectively unreachable location. You don't even need bombs. Rods from God are a thing.
Governments have a long-term interest to ensure colonization - not industrial development - is slow, limited and guaranteed to align with their purposes. Space is the ultimate anti-government, anti-anyone position. Literally the high ground. Otherwise you'll get the plot of Heinlein's book, Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Lifting anything into space to bring it back is a fool's errand. Look at how much of the Saturn V that went to the moon came back. Plenty of resources exist in space already to mine locally.
And without on-site captive customers...err, colonists, the economics dominate the situation. Industrialization is most likely to happen around the time that industrial jobs finish being taken by robots. That way you don't even need to ship messy old people with their huge life support systems. With enough resource scarcity to make market-wide recycling economic this would only be done for selected items anyway. Anything that can't be automated would be telepresence, keeping your workers and citizens safely in reach of the police and military.
You would always build wood stuff on the Earth. But if I could drop 10,000 custom-yet-completely-prefab concrete and aluminum houses, white goods and all, anywhere in 10 minutes (with clearance from traffic control) that could be a game changer for disaster relief or interesting for urban development.
But with any factory in a new area the problem is getting the first one up. Then you have the infrastructure to get many more much cheaper and quicker. Just look at how industrialization happened everywhere on the Earth.
BioSphere II was a poorly planned theme-park garden now owned by the University of Arizona.
Want to see what can be done if you really understand ecology and not just theme park construction? Look at Ascension Island. Joseph Hooker, with the aid of Charles Darwin and Kew gardens, built the ecosystem on the island out of completely foreign species. This cloud rainforest was built whole cloth on a bare lump of clinker sticking out of the ocean long before electrification.
The key difference is ocean.
Biosphere II was designed with almost no significant bodies of water containing phytoplankton, which produce up to 85% of all the oxygen. The facility has a glorified wake pool that would have fit in a large cities' water park. The planners put in 50% more grassland than synthetic ocean. Much of that 850m "ocean" is dedicated to a coral reef. Unsurprisingly, the oxygen levels crashed soon after closing the doors. Both times.
If one thing was unrealistic about O'Neil Colonies it was the sheer lack of mixing oceans in all the designs. Water is one of the most abundant substances outside the dry line in the Solar system. It's also a good radiation shield and has high thermal mass. The giant magic space windows that somehow didn't let in vast amounts of cosmic radiation were more realistic.
O'Neil also wrote about Bernal Spheres. These are slightly better, but have their own engineering challenges. Artists still show the interiors as if they were a cutout of a heavily populated Italian riverside. More relaistic would be 70-80% ocean with islands or peninsula. But in Bezo's case it's probably a matter of go big or go home. And the Island Three plans are certainly Big Homes.
The space departments clean these landers quite well. But exploding on impact was either effective at sterilizing the craft in a final way or spread the contamination over the maximal area.
In both cases Mars maintains a reputation as the place that robots go to die.
The study is actually important. They showed that the brains didn't recover from the damage as expected. The radiation treatment did not trigger the plastic repair behavior expected from an injured brain.
Yes, the particles used don't resemble background Solar radiation. It doesn't even resemble the stream of lightweight charged particles from a Coronal Mass ejection. However, the model is similar to the burst of Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR). Like the kind you get on an unplanned spacewalk to fix something on the outside of your spaceship. Or if your shielding fails.
It is very hard to make a usable spacesuit for a human that shields against individual sometimes neutral particles with the energy of a fastball thrown by a world record setting baseball pitcher. It is also hard to build a light enough and thick enough shield against CBR when your astronauts insist on hanging out on the edges of your rotating spacecraft to avoid losing bone mass.
This lack of repair response is the kind of thing you have to learn about to be a space faring species. It's the science part of science and engineering.
Fixing it is the engineering part. You'll have to use better shielding. Or you can genetically engineer people to trigger the plastic response to damage like Water Bears use. Or just make all repairs outside the CBR shielding involve robots and drones.
Slashdot is a news aggregation site. Ostensibly for 'News for nerds, stuff that matters' at founding. In practice is was a blog for Rob Malda, CmdrTaco. It was also a website with an accidentally really good commenting technology.
Been around long enough to see the jokes about not reading the article? Then you have probably been around long enough to see the argument that a lot of the people still visiting the site do so for the conversation in the articles. They provide everything from group-think arguments, good counter-arguments and funny jokes about the topic to warnings about click-bait, pay-wall free options and corrected sources.
If Slashdot had ever depended upon the quality of the articles it would have failed when it was still Chips-n-Dips hosted on a university student account. The commenting system is more than a chance to keep up your HTML skillz. People in the know are really providing the value. (Queue complaints about Facebook's model, etc.) However, getting quality articles is important to attracting the readership that does not know about the site.
For instance, this article currently doesn't shows up in Google search for annoying LEDs, being a day old. But the top link is for lifehacks.stackexchange.com for whatever reason. Stackechange and Amazon dominate the front page. I almost feel sorry for companies with products on that page. Even with no such thing as bad marketing, being known for having annoying lights on your non-party-joke product is not a good thing.
The Blue LED backlash article on McConnell's blog is page three. And he discusses a vendor that sells low intensity LEDs for computer products. But I expect - or at least hope - this slashdot article to make it to at least page three with McConnell's blog if not higher.
But Drug dogs work perfectly for law enforcement: they provide whatever answer the police want and the gullible public believe the dogs are infallible.
I fear you might not know just how accurate some critter's sense of smell is.
You might just not know how dogs behave.
If search dogs work then the dog should be fine to hunt these without the handler there at all. Just let the dog search on his or her own.
Search and rescue dogs work this way just fine every day. You let them go and they hunt down people easily that you or I cannot see or hear or smell.
But any person who raises and breeds and trains dogs professionally knows the first and only thing a well trained dog wants is to please the handler. That's the definition of well and trained for a dog. Drug sniffing dogs are very well trained.
In the hands of their handler a dog is just a dowsing rod for the man with the leash. Combine that with objects that conveniently fit in an officer's pocket and the long history of corrupt government officials. You shouldn't have plausible evidence. You should have plausible deniability. Yes, dogs are great at finding skunks or burnt joints you might be able to smell yourself. Not so much for things in air-tight closed containers on in piles of stuff that smells exactly like it.
But like you demonstrate, most people don't know how dogs behave. (Or how to spot magical thinking.)
Keep the handler away from the dog. Let it search on its own. Otherwise he or she is just a furry four-legged lie detector.
Human factors and industrial engineering turns out to be important when working on systems used by humans.
This is the biggest argument for open source software. Security software is important software. It should work, do so correctly and be able to survive audit or exposure. Do you re-implement printf(3) to write a web page? (Usually no, but I've seen some interesting stuff. Ask a veteran C programmer to do HTML and you might get a new web server with the pages statically encoded in the binary.) But we re-implement user space stuff all the time that is really infrastructure in disguise.
The amount of time wasted re-writing stuff that should be written once and well is I guess a useful tax on the stupid. And too often that's how business works. The waste certainly keeps a lot of people employed.
"Code Monkey says maybe manager should write stupid login page himself."
Requirements are funny things. Required fields on passwords actually reduce the strength of passwords. I don't need to guess or search the entire alphabet if I know that I only need combinations of unique characters. The result is a much smaller space to brute force. Sadly, without any requirements on variety most people just pick familiar and public information, which is even worse.
Even with the American insane focus on the rush to get "there" the station doesn't make money off the gas. The profit is in the junk food, services and garbage for sale inside.
And that is fine by this gas station logic.
There is money to be made in slowing down the pace of life. Just like making people queue a long time right next to the junk food stands at a Best Buy store. You might see restaurant style waiting tables inside more convenience stores with cellphone charging stations. Perhaps even possibly better bathroom cleaning schedules.
Well, one can hope about the cleaning schedules.
If you go places to do something longer than minute it fits with the EV lifestyle. This may sound like a retirement community approach instead of a high schooler's idealized speed-demon lifestyle. But the money is in gas stations that operate more like restaurants or rest stops. This is the reason charging stations pop up at malls, parks and recreational locations. Like a coffee shop with power for you in a cup and your car in a plug.
For infrastructure we are only talking about the last few inch problem here. You already need a power tap to run the pumps. This just cuts out the pump between your car and the grid. Most of the remodel will be in getting those tables and chairs.
And getting those bathrooms cleaned.
A temperature-controlled environment, clean power, low shock and vibration, and 1 out of 5 still fails
The density and structure of a pod is only temperature-controlled in that it is going to get hot, quickly.
Remind me never to buy Seagate.
The numbers from Backblaze you'll actually see that you shouldn't buy one particular desktop model of hard drive for your "datacenter." Numbers like Backblaze releases are quite fascinating in that you can analyze them. You can find which models at any vendor to prefer or avoid.
Oh, wait, I already vowed never to buy another Seagate- about 10 years ago after experiencing their unequaled propensity to die fast and hard.
Sorry to hear about your loss. I hope you kept backup copies. If not, I hope it taught you that if you don't have a copy then you don't have a backup.
It is certainly reasonable to avoid a vendor when a lot of their products from many lines have defects at a given time. Seagate's desktop line certainly took a hit from the initial Backblaze numbers. The DM1000's huge failure rate is almost as legendary as the IBM Death Star line or Maxtor click-of-death. But stuff from before or after a given run may have better or worse quality. And of course even manufactures can get batches of bad parts. (Hidden variables like that are one of the reasons why the singular of data isn't anecdote.)
I also wonder if we'll ever get numbers from Backblaze on things like the actual temperature, decibels and power these drives lived through. More than just avoiding a particular model. It would be nice to know how hot, loud and nasty you can get before your commodity-class storage starts pooping out.
I hope this thing is happy being fueled by cheap polluting sources and doesn't clog much. Just with clean water the current politics of 3rd world nations makes access to fuel sources difficult. But it could be very useful to roof-top first-world herb gardens and space travel.
One common plan to colonize Mars, the Moon or various science fiction worlds starts with dropping of robots and letting them build the infrastructure. Then all you need to send humans is a fancy taxi with some really good entertainment for the long trip. One problem facing these plans is that the cost estimates. One NASA plan to research, develop and implement the robotic parts of a farm on the Moon has a literal Moon-shot price.
Yet here we are in the age of Kickstarter and Indiegogo funding where the key parts of a space colony are being invented one piece at a time.
Let's just hope that nobody decides to take the money and go build a house with it instead. That would be just Peachy.
Investors.
Also the implied definition of profit it very limited. There are other kinds of profit than 'make as much money as possible.' But the investors are always taking on some of the risk and responsibility for a profit.
Large investors like Venture Capitalists or Mutual Funds may only be interested in how to generate money since they don't really have any other value they can derive from a random business.
It is sad today that any company created who doesn't have the express purpose of making more money is called a non-profit. It reflects our current narrow thinking in Western culture and a lack of knowledge of our history. Originally a company was a kind of business that a group of people formed legally to achieve some end of some kind. There were many kinds of charters. Often expected social benefits were required for granting the recognition of a company as a thing.
A company was once practical tool for a practical world. If openness was not harmful it might even make the achievement of that goal easier by enabling other companies to work together to achieve that goal. A perfect example is Universities creating the Internet long before the private dial-up networks created their closed captive markets.
But in lassie-fare market economics secrecy can give your for-money-profit-only company a competitive edge. Deny others access to your market and force them to spend time developing their own trade secrets. There is little advantage in the for-money-profit-only world to you letting government regulators or customers in on your super secret formula. Best to do away with the FDA and BSA, too.Your product or process could be a ball full of crap, kill kittens to make pop-tarts or power ancient evil with pollution. Openness would be harmful to that business model.
Because to buy oil for heating, making gasoline to drive cars, making diesel to drive trucks or persecutors for plastics you need dollars. US dollars.
The US governments, both one for the rich and the one for the poor, have been mighty stable compared to many poorly managed governments. But that's only because its economy moves in lockstep with most everybody's economy now. Thanks to international trade the US economy can feel any Chinese slow down or European Union financial stress. But to get or sell that fuel oil you need greenbacks even when your petro-nation is circling the $20-a-barrel toilet.
And every time some uppity nation of non-white people tries to sell oil for Russian Rubles or Chinese Renminbi guns and bombs with American flags painted on the side go raining down on them until they change their mind.
Any "solution" that is premised on changing human nature is not a solution at all.
Human nature is just an implmentation detail. With germ-line and retrovirus treatments improving your crops and pets it is only a matter of time until that gun is turned back on us.
After all, GMO people are safe people. Does your neighboor come with a Monstanto Pedophile Free(tm) garuntee?
The solution to this is very simple: end the H1-B visa program. Replace it with a program that lets you import a worker temporarily to do work only if (a) the employeer cannot find someone with the skills to do that job (b) willing-to-work-for-ramen level pay cannot be a consideration as a skill (c) that employee must actively train a native or green card holder in that skill. Set a deadline for replacing that worker with the native worker. Make the employeer pay both people at the same time.
When you are in business for the money that's the only thing you'll care about. Tariffs aren't just for products. Making that the H1-B "replacement" always costs much more than just hiring and training a citizen then your government is actively protecting and investing in the people that created that government to protect and invest in them. As long as your elected government creates and supports a system of cheap labor importation those employers who can take advantage of the cheap price will.
If you read the filing the desktop market is tanking but the money is in storage for cloud providers. So these newly unemployed don't need to buy drives anymore just play Pokeymon Go! on their phones and keep uploading selfies on their data plans.
. Air travel already involves sitting in a seat for too long.
Sit in a car. Stand in a line. Sit in chair. Stand in another line. Sit in a tiny, cramped seat. Sit in another car.
For shorter trips a high cost of air travel today isn't money, it's the long lead time and frustration. You can get in your own car and start driving to your destination in minutes or seconds. Trip on an airplane? That's a car, train or bus trip plus waiting in several lines for upwards of hours just to sit in a "lounge" for your aircraft.
What people *actually* want are revolutionary new concepts that cut the cost of air travel
I want to know: what does the USA's TSA thinks about people getting into pods?
I doubt that a pod would be pleasant after the bean counters come around and ask how tightly can you pack people into them.
16-bit Windows software can be run through Wine. Linux has never had a 16-bit implementation.
Some business software is run through Wine. But it is heavily used for Windows games on Linux Mostly just 32-bit Blizzard titles and a few 32-bit or 64-bit MMOs like Eve Online.
For these applications Windows-on-Windows (WoW) is something Wine should handle. Wow is a subsystem specific to Windows. Both the 16-bit and 32-bit versions. Thunks to Linux 32-bit compat libraries may not always be appropriate when WoW behavior is expected.
64-bit Wine prefixes are considered experimental. But I would expect them to be very common. Ubuntu, MagiOS, openSUSE and Fedora provide it. Gamers playing on Linux likely will be using it the way from their distribution built it. That will be on 64-bit if their OS is 64-bit. On the flip side, competitive gamers looking for as much performance as possible are likely to try every combination to eke out that extra few fps. I have met people who dual box Windows and Linux for extra FPS on Linux when possible.
At the worst, 32-bit compat libraries will have to remain around. Wine can use those instead of providing internal narrowing support. The compat libraries are needed anyway for closed-source applications. Things like Oracle products, random indie developer apps and any number of long gone companies that farted out a single Linux edition in the 90s.
Nope. In an unregulated economy, the only way to make a monopoly is by offering your products or services at a better price than your competition
Don't confuse an econ 101 market with the real economy as a whole. In a completely unregulated economy my business can purchase the ability to burn your company to the ground or purchase the ability to prevent you from having shop space to sell your goods. If I can keep people from knowing your products exist your prices do not matter. I can do that by slander with advertising or buying you out.
Instead we have a government - a designated group of people with the monopoly on the business of violence - to prevent the former. And that government also has anti-trust regulations to prevent the latter cases.
More to the point, natural monopolies form in any market where there is huge advantages of scale, first mover advantages or large infrastructure outlays required. The services provided by water, gas, electric and gasoline distribution follow these laws. These are all heavily regulated because if they don't start with a monopoly the eventual consolidation of businesses for efficiency creates them.
In the case of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft on Internet services they have a long-tail market with network effects and high cost of entry (largely a sunk cost today between the Free/Open Source Software and piracy movements.) In this you have all the features to create a natural monopoly. Except in Microsoft's case, the cost of switching is the only risk. In that case it is usually easier to create an oglopoly - a group of companies who work lock out competition - with low switching costs but the benefits of a monopoly and an illusion of choice. I can raise prices since the oligopoly can use undersell you temporarily at unsustainable levels to prevent competition. (Again, there are anti-trust regulations required to prevent that.)
Oddly enough, this is similar to the Democratic verses Republican party system. You have the illusion of choice but you are forced to buy something you don't want at a price you shouldn't have to pay.
What are your views on version control systems like git and modern development practices around them?
Early F/OSS development practices started with tarballs and patches, moved to packages and VCSes then to (a)social coding with DVCS like Mercurial or git. You've been there for most if not all of that.
git can be described as a distributed content management system for patches. Linux Torvals' git --am workflow can be likened to playing chess via email but with kernel development the end game and patches as moves.
And thank you for patch, by the way. The diff command outputs the difference between two files. You wrote the patch command to take diff output and turn one file into another, including the ability to even go backwards and undo that change later. As someone who's had to package software for a Linux distribution this is critically important tool. Patch lets me preserve the original author's work. But patch (and quilt) lets me still apply needed changes and store those changes in obvious discrete packets of standard format that are diff files.
I wondered if the extinction record could be used as evidence of past intelligent species on Earth. If there were any kind of prior top-shelf minds spreading across the globe one unmistakable evidence would be in how they shaped the foreign ecology they spread into.
Tools and buildings may not survive deep geological time. We may not even recognize something created by a very different kind of intelligence as a tool. Ancient hearth and midden piles on the Amazon are mined today for rich soil and charcoal but really hide the enormous human presence on the river that disappeared overnight to mostly likely European diseases. It took a surprising amount of time for someone to figure out that stuff came from us just a few centuries ago. But a sudden biodiversity decrease without a volcanic or meteoric crater and a change in seafloor sediments might be a smoking gun.
I would think humanity is almost a best case for leaving behind a detectable legacy. Outside of a pathogen we are the ultimate bad neighbors for a tasty species. Humans are aggressive territorial omnivores with very poor hygiene as a group. We may leave behind just enough trash to tell someone we were here long after our radio and radar signals are lost to the background noise. But what about our paleontology record?
If we cannot even kill most of the vertebrate species then that argues against using the extinction record to track prior intelligence that may have arose here. A technological species that develops green ethics before hitting the shoot-it-if-it-moves level may leave little change at the level we can detect.
Where are the "Female Anatomy" joke projects?
Or is reminding people that humans have sexual organs somehow denigrating women?
I mean, it is sexist by definition. Being based on sex and all that. But when can we, in a world of transgender and homosexual people, stop abusing sexism to mean 'only hurtful to women?'
Really, can we at least get a show of hands of the number of gay men offended by this low-brow dick joke project?