I use NewsBlur and GrazeRRS On Android. Free, never miss the stuff I care about. Never see a headline twice: go down the list, swipe right on the stuff I want to read, dismiss the rest. I can read it on the London tube with no network, or in a PC, it is all synchronized. I have been doing this for 15 years (GrazeRRS used to work with Google Reader, it was called NewsRob back then). I haven't found a better option.
Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication
So making it infrastructure dependent will be a bad idea, right?
Once you start deploying plasma bombs, all device makers will start depending on it. Lower costs, more efficient, etc. If you want to keep the "infrastructure free method of global communication", you need to keep it active and alive.
You don't get the business on Earth (worth billions) without the antenna up there. refueling half way let's you put a bigger antenna, or use a smaller rocket. I agree that the space industry is full of crap, but this one may be more realistic and significative than most.
There is a lot of business going on in higher earth orbit, for example geosynchronous orbit: comms satellites, weather satellites. Making the fuel to go from low earth orbit (100 km up) to geosynchronous orbit (30000 km up) 6 times cheaper is a big deal.
That is dangerously wrong.
A fire safe is designed to keep its internal temperature below 351F. As any Ray Bradbury fan will tell you, that is the temperature paper burns, and that is what they are designed for. USB sticks won't survive that. A media safe will keep your CDs from melting, which probably means that flash memory is safe, but CHECK THE SPECS.
British Museum is my favourite, but 15 min walk away is the British Library (by St Pancras Station). Their "Treasures Room" has some seriously cool books and manuscripts, which you can see in one hour.
PHP gets executed in the server, JavaScript gets executed in the client. Very big difference. For PHP to get input from the user, this input must travel between client and server (which means a page load unless you are using Ajax, which means JavaScript, or an specialized client). Javascript can act on input right in the client.
JavaScript is such a good idea with such a poor execution... The spec is unreadable and ambiguous. The implementations have so many quirks and incompatibilities. I wish we could just kill it and start over.
Hydrogen is not the solution. Alcohol is not the solution. If there is any solution, as the article says, it will probably be moving as much transportation to electric as possible, and getting electricity from solar photovoltaic.
I will run Linux. I will just pass on all the new stuff, if it is DRM'd. I will have my huge library of free stuff that I have been accumulating for years. And I will share that stuff with others like me.
They can keep the latest Christina Aguilera album for themselves. I still have to sit through the eight seasons of Futurama, the complete Monthy Python Flying Circus, the discography of Def Leppard, hours of MP3 that a friend recorded while in college, and more than 10,000 books in Project Gutenberg.
They can only DRM the new stuff. The old stuff is there. They are trying to outlaw the public domain, but they might as well try to outlaw teenage sex.
Here in Spain, people do beautiful movies that get almost no money in movie theaters. How they do it? Government grants. They are shut off the theaters by the US majors. If there were no US big-budget, big-publicity-campaign movies, there would still be a ton of good movies to see.
All those Clint Eastwood spaguetti westerns were pretty cheap. And they are amazing.
This, at the end of the article, has me intrigued:
On 18 August a new proposal was mooted, adding that the object also needs to be by far the largest object in its local population.
The Earth has only four times the diameter of the Moon. Does that count as "large by far"?
Planet is an old term. Originaly it meant Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. We should invent a new term for "spherical solids that do not start nuclear fusion".
Mercury gets to be a planet because it can be seen with naked eyes.
Seriously, they should have left the planets at 5, and find new names for the new categories of objects. That is how the came up with asteroids. Rockies, cloudies, and icies. Globs if they are round, asteroids if they are not. So a comet is an icy asteroid. And who cares what they orbit. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are not planets, because the ones that defined the term, the Greeks, did not say so: they could not see them.
The ISS's only purpose is to serve as a destination to the Shuttle.
The Shuttle's only purpose is to serve as a vehicle to the ISS. We do not let kids ride school busses one third the age of the Shuttles. Both are insanely expensive mistakes. It is perfectly OK to make mistakes on science, but what is not OK is to recalcitrate on them and let them crowd out very useful projects. But then, Very Big Companies With Very Good Connections would have to give up some nice contracts.
We should first get a nice way to get to space before we start exploring it. Strapping a rocket to your back is dangerous and expensive. We are putting the cart in front of the donkey. Once it is cheap and safe, a motivation for exploration will appear.
Register in a precinct with a big majority of the opposite party. Get in late to vote. Fry the machine with whatever means at your disposal. Preferably something that leaves no trace and/or cannot be blamed on you. Injecting salt water with a small syringe, or discharging a small battery through two long needles into the machine look good options. Puff, all those votes go out in a plume of blue smoke.
With friends like this, who needs enemies?
on
Unusual Open Source
·
· Score: 1
So The Economist is just trying to teach those poor Open Source programmers The Right Way (tm) of developing software. This article is wrong in so many ways. But others like Groklaw have pointed plenty of them.
I just want to make a point that I always miss in this kind of discussion. There is a wildly sucessful, innovative, world changing collaboration effort that works in the same principles of open source that is never mentioned: science.
Scientists build on top of each other's work. They publish data, theories and results for other scientists to use freely. They form a meritocracy that measures success by how much their work is used by others.
By contrast, propietary software is alchemy, magic. They will only do their trick if you pay them, and never ever tell you how it is done.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And then, they forget that they ever anything but your best friends.
Actually, it's been proven quite a few times that bacteria does just fine in space even after a few years.
I meant that they might not be in top shape when they arrive. For them it is a crazy voyage and a crazy environment; for anything in Titan, it is home.
Titan life has home advantage in any kind of fight. I mean, any Earth bacteria in Huygens has been travelling for several years in space, subjected to a huge range of temperatures and a hell of radiation; and I do not think that that would be healthy to your usual Cape Cañaveral bacterium.
Then it arrives in Titan. First it has to survive freezing temperatures, an unusual atmosphere, and not having any of the nutrients it is used to.
If the planet is barren, there is a slight chance that it might survive and reproduce, and maybe then, its offspring would evolve and colonize, a la panspermia. But if there is any life there, I'd say that it would only serve as a quick snack...
It would be like sending a bunch of nigerians to play football to the Himalayas against Sherpas. Naked. At 7000 m. In the snow. In the winter. In a snowstorm.
I really hate that. Multicast and, later, IPv6 would bring so many new capabilities...
Bittorrent takes >30% of the bandwith in the Internet. And Bittorrent is just a small kludge compared to multicast. If a Bittorrent has 10 receivers, multicast would save 90% of the bandwidth. That's a lot of bandwidth saved.
A multicast P2P would alleviate my bandwith woes. Specially with DSL; DSL gives people more download than upload speed, and without multicast, every kb of download needs someone doing a kb upload. Multicast duplicates packets inside the network so a kb uploaded of a popular file could mean many kb downladed... Goodbye to queues!
Coupled with some credit system so good uploaders get first choice in next multicasted download.
With IPv6 P2P gets more goodies. Quality of service, so I can set my mulita to a lower priority so it does not slow my slashdot surfing to jellyfish speed
Why do not open-source P2P embrace the new technologies? As soon as programs start giving some advantages to multicast/IPv6 sharers, users will start asking for it. And then ISPs will start providing it. It makes sense for them, it makes sense for the backbone, it makes sense for the users.
Slashdot Mirror
I use NewsBlur and GrazeRRS On Android. Free, never miss the stuff I care about. Never see a headline twice: go down the list, swipe right on the stuff I want to read, dismiss the rest. I can read it on the London tube with no network, or in a PC, it is all synchronized. I have been doing this for 15 years (GrazeRRS used to work with Google Reader, it was called NewsRob back then). I haven't found a better option.
Julian Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is a decimal coordinated time system in wide use.
Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication
So making it infrastructure dependent will be a bad idea, right? Once you start deploying plasma bombs, all device makers will start depending on it. Lower costs, more efficient, etc. If you want to keep the "infrastructure free method of global communication", you need to keep it active and alive.
You don't get the business on Earth (worth billions) without the antenna up there. refueling half way let's you put a bigger antenna, or use a smaller rocket. I agree that the space industry is full of crap, but this one may be more realistic and significative than most.
There is a lot of business going on in higher earth orbit, for example geosynchronous orbit: comms satellites, weather satellites. Making the fuel to go from low earth orbit (100 km up) to geosynchronous orbit (30000 km up) 6 times cheaper is a big deal.
That is dangerously wrong. A fire safe is designed to keep its internal temperature below 351F. As any Ray Bradbury fan will tell you, that is the temperature paper burns, and that is what they are designed for. USB sticks won't survive that. A media safe will keep your CDs from melting, which probably means that flash memory is safe, but CHECK THE SPECS.
British Museum is my favourite, but 15 min walk away is the British Library (by St Pancras Station). Their "Treasures Room" has some seriously cool books and manuscripts, which you can see in one hour.
PHP gets executed in the server, JavaScript gets executed in the client. Very big difference. For PHP to get input from the user, this input must travel between client and server (which means a page load unless you are using Ajax, which means JavaScript, or an specialized client). Javascript can act on input right in the client.
JavaScript is such a good idea with such a poor execution... The spec is unreadable and ambiguous. The implementations have so many quirks and incompatibilities. I wish we could just kill it and start over.
Hydrogen is not the solution. Alcohol is not the solution. If there is any solution, as the article says, it will probably be moving as much transportation to electric as possible, and getting electricity from solar photovoltaic.
Of course a format can be buggy. If the specification says one thing in one place and an incompatible thing in another, it is buggy.
I will run Linux. I will just pass on all the new stuff, if it is DRM'd. I will have my huge library of free stuff that I have been accumulating for years. And I will share that stuff with others like me.
They can keep the latest Christina Aguilera album for themselves. I still have to sit through the eight seasons of Futurama, the complete Monthy Python Flying Circus, the discography of Def Leppard, hours of MP3 that a friend recorded while in college, and more than 10,000 books in Project Gutenberg.
They can only DRM the new stuff. The old stuff is there. They are trying to outlaw the public domain, but they might as well try to outlaw teenage sex.
Here in Spain, people do beautiful movies that get almost no money in movie theaters. How they do it? Government grants. They are shut off the theaters by the US majors. If there were no US big-budget, big-publicity-campaign movies, there would still be a ton of good movies to see.
All those Clint Eastwood spaguetti westerns were pretty cheap. And they are amazing.
This, at the end of the article, has me intrigued:
On 18 August a new proposal was mooted, adding that the object also needs to be by far the largest object in its local population.
The Earth has only four times the diameter of the Moon. Does that count as "large by far"?
Planet is an old term. Originaly it meant Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. We should invent a new term for "spherical solids that do not start nuclear fusion".
Mercury gets to be a planet because it can be seen with naked eyes.
Seriously, they should have left the planets at 5, and find new names for the new categories of objects. That is how the came up with asteroids. Rockies, cloudies, and icies. Globs if they are round, asteroids if they are not. So a comet is an icy asteroid. And who cares what they orbit. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are not planets, because the ones that defined the term, the Greeks, did not say so: they could not see them.
The ISS's only purpose is to serve as a destination to the Shuttle.
The Shuttle's only purpose is to serve as a vehicle to the ISS. We do not let kids ride school busses one third the age of the Shuttles. Both are insanely expensive mistakes. It is perfectly OK to make mistakes on science, but what is not OK is to recalcitrate on them and let them crowd out very useful projects. But then, Very Big Companies With Very Good Connections would have to give up some nice contracts.
We should first get a nice way to get to space before we start exploring it. Strapping a rocket to your back is dangerous and expensive. We are putting the cart in front of the donkey. Once it is cheap and safe, a motivation for exploration will appear.
The Classical Planets are already defined. They are the ones that were known from ancient times: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
Register in a precinct with a big majority of the opposite party. Get in late to vote. Fry the machine with whatever means at your disposal. Preferably something that leaves no trace and/or cannot be blamed on you. Injecting salt water with a small syringe, or discharging a small battery through two long needles into the machine look good options. Puff, all those votes go out in a plume of blue smoke.
So The Economist is just trying to teach those poor Open Source programmers The Right Way (tm) of developing software. This article is wrong in so many ways. But others like Groklaw have pointed plenty of them.
I just want to make a point that I always miss in this kind of discussion. There is a wildly sucessful, innovative, world changing collaboration effort that works in the same principles of open source that is never mentioned: science.
Scientists build on top of each other's work. They publish data, theories and results for other scientists to use freely. They form a meritocracy that measures success by how much their work is used by others.
By contrast, propietary software is alchemy, magic. They will only do their trick if you pay them, and never ever tell you how it is done.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And then, they forget that they ever anything but your best friends.
Supernovas Are Industrial Accidents
Actually, it's been proven quite a few times that bacteria does just fine in space even after a few years. I meant that they might not be in top shape when they arrive. For them it is a crazy voyage and a crazy environment; for anything in Titan, it is home.
Titan life has home advantage in any kind of fight. I mean, any Earth bacteria in Huygens has been travelling for several years in space, subjected to a huge range of temperatures and a hell of radiation; and I do not think that that would be healthy to your usual Cape Cañaveral bacterium.
Then it arrives in Titan. First it has to survive freezing temperatures, an unusual atmosphere, and not having any of the nutrients it is used to.
If the planet is barren, there is a slight chance that it might survive and reproduce, and maybe then, its offspring would evolve and colonize, a la panspermia. But if there is any life there, I'd say that it would only serve as a quick snack...
It would be like sending a bunch of nigerians to play football to the Himalayas against Sherpas. Naked. At 7000 m. In the snow. In the winter. In a snowstorm.
I really hate that. Multicast and, later, IPv6 would bring so many new capabilities...
Bittorrent takes >30% of the bandwith in the Internet. And Bittorrent is just a small kludge compared to multicast. If a Bittorrent has 10 receivers, multicast would save 90% of the bandwidth. That's a lot of bandwidth saved.
A multicast P2P would alleviate my bandwith woes. Specially with DSL; DSL gives people more download than upload speed, and without multicast, every kb of download needs someone doing a kb upload. Multicast duplicates packets inside the network so a kb uploaded of a popular file could mean many kb downladed... Goodbye to queues!
Coupled with some credit system so good uploaders get first choice in next multicasted download.
With IPv6 P2P gets more goodies. Quality of service, so I can set my mulita to a lower priority so it does not slow my slashdot surfing to jellyfish speed
Why do not open-source P2P embrace the new technologies? As soon as programs start giving some advantages to multicast/IPv6 sharers, users will start asking for it. And then ISPs will start providing it. It makes sense for them, it makes sense for the backbone, it makes sense for the users.