I can think of more than a few other very large companies, who through the nature of the business they conduct, should be joining Microsoft and Google. This is a good start, but it would be nice to see a whole bunch of companies gang up on the government over this. It might also help the little guys stand up.
Seriously, posting the "we might be martians" story has become equivalent to trolling Slashdot. I would carry on about why the notion of Earth life coming from Mars is flimsy and fanciful to begin with, but we have had that discussion over and over. It's like Groundhog's Day - only not entertaining.
What do I think will change? That's just it, I don't know. Other than the possibility that landing on the moon could prove to be an exercise for greater missions that would profit. My point is: all of scientific and technological achievement going into even the near term future has become by far and away a greater wild card than it has ever been before, and we have only just achieved that level of mystery. I'm just saying, don't put anything past the near and long term future. We can't know anything other than continued accelerating change will take us to unknown places. The old paradigm you speak of is shifting faster then we can understand.
In a rare event, I am going to play the optimist and suggest commercial space endeavors will get us back to the moon before then. How soon? Perhaps between 2020 - 2025. It's easy to scoff at that, but technology is officially advancing at rate such that we already can't guess what things will be like in a mere six and a half to eleven-years from now. Scientific and technological advancement has become like a runaway, and aggressive, chemical reaction - like a wildfire burning intensely in powerful but chaotic winds, heading in directions we can't know until it gets there. Commercial space endeavors might not beat the Canadian effort by much, but the sooner the better by no matter how small a margin.
Why would commercial spaceflight take us back to the moon? I can't know, but I can guess it would make great practice for traveling longer distance and pulling off complex tasks. Maybe a warm up exercise for an ambitious and profitable mission.
That was probably not the best analogy, but you get the idea. That and I don't know much about cars.
There is a rumor going around that Elon is kinda busy right now, so I doubt that would happen. As a thought experiment, he would probably move MS headquarters to the moon.
When the petition program started, I thought it was a fantastic and forwarded thinking way of giving voice to the American people. If there is one thing I have learned, it's that if the administration doesn't like something, no matter how many signatures, they simply send out a form letter with a vague reason why they are declining it. It's all fuzzy and feel good on the outside, but in the end it will become ashes in your mouth.
I think it's a great way to get kids thinking about their future before said future hits them like a truck. Putting together professional profiles would make a great (and gradable) school project that could be kept up to date as they progress through middle and high school, and who knows, it may even get kids to clean up their online act when they realize what effect their trashy facebook profiles could have on their future. Then again, it would be interesting to read a well put together LinkedIn profile of a 16 year old, and then compare to their facebook profile.
Did you know that the United States is made up of many states that are overall very different and spread across a wide geographical area? We even have our own separate laws. I am from Missouri and find it frustrating to be lumped in with Texans.
This all seems like such a bad dream. Unfortunately, that makes the American predicament no less real. We may soon find ourselves facing three choices:
1. Passively watch our experiment in democracy lay down and die, while accepting that 2 + 2 = 5. Hopefully your children won't be too dissatisfied with your parenting. They might turn you in under the guise of suspicion of thinking freely.
2. Flee the country. Get you're passport and leave now while you still can. We may find some of the more desirable countries banning the immigration of fleeing US citizens, or at the very least face widespread discrimination abroad.
3. Fight back - I'm talking violence here.
I know how melodramatic that all sounds, and a few years ago I would have never imagined myself realistically making such a statement - not in a million years.
I can't believe I have a front row seat to everything that's going down. Maybe someday I'll find myself telling someone where I was when the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights were permanently suspended. Maybe someday I'll tell someone how the entirety of US history really went down from founding ideals to however this ends - I'm sure it will be nothing even remotely close to their heavily censored, revisionist textbook.
In this debate, people have forgotten an important point that Musk made early on: In being solar powered, the system is expected to yield enough excess electricity to make it worth contributing to the grid. I'm not going to get into the debate itself, but for those of you tossing the ball back and forth, you should consider this point in your arguments, whether you think that particular claim is feasible or not.
I believe the strategy here was is get potential OEMs tripping all over themselves in consideration of the number of people willing to put down money for the idea of a product that is over a year out from production, namely those willing to lay down enough for a prototype. At $10 mil, I'll bet they have perked plenty of corporate ears.
Myself as someone who has been following the development of this product, and has taken the time to understand why it's OS is innovative, and most importantly (to me anyway) it's kick ass interface, I'm rooting for them.
BTW - it's not vaporware until it doesn't happen, and they're not planning on even having a production phone for year - which they have been completely up front about.
I would also like to say that I find it disheartening that so many Linux based projects get their teeth kicked by slashdoters these days. I remember a time long ago on slashdot when something like this would garner a sense of adventure.
they are a for profit company in there somewhere
Semantically, I'm not quite sure how to interpret this attempt at putting words together into a coherent thought, but I'll respond based on a guess of what I think your trying to say: It is not possible to design a $100 million Open Source factory to produce these phones, where said factory and all assembly machines are drawn up as Open Source schematics, and to then have a bunch of Open Source construction workers work for free in their spare time to build said $100 million factory, and to then pay the power bill with Open Source........? Or perhaps you are talking about Canonical making money? Before I go so far as to respond to that in all the ways I could interpret, I'll let you post back with clarification. Or perhaps I have just wasted my time writing a rebuttal to a troll.
What I gather from the article is that it has impact strength but not much in the way of tensile strength. It appears to have a few other interesting properties though.
I've wondered if there could be a scheme where you have an app that in installs say, the sproutcore framework, server, and a minimal web server on a device. Further, use a rendering engine in such a way that you would not have to run it in a full browser. It would look just like an app and you could use it offline. Of course there is a matter of how to make something so crazy secure. Then I suppose the question is why do it at all. Fact of the matter is: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Any input from someone who does know what their talking about?
What planet are you from? MS wrote off $900 million in surface tablets. They didn't sell them. There are about 6 million units collecting dust in a warehouse right now.
While it would be interesting to see how fish would operate under 38% Earth gravity long-term, I have doubts that such a system would be indefinitely sustainable without quite a bit of work for people who would already be stretched to their own operational limits. You make it sound simple, but one thing goes wrong and a large and important part of your food source could be gone with no hope of recovery. For a non-plant source of protein, I think it would make more sense to breed an insect such as grasshoppers, or something more efficient. You could breed them in an environment with a plant source that would not cut into human crops, and there are such plants that require very little water. There would be a balance, but I am suspicious it would be a lot simpler than maintaining a Martian fishery. Being among the first settlers living on Mars would be a life without luxury, everything would have to be as simplified as possible.
It's nice that people come along and try to drum up interest in space with these pseudo-experiments, but this is not really very practical. If we were to send people to Mars it would be for a very, very, very long stay. Think years, if not forever. While the first humans on Mars would surely bring with them a few months of food to get started, they would have to consider themselves on their own past that. In terms of weight, it would only be practical to send as little as possible with them. Re-supply missions would be so costly, they would likely be far and few between and would concentrate on water and replacement equipment - things do break down. Also, what if something went wrong and a food re-supply mission that said Martians would be depending on did not make it? At least water can (and would), be recycled and stretched out. It's well established that a long-term manned Mars mission would have to be largely self-sustainable - in other words: luxuries such as cheese and fish would be out of the question. A more practical experiment would involve establishing how and what foods future Martians would be able to cultivate on their own, as boring a diet as it might be, as well as pushing water recycling to new levels of efficiency.
When they started this whole fiber deal, Google clearly stated that they had no idea what people might use this bandwidth for. They said it was an experiment to see what creative uses people might find for it. This policy clearly goes against that statement. As someone who will have Google Fiber available in the next couple months, this is frustrating. I am a "tinkerer/pseudo hacker", and that means sometimes running an internet facing server of some sort for pure nerd learning purposes. Sigh...
Reminds of a mini Moller Skycar M400 , except it works. I've been following the M400 since about 1990 in hopes it might actually make it somewhere, unfortunately, this is as good at it has gotten. never understood why the last decade in computer advances haven't lent something towards stability for that crazy thing. Maybe they should take a lesson from this. I've given up on Moller's sky car, yet things like this make me still dream about it. Oh well...
And I apologize for that. Unfortunately, my first choice was Gary Johnson but that went nowhere. Although if he runs again in 2016 (oh please please please), I will be outright actively joining his campaign. No less, I have already started spreading the word about him, his platform, and where he stands on issues. With everything that has been going on, perhaps he will have a chance.
My favorite way to study in a situation like yours is to first take my notes the old fashioned way: with paper and pen in class. I then take those notes, along with applicable textbooks, and manually compose them in whatever software makes sense, typically LibreOffice Writer. The act of first taking notes the old fashioned way, and then cross referencing with the textbook, while in turn creating a highly refined set of notes in an application, strongly re-enforces what I am studying in my brain. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote rehearsal = good). Plus the act of composing more highly refined notes from your originals takes it one step beyond that.
Past that, I really don't think there is a single application that will filter all your notes automagically into so many different formats.
Considering it's running the Linux Kernel, and from what I've seen of the filesystem layout with the terminal I have on my phone, it looks to me like it is overall a linux distro, just very different and funky. Can we not also call Elementary an OS based on that rather than confining it to the category of yet another distro? I'm not talking back, I really am asking this as a question that perhaps has a less obvious answer than I realize. So... enlighten me.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a decent Linux driver for once.
I can think of more than a few other very large companies, who through the nature of the business they conduct, should be joining Microsoft and Google. This is a good start, but it would be nice to see a whole bunch of companies gang up on the government over this. It might also help the little guys stand up.
Qeng Ho
Seriously, posting the "we might be martians" story has become equivalent to trolling Slashdot. I would carry on about why the notion of Earth life coming from Mars is flimsy and fanciful to begin with, but we have had that discussion over and over. It's like Groundhog's Day - only not entertaining.
What do I think will change? That's just it, I don't know. Other than the possibility that landing on the moon could prove to be an exercise for greater missions that would profit. My point is: all of scientific and technological achievement going into even the near term future has become by far and away a greater wild card than it has ever been before, and we have only just achieved that level of mystery. I'm just saying, don't put anything past the near and long term future. We can't know anything other than continued accelerating change will take us to unknown places. The old paradigm you speak of is shifting faster then we can understand.
In a rare event, I am going to play the optimist and suggest commercial space endeavors will get us back to the moon before then. How soon? Perhaps between 2020 - 2025. It's easy to scoff at that, but technology is officially advancing at rate such that we already can't guess what things will be like in a mere six and a half to eleven-years from now. Scientific and technological advancement has become like a runaway, and aggressive, chemical reaction - like a wildfire burning intensely in powerful but chaotic winds, heading in directions we can't know until it gets there. Commercial space endeavors might not beat the Canadian effort by much, but the sooner the better by no matter how small a margin.
Why would commercial spaceflight take us back to the moon? I can't know, but I can guess it would make great practice for traveling longer distance and pulling off complex tasks. Maybe a warm up exercise for an ambitious and profitable mission.
That was probably not the best analogy, but you get the idea. That and I don't know much about cars.
There is a rumor going around that Elon is kinda busy right now, so I doubt that would happen. As a thought experiment, he would probably move MS headquarters to the moon.
When the petition program started, I thought it was a fantastic and forwarded thinking way of giving voice to the American people. If there is one thing I have learned, it's that if the administration doesn't like something, no matter how many signatures, they simply send out a form letter with a vague reason why they are declining it. It's all fuzzy and feel good on the outside, but in the end it will become ashes in your mouth.
I think it's a great way to get kids thinking about their future before said future hits them like a truck. Putting together professional profiles would make a great (and gradable) school project that could be kept up to date as they progress through middle and high school, and who knows, it may even get kids to clean up their online act when they realize what effect their trashy facebook profiles could have on their future. Then again, it would be interesting to read a well put together LinkedIn profile of a 16 year old, and then compare to their facebook profile.
Did you know that the United States is made up of many states that are overall very different and spread across a wide geographical area? We even have our own separate laws. I am from Missouri and find it frustrating to be lumped in with Texans.
This all seems like such a bad dream. Unfortunately, that makes the American predicament no less real. We may soon find ourselves facing three choices:
1. Passively watch our experiment in democracy lay down and die, while accepting that 2 + 2 = 5. Hopefully your children won't be too dissatisfied with your parenting. They might turn you in under the guise of suspicion of thinking freely.
2. Flee the country. Get you're passport and leave now while you still can. We may find some of the more desirable countries banning the immigration of fleeing US citizens, or at the very least face widespread discrimination abroad.
3. Fight back - I'm talking violence here.
I know how melodramatic that all sounds, and a few years ago I would have never imagined myself realistically making such a statement - not in a million years.
I can't believe I have a front row seat to everything that's going down. Maybe someday I'll find myself telling someone where I was when the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights were permanently suspended. Maybe someday I'll tell someone how the entirety of US history really went down from founding ideals to however this ends - I'm sure it will be nothing even remotely close to their heavily censored, revisionist textbook.
Last but not least: this really sucks.
In this debate, people have forgotten an important point that Musk made early on: In being solar powered, the system is expected to yield enough excess electricity to make it worth contributing to the grid. I'm not going to get into the debate itself, but for those of you tossing the ball back and forth, you should consider this point in your arguments, whether you think that particular claim is feasible or not.
I believe the strategy here was is get potential OEMs tripping all over themselves in consideration of the number of people willing to put down money for the idea of a product that is over a year out from production, namely those willing to lay down enough for a prototype. At $10 mil, I'll bet they have perked plenty of corporate ears.
Myself as someone who has been following the development of this product, and has taken the time to understand why it's OS is innovative, and most importantly (to me anyway) it's kick ass interface, I'm rooting for them.
BTW - it's not vaporware until it doesn't happen, and they're not planning on even having a production phone for year - which they have been completely up front about.
I would also like to say that I find it disheartening that so many Linux based projects get their teeth kicked by slashdoters these days. I remember a time long ago on slashdot when something like this would garner a sense of adventure.
they are a for profit company in there somewhere
Semantically, I'm not quite sure how to interpret this attempt at putting words together into a coherent thought, but I'll respond based on a guess of what I think your trying to say: It is not possible to design a $100 million Open Source factory to produce these phones, where said factory and all assembly machines are drawn up as Open Source schematics, and to then have a bunch of Open Source construction workers work for free in their spare time to build said $100 million factory, and to then pay the power bill with Open Source........? Or perhaps you are talking about Canonical making money? Before I go so far as to respond to that in all the ways I could interpret, I'll let you post back with clarification. Or perhaps I have just wasted my time writing a rebuttal to a troll.
What I gather from the article is that it has impact strength but not much in the way of tensile strength. It appears to have a few other interesting properties though.
I've wondered if there could be a scheme where you have an app that in installs say, the sproutcore framework, server, and a minimal web server on a device. Further, use a rendering engine in such a way that you would not have to run it in a full browser. It would look just like an app and you could use it offline. Of course there is a matter of how to make something so crazy secure. Then I suppose the question is why do it at all. Fact of the matter is: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Any input from someone who does know what their talking about?
What planet are you from? MS wrote off $900 million in surface tablets. They didn't sell them. There are about 6 million units collecting dust in a warehouse right now.
While it would be interesting to see how fish would operate under 38% Earth gravity long-term, I have doubts that such a system would be indefinitely sustainable without quite a bit of work for people who would already be stretched to their own operational limits. You make it sound simple, but one thing goes wrong and a large and important part of your food source could be gone with no hope of recovery. For a non-plant source of protein, I think it would make more sense to breed an insect such as grasshoppers, or something more efficient. You could breed them in an environment with a plant source that would not cut into human crops, and there are such plants that require very little water. There would be a balance, but I am suspicious it would be a lot simpler than maintaining a Martian fishery. Being among the first settlers living on Mars would be a life without luxury, everything would have to be as simplified as possible.
It's nice that people come along and try to drum up interest in space with these pseudo-experiments, but this is not really very practical. If we were to send people to Mars it would be for a very, very, very long stay. Think years, if not forever. While the first humans on Mars would surely bring with them a few months of food to get started, they would have to consider themselves on their own past that. In terms of weight, it would only be practical to send as little as possible with them. Re-supply missions would be so costly, they would likely be far and few between and would concentrate on water and replacement equipment - things do break down. Also, what if something went wrong and a food re-supply mission that said Martians would be depending on did not make it? At least water can (and would), be recycled and stretched out. It's well established that a long-term manned Mars mission would have to be largely self-sustainable - in other words: luxuries such as cheese and fish would be out of the question. A more practical experiment would involve establishing how and what foods future Martians would be able to cultivate on their own, as boring a diet as it might be, as well as pushing water recycling to new levels of efficiency.
When they started this whole fiber deal, Google clearly stated that they had no idea what people might use this bandwidth for. They said it was an experiment to see what creative uses people might find for it. This policy clearly goes against that statement. As someone who will have Google Fiber available in the next couple months, this is frustrating. I am a "tinkerer/pseudo hacker", and that means sometimes running an internet facing server of some sort for pure nerd learning purposes. Sigh...
Reminds of a mini Moller Skycar M400 , except it works. I've been following the M400 since about 1990 in hopes it might actually make it somewhere, unfortunately, this is as good at it has gotten. never understood why the last decade in computer advances haven't lent something towards stability for that crazy thing. Maybe they should take a lesson from this. I've given up on Moller's sky car, yet things like this make me still dream about it. Oh well...
Point taken.
And I apologize for that. Unfortunately, my first choice was Gary Johnson but that went nowhere. Although if he runs again in 2016 (oh please please please), I will be outright actively joining his campaign. No less, I have already started spreading the word about him, his platform, and where he stands on issues. With everything that has been going on, perhaps he will have a chance.
My favorite way to study in a situation like yours is to first take my notes the old fashioned way: with paper and pen in class. I then take those notes, along with applicable textbooks, and manually compose them in whatever software makes sense, typically LibreOffice Writer. The act of first taking notes the old fashioned way, and then cross referencing with the textbook, while in turn creating a highly refined set of notes in an application, strongly re-enforces what I am studying in my brain. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote rehearsal = good). Plus the act of composing more highly refined notes from your originals takes it one step beyond that.
Past that, I really don't think there is a single application that will filter all your notes automagically into so many different formats.
Considering it's running the Linux Kernel, and from what I've seen of the filesystem layout with the terminal I have on my phone, it looks to me like it is overall a linux distro, just very different and funky. Can we not also call Elementary an OS based on that rather than confining it to the category of yet another distro? I'm not talking back, I really am asking this as a question that perhaps has a less obvious answer than I realize. So... enlighten me.
I made another post discussing this in slightly more depth further down, read it here:
A brazen copy of OS X
Be sure to read the follow up where I reply to myself too. And be sure to give it a spin when you get the chance, it's really very good.