What surprises me, given their popularity in education(and the fact that turning any old laptop design into a 'chromebook' involves little more than a firmware change), is that nobody seems to make a modestly ruggedized Chromebook.

  Among normal wintel laptops, the bottom of the range is dangerously cheap plastic crap that breaks if you look at it; but it's quite easy to buy various levels of ruggedness from 'adequate build quality' to 'actually designed with road warriors in mind' to 'yes, actually rated to an alphabet soup of drop, vibration, and other tests' to 'Toughbook' to 'Please Consult a General Dynamics Representative, and have your checkbook open'.

  Given what you pay for the really high end, the cost/benefit for student use tends to land somewhere on the toughish side of boring business laptop; but you can buy those easily enough. For some reason, nearly all Chromebooks are delicate little things, cheap and lightweight; but just not that tough.

Ruggedization costs money. try speccing out that Toughbook sometime and you'll find it costs a heckuva lot of money for not a lot.

Partly because they're niche devices that don't sell a lot, but also because the ruggedization means extra materials and assembly that costs more.

And Chromebooks are designed for a very price-sensitive market - they can't cost more than $200 before approaching "regular laptop" price ranges. And in the end, they may be more fragile, but with the data in the cloud, they're also a lot more rugged because if the student drops or breaks it, they just log into a new one and all the data is there.

There's also the cost factor - if it costs $50 more to ruggedize a Chromebook, then it means instead of buying 5 Chromebooks at $200 each, they buy 4 at $250 each. The 4 may be ruggedized, but if students are careful and they don't break one out of the 5, then it's cheaper to go non-ruggedized.

The other big issue with laptops is theft - and Chromebooks just aren't the target people wantak

I'd be willing to pay money to not have to use that piece of crap.

How can folks be so arrogant to assume that a professional hasn't got her workflows up and running? We are't thrilled to get *your* workflow and *the other publisher's workflow* all of them pushed down our throats.

And we, the researchers, libraries and students are collateral damage of the turf wars of the platforms. Thanks, but no thanks. Go play bingo or blackjack in some casino, but leave us the fuck alone.

I'll take paper over this mess any day.

Then use the existing methods, they aren't going away. And if you really do need access to Nature (or Science), you probably already have institutional access that gets you what you need.

This stuff is more about the public not having to pay the $10 or whatever to get past the paywall and read the rest of the paper. You know, the people who don't have subscriptions to Nature.

Now they do. Funny how people can now have a free option to read the stuff and it's not "free" enough, when before they had to pay.

Sure it's not open access. But you know what? It's a step. Right now open-access journals have a reputation problem (see that paper that got published about a mailing list?).

For those who hate it - well, the situation is the same as it was before - you don't have access to the paper. For those willing to run through the hoops, you just got access to it, whereas before you had to ante up. That's progress.

And that 6-month rule has always been there, so no changes.

Sheesh, the way people react, it's as if yesterday's access was better than today. Because yesterday you couldn't get at the paper, but today you can if you run through some hoops.

Not really been wondering, we already got to witness it first-person in HalfLife! Just watch out when you notice any resonance cascade...

Well, we're gonna be fine as CERN has Gordon Freeman working for them. He even got a crowbar

Should the time cops broke up that party a kid was at be available, in video, for the rest of the kid's life?

How about the time the couple at the end of the block fought and a noise complaint got called in? Should future employers be able to get access to recordings of people at the worst moments of their lives?

There already is a wonderful curator. It's called the courts.

The recordings must be kept, and they're available to the public. All the public needs to do is convince a judge as to what records you want (giving a date and time) and why.

If you want all the video recorded, then you have to convince a judge as to why they're relevant to you.

And if the police fail to produce records they should be able to produce, guess what? The judge can order production, or hold the police in contempt.

So if you're a kid that got recorded during an out of control party, well, your employer needs to be able to convince the judge that that exact incident is relevant for their business.

For crimes or police harassment, the date and time as well known and the judge can easily demand release of video around that time - even +/- 1 hour to give some leeway.

But try convincing a judge that you need all video recorded on December 1, 2014 from everyone. The judge will ask you about what incident requires you to have that much video.

I use Google Wallet where it lets me, in that I like the bonus layer of a virtual card. No need to panic every time a home improvement store gets hacked, or worry who gets my card info when I buy a Coke from a vending machine...

Given the way Google Wallet work, you may not be as protected as you think. Google Wallet works by being a virtual debit card - they use Host Emulation to be a chip card to a (I think) Bank of America debit account. So when you pay, the merchant sees a NFC debit card, and does the transaction that way. Bank of America then takes those payment details, forwards it to Google and Google demands payment from you.

If someone grabs that debit account number, that could be problematic because that's a debit account in your name. It also means Google must absorb a fee somewhere because the retailer believes they're charging a debit card and pays that fee, but Google needs to charge your card and Google must eat that fee.

It's also why no bank will create Google Wallet as a card-present payment - because Google is still charging your card similar to an online payment.

Apple Pay is really just a slick implementation of EMV which means the retailer sees a very expensive credit card and because that credit card was presented, gets the Card Present rates. The only "secret sauce" Apple adds is a slick way of adding cards.

Since I was born with speech and hearing impediments. However, I can socialize online decently (like this /. post) but many people don't like those. :(

The impediments are only impediments if you treat them as such. If you want to talk to people, do. Social skills are social skills, and if you're a genuinely interesting person to talk to, people will accommodate.

It may help to just talk (and talk and talk to exercise the speech path) and try to normalize your speaking to aid comprehension, but if you're someone who people want to talk to for whatever reason, a speech impediment isn't. And the more you do it, the better you'll be at overcoming it.

This system (which brings the shelves to the workers, as workers are MUCH better at plucking small, irregularly-shaped items out of boxes) has fascinating challenges all of it's own, mainly related to traffic control, safety, and where to put the shelves after you are done. (A fixed location is very inefficient, but neither do you want to stick the shelf in the first available space.)

The shelves are movable like you said. The position of the shelves within the warehouse can change depending on the hotness and coldness of the items within.

You have to remember the robots are not autonomous - they are controlled by a central computer tied to the ordering and inventory databases. The central computer is also responsible for knowing where all the robots are in the warehouse, what they're doing, and where they're going. And human traffic is easy to detect since the robots have traditional bump, IR and other sensors (which the computer can look at the path planning and stop other robots headed towards a collision with the first robot).

And this leads to the idea of hot and cold shelves - because the shelves are movable, they can be put anywhere. And in Amazon's warehouse (as is everyone else's using the robots), the shelves are arranged from hot to cold with hotter shelves towards the packers and colder shelves towards the far end of the warehouse. The computer adjusts the location of the shelves dynamically as need be - as a shelf gets hotter, its position in the warehouse changes.

Yes, it means that a company like Amazon can't tell you WHERE in the warehouse something is without consulting the inventory database because that location changes constantly. Probably easier to just have a robot bring you the item than to look it up and pick it manually.

Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)

Plus, in Europe, generally speaking there's a very good public transportation system that one doesn't NEED a license to go anywhere. So drivers who do drive generally drive because they like to drive.

If you hate driving, you have a perfectly usable option of public transportation.

In North America, that's generally not an option except in a few areas, so the end result is you have a bunch of people forced to drive who would rather be doing other things. (Like say, texting, or prepping for the party or other activity).

So yes, they drive better not because they're better drivers, but those who don't want to drive have viable options of getting around, leaving the roads filled with people who like to drive, enjoy it, and are generally more skilled because they like the challenge. Not some soccer mom who'd rather be gossiping with friends or doing their nails instead of driving.

And that includes getting around between cities too - between buses and cheap flights, you can do a lot in Europe without setting foot behind the wheel.

I hate to be pedantic but....ahh fuck it, I LOVE to be pedantic....the propagation delay of signals in anything other than a vacuum is always a fraction of c. So the speed of the signals through a cable can be anything from 65% to >90% of light speed in a vacuum.

But at the end of the day, the propagation delay in the cable itself is still way way less than 1 microsecond, which is not perceptible in the slightest for a human. The electronics at either end of the cable are a whole different ballgame, and are the cause of perceptible lag and delays in a system.

Instead of guessing, you could calculate it, or rely on Adm. Grace Hopper's famous "1 nanosecond". At c, that's just under a foot. Adding 10 feet of cabling means the signal takes just over 10ns longer. If you add in velocity factor, .66 is convenient for copper wiring, that's really 15ns in the end.

And a microsecond is 1000ns. Or just under 1000' at c.

Thanks for the clarification.. I guess I'm just depressed that artists have to deal with this kind of sh*t in the first place, at all, ever. Music is art, and these matters should be (in my idealistic opinion anyway) dealt with within the art community instead of in the courtroom.. What's a better punishment for ripping someone off as a musician: your own music community shunning you, or having to pay money?

And yet "ripping off" music is common and even popularized. Rap was created this way when a drum riff intro was repeated over and over and over again (from Aerosmith? I can't recall). We consider it a legitimate form of music today (for varying degrees of "legitimate"), yet its origins are in copyright infringement. And there have been many a sampler musician who has made great music despite sampling being literally copyright infringement.

And shunning only works if the community is small, and extremely difficult in something as subjective as art. You can shun, but there is a chance that someone actually likes it, and despite shunning, embraces the "theft" or infringement. Then it's a case of which community is larger or who can grow and evolve taste.

Perhaps if those webpages were not laden down with masses of Javascript, doing who knows what, the pages would be faster to load. All that Javascript has to be downloaded from a server somewhere and executed in the browser. It all takes resources.

Many website developers today seem to think that his/her web pages only need to load on the fastest computers as the sole page open in the browser. I think of them as "greedy" websites, because they are greedy with the end-users' compute resources.

The problem is that developer PCs are often some of the most powerful in the company because they are developers and can demand it. I mean, give a developer, web or otherwise a bog standard PC with less RAM that "average" people have and you'll get nothing but an endless stream of complaints.

So yeah, web developers with Haswell 3.5GHz i7s and 16/32GB of RAM designing webpages. yeah, it loads fast, but bogs down someone with a 4 year old PC and barely 4GB of RAM.

Then there's all the preparation for traffic - yeah, they get all the static CDNs up and running, the database servers are beefed up and the dynamic servers are beefy. Then they forget one script they have on every page references some dinky little server everyone forgot about. That server keels over and the page coding is such that the browser isn't able to render the rest of the page while loading it in the background. So now the pages load slower and slower and slower and everyone thinks it's either the static CDNs, the database or the dynamic views being generated, and not the server handling that one script which is vastly underpowered because it's hidden in the corner of the datacentre and forgotten about.

Get a less noisy system. How hard is that to figure out?

Get a case that has one or two 120mm or larger fans for airflow. They generate much MUCH less noise than 80mm fans and still push enough air to keep the thing chilled.

Switch CPU/GPU fans to ones that only turn on when needed, and are off while the system is at a cool idle temp.

I built an HTPC recenty and used some high-end parts because they were on sale and well, at their target load it would mean their fans are basically not running.

I also invested a lot in Noctua fans - the motherboard supported speed control (4 pin) so I bought 4 pin fans that go from slow to moderately fast. The heatsink on the CPU takes a whopping 150mm fan, and the fan itself can do 200-800RPM. Most of the time at the load it's at it's at 200RPM, and it turns out the tachometer thinks less than 300RPM is stopped - so I kept getting fan-stopped alarms because the fan was running so slow.

Likewise, the case needed 80mm fans, I used ones that went from 400-1000RPM, they usually idle at 400RPM.

In fact, the noisiest it gets is about 3 seconds on resume as things spin up then go silent (it has an SSD for the OS, and a HDD for media - storing multi-gig files on the HDD doesn't cause much seeking and the drive is virtually silent). Yes, the PC is in sleep mode most of the time which ensures the noise is at a minimum.

It's not hard. It just requires a bit of work choosing quiet components. Case fans are a big source of noise, so pick 120mm or larger if you can, or pick speed-controllable ones if you can't. And go for airflow designed ones like the Noctuas - the blades and case are designed to cause as little turbulence as possible to reduce noise.

And if you're choosing a case, choose one that has wire fan grills rather than ones made from stamped metal. Stamped metal is cheap but adds turbulence.

Power supplies - Seasonic makes some of the most quiet ones, but 120mm ones generally are quiet. If you can, there are even passive fanless ones!

I know it would add cost but as someone else said why doesn't the FAA require a license and transponders on drones so that everyone knows what's in the air and who owns it?

The FAA has proposed just that - currently for commercial use. Right now commercial use of a drone is restricted, but the FAA is planning on requiring a licensed pilot be in control of a commercial drone.

They haven't gotten around to regulating recreational use just yet - given the commercial variety tend to be able to carry more mass and be able to be in the air longer (and also cost in the 5 digit range, which is relatively cheap).

Recreational use is tricky because the FAA doesn't want to limit those cheap $150 ones that can't go above 50 feet or last more than 5 minutes, but wants to go after those more sophisticated ones like DJI Phantoms that can reach a couple of thousand feet and be there for 10s of minutes at a time, and filtering between the two is really hard.

Plus they're so easy to (mis)use and fly that people really don't think they need a pilot's license for them. And it's the major reason we're seeing all this right now - they're cheap, they're easy, and everyone with $1000 can get one. And common sense is well, less than common given what we see in other fields (e.g., computing). Hell, I'm sure this holiday season some teens and pre-teens even will have Phantoms under the tree.

Airport databases don't work too well - new aerodromes and such come into and pop out of existence on an almost daily basis (the major airports are easy - there's only around 100 of them, but there are thousands of public use GA airports, and probably 10s of thousands of aerodromes, private and public). It's one reason why there's a 56-day cycle on materials And even then the FAA doesn't have a full listing - they do for public use ones, but private aerodromes don't necessarily show up.

I can't get to the study but it seems like the sample size was one secondary school class. That's routhly 30 children. How is this considered a scientific study?

What, you have to do a complete double-blind study with thousands of people just to see if a hypothesis MIGHT be true? Or just to see what happens?

Here's how the real world works. You have a hypothesis. You design a test to try to test it (this is hard and you may inadvertently introduce an unknown that you're actually measuring). Next comes the expensive bit - data gathering.

But if your hypothesis isn't cut and dry and your experiment isn't necessarily well controlled (common most of the time because you're not testing stuff like "is the sky blue?" but more open-ended ones like "can girls write nicer than boys?"), you're not going to run a test on thousands because it costs too much. And you may find a flaw in your test that invalidates the whole result.

So you run a small scale test, and do your data gathering and analysis. Like say, you do it on a class. It won't be well controlled nor a population sample, but it will reveal several things. First, it will tell you if you're blowing smoke up your ass by having a hypothesis that's invalid. Second, it can help reveal issues with your data gathering. Third, it helps you do data analysis quickly - far easier to ensure your results are accurate when you're only analyzing 30 people versus 3000. The former is small enough that you can double-check your analysis programs with manual hand calculations.

Plenty of research fails because the expected hypothesis was wrong to begin with. Better to have done it and wasted a few thousand dollars than tens of thousands or more. If you're trying to present something to a grant committee, it's far easier to have small scale results that show promise than hand-waving "we thinks".

And yes, it's possible a larger scale study proves no significant difference. Which isn't a failure - it means you forgot to control a variable. Which means it's still a result and you analyze why you got the results you did that you didn't get int he later study.

And, a small scale test may even reveal more questions to ask so when you enlarge the dataset, you can do more analysis and maybe if your original hypothesis is invalid, you can still salvage something. Plenty of science was done by doing a study and "hey, that's kinda interesting..."

30 people may not be population representative, but it certainly produces a result worth studying further, no? You can even do secondary studies like what's the gender population at this level, and compare it a few years later. We always ask why there aren't more females in IT, and inevitably people say "why should we care?" If the population isn't as skewed in the early years, longer term studies can be performed that see why it gets skewed later on. Is it a structural problem, a societal problem, or is it even a problem with IT workers purposely discouraging females from joining? The first we can't do much about (in which case the "why should we bother" crowd is correct), the second we can look at, and the third points the blame solely at IT workers as the main problem (where perhaps it's "IT workers are a bunch of immature boy cliques that treat females as having the cooties").

I'm kind of hopeful that the Ubuntu people will consider dropping Debian for Devuan, and that perhaps the Devuan project can start working more closely with the Ubuntu people, possibly even becoming a dev distro from which the desktop distro is derived, kind of like what Ubuntu does with Debian now. If I read it correctly, they moved to systemd because Debian did, not because they wanted to.

Ubuntu also moved to systemd because everyone was moving to systemd. Before that, Ubuntu has their own init system called Upstart, and there was much debate in Debian on whether to use systemd or Upstart.

Of course, in the end, even people wanting sysvinit are obviously doing something wrong because they're not using sysvinit properly. Sysvinit has a daemon manager built into it yet it's only used for one daemon typically (getty).

Instead, we abuse it to run shell scripts that barely replicate that functionality that is already built into sysvinit. I mean, init monitors the processes it runs, restarts them as necessary, and if they fail by restarting too quickly, init waits 5 minutes before trying again. Which his what daemon management is.