The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.

If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.

I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.

The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.

If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.

I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.

Hollywood has an idea shortage.

True, but there is another point you might want to consider: media fragmentation.

It used to be that there were only three TV networks, and most people could only see a movie by going to the theatre (which didn't have 12 different screens in those days either). For music, there were a limited number of radio stations.

Now, there are many different cable channels, plus YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Rhapsody, and DVD rentals or purchases. For consumers this is great, because you can watch what you like, when you like it.

But Hollywood is unhappy because it's much harder now to build a new franchise. As a result, Hollywood is recycling old franchises, even if the end product has very little to do with the original.

For a bonus, many people who have purchasing power now have fond memories of things they watched as kids.

Thus, you have crazy stuff like the Battleship movie; I'm pretty sure they literally started with the brand name, and ginned up a movie project to put on it. I submit to you that Battleship isn't an example of scraping the barrel for ideas, but rather an example of jump-starting the marketing for a movie by building off a well-known pre-existing brand. It's gotta be the same thing with Tetris: we have this brand, how can we leverage it to sell movies?

Many of the reboots and sequels have little to do with the original source material; and I think in many cases Hollywood just took some script and said "we can shoehorn this into a pre-existing franchise" and did it.

Also, in my opinion the reason Guardians of the Galaxy was so successful was that it was made with love, and well-made at that; the third-tier Marvel characters are so obscure that they didn't really bring much to the marketing. I, for one, saw it because the previews made it look fun and because I read some really favorable reviews.

This is a little bit tricky because it is, in theory, a violation of the DMCA to play DVDs without a properly licensed DVD player program. (Specifically, a program that has licensed the dread secret of CSS.)

Both Ubuntu and Mint have packages you can install to play DVDs.

If you don't mind paying some money, you can get a properly licensed DVD player from Fluendo. I bought this, and it Just Works.

http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/oneplay-dvd-player/

I wish Fluendo would also offer a Blu-Ray player, but as far as I know the only legal-in-the-USA way to play Blu-Ray on Linux would be to install Windows in VirtualBox or some other VM, and then install a Windows Blu-Ray player.

...I don't waste my time with Python. There will always be a latest and greatest scripting language to come along and replace the previous one.

Maybe so, but Python is getting more popular and widely-used rather than dying out.

IMHO Python hits the sweet spot: it's powerful and expressive, yet the code is readable and maintainable. The worst thing about Python is that it's pretty slow, but it has a vast library of extensions (written in C or even FORTRAN) and the extensions aren't slow. (Like, if you wrote your own FFT in Python it would be glacially slow, but you don't need to write your own FFT because fast ones are available... and if your program is mostly doing FFTs it will be nearly as fast as a C program, because the slow Python glue code isn't where the program spends most of its time.)

In the world of science, everyone is converging on Python because of SciPy (which rocks). As people get fed up with legacy systems, they adopt Python as the replacement. I attended a keynote lecture at the SciPy conference a few years back, and a senior guy from the Hubble Space Telescope project talked about how they were leaving a language called IDL and switching to Python, and how much happier they were with Python.

I have heard that the Ruby guys had a project to make a "SciRuby" but (a) progress was slow and (b) the science guys are already using SciPy and won't switch unless some really compelling advantage appears.

Python is a clean, well-designed language that can have anything you need put in as an extension. So you can replace Matlab with Python and it's mostly a win. You can replace R with Python (and I think it's probably mostly a win, but I'm biased toward Python and have never seriously used R so feel free to ignore my opinion).

Python can be used by sysadmins, web site developers, cloud app developers, scientific researchers... really almost everyone can do their work in Python, and they can talk to each other about it if they are all using the same language. That's not a trivial benefit.

So, IMHO you would not be "wasting your time" to try actually using Python.

Google/Motorola trying to extract four billion dollars out of Microsoft for some .mp3 patents?

Nope. You are thinking of Alcatel/Lucent. And technically Alcatel/Lucent couldn't ask for a specific amount of money; the award was 1.5 billion dollars but could have been 4.5 billion dollars had the jury decided it was willful infringement.

Microsoft isn't an angel, but they do pay license fees on patents, and they were paid up on MP3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft_Corp.

Samsung being told by the EU that they could face a fine up to $17 billion unless they stop trying to use their patents in anti-competitive ways?

Yep. Actually up to $18.3 billion per this article:

http://bgr.com/2013/12/09/samsungs-patent-settlement-concessions-eu/

Has anyone else noticed this- that overall the cheaper and sleazier the motel, the better the wi-fi?

I wouldn't go that far.

I once stayed in a really bargain hotel, which advertised free WiFi. I think they had a single consumer wireless router in the office, and my room was not close to the office... I couldn't get a usable signal. So no, definitely not "the cheaper... the better the WiFi".

But middle-of-the-road hotels generally have perfectly usable WiFi. I wouldn't try to stream Netflix on it but it's fine for reading Slashdot or whatever. (I would rate Motel 6 as middle-of-the-road for motels.)

As others have noted on this thread, expensive hotels also try to hit you with extra charges for phone use and anything else they can get away with. And, I have seen them charging by MAC address... your daily Internet fee is intended to allow you to run just one device.

The article is pretty terrible on the details. It seems that this CPV device is intended to be built near the ocean, and use salt water for cooling; the water can then be run through a desalinization system.

The hot water can then be used in an attached desalination system that creates drinkable water by passing itwater[sic] through a Gortex-like membrane.

According to Wikipedia there are several desalinization processes available that use heated water and a membrane. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Desalination_powered_by_waste_heat

The article is vague on how the CPV system provides cooling, but the CPV system produces heat as a byproduct, and it is possible to use extra heat for cooling. There are refrigerators that run on propane, with no motors. (There is a sort of pumping of coolant that relies on gravity.

There are a lot of places in the world that get lots of sunlight, are near salt water, and could use more fresh water. So this sounds like a good idea, but it isn't going to be installed everywhere.

I was surprised at how many instructions that developers previously spread out over multiple lines are now packed into highly idiomatic one-liners.

As with many things, Python one-liners can be good or bad. When done correctly they are awesome.

Consider this code:

bad = any(is_bad_word(word) for word in words_in(message))

If words_in() is a generator that yields up one word at a time from the message, and is_bad_word() is a function that detects profanity or other banned words, then this one-liner checks to see if any word in a message is a bad word.

I love the any() and all() built-in functions in Python.

You can take this too far. Instead of defining a function is_bad_word() you could put the code inline as part of the on-liner. And instead of defining a generator that yields up one word at a time, you could add the splitting code to the one-liner. Then you would get:

bad = any(word in bad_words_list for line in message for word in line.split())

Or let's say the definition of a bad word is that any substring in the word is from the bad list (thus "frakking" is a bad word if "frak" is in the bad list), with it inline you get:

bad = any(any(bad_word in word for bad word in bad_words_list) for line in message for word in line.split())

I think we can all agree that the above is horrible, but I hope you will agree that the first one was pretty nice.

I have an HP MicroServer running Debian Stable, with several VMs running under Xen.

I love the MicroServer. Quiet, easy to work on, and inexpensive enough that I'm going to just buy a second one as a hot spare.

It doesn't support hot swapping of hard drives, but for my home use I don't need four nines reliability; powering down to swap drives is just fine for me.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107921

I run an email server with a small number of users (family and a few friends). This makes me appreciate sysadmins more.

I am planning to switch from using Xen VMs to using Docker containers.

He points out, correctly, that many servers don't need much. Particularly with cloud services, servers might spin up a whole bunch of very lightweight virtual machines doing one thing (running a web server like nginx for example).

So his big idea is a "server-only" distribution that doesn't have any support at all for GUI operation. But he doesn't really explain the benefit. As far as I can understand, he names one single benefit: such a distro would be "not beholden to architectural changes made due to desktop package requirements."

The only "architectural changes" I can think of recently are related to systemd, so I guess this was his very roundabout way of wishing for a Linux distribution with no systemd support.

Am I wrong here? Did you manage to find any other advantage listed in his article to explain why it would be great if you were unable to set up a machine running your server OS with a GUI?

I really do want digital albums, complete with very high resolution art, full lyrics, liner notes, and extras.

I'd actually like to have the ability to buy the "full album" that would include video files of each music video from the album, "B" sides from old 45 releases of songs from the album, backstage videos, interviews with the artist, whatever.

The old album covers from the 70's, the ones that were supposed to be on large vinyl record jackets... I want to be able to put those up on a large flatscreen TV while the album is playing. Preferably not just a scan from a CD printing, but the original image scanned in high resolution. I'd like to be able to see all the details in Hipgnosis images like the jacket art to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or Wish You Were Here. (Hmm, someone made an animated GIF for that last one... heck, I'd like it both ways in the digital album, original and new animated version.)

Of course, I want this all using open file formats (FLAC, JPEG, HTML). But since nobody else got around to doing this, Apple is doing it first, and of course with Apple it will be proprietary, opaque, and likely patented somehow for maximum lockin.

I don't think this will revolutionize music, but it really is something I want.

Agreed on the ChromeBook.

I'm not sure about making a ChromeBook use dial-up, so the solution is to somehow get a WiFi router on dialup.

I think there used to be WiFi routers that could manage a modem directly, but there isn't much call for them these days so I doubt you can find one.

You could set up a computer with Linux just to manage the dialup, and plug that into the router's WAN port. But maybe you can just customize a router to do what you need:

Buy a router that is well supported by open firmware and has USB ports. Install the open firmware, login as root, then customize the router to do the dialup with a USB modem.

In the past, I have used TomatoUSB with an Asus RT-N16 router (costs about $80 new). It was a pleasure to work with. The router gives you about 24 MB of usable storage using onboard flash memory, but you can trivially plug in a USB flash drive and have gigabytes of storage if you need it. But you can probably set up the needed scripts to manage the modem in the 24 MB space.

There are newer routers with bigger onboard flash if you prefer. I only mention the Asus RT-N16 because I have actually worked with one, and it's very inexpensive. And it has plenty of CPU speed and RAM for this application.

The above solution is cheaper than using a computer to manage the dialup, and should be bulletproof. Also your relatives are unlikely to mess with it.

P.S. Hmm, I did a quick Google search and there are still routers with dialup support. Here's one for about $150... I've never used one so I don't know how well it works.
http://www.greatarbor.com/products.html#GAC-252

http://www.nature.com/news/artificial-spleen-cleans-up-blood-1.15917

Key points:

* The coating on the nanobeads binds to many different things, so it's useful even if you don't know in advance what is making the patient sick.

The device uses a modified version of mannose-binding lectin (MBL), a protein found in humans that binds to sugar molecules on the surfaces of more than 90 different bacteria, viruses and fungi, as well as to the toxins released by dead bacteria that trigger the immune overreaction in sepsis.

* The device can process about 1 litre of blood per hour; compare with about 5 litre blood volume for a typical human, thus this should be able to completely process a person's blood about once every 5 hours. If a faster rate is needed, multiple devices could be used in parallel.

* This has been successfully tested on rats. They infected rats with bacteria and 89% of the rats treated with the "artificial spleen" survived, while only 14% of the control group survived.

* This could move to human clinical trials relatively soon.

Nigel Klein, an infection and immunity expert at University College London, says that the biospleen could also allow diagnosticians to collect samples of a pathogen from the blood and then culture it to identify it and determine what drugs will best treat it. As blood transfusion and filtration are already common practices, he expects that the biospleen could move into human clinical trials within a couple of years.

Read the whole article. It's not long and all of it is interesting.