If all goes through, what will it mean?
If I understood correctly, it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey, so that you can begin your journey later. For example, to go to Alpha Centauri A, where light takes a few years, you may start the warp drive, wait for a year, then jump into the ship and travel there (taking 1 year less time).

It will not save you anything going to new places you did not plot a course to.

I am also not sure about the speed limits that warp drive imposes. Possibly beyond light speed if it squeezes space enough? (By light speed I mean compared to flat space).

Tell that to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft!

> Once that is done, the value of stingray devices will be moot.

Indeed one can bet that the stingray technology is obsolete and the next surveillance gadgets are ready for use.
 

Right, which is why I added the second sentence. My point is that it could've been phrased in a manner that avoids implying Moscow is a trap, e.g. "unable to return home." I'm sure there are schools of propaganda training that are more subtle and don't pooh-pooh that sort of structuring, but at the very least it implies some restraint on the parts of the authors away from being a proverbial anti-US slant.

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

And! And: it says Snowden is "trapped" in Moscow, which is not very agitprop-friendly. Workable, but not exactly jingoism.

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Multiple IPs was one solution, but the other was much simpler.

The real address of the computer was its MAC, the prefix simply said how to get there. In the event of a failover, the client's computer would be notified the old prefix was now transitory and a new prefix was to be used for new connections.

At the last common router, the router would simply swap the transitory prefix for the new prefix. The packet would then go by the new path.

The server would multi-home for all prefixes it was assigned.

At both ends, the stack would handle all the detail, the applications never needed to know a thing. That's why nobody cared much about remembering IP addresses, because those weren't important except to the stack. You remembered the name and the address took care of itself.

One of the benefits was that this worked when switching ISPs. If you changed your provider, you could do so with no loss of connections and no loss of packets.

But the same was true of clients, as well. You could start a telnet session at home, move to a cyber cafe and finish up in a pub, all without breaking the connection, even if all three locations had different ISPs.

This would be great for students or staff at a university. And for the university. You don't need the network to be flat, you can remain on your Internet video session as your laptop leaps from access point to access point.

You make it sound like the temperature of the (empty) region averages down the background, making it colder. But something way more awesome actually happens: Photons enter one side of the Void (empty region) at an early time and travel through it. During that time, the Void expands. To escape the Void, the photon then has to lose more energy than it received when it entered. It is the slow light speed relative to these enormous scale, evolving structures that causes this effect!

For Gentoo, I can switch between systemd and OpenRC at boot time. Also for Ubuntu 15.04, you can switch between systemd and upstart. So I don't think your argument that the user does not have a choice holds, this is just about which package is installed by default.

You can't just leave things alone, because computers have also changed. Today we do not work on mainframes or desktop computers, but increasingly on laptops and mobile phones, which constantly change state, in terms of network connections, devices plugged in, location, hibernation.

I think there is consensus that these things did not work well on the old init system, although band-aids were found. I remember that changing the hostname stopped X from working, which can occur when DHCP gives you a new hostname. That is 80s design for you. Or changing the time messes up the logfiles.

Now you can choose which modern init system you want, and there are a couple out there: OpenRC, upstart and systemd are the most well-known ones.

OpenRC is the familiar runlevel based approach, which runs scripts which may or may not succeed.

Upstart is a triggering framework, that takes pre-defined actions (but does not work with goals). That means you have to write tasks for how to get from A to B with your system.

systemd is a dependency resolution program, that knows what to activate next to get to a certain state (goal). It handles services, mount points and network connections in the same framework. It is essentially an overseer of a services tree.

There are some upsides to systemd, besides parallelizing the tasks of a dependency tree to reach a goal. One is for every process it is known which service launched it (there are some Linux-specifics that allow marking those processes). Also, each service can be assigned resources (memory, number of processes), which it can not exceed (again, modern Linux supports that). And, obviously, you are not limited to a set number of runlevels.

Yes, systemd is annoying, because it is a new thing to learn. And it is annoying, because the maintainers are inconsiderate. But in the end, it is just a program to start other programs, with one particular way to do it. I don't get what the big deal is. If it is feature bloat -- Linux also has a lot of features, so does VLC -- there we consider them a good thing. Technically, the dependency resolution approach of systemd seems like a good thing (as in progress for Linux) to me.

Here is a presentation by Pim Schellaert (referenced in the article) with some more information:
http://www.lofar.org/wiki/lib/...

I've seen a presentation of their more recent results, but that doesn't seem to be public yet, I can't find a link.

One of the coolest things we did recently with the LOFAR telescope was to observe the Solar Eclipse in real time, I think it has never been done with a radio telescope before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In general you can find a lot of info about what we're doing with the LOFAR telescope here:
http://www.astron.nl/dailyimag...
and here: http://www.lofar.org/wiki/doku...

My feet are on the ground, which is at an elevation of about 3 meters.

This is considered quite high in my country (The Netherlands) as it is above sea level.