With the exception of the update reboot thing, you could also argue the real cost of Linux is the hours you spend with it as well. Every time I do a major distro update, it takes me about a full day to get back up and running 100%, making sure my data got moved over to the new install, setting up the services and daemons. Often config file formats have changed slightly, so I have to tweak my old config files. Sometimes new bugs and incompatibilities show up (looking at you, nVidia). Despite its reputation, I've found modern Linux distributions aren't very backwards compatible with older hardware. Just upgraded to a distro with 3.12 kernel from an old distro with 2.6.32. And no matter what I do I can't make the nVidia (any version) or nouveau drivers work with my integrated geforce 8200 video card properly (gnome 3 trying to composite windows hard locks my machine, openGL is iffy, any compositing with KDE or compiz also definitely hard locks). So $50 later I've got a video card coming to hopefully address this issue. The older kernel worked fine even with a very recent nVidia driver. However that's not supported any longer, and certainly not by the newer distro release.

Before you ask, yes I do know how to use Linux, in fact I've used it professionally and exclusively for many years. So this is in no way intended to a billy gates-style troll comment. Just a statement of fact.

There's the old adage that Linux is only free if your time is free. It is cheaper than Windows for me, both in terms of time and money, but it surely isn't free in cost. Sometimes it can be quite expensive.

A very late comment here, but I wanted to say I completely agree with you. It absolutely is a balance that has to be found. Also farmers need to deal with the fact that aquifers are being used up faster than they are being replenished.

Easy for you to say. Tell that to the researchers working in this area. Just shifting your angle of view is enough to change the colors dramatically. It doesn't matter that it's the same time, same aperature, etc. Trust me, even a slight change in perspective can alter the shades and make the shadows appear differently. It's not as simple as you make it out to be, believe me.

Not sure what you mean by land is homogeneous by definition. The crops move in the breeze, dirt is a different color from area to area. Fly east and it looks a certain way, fly west and it looks completely different.

Yes NDVI does show something about photosynthesis. Oh look, here's photosynthesis occurring. But what does that actually mean? Is this good? Is this bad? Photosynthesis occurs in all sorts of places. How can I use this information to maximize production and economy?

Anyway, like I say, I'm not trying to stop the progress of UAVs in agriculture, just trying to be realistic about the pace of progress and the problems that have yet to be overcome. Speaking as a hobbyist and a farmer. There are companies here now that will do mapping for me, but the actual bottom line is that they don't current pay for themselves.

A lot of people are getting excited about what drone can do in agriculture. Folks on the diydrones forum, when they find out my brother and I actually are farmers, get all excited to try to solve problems for us. The problem is, it's going to take a lot of work to make drones useful in agriculture. I attended a presentation recently by an professor specializing in remote sensing and agriculture. She uses satellites, planes, and drones to try to get useful data from crops. It would be really handy to determine crop disease or monitor moisture use, etc.

Turns out, though, these are very hard problems, and small UAVs are actually making it harder in the short term. Here's why. A UAV map of a field, typically is done at low altitude, but stitching together thousands of high res images taken as the aircraft passes back and forth across the field in a pattern. Stitching is done using standard image algorithms that try to identify common pixels to line things up. The problem with this is that the very process of stitching the images changes the data. Is this pixel really this color of green, or did it get changed to fit in better (exposure adjusted)? Also the crop looks very different when you pass over it one way vs another way. For example a silk rug changes color if you view it from a different angle or rub your hand across the nap. This becomes a problem with UAV mapping because the resolution is so high, and the number of pixels is so great. With satellite imagery stitching doesn't really enter into it.

And once you get your image, what does it mean? I see some dark spots. Are these individual plants, rocks, dirt clumps, or shadows? Or is it horrible disease? And even if you can detect a difference in the crop's NDVI pixel values, that does that mean? Is the plant just dry? Soil is naturally poorer? Or is disease. Sometimes disease shows up very clearly in an NDVI map taken from a drone. But in the end a human really has to walk the fields anyway, and take samples.

So the field (no pun intended) of UAV imagery is just getting started. I believe it will do cool things, but we have to be patient as we address the inherent problems with stitching, and also develops a means of understanding and exploring the data (google maps zooming for farmers' fields!).

For me the number one thing I'd like to get from UAV imagery would be accurate 3-d mapping of the topography for drainage purposes.

For right now, it's an expensive toy for some farmers to play with (UAV mapping and agronomy companies), and a project for researchers. And for me, UAVs are just a fun hobby.

How are farmers wasting massive amounts of water? Do you know anything about food production and agricultural water use in general? American farmers do export a lot of food, but your food prices are low because of the wealth of food grown right in your backyard. Where are farmers growing food where they shouldn't be? Do you have an alternative? In many places, the best farmland is under cities now, perhaps pushing farmer to more marginal lands. This is an unfortunate consequence of growth. Granted.

Farming is under more pressure than any other industry to use water efficiently and effectively. And farmers are more aware than anyone else how scarce it is and how badly drought can affect them. Especially in California, irrigation is done using the most efficient means possible. Drip irrigation, low-pressure center pivots that put water down close to the plants. Irrigation losses to evaporation during irrigation are about as low as they can get. Current pivots are, depending on the wind, around 85% efficient, which is pretty good. Could we get better? maybe so. In the end, though, it still takes a lot of water to raise vegetables, grains, fruits. All things that, when they are in season, you enjoy, locally sourced.

I heard an astounding sound bite on the news once. A woman was upset about having her city water rationed in Reno, NV, and, I kid you not, said to the interviewer, "Why do farmers need all that water anyway? Why can't they buy their food at a grocery store like everyone else?" Just. Wow.

The problem is that every time a politician agrees with you about simplifying the tax code, and tries to do something about it, it just gets more complicated. The only solution is to throw the whole tax code out and start over. But that will never ever happen.

If the simulation is completely perfect, then it also must have a near infinite amount of memory as well, or else little inconsistencies would be manifest and detected. But philosophically, if one were to create a simulation, and that simulation is perfect and infinite in size and scope, then it is by definition the same as if you had created the universe. So really it doesn't matter, except to mathematicians whether or not it's a simulation or reality. It's fundamentally equivalent at this scale.

Yes if you think systemd is bad, either rip it out on your machine or roll your own distro. Or move to FreeBSD. It's available now, and it runs great. So no need to whine. Just move to an operating system that fits your personal parameters. More likely you'll stick with your current distro and whine and moan about something that you don't well understand.

On the desktop side of things, I've been watching Linux struggle for years to do simple things like deal with removable media and USB devices. For a while there was hal, then udev, and now systemd. And finally things are actually working, and working rather well. Mostly thanks to udev, but systemd now builds on that. I know many people don't mind manually mounting devices and loading modules to make usb devices work (I don't mind, really). But it's nice to have things automatically work.

And really systemd on the service isn't that bad an idea either. Fine-grained logging is very useful and conventional syslog is still available and will always be there. Process supervision is something that's been needed for a long while now.

Fedora made the transition some time ago, and from a user's point of view it was completely transparent.

RHEL7 beta has transitioned to systemd, and again it's pretty transparent. The old service command is still there and thunks through to systemd. The only time you really notice the difference is if you want to install a custom daemon. You can either use an init script, or you can create a simple systemd service file. There are a few systemctl commands to learn. But really, it's as close to a painless transition as you can get.

RH6 went to systemd? I don't see systemd on any of my RHEL6 or CentOS6 machines.

I am running a RHEL7 beta box, and it does have systemd. And it's not really that cryptic or unhackable. In fact getting a new daemon installed and running is far simpler than with sysv. You don't have to write an init script. Just create a simple ini file, and away it goes. Because there's no init script to screw up, things are easier to debug. If you can run the daemon from the command line and it's happy, then you know it will work with systemd. And the logging facility is much better since the daemon can just write to standard out or standard err if it wants to, and everything is captured to the log (and normal syslog still works).

Yes if you resist working with Systemd, and work against it, your life is going to be a lot more difficult. And I used to think as you do about it, but after working with it a bit more, I can see how it is a better system. It's still too opaque for my tastes, but in practice it works very well.

My only concern is how deeply it ties into the Linux Kernel, which means that we're losing the freedom to use other Unix operating systems once we tie to systemd. Competition is always good but this is going to really squeeze FreeBSD (and to a lesser extend OpenBSD). Gnome 3 is Linux only because of this. We'll have to see where this goes I guess.

Am I the only one that thinks car manufacturers reactions to these "hacks" is just going to be heavy DRM on the bus, more nickel-and-diming for unlocking features, and more expensive parts because third parties are locked out because of the DMCA?

Right now in agriculture, everything is quite proprietary on the bus, but having it free and open would be a huge boon. There is no DRM at this time, but the protocols themselves are closely guarded secrets. In an ideal world, one companies' GPS receiver should work with another company's autosteer navigation system, and that should work with any company's tractor (yes steer by wire over the bus).

Of course the researchers likely aren't advocating for DRM by calling for security, but the layperson isn't going to make the distinction and I think auto companies are going to use this for fear-mongering to push expensive, proprietary solutions on us that we really don't need. Do I need my remote start kit to cost $2000 and have to come from the car company only. I mean cars are so insecure you can start a car by tapping into 4 wires under the dash with any old off-the-shelf remote start kit! Horrors!

It all depends on your definition of freedom. I don't believe Linux would have the diversity of corporate backing without the GPL. The GPL is what allows IBM, Google, RedHat, and other heavy weights the freedom to collaborate for mutual benefit while still being competitors. Every contributor and developer operates on an equal legal footing with the GPL. The BSD works fine for many people, and for companies, like Apple. But Apple definitely is not collaborating on core OS X proper with other companies. Apple releases some of their core code under the BSD, true, but they aren't worried about it being used against them in competing products. This opinion is not necessarily mine; I have heard this from others who are involved with Linux development. Whatever the cause the amount of collaboration surrounding Linux has enabled it to go places BSD-based unixes just aren't going, like embedded devices, tablets, etc.

Anyway, as they say, different strokes for different folks. Your opinion is nor more valid or invalid than any other one. And you're right about the fact that in a perfect world intentions would always be honored without formal documents and copyrights. I think the GPL states that very fact.

-1, offtopic. ;) Your post is the only post visible to me at the moment that has anything to do with the actual article.

What I want to know is how did snowden cause this horrible slashdot beta design to happen?

Or you're already hacked...

Yes the snow is quite red up here. However it's not from the communists. It's from the politicians in the Harper government falling all over themselves to be more like their idols, the American Republican party. Also it seems like they are hell-bent on Americanizing Canada in any way they can. If it weren't political suicide, they'd have scrapped public healthcare insurance a long time ago. But time will change that, and they will do it if they are in power too many more decades.

That said they are perfectly willing to act as if they are opposed to the will of American politicians when it suits them, such as defending Canadians against American invasive tax policies, verbally at least. But their heart's not really in it as Canada's banking system is now completely beholden to the whims of the IRS.