Obviously it's for publicity, but their claim is clearly tongue in cheek. Let me put it this way. Everyone is taking this way more seriously than Nvidia is.

To me, the real lede is buried pretty deeply in the article. The light on that particular photo IS anomalous. It sounds as if the conspiracy theorists were right about that, and that's kind of astute.

What's interesting is the resolution of the anomaly: it's light reflected off Neil Armstrong himself. Or rather, his large, bright-white suit. The NVidia guys showed that it reflects enough light to account for the lighting in the picture. If you don't include it, the lighting is off. I think that's pretty cool.

This doesn't, of course, settle anything for the conspiracy nuts, and I fully expect this to prove only that the NASA guys were wily bastards. And that sucks, because it sounds as if the brain power they're applying might well have turned up something more interesting if it weren't fixated on achieving a delusional result.

Thank you for caring. Seriously.

I've made my peace with future generations about my apathy. In part that's because I have no children, and don't want them; in fact, a (tiny) part of the reason I have none is that I don't want the burden of the fact that I don't believe I can contribute to a fix to this problem.

I am sorry, future generations, but the enemy was too big to move. Most of the world understood, but crucial people in crucial positions were happy to leave you a worse world, and let you deal with it. They found an awful lot of common cause with a large group of self-centered, gullible people who were easily led to believe anything that meant that they could live any way they wanted with no repercussions. No reasoning could dislodge them from that, and emotional appeals were met with contempt. It was clear that I couldn't win, and that by the time it became obvious that something had to be done, it would be much too late. It is, I suspect, already too late.

I really appreciate that you're not taking the coward's way out, as I am. Maybe you can do something I should be doing. But I simply can't justify anything but apathy. I've tried.

I completely agree... and yet there is one prominent counterexample: Wikipedia. When Wikipedia came out I was absolutely certain it would not work. And yet, somehow, it does. There are trolls, and controversial pages have to be locked down, but overall the site does astonishingly well. It's the go-to source for general information on the Internet, at least as good (and in many ways better) than expensive curated sources.

I don't completely understand what it is that makes Wikipedia work. I'm sure it's a lot of things, and at least some of the things also contribute to dysfunction (like deletionist moderators). I don't know if that can be adapted to review sites, which are at core about opinion, while Wikipedia's guiding principle of objectivity gives it a touchstone that all non-trolls more or less agree on.

The trolls don't, of course, but somehow the fact that the non-trolls outnumber the trolls makes them relatively easy to spot and manage, though there are still problems. Especially in out-of-the-way places, which is the other difficulty with review: most places will get relatively few reviews and won't have millions of eyeballs on the lookout for trolling.

Still... the reason I brought this up is that somehow, Wikipedia works, and I would have sworn it wouldn't. So maybe, just maybe, there's some hope for review sites as collaborations. It won't be as simple as reverting the many different kinds of bad reviews (from outright trolling to "I hate spicy food so you shouldn't go to this Mexican restaurant"), but I'm uncharacteristically optimistic that there might be a route forward. (I'm certain, though, that Yelp hasn't found it.)

Thanks for taking the time to explain that!

Yep. Still sufficient reason to reduce the amount of plastic that gets into the oceans, but unfortunately, it seems really hard to get people to take any positive environmental steps unless you exaggerate it into ugly, apocalyptic terms. And even then, for every person you convince by it, there will be one who heard that it was exaggerated and concluded that therefore nothing needs to be done at all.

I didn't follow the speculation, but perhaps you'd know: did they realize that splitting was an option? Did Boeing and SpaceX each get half a loaf, or did NASA somehow manage to "grow the pie"?

If so, where will they dig up additional billions in funding? If not, will either SpaceX or Boeing be able to accomplish a large fraction of the work for a fraction of the funding they'd hoped to get?

I'm ecstatic to see them say "Why not both?", since if the government is going to be spending tax dollars, I'd rather see it go to a good scientific cause than... well, to a lot of other things that the government is prone to spending money on. But It's a fair bit of money, even in government terms, and I hope it's being spent wisely rather than having a Solomonic decision that gives us two halves of a baby.

The way this headline is written, it's as if they'd written "Armstrong jumps to moon", and neglected to mention in TFS that he was jumping from the ladder of the lander to the surface. TFS says "managed to 3D print, and assemble an entire automobile", and that's misleading to the point of lying.

It's a cool, impressive, incremental achievement, but they haven't landed on the moon here. And tech reporting, and tech in general, would be better served by accurate reporting of it.

Yep. MOOCs don't serve the important part of the teacher's job. Teaching is best as a dialogue. A videotaped lecture is little different from a book, in that the information is fixed; worse, unlike a book, you don't even get to read at your own pace. It's not without value, since some things adapt well to that and different modes work for different people, but it's still missing the two-way communication that a real teacher provides.

People have pushed MOOCs largely for the learn-a-bunch-of-facts classes, such as science and tech. Technique is also a "fact"; it's stuff that can easily be tested and graded. The things that are missing are the parts that make us consider a student well-rounded: history, literature, sociology, art. These sound trivial to nerds but they're about innovation and communication. They, too, have to be practiced, and it's not something that can be memorized. Even the STEMmest jobs are ultimately about people: seeing what people want, finding ways to tell them your ideas, building up a story together. And that's something that a real teacher can help with, and a videotaped teacher can't. (Nor can a videotaped teacher answer questions or ascertain just why a student isn't "getting it". Even a "great teacher" is little more than an actor when on video.)

Teaching is too often undervalued as if they were just handed a book. It's a skill of its own. We STEM nerds often undervalue that skill because it's not easily graded on a multiple-choice test.

TFS is written primarily in the present tense, which is kind of odd seeing as Lem has been dead for nearly a decade. We are already living in Lem's future, and the future for Lem himself is pretty much a steady-state.

Danger Will Robinson!

Do yourself a favor; avoid the hostile Latvians at Mikrotik and use UBNT's Edge Router! [And hey, I've got nothing against Latvians - a colleague is Latvian and the nicest guy ever. Dunno, perhaps it's something in the water, but wow Normis is out there - as are most of the other 'Tik guys.]

Seriously! The feature set of EdgeRouters is pretty full and there's nothing I can't do on ER that I could [and used] on 'Tik.

Plus you get a real Linux underbelly - if you can't do it in the CLI, you can probably find a way to do it in Debian.

-Greg

++1

Seriously. I've used Mikrotik (hostile latvians [check], and buggy firmware [super check] - really the rant list is too long to enumerate here!) and am moving lots of stuff to UBNT.

The edge-router line is frankly totally incredible.
And speaking of VPN - they have an OpenVPN that actually supports the full spec, rather than the totally neutered one 'Tik does.
Real IPSec firewall interfaces! [L2TP where IPSec can get bypassed? Another 'Tik exclusive!]

(Do I sound kind of bitter about 'Tik? :) Yeah, I've got quite a number of people on 'Tik stuff, but given their hostility [it's legendary] and crap firmware [firmware russian roulette anyone!?] and a host of other issues - I'll be glad to have all my clients off onto Ubiquiti's stuff. )

Learning curve is steep, but no more than equivalent products - for example 'Tik, Cisco etc. It's a Vyatta based platform. UBNT's forum is incredible, as are UBNT staff themselves.

Virtually any UBNT product I'd not hesitate to buy. It's *incredible* value.

---
As for a router on a PC or some other idea...
It's way less power than a franken-PC.
Solid-state disks. [less mechanical failure possibilities]
Massive packet throughput. [1M pps for the $100 ER Lite, 2Mpps for the 8 port versions!] Based on Debian. Rocks.
Damn cheap!
Quiet!
And best of all. Really pretty easy, quick.

Basic stuff won't require a lot of work/time. If you want more, pretty much the sky's the limit. But more fancy stuff will take more time.
But basic functionality - probably a couple of hours start to finish.

Good luck!

-Greg

Good for you, man. I'm glad to see it happening. I don't like having publishers as arbiters of public taste any more than you do. I just think it's important to recognize that the vast majority of self-published ebooks aren't very successful, and it's not just the bad ones.

Taking into account, of course, the fact that you have to do all of your own marketing. You have to make your novel stand out among zillions of other indie ebooks, all of which have the same low barrier to entry.

Just having a major publisher's name on it is pretty substantial marketing. Even more so if they go to the expense to print out a physical book, which is a large sunk cost up front. That tells readers that somebody believes in the book, to the tune of a few tens of thousands of dollars. And that publisher will generally get it into meatspace bookstores, where your book has to stand out only among a far, far smaller crowd of other physical books on the shelf.

It's not impossible to do very, very well with an ebook. But much of the time that additional 45% you get to keep is 45% of a much smaller pot. (And generally the margin is much wider than that, in fact. Going rate is usually in the 10-13% range, in my experience.)

The way I see it... if you can get a publisher interested, you probably should, at least until you have a large fan base of your own. It's the easiest way to that fan base. Building it up yourself is difficult. Not impossible, and possibly no harder than getting a publisher to take an interest in you. But if I had a publisher on the hook, I'd keep it.

There is a certain amount of lock-in to the film incentives, especially for TV series. Shooting a film requires a substantial amount of infrastructure, both personnel and equipment, which doesn't exist everywhere. These people are often not employed by the studio directly, but form local service companies. And where those companies exist, it's easier for more film projects to move in.

Even if Walking Dead were to pack up and move, Georgia may still have accomplished its goals with the subsidies. I know that Maryland is similarly pushing this. They developed a lot of that infrastructure a while back during the filming of Homicide in Baltimore, and there have been a lot of follow-on projects. They're now trying to boost that with House of Cards, which is an enormous undertaking that employs many hundreds of people (at least part time). The resources of material and knowledge built up in the local economy attract other film projects that can do the job faster and better because it's already here, rather than building it up from scratch.

Of course, producers know that, and will drive up the price as far as they can. Maryland nearly lost House of Cards in a kind of game of chicken; neither side wanted the production to move but each wanted to get a better deal. In the end, House of Cards largely won, and people in the local film industry are extremely happy about that. I don't know if it's really a good deal for the state in the end, but at least for the moment it's employing a lot of people, and since it's a series they'll go on having work to do for a while.