AVLIS (and the closely related MLIS) should work in a microgravity or free-fall scenario.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_vapor_laser_isotope_separation

Once again, space technology can benefit from something created from the nuclear weapons research of those spunky monkeys from the dirtball orbiting a nondescript yellow dwarf out in the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

I wonder how a machine learning program deals with the 10 year old who thinks it is funny to press every single floor button then get off on a random stop. Usually when at least half the building's population is running 5 minutes late for their flight.

The thought that we're just the 0.1% of the dirty precipitate at the bottom of the gravity well is a tad humbling. Not that much isn't when you look up from the T.V. to a clear night sky.

Galaxies are apparently quite dynamic things: a rain of in-falling gas to make new stars, pressure from new stars pushing back, dust build up from all this nucleosynthesis, blackhole cores that cycle on and off. One paper I read even claims this is the beginning of the 'green' period for the Milky Way. The conditions for life will be come more abundant: the number of long-burning dwarf stars like the sun continue to rise as a fraction of the stellar population while the dust percentage (you know, planets) rises at the same time a lot of the big super- and hyper- novae are over with.

However, longer term prospects seem bleak if the dynamic gas is all consumed or blown away. Eventually stellar production would grind to a halt. The green galaxy would give way to white and red dwarfs floating amid other stellar corpses and thinned gas.

I have to wonder if the temperature and environmental coupling of this gas is enough to become a future raw star material resource? I mean, we're talking about 99.9% of the matter here and it's already gravitationally bound. Could someone model long-term in-fall of this ionized matter? Could it cool fast enough or even at all to beat the predicted 'big rip' from dark energy and give the galaxy a 2nd, 3rd, etc. childhood?

So how can Google maintain any kind of abusive monopoly.

Easy: by being a $3.8 billion per year target for politicians.

The only obvious crime committed here is being popular and making a lot of money.

It is sleazy for a company to favor it's own wares on what a naive customer assumes is a fair market. But that is the nature of 'free' markets and naive customers. The only reason anybody assumes the vendor they are dealing with is free of bias is lack of truth, which is just part of the limited, imperfect knowledge players in any real market can obtain. (This excepts toy markets from ECON 101 as they are by definition more imaginary than Internet Spaceships as any player of Eve Online would tell you.)

Also, Google claims their moto is 'Do no Evil.' Fiddling search results without telling people is pretty much Evil in my book. But Google still has to make money in a world where the DMCA police, the nanny states and the religious nutcases de jour all hold guns to Google's wallet. These politicians are just the last highwaymen along for the ride to get at those purse strings.

Like Microsoft Research, this will be a patent farm where ideas that threaten Microsoft's platform go to die.

Maybe, just maybe, someone in marketing will decide they can make a product out of something from this new Microsoft lab. It may even be awesome. But you never know until after the research.

It seems that whenever someone in management lets marketing smoke enough weed to even think about visiting the engineers we get something like Bob or ME or Vista or Metro.

I wish them good luck. Changing corporate culture is very hard when 'those other guys in that other building' are easy to let go when the stock price tumbles for reasons known only to the Random Number God(s).

Joe average user doesn't know Linux exists, but let's pretend he's heard of it somewhere - maybe due to a huge marketing push by a vendor.

With virtualization, joe average user can try another operating system even in the world of UEFI's Secure boot model. Even today Linux distros become just another "app" joe can download to joe's Microsoft desktop and run.

There are some downsides to this. Any killer app for Linux becomes also a killer app for Windows. The experience of moving from Metro or Aero to something like GNOME 3 is likely to deter joe average user from trying that again.

Of course, as a Convicted Monopolist, Microsoft can report these Linuxes as viruses or trojans and refuse to run Linux virtual machines. Microsoft is also free to ban virtualized Linux distributions from the Windows Marketplace. Then joe is rather stuck. He's not going to some ugly website talking about Open-this and Free-that just to download something the size of a large movie that doesn't involve tits or explosions.

Booting Linux was once just the providence of the enthusiast. Today major Linux Distributions are as easy as if not easier to install on supported hardware than Microsoft Windows. But that window is quickly closing.

There is no telling how complicated or difficult disabling secure boot or installing a new vendor key will be in the future. I have a Sun Sparcstation 2 on which I have to program the boot PROM each time I power it on. Sure, it's just a couple dozen lines of Fourth. But there's a reason I never boot that space heater anymore. Even in the cold of winter.

It is hard to come up with a system superior to barter for resisting taxes. Perhaps something might work involving offshore accounts, 'charitable organizations' and friends in politics. But that's not something the average joe can get in on.

Remember, it is the government and its police/military that backs up the concept of money as value. It is these quarterly taxes ensuing that vendor needs to take in a lot o' the current regime's dollars and the company needs to pay out in same. Otherwise the value of fiat money is whatever the vendor will take. Corporate script is worthless outside the company store.

Well, there is debt as a form of control through obligations, but that's a whole other topic.

All btrfs does is manage a B-tree filesystem. All grep does is apply a regular expression to a string.

However, the UNIX way is not always even a good thing.

It is also the UNIX way to duplicate a single thing a hundred times for each little feature variation (grep, egrep, fgrep, most of Perl.) That can also be unpleasant for the end user (xterm, gnome-terminal, kterm, gterm, LXterm, terminator, editing Perl.) Great for a system administrator who is expert at their particular tool and only that tool but horrible for everyone else.

That's without getting into the UNIX Way for (lack of) documentation. Or how that one thing is so often the wrong thing so it doesn't matter how well that one tool does it.

btrfs is famously called a rampant layering violation. The roll-up of filesystem-management features in one place actually lets the developers avoid duplicating code (which may actually be about as non-UNIXy as you can get in some ways.) Code that now knows about certain information normally hidden from it can do things differently. This is sometimes better (rapid mkfs) or worse (fsck tool was apparently hard to write.)

In my opinion, if your enterprise system depends on fsck and not good backups then you don't have an enterprise system. Yes, xfs_repair can do amazing things to mostly trashed disks. But one day your data will take a good fscking where only surviving copy will be the backup copy.

RAID5 implementation from Intel is in the tree, but waiting until after the fsck is done. And btrfsck has been around since, oh, February? And the btrfs-progs you should be using with the 3.4 kernel have btrfsctl included?

I was hoping the RAID5 code was going to land in 3.4, actually. Reading the pull request says that RAID5/6 should be in 3.5. Oh, well.

Of course, if you have enough money to buy an "enterprise" solution, your SAN/NAS should do the thing doing RAID for you anyway.

My major criticism of btrfs is the horrid sync performance. Hosting virtual machines tends to require lots of small writes to disk that make btrfs incredibly non-performant.

btrfs has many sexy, sexy features for a world of enterprise SAN storage and virtual machine hosting. It has thin disks, balanced meta-data, flexible storage, SSD optimized modes, multiple snapshot layers, checksummed data on disk. All of this just because it does one thing and does it well: manage a B-Tree database.

Today it's is just not there in the I/O department, sadly. Probably good for inside the virtual machine guests, though. Only testing will tell.

Wow, speaking of niche file systems. Log file systems have quite a long history. Of horrible performance and fragmentation. But if we all end up on SSDs, that won't matter. Underlying any file system you put on it, an SSD implements storage as a circular log and performance is fast enough to not depend on huge uncommitted disk caches.

Well, to be fair most the webcomics linked in the Funnies slashbox stopped updating somewhere around the middle of Bush, Jr.'s second term in office.

Having been around to participate in the comic vs. news debate back in the day and seeing a lot of full-of-themselves trolls leave just over that, I would have liked to see some spiffing of it up. But not quite as sexy as a fresh coat of CPU chewing javascript, of course. Or ads in the whitespace on the left which run up under the top left logo in chrome and firefox creating a colorful 'slashdot' title where the white one was.

Just pay my friend over there. Then you can have the stuff.

Criminals have been using third party pay as long as money has existed. No way you can trace it to him. Just some random guy.

Nobody *pays* Fat Tony. They just do him favors. See, when he goes somewhere his money is no good. Love the kids and the place, hope nothing bad happens to them. But he'll have one on the house.

Traceable currency has only one use: collecting marketing statistics. For every other use there are trivial loopholes and, as you very clearly mention, unintended consequences for the poor. But marketing doesn't really care about the poor. Your target demographic is people who can afford to pay. Even if it would ruin them.

Today people who use paypal, debit and credit cards should be aware that they trade free marketing data for convenience. Tomorrow it may not be a choice. To riff off Ghostbusters: "there is no search, there is only Google."

$30USD 'crappy' inkjets or $70USD multi-function fax/printer/scanner are not what you or I would call a printer. Or a fax, scanner, et cetera.

These are Windows OS accessories.

This hardware may not be made by Microsoft or a Microsoft subsidiary, but they are for all intents and purposes just an add on to their existing software product(s). Using a standard does not enter into the design consideration, unless one means MSDN documents.

If Linux, and I do mean the kernel, wants to interact with this type of hardware it has to replicate the functions of the Windows OS the device requires. The observant will be making comments about user-space drivers talking to raw hardware connections at this point. The bitter will mumble about "it's Linux, not ReactOS."

The funny people will just make jokes about dialogs for root access being the distribution equivalent of an IE pwn-my-system pop-up. However, many traditional UNIX user-space processes that talk to hardware have had permissions problems like Linus is complaining about.

Getting lots of little bits of software, each running under their own users and groups, to talk together is annoying at best and horridly bad most the time. Add various users into the mix and the UNIX groups-are-how-you-share model just falls over. Bad permissions, for lp and printer software in particular, appear to be the norm. In one system you have SETUID executables and SETGUID directories spreading like kudzu in the filesystem. Others with equivalent-to-god accounts (oracle anyone?) plus the yellow-sticky with the password getting passed around the office. In another, everything pretty much just runs as root, bypassing any Discretionary Access Controls and screaming at users to put in their keys to the kingdom just to get a photo to spit out of the damn laserjet.

It almost makes one pine for an implementation of Capabilities.

But that still won't solve the winmodem hole. Fuse for printers, perhaps?

Bleeding-edge users who know what they are doing and don't care about data loss are being offered the chance to test a new and interesting filesystem

Amen.

fsck's only job is to make that junk that was a filesystem look something like a filesystem again. Nothing in there about making it look like the particular filesystem you used to have. fsck is not backups. fsck will not (necessarily) get your data back. fsck may eat kittens on a bad day. What fsck does hand back to you should not be trusted and should certainly be verified.

If you think that pulling most of what was /home, /var, /srv or /opt out of lost+found is fun, just remember that corrupted directory and filenames get named after their inodes. Nothing like trying to figure out of 1234567 or 1234568 was the start of the quarterly financials report.

If you are relying upon a fsck to get your data back after a power outage, you have more faith in your filesystem than you should. It's a nice validation tool, with the caveat that a False Negative means you go back to using a damaged filesystem for more fun later, rather than now.

BUT if you have backups, please do test. Having talked to the BTRFS team directly at LINUXCON, Mr. Chacon and folks are pretty cool about getting feedback. And you can do nifty things like snapshots for backups on RAID10 or thin disks on virtual machines which don't inflate during formatting.

For many filesystems, failing a fcsk means reaching for the format tools and the last (verified) backup. You are backing up everything, right?

$7.8 billion

Think of the science NASA could do with that cash being wasted to frisk old people for their pill bottles!

Or, if you're one of the NASA haters, think of all the children who won't get an adequate education/vacination/lunch/foodstamps for that money.

But damn tootin' if one of them grandmas thinks she can pass off a bottle of Midol, our Skies Are Safe(tm)*

* (For values of safe equal to We Covered Our Butts come election time. Deal not available in major markets, near large cities or in New York state. Remember: you only need to give up a little freedom or the terrorists win. Vote TSA again, next election.)

These types of arguments tend to run on one of two lines: people trusting that which they shouldn't and examples of simple broken systems.

There is nothing you can do about people trusting systems they shouldn't. Houses have many ways in that are usually easier to open with tools than the doors. Windows are used for entry because you only need a fist to break most. Walls are just as easy with power tools. It's the social contract between people that prevents this type of security problem. Locks on your doors only keep out lazy opportunists checking doors for easy access. Sadly, the Gabriel's Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory implies that online the contract fails.

All security mechanisms suffer from this. Reference: http://xkcd.com/538/

The obvious is to just use a tool that can attach things to doors. Even a harmless looking sharpened thumbtack defeats the 'handle-less' door yet is stymied by the presence of a lock.

I think the equivalent in computer security is pop-up phishing. Such as putting up a webpage popup AD with a similar password requirement and appearance, hoping that some people will try their existing passwords from their existing systems. Or a fake screensaver overlay that kicks in after one minute of idle.

It is a simple matter of application of non-obvious force: smack the door with your fist. One that is easier to do than even smashing windows. It not only leaves no trail, but makes it look like you know what you are doing so unaware bystanders will think you should be using that door. Unless it is badly fit to the frame and actually stuck to it, if pushed on such a door will bounce open. Materials are elastic to some degree and forces between joints will be partially reflected just due to the difference in material (the gap that comprises the joint between door material and frame.)

To translate into security speak, this is shoulder-surfing someone who uses the same password everywhere.

Fundamentally, security is about psychology and not technology. The lock should be the hardest part of the door to deal with so attackers focus on it and waste their time. This gives you time to discover and deal with them manually assuming the attacker just doesn't give up and go check other doors. Most people are dumb - well average or bellow - so this works well. You cannot keep the smart ones out - even if they ignore the window you left open they know how to use a battery-powered chain saw to make their own doors.

Now, the human race has been expanding exponentially at the historic average of 2% per year.

No, the human race - and all other breeding populations bellow any limited threshold - is on a logisic curve. Historically it just looks looks exponential because we have been near the origin. It's also a much scarier curve when you consider the growth period is the 'good times.'

In a natural population the number of breeders explodes until it hit some limit and loss suppresses any more gains. It is a simple consequence of reality. With the ever changing environment that is the natural world, any species able to rapidly expand when one of their limits is removed becomes numerically dominate. Since evolutionary success is simply having more grandkids than the other guy, leveraging these opportunities is built into just about every living thing from bacteria to Redwoods. You breed and spread during the happy times until the limit. Then you replace spreading with horrible churn: for each who is born, someone must die.

The unanswered question is: what limit will keep human population from growing? Very poor economists and armchair sociologists trot out the 'limited space' arguments based on totally unrealistic understanding of not only 3D space and what 'food' is, but also territorial needs of humans and how they can overlap. People who have looked into the matter discovered an amazing thing.

Give education and rights to women and your population grown slams to a standstill.

Why?

It's simple: you have most if not all your children surviving to adulthood and educated, wealthy women women able to tell their man/cleric/priest/culture NO to unprotected sex. There is less successful coercion of women into walking-baby-factories for men by accident or purpose. The world is long past the need for huge families to keep the farm running or fight that war. (Starvation is a logistics and distribution problem.) Also, consider the improved access to medicine available to educated, non-poor mothers. Birth is no longer a lottery in which both the future adult and its mother gamble their lives. There is a lot behind this topic and Google is your friend.

It turns out that humans are more than dumb animals. At least some of us. And by definition what people do is unnatural. Long before starvation or disease limits human growth we do it ourselves. Cut the mechanism behind rapid population growth and it stops. Long before you need government mandates, starvation lotteries, colony ships, O'Neil colonies or Logan's Run our women stand up and conveniently have a headache tonight.

We won't over populate this planet let alone the solar system if we can just do one thing: raise women out of poverty.

It's basic humanity.

(And if that doesn't work in the end, just putting all the women on the ship and forcing the men to stay at home will. Motes we are not.)