Apparently none of those jokers ever read Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It's overkill to lob nukes from the Moon. Simply throw rocks.

My fear is that, literally, he who gets to the Moon and has a permanent base first will rule the world. I suspect it'll be the Chinese or Russians.

Seriously, if somebody took up residence there and put some boosters on a few boulders, there'd be absolutely nothing those Earthbound could do about it.

... knowing when we've found it.

Real extraterrestrials will look nothing like human. They might be super-intelligent shades of the color blue. If we're lucky.

Differentiating them extraterrestrials and the landscape may be problematic.

In any case, all the exoplanet talk is entirely speculative. During my lifetime, scientists expected to find life on both Mars and Venus -- and those planets are infinitely closer to Earth than any exoplanet. It was only after sending probes to Venus, for example, that we discovered it was a hell-hole incapable of anything resembling terrestrial life.

Anyone who tells you they've found an Earth-like exoplanet is flat-out ignorant. We've found exoplanets in roughly the right orbits to possibly sustain human life -- but the same could be said of Venus and Mars, and look how that turned out.

I'm sorry, but in June I'm getting 100GB as part of my $36-annually MetaARPA membership over at SDF. Not to mention the UNIX shell account I've been using there for fifteen years. And the private Minecraft server. And Gopher. And dev tools. And VPNs, VPSs, a boatload of other stuff ...

Not to mention I'll be able to mount the SDF 100GB to my Linux box using SSHFS under FUSE.

Three million accounts intrigue me, so naturally I went looking for the posted list.

I can't find it. I find endless references to the story, but no list. I can't find Zarefarid's blog. This strikes me as odd, since the list was supposedly publicly posted there. Usually by this time, there are downloaded copies on all the file-sharing services, torrents, etc. There's nothing.

Knowing as I do that the majority of stories on which the press reports are wildly sensationalized or at worst entirely fictional, the lack of a list makes me think this may fall in the latter category.

Box's DAVfs is only useless if you have an OS that doesn't speak DAV. I have mine configured via davfs2 under fuse, and it automounts when I enter the mount directory (using AutoFS).

Of course, one needs a Linux distro to make it work ... ;)

Dakota Smith

The better part of a year. I'm extremely pleased, having had my account converted to SSHFS free of charge.

However, unless EchoFS does something differently very soon, I think they're going the way of the Dodo Bird. They aren't marketing themselves well, and I expect services like Box.com to overtake them shortly.

It's a pity, because they're very, very good. But if nobody knows about the service, they won't survive.

Dakota Smith

There are a number of file managers on Android that can read a variety of network shares. I use FX File Explorer, and I have SSHFSes, Box, and two Windows shares configured.

I also use FolderSync Lite to automatically mirror files. Though to be honest, with 30GB to 50GB storage to play with, I store a massive amount of data in the cloud and use the file manager apps to copy them to my Android when needed. I mostly do this with my ePub library since I'm keeping my music and videos with Google (30GB).

The cool part is that the people at EchoFS are easy to work with. They converted my DAV share to SSH for no charge and in about fifteen minutes.

I've got 50GB free at Box and 30GB free on EchoFS.com. Why should I care about 5GB? Just because it's Google?

I think a replica rifle is liable to cause some consternation at your average sporting event.

Well, almost the complete works. There's one novella not yet in the public domain.

Piper's complete works at Project Gutenberg.

Go now. Your brain will love you for the rest of your life.

Dakota Smith

Just for reference, I live in small-town Iowa -- after having spent most of the 1990s in Chicagoland.

Small towns are the only place where any level of freedom still exists in the U.S. It's getting worse, though. It's as nothing, however, compared to even Des Moines, where I work. DSM, like all American cities, has become a police state. In Redfield, you're still pretty much left alone.

That doesn't mean we don't do things that are illegal. If you live in the U.S., statistically you're always in violation of at least three laws, whether you know it or not.

Essentially, things have been engineered so that anyone can be picked up at any time due to some violation of some law. If you're not picked up, it's because the cops didn't want to. 24x7, they now have something with which you can be charged at all times.

Dakota Smith

This is kind of old. I'm a college professor in a computer science department. Our students were affected at the beginning of this term (we offer free external hard drives on which to keep their work). About four weeks in, the supply opened back up. We initially issued 16GB flash drives, and now they all have their 320GB USB drives.

I was amused when I read that Linus had switched to Xfce for the exact same reason I went to Xubuntu at v11.10.

As Linus noted: Xfce is a downgrade from GNOME2 -- but and upgrade from GNOME 3.

Dakota Smith

Have all UI devs completely lost it?

Windows 8: Metro and no Start Menu. No one I've thrown the developer's release to can figure out how to make it work.

GNOME 3: Just plain crazy. Users I throw at it have no idea what to do.

Unity: Utter and complete suckage. I've been using *NIX for decades and can't use Unity (or GNOME 3). Users I throw at it just stare blankly.

OS X: I know Mac-heads love it. I've tried it, via theming Ubuntu. Better than Win8, G3, or Unity, but not as good as the plain 'ol Start Menu.

I'm sorry, but menus make sense on a desktop, they're reasonably untuitive, and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to change it.

And in changing it, Ubuntu (and G3) are shooting themselves in the foot. Look, Win8 is going to ship with a user interface with which users cannot interface. G3 and Unity are no better, and I see no reason to believe that Ubuntu has seen the light with HUD.

If Ubuntu had a user interface that was actually intuitive, the distro would have the opportunity to get users who will throw their hands up at Win8 in disgust. Unfortunately, Ubuntu has an interface that leaves users with a "deer in the headlights" look.

This is a stupid interface. All modern interfaces are about to suck (stupidly). Pity Linux couldn't be different at a time when it would work to its advantage.

Dakota Smith