Apple's touchpad is possibly one of the most aggravating components I've found on a recent-vintage shipping notebook and moreover, the Surface Pro doesn't have to be used with its keyboard or trackpad, what with the touchscreen and all.
The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying.
All forms of intensive energy-harvesting will have feedbacks, even if some are more powerful than others. A study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, found that extracting energy from wind power on a huge scale can cause its own global climate consequences. When it comes to building world-girdling civilizations, there are no planetary free lunches.
By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change (PDF). These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear.
As we describe in a recent paper, using what’s already known about planets and life, it is now possible to create a broad program for modeling co-evolving “trajectories” for technological species and their planets. Depending on initial conditions and choices made by the species (such as the mode of energy harvesting), some trajectories will lead to an unrecoverable sustainability crisis and eventual population collapse. Others, however, may lead to long-lived, sustainable civilizations.
Surface Pro 3s are basically superior in every way when compared to shipping MacBook Air systems. They run Windows, but nothing stops you from running whatever you want in a VM.
Subject says it all.
The three distros in the Subject line do not use systemd, though Gentoo does offer it. They may well be the dig-in-the-heels distros that will stay that way, driven by people like you. Moving to one of those distros is a smaller/easier move for you, and doesn't preclude moving to a BSD in the future.
Years back I thought about moving my server to OpenBSD, based on reputation. However after some thinking I realized that potentially the safest server is the one you know best how to administer. I was probably better off knowing how to administer Linux well across my home cluster than to divide my efforts. I know OpenBSD is supposed to be "secure by default", but don't know how I might accidentally mess that up by mis-applying Linux knowledge to it.
I think a libation is in order.
I think I'll go down to my basement and gather up a buch of old through-hole resistors, caps, potentiometers, 555 timers and 74-series TTL logic. Then I'll fill a 40 oz bottle with them and slowly pour it all out on the ground.
Then maybe I'll scribble my full name, address and phone number on a 3-sheet carbon paper form one last time.
They wanna roll Blackberry's well-regarded but proprietary secure messaging system into Samsung's home-grown mobile security application. Duh.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
I remember when the 8086 came out, Intel also brought out the 8087 FPU and the 8089 I/O Processor. The former got bundled into the CPU a few generations later. I don't rememeber details of the 8089, but it seems to have withered away. Nor does Wikipedia say much about it, once you differentiate it from the Hoth Wampa Cave Lego set.
... unless they've made a slight math error in their navigation computations.
Names don't necessarily hold back any language. For example, having a name that's exactly the same as a below-average schoolwork grade clearly doesn't prevent you from becoming one of the most prevalent programming languages in computer history.
I liked David Brin's "Tank Farm Dynamo", which featured a space station made from used external tanks. Part of the premise was that ETs were deliberately discarded the way they were, so that they'd burn on reentry and not become space debris. For negligible cost they could be brought the rest of the way to orbit, available for use there.
Every first stage ever made and flown has been simply thrown away after one use. FIrst stages are quite a bit different from whatever is on the top of the stack.
For that matter, "lander on legs" is a different thing on Earth than it is on the moon or Mars.
I will agree that there is a decided anti-NASA attitude around here, though.
Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz
