Humans don't consume 'planets.' At best we make it inconvenient for other humans to live near us in the tiny rind on a huge orange. Not really even a rind, but the zest layer that we favor. This is what we get for being slobs, though. No matter how many cute cuddly pandas we kill off, if there is a niche for them something just as cute and cuddly will be back once humanity loses the Russian Roulette we play every time someone craps in public or throws trash in the streets.

But this is Planetary Chauvinism at its worst. Planets are inconvenient accumulations of resources down a deep gravity well. Heck, all the good minerals are locked deep down underground. Most the planet is useless to us. Sure, baring major collisions or inconvenient changes in stellar output they are neigh invulnerable (outside pure Science Fantasy.) But I'd much rather be out there in a comfortable station, craft or other human-friendly bubble with the rich resources of the Solar System than suck on a rock.

Too many people are mentally stuck on a rock. Literally and figuratively. Hawking is stuck in a chair and yet he gets this.

Because if these tiny sources (cube law, hello?) of random RF noise really were a problem, they don't suddenly become less of a problem while flying in the air at over 10,000 ft. Or when flying through or even remotely near a thunderstorm that produces many times that RF. Heaven help the poor pilots that get painted by a military radar or even the radar from the airport.

It's not like an airplane needs reliable controls when say, hurtling through the air at a couple hundred miles an hour over populated areas, is it?

At the best we can blame the aircraft designers for not doing their due diligence in properly shielding the route between servos and controllers and cockpit. After all, shielding is precious weight in paying passengers you'd have to give up in fuel. And we obviously don't have lighter weight communication medium that isn't RF sensitive.

His researchers are also working on a system modeler tool, which will allow researchers to simulate complex devices with tens of thousands of components

How many years until it catches up to Dwarf Fortress?

And can it get more than 4 frames per second modeling 200 dwarves down to the fingernail on a 3.5GHz machines with 16Gb of ram and SSD drives?

One of the big criticisms of MS is that it did not start with how humans were going to interact with it's equipment.

One must be careful when using this definition of human. This wide net catches up the technophiles and the feature freaks with the technophobes and the Alzheimer's patients. The wider market is all that Google is courting here with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). That group is made up of very different people from the early adopters. It should be obvious that majority of users of computing devices today are not going to use these devices the same way someone who would come to slashdot or install GNOME 3 would.

It's not like a google search wouldn't uncover the massive industry dedicated to showing how foolish such generalizations are. Yet we continue to make bad UI choices and target the wrong crowds, often poorly like armchair quarterbacks at the human interface Superbowl. Your average human has more than the average number of legs, that still doesn't mean you make one legged pants. Why do developers continue to churn out the proverbial pocket, pant and half-a-fly?

I claim it's only partially this 'every human' culture but mainly lack of training. Outside of the craft industries the engineers, developers and other creators of our stuff start off learning how to solder circuits to breadboards and sling code at a compiler without even the idea they need to consider how people will use this stuff. Run tar --help verses git --help verses gpg -h and see for ask yourself which one was designed to be used by people and which one was slapped together to be run by a machine.

What Google is doing here is something salespeople, marketers, Apple and the military have known since the first rock got sold to the first caveman. You can sell to everyone on envy what you cannot sell to everyone on features. And Google is out to "sell" to everyone (i.e. put ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.)

I wish them the best of luck with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). The very existence of contacts and their popularity among the visually impaired strongly argues against their success in Western markets.

While EULAs can be problematic, Microsoft's antics here are much more serious.

Read over the details analysis by a real lawyer of Bilbo's Contract with the Dwarves. That is an item sold as merchandise with the new Hobbit film. The lawyer brings up that in most court systems contracts are not valid if they ask one of the parties to engage in or are written to cover illegal acts. The huge contract is written carefully to avoid outright saying the Dwarves are hiring a Hobbit to steal for them just because of this.

IANAL, but this appears to me to be a problem for Microsoft. Is Microsoft is requiring these terms as part of support contracts for which they are receiving money? Is this first-sale-is-final-sale contract? Is this forced bundling contract? Are they doing this under or outside the terms of the court rulings about their prior monopoly activity? If this is in fact an illegal practice in the jurisdiction those contracts are written could Microsoft be writing contracts obligating someone to perform an illegal act?

It is probably a good bet that only a Judge in a civil court will settle any of those questions. Assuming he can get his Microsoft Office to install on his PC to open his docket files.

This is not legal advise. Consult your lawyer before applying. Do not pass Redmond. Do not collect 200 Debian CDs. Some itchiness and soreness is normal. Contact a doctor if it persists past four hours.

At what point do the particulates start to cause problems with Internal Combustion?

I can find plenty of information on what it does when humans breath that stuff in (hint: a coal miner is you!) but little on when the engines start to choke on their own output.

Diesel engines can operate on some pretty ridiculous fuel mixtures as long as there is enough oxygen. Considering how nasty oxides can be once mixed into water I'd expect something else in the power train (beyond the operator's lungs) would break down before the engine couldn't cycle on that mix of "air".

The steam .deb package converts well with alien and installs on .rpm based systems (fedora and opensuse tested). Some of the games require libraries distributed by Ubuntu and nobody else, but that can be worked around as well with self-made packages or upstream tarballs. (libtiff4, really?)

In my opinion the Valve engineers have done a good job of integrating their application with the ecosystem of a Linux user's home. Adhering to XDG standards for configuration directories makes steam 'just work' on a desktop using those freedesktop.org standards.

Also, their team deserve props for using actual packages. This is unlike some ported-to-Linux games that are shipped as sharchives, binfiles or even tarbombs. On Microsoft's platforms, not having a quality installer could hurt your sales and look really terrible in the review press. On package-based Linux distributions not having a package (or even a repo) is just tacky looking but can also backfire when the installer will no longer work even when the game will.

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.