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Comment Technically Illegal? (Score 5, Interesting) 412

The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty prohibits the exploitation of Antarctica's resources based on environmental concerns.

Now it does say -mineral- resources and I don't think ice counts as a mineral, but still, I'd imagine the environmental impact isn't negligible. Specially if done in large scale.

Submission + - Dropbox is dropping Linux after 11 years (dropboxforum.com)

rokahasch writes: Starting today, 10th of August, most users of the Dropbox desktop app on Linux have been receiving notifications that their Dropbox will stop syncing starting November.

Over at the Dropbox forums, Dropbox have declared that the only Linux filesystem supported for storage of the Dropbox sync folder starting the 7th of November, will be on a clean EXT4 fs.

This basically means Dropbox drops Linux support completely, as almost all Linux distributions have other file systems as their standard installation defaults nowadays — not to mention encryption running on top of even an EXT4 file system which won't qualify as a clean EXT4 fs for Dropbox (such as ecryptfs which is the default in for example Ubuntu for encrypted home folders).

The thread is trending heavily on Dropbox' forums with the forum's most views since the thread started earlier today. The cries from a large amount of Linux users have so far remained unanswered from Dropbox, with most users finding the explanation given for this change unconvincing. The explanation given so far is that Dropbox requires a fs with support for Extended attributes/Xattrs. Extended attributes however are supported by all major Linux/Posix complaint file systems.

Dropbox have up until today supported Linux platforms since their services began back in 2007.

Comment I don't get this (Score 3, Insightful) 135

Why does Amazon wants access to a car or my house?

Here's a $50 solution
1) Get large crate, fix it in place to prevent removal
2) Get padlock
3) Leave padlock inside crate
4) Delivery guy places package in crate
5) Delivery guy uses padlock, locks crate
6) Get home, use only key to open padlock
7) Get package
8) ???
9) PROFIT!

And before people start tearing down this idea, ask yourself, is the flaw you found worse than "letting a stranger in my home"....

Comment Genetic Algorithms (Score 4, Interesting) 154

You get an algorithm to create complex non-traditional 3D rotor shapes, simulate their behavior in wind, and then mutate the design, simulate again, and get a machine learning algorithm to learn what sort of mutations lead to a better performing 3D rotor. In theory, enough iterations -- perhaps millions or more -- should eventually lead to the "ultimate rotor"

You're describing Genetic Algorithms. It's a fairly old technique. It shouldn't be too hard to implement it. The problem here is not FOSS, it's computational power. You need quite a lot of CPU time to run all the simulations and evolve the solution.

Some sort of distributed computing framework like INSERT_PROJECT_NAME@home would work. But then you'd have to convince everyone to use it....

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