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Comment Re:Well, I suppose -fms-extensions is better than (Score 1) 34

in order to let gcc use data structures in MS's headers and have somewhat source compatible builds

This is what I fear. I'm just not certain whose source will be "leaking" into whose kernel. Or why, if Linux devs (Linus) have decided up to this point _not_ to adopt a standard C construct, it is now considered to be a good idea.

Are we developing Linux using the Cut-N-Paste culture of Stack Overflow?

Comment Yes ... No (Score 1) 34

As a step toward application portability between Microsoft apps and Linux systems, maybe. But that seems to be more at the library level. But who out there is suggesting that we need to splice Microsoft stuff (drivers, etc.) directly into the Linux kernel?

On the other hand, it could help in porting systemd to Windows.

Comment Re:I wouldn't care if my taxes hadn't paid for it (Score 1) 85

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Comment DOGS for self-replicating space habitats (Score 1) 91

As I proposed in 1988: https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction.
        During the past semester, I have written one paper on this concept, entitled "The Self-Replicating Garden". Its thesis is that this concept provides a new metaphor for thinking about the relation between humans and the machinery that constitutes our political and technical support systems. Writing this paper has helped me organize my thinking and has given me a chance to explore the extensive literature relevant to the design of social and technological systems."

Still want to do it, but lots of distractions and small steps along the way.

On DOGS (Design of Great Settlements) see from me from 1999:
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

and also from me in 2005:
"We need DOGS not CATS! (Score:2, Interesting)"
https://slashdot.org/comments....
        "So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck. So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space. And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from materials found in space.
        So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
        So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored ... or a couple other sites I made in that direction ...
        My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now. ..."

Reprised in 2017:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

Jeff and I took the same physics class from Gerry O'Neill as Princeton... We have related goals, but we took different paths since then though...

Comment Re:With Science (Score 1) 91

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Comment uh, both, dummy ? (Score 2) 91

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

Comment Re:Dusaster (Score 1) 153

I fully anticipate there will be branding changes, like adding a '+' for rewards and consumers will learn fairly quickly that merchants frequently don't want to deal with the more expensive 'plus' transactions.

Can't blame them, your rewards points/cash back is just being charged to the merchant.

Comment Re:In theory not a bad idea (Score 1) 153

Or you just carry a couple of cards, one with no rewards that people will actually take, and maybe one or two with rewards that some merchants will still take.

The biggest thing to get right is some simple 'branding' so consumers actually know at a glance what cards might work or might not.

It's just bonkers that the credit card companies have basically made the merchants pay for the credit card companies to motivate cardholders to use the cards that merchants don't want them using in the first place. Those 'cash back' and 'rewards' represent some of cost of goods that a consumer can't really get away from without these measures.

Comment Re:That dog won't bring home Huntsman's Rewards (t (Score 3, Insightful) 153

including rewards credit cards, credit cards with no rewards programs, and commercial cards,

It's right there in the summary, that merchant's would start being able to decline the credit cards with 'points' and 'cash back'. I presume this would come with some rebranding to be phased in, like 'Visa+' and 'Visa Business', with a lot of merchants refusing 'Visa+' just like they reject other high-fee cards.

Comment Re:I never stop being amazed (Score 1) 49

Z-Wave v. Zigbee largely stemmed from some awkward licensing to implement Z-Wave.

I think the thing driving Matter-over-Thread seems to be a desire to have more commonality with IP stacks, notably Apple's Homekit not having the adoption Apple wanted and Apple deciding to maybe go with something that the device manufacturers will go for, but not wanting to have to have a totally different stack for dealing with Zigbee vs. wifi devices.

So here's Matter, based on IP, with endorsement of 'Thread' as one of the transports. Now talking to a Matter device over Wifi is pretty similar to talking to a Matter device over Thread, except Thread is not generally IP routing.

So Thread is an inherent mesh design, unlike Bluetooth or Wifi, and low power. Bluetooth kind of sucks for this application since it's peer to peer. Wifi somewhat better but it means you have to inject access points even if coverage could be had mesh-style, with a light switch serving as a perfectly viable relay while doing it's job otherwise. Also you have an actual shot of running a Thread radio on modest battery much longer than Wifi.

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