padraigm

Yeah, my first thought was "wow look at all these old white guys". If the pictures weren't right next to each other I'd probably have trouble telling any two of them apart.

"mail" is actually a fantastic interface to an email box assuming you don't receive very much mail. I still use it for things like sending myself an email notification when a long-running job is finished.

Maybe this wasn't the case back then, but with the mailx the comes with modern Linux distros you can attach files using the -a flag

I use org-mode, with links between files as necessary and some helper functions to quickly create new files in an organized manner with a single key combination. That particular set of org-mode files looks a lot like a wiki, and I can use the agenda view to quickly see all to-do items without having to necessarily hunt through all of the various files for them.

DanBC is right about the comments here on HN, but I was talking about the response from the "tech community" at large in my original comment anyway.

The guess-and-iterate method would still be more efficient than trying to work through a stats textbook if the author is not educated in mathematics, though. Anyway, a lot of people don't enjoy learning math (crazy as that concept may seem to me, and, I guess, you) but guessing-and-iterating on a game you're excited about would always be fun.

And, importantly, much of the backlash has been quite sexist. Ultimately that's a huge problem in the tech community - when a man does something inappropriate it's seen as evidence that he's an asshole, but when a woman does something inappropriate it's seen as evidence that women are assholes.

Hormone replacement therapy stops and in some cases reverses mpb. Maybe not the solution you were looking for, though.

The Mincome experiment only failed in the sense that despite proving the benefits of a minimum income, it hasn't caught on very quickly elsewhere.

The results are only representative of /r/linux readers, not linux users as a whole.

Whether they count or not, I would expect to see "regular" users to be orders of magnitude more common than web crawlers.

I think you're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether there's a 3D printer in every home or not, because there will always be a non-negligible number of people who find the ability to rapidly prototype objects on demand in their homes appealing. You wouldn't argue that the law can ignore the fact that many people have general purpose computers just because most people use iPhones, right?

Like graue said, Firefox OS is for phones only. However, installing Firefox was just about the first thing I did when I got my Cr-48. http://i.imgur.com/eCWwJ.png

Has your group taken a serious look at KDE 4? It has reached or exceeded feature parity with KDE 3.5 across the board, it's a lot more stable now than any previous release of KDE ever has been, and it's well supported by RHEL (and SUSE, for that matter). Even though part of the KDE team is putting a lot of work into the tablet interface etc, the system is modular enough that the desktop doesn't suffer for it.

A lot of people tried early version in the 4.x series, and up until about 4.6 or so it was a crashy disaster, but it's really shaped up in the last year or two.

I'd consider the flagrant human rights abuses in the U.A.E. to be a pretty substantial downside. The U.A.E. routinely imprisons rape victims for extramarital sex, imprisons or castrates people convicted of homosexuality. There is little or no protection for freedom of speech or of the press, etc. The U.A.E. would be a terrible country to live and work in, and a low cost of living does nothing to change that.

"Is this job ad fake? Report it! or Recommend to a friend"

Why would I want to recommend a fake job to a friend? ;)

I don't know, at the time almost everyone way saying they got way more than they were worth. If this were a field with a lot of room for further innovation, I'd tend to agree with you, but social photo sharing? Take the $1B and move on to the next project.

The thing is, most game engines don't even simulate Newtonian physics very accurately; it would be much too computationally expensive to do so. Gravity only works on certain objects and is usually a constant acceleration applied along the vertical Cartesian axis, objects are composed of at most a couple dozen perfectly rigid parts attached together at defined joints, liquids and particles are simulated in batches using only rough heuristics, and so on. If we were to allow arbitrary changes to fundamental physical constants, the game engine would have to simulate the world from the quantum scale up.

That's a hard damn problem. There are some extraordinarily well-funded research groups that are struggling to model any reasonably large number of interactions at that scale. State of the art supercomputing clusters can currently simulate systems of hundreds of thousands of atoms, not even in real-time, and they're still making some assumptions along the way, which might not hold true if you were to arbitrarily modify any fundamental constants.

You could probably write a physics engine that passably pretends to simulate some (non-arbitrary!) changes in fundamental constants. But it would be hard to guess what matter would even look like for different values of, say, Z0.

Every time I join the YouTube HTML5 trial it gets silently turned off and videos start playing in Flash again a week or two later. Does that happen to anyone else?

As tikhonj mentioned, Emacs evil-mode is very likely exactly what you're looking for. I had considered myself a hardcore vim user, but I felt the call of Slime and org-mode. When I finally took a serious look at Emacs, I became convinced that Emacs with evil-mode is the ultimate editor for vim lovers.

I think your parent's point was that if the union can guarantee that its members are high-quality, it will have a lot of leverage to negotiate with employers. A union taking that approach doesn't need to stipulate that employers only employ union workers or anything like that; it simply says "all of the best people work for us - if you want to hire them, you have to agree to our terms (re. salary, benefits, working conditions, etc).

The Qubes project is interesting in some ways, but I think they're trying to do too much in one go, and as a result the final product doesn't seem very practical. For example, applications can't use hardware accelerated video according to their FAQ [1].

So pardon me while I braindump...

It would be an interesting project to integrate an Android-style permissions permissions system(possibly using SELinux) complete with per-application virtual filesystems (using FUSE) into the system package manager. So, for example, you install a music player, the package manager sets up a virtual filesystem for it that lets the program see its own configuration directory and your music directory, but nothing else. The package manager asks if you'd like to allow network permissions to the music player (for downloading album art or whatever); if yes, a firewall rule is added specifically allowing that process to access the network, if not, none is.

One problem with that kind of system is that a lot of end-user desktop programs are written with the assumption that the entire home directory is fair game. I'm not convinced that's really necessary, though. In case a program occasionally wants to access a file outside of its normal sandbox (say, you just downloaded a podcast into your downloads directory and want to play it with that music player I mentioned previously) you could always have the supervising program ask the user if it's okay to temporarily add that file to the program's sandbox. If it happens in an expected way (e.g. the user clicks on a media file in the file manager) you could safely grant access to the file without explicitly asking the user.

Something like that, on a distro using Wayland as the windowing system (to avoid the gaping security holes in X), would provide 90% of the security that Qubes does with significantly less inconvenience to the user. It would still require a good deal of work for the package maintainers, but perhaps a distro like that could implement something like the AUR [2] so users could do a lot of the packaging work for peripheral packages.

[1] http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html

[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/

Some people complain about bloat and bad compositing performance under X, but my real problem with X is that it's very insecure. Any program running on a given X server can see any keyboard input to any other program running on the same server by default. As it stands, there's not a practical solution to this.

Here's an interesting coincidence: I noticed that October 14 is also the date that Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-1

"I wonder if the extra electricity generated from the solar panels will go into paying the rent for the spaces."

The article definitely made it sound like that would be the case. They might also be counting on charging people in cars other than Tesla ones.

I had forgotten that Armadillo Aerospace existed. Do they consider themselves to be a serious competitor? In other words do they actually employ engineers and design rockets, or are they just talking about it?

Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are both extremely serious about civil liberties. It's really unfortunate that the U.S. political system is so heavily stacked against third parties.

This is false. Unity is an alternative to Gnome-shell; it uses (sometimes patched versions of) the same underlying Gnome 3 libraries.

My understanding is that the actual drones themselves do run a hard realtime operating system. Linux (and formerly Windows) is used to run the workstations on the ground that the drone pilots use.

I'm happy to help. I take a lot of notes, and I have not yet found a note-taking system that I'm completely happy with.

Regarding handwriting recognition, I understand that, handwriting transcription is hard. You would need to be able to identify fragments of handwritten text spread around an image and transcribe them independently; there are text-transcription libraries to help with that but it would still be a lot of work. However, it's the hard things that will set you apart from the masses of crappy note-taking software ;)

Anyway, good luck, I hope you come up with something great.

Ideas can not always be represented well with just text; they seem to require at least the ability to create arbitrary arrangements of text and diagrams in two dimensions. That being said, many of my notes are done in vim with some unholy amalgamation of markdown and LaTeX.

The tactile feel of a real pen on real paper is very nice, it makes note-taking a more pleasant experience. However, paper notes are difficult to index and amend, and easy to lose or damage, which is why I'm willing to compromise and take notes on computers.

I think the ideal device for note taking would allow me to cohesively use some sort of stylus or touchscreen and a real hardware keyboard at the same time. Currently I use vim for some notes and a paper notebook for others; the most helpful thing note-taking software could do for me is allow me to seamlessly combine these two.

So here are my notes about building a good note-taking program. The Bonus Points are the kinds of things that would get me to spend greater-than-pocketchange amounts of money on said program.

* Make it easy and straightforward to input and format text with the keyboard

* Make it easy and straightforward to draw diagrams and re-arrange text with the mouse/stylus/touchscreen

* Run on my local machine. I don't stop coming up with ideas just because I don't have a network connection, and I don't stop needing access to my ideas when your company goes out of business. Syncing between computers is still important though, use Dropbox for that. Bonus points if you give me a daemon I can install on my server and sync everything through that.

* On that note, use a highly portable native file format. I know I'll want to be able to review my ideas 5 or 10 years down the road, but I can't trust that your software will still be around. Plain-text is obviously the best in that regard, but some kind of archive format that includes plaintext and layout information would be more practical. Bonus points if you hack the file format however you need to so that if I open my notes in vim instead of your program, they still look as correct as possible, and if I save changes in vim they transfer sanely to your program.

* Support LaTeX formulas or at least have very good handwriting transcription for formulas. If I were taking notes about the humanities, I'd certainly just use a text editor and be done with it. Bonus points if you do both seamlessly (so, I hand-write a formula, you transcribe it into the correct LaTeX and now it's there when I open the file in my text editor).

* Huge bonus points: If I take pictures of (note that I did not say scan, I said take pictures of, as in with a webcam or cellphone) paper notes, your program imports them in a sane way (with handwriting and diagram recognition).

* Have a very clean, minimal GUI that doesn't get in the way and makes normal use cases (text, simple diagrams, and formulas) Just Work. This is not a cloud "app", nor is it a social network, an email client, an IDE, a word processor, an address book, or a calendar. Focus taking and archiving notes well, at the expense of everything else, and I'll enjoy using your program.