isomorphic

Absolutely. We're not even certain if life exists (or ever previously existed) on planets that we have hardware on.

The criteria in the article were input energy and a "bath" into which that energy can be dissipated. Perhaps there is a minimum potential difference before structures will self-organize--or perhaps the probability of self-organization is proportional to the difference.

Speculating along this line of reasoning: On Mercury, you have plenty of input energy, but few options for dissipating it. On Europa, you may have the reverse problem.

For all we know, however, Europa may actually have life. Our sample set is too small.

10 bits per second?

That probably means you'll need to register your URL/vendor/etc. with Fujitsu, since sending a normal-sized URL would be excruciating.

"Here, just aim your smartphone at this for 10-20 seconds."

> sets of IQ-predicting alleles

This bothered me more than the autopraise. He (and, if he is to be believed, China) are proceeding from the assumption that IQ can be reduced to a set of switches in the genome.

What if there are alleles that select for intelligence--but also select for a mixture of cancer, OCD, suicidal depression, and plain batshit crazy?

Well, the current Internet pendulum has swung to nearly the polar opposite of federated services, much to the dismay of my inner software-libre graybeard.

Even a duopoly (!) would be preferable to a single vendor.

By "failure," it never occurred to me to mean a technical or operations failure.

I'm thinking: shut down due to the business model not working, or some other business-model variant, such as gradually getting intolerably crappy like SourceForge. Cash flow isn't great; let's introduce "sponsored" code. Etc.

I disagree. Many OSS projects rely upon GitHub, especially projects that package or distribute other projects. Sure, everyone would eventually work out their own hosting, but it'd be a nightmare of changing URLs and uneven servers in the interim. I think a week would be extraordinarily optimistic.

Google is a giant single point of failure. Others would rush to fill the vacuum, but it'd be a brutal few months (years) while we all relied upon Bing.

Is there any GitHub-esque outfit waiting in the wings that provides free OSS hosting?

It's not limited to open source, but commercial enterprises pay for GitHub's services, so at least there's some sort of service agreement. OSS depends upon GitHub's largesse (which is extensive). However, if GitHub changes its mind (deciding, for example to focus on selling code-editing software), or if something goes wrong with the commercial side, then OSS is left high and dry.

This sort of thing feeds my paranoia about GitHub being a giant single point of failure in the open-source world.

I know the argument: Someone, somewhere has a copy of each repo checked out, so we (the nebulous "we") could reconstruct everything from the diaspora of ".git" directories.

It just bothers me to think how dependent OSS has become upon GitHub.

He was my favorite author (and not just for the science fiction). He is sorely missed.

This is because American Libertarianism conflates the two ideas "I should be free to do almost anything I want" with "I owe nothing to other humans (and vice-versa)." The Culture is absolutely about the former and absolutely not about the latter.

> too big of a list for them to follow up on thoroughly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Define "thoroughly."

tl;dr: Comey: "The Bill of Rights is inconvenient. We'd like to wipe our backside with it, and we need Congress to make that legal. Support such a law because $BOGEYMAN. Thank you, citizen."

...an open-source BigDog with a locked bootloader, and green felt outer cladding.

Yeah, not giving Walmart (or its proxy, CurrentC) my bank account number. Sorry. The credit card system creates a buffer between me and vendors, and I like it that way.

...which would mean L2013 Mac Pro users would be left out in the cold.

Perhaps you'd be happier with the term "obfuscation." But the code does meet the textbook definition of "encryption." Maybe not strong encryption...

One wonders what Google's cost is to run these services, what margin they'd be happy with, and whether people would pay that in exchange for privacy.

Google's latest quarterly website revenue is about US$11B; assuming 500M active users, primitive math gives $88/user/year. Interestingly, that number is right between Google Apps' two paid tiers. However, I'm not sure if adopting paid Google Apps means you've totally escaped the advertising and privacy implications of all of Google's services.

"Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple."

Shots fired.

(At Google, obviously.)

They can hand over copies of data (after being presented with a warrant) without giving "access to our servers."

This may save some people some money, but I'm not crazy about insurance-company OBD-II devices in my car, either.

I suppose these technological tattletales will resign us to a future where we're either paying a premium for "bad" behavior (bad to an insurance company, anyway), or for privacy.

I await the lawsuits to expose insurance-company pricing models, when people figure out the industry isn't using the stated attributes for punitive pricing, because those attributes do not, in fact, correlate to claims. (Note that I'm not saying the insurance industry won't very quickly figure out which signals result in claims; I'm saying they won't reveal what those signals are.)

403 Forbidden.

paulsutter gave a good answer to this elsewhere in the comments. But I would add this: All other things being equal (or roughly equal), pick one at random.

Sure, there's opportunity cost, but there are also costs way beyond the time you take fretting over a decision. You said it yourself: You're "crippled" by anxiety. How is that better than making a random decision? Or just going with your gut?

Theoretically yes, but technologically no. I can't "own" something with server-based DRM on it. DRM creates a right (or an ability) of revocation for the seller.

Amazon is using language like "e-book(s) sold" when the reality is that they mean "e-book license(s) sold." The difference may be subtle, but if an e-book comes with DRM, the buyer certainly does not "own" it. Amazon even makes that point themselves, as they promote e-books as having "no secondary market."

This is an important point when you consider the vendor lock-in of the Kindle "ecosystem." Instead of "e-book," a better phrase might be "Kindle software."

Amazon should be careful of throwing stones about illegal collusion as they approach market domination. It will be very easy for them to make a mistake which runs afoul of anti-trust law.

I run various production systems in both VMware ESX and VirtualBox, and I have time issues in all VMs, regardless of hypervisor vendor. The VM tools are installed and operating "properly." The host machine clocks are synced correctly with ntp. Yet the VMs will sometimes get tens of minutes out of alignment in short order.

At this point I'm thinking I need to run ntp on the physical hardware with the least jitter, then just run ntpdate in a cron job on all the VMs. This would work better than ntp clients in the VMs or the VM tools.

Soon they won't even bother with that pretense. It's already happening in the US; people who disagree with pervasive surveillance are "extremists." And so power seeks to preserve itself.

s/F-35/Mars Lander/

> "I went on to develop aerial cameras for Google, but that story will have to wait for Google to publish some details."

I'm wondering what, if anything, that statement has to do with the Skybox acquisition, or if the two are previously-unrelated parts of an overarching aerial imaging plan.

Google is so far ahead of others in mapping it is downright scary.

I read somewhere speculation that Apple's iBeacon could be used to create precise indoor maps of public or semi-public spaces. But then I read about Project Tango, and wonder...

- Didn't test database apps because reasons.

- Tested Twitter instead.