primitur

>Are you saying they just stand by and passively let the military-industrial lobby get what it wants?

Are you really ignoring the acounting for $Trillion defence debt that gets lost by your Pentagon masters on a regular basis?

>Putin and Russia are basically peace-loving.

Tell me again, how many foreign nations has Russia invaded, destroyed their infrastructure, militarily occupied in the last .. lets just say 30 years? Now, how many has the USA invaded? By comparison, Russia is most definitely more peaceful than the US.

>And Putin was for decades a dedicated communist who believed world peace could come about only through either revolution or conquest. And Russians are highly ethnicist and nationalist, not at all peaceful universalists.

We're not even going to go into the Death Cult to which a significant majority of American military-industrial puppets belong, eh?

Ukraines' civil unrest put Russia's not-insignificant Crimean and eastern-Ukraine military assets at risk.

Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation - or is voting only "pure" when America does it (lol)?

Is the USA the only country who is "allowed" to protect its sovereign citizens?

>USA threatened Canada and Mexico

I dunno. When was the last time Canada and Mexico threatened to impound a US naval base? When was the last time Canada tried to ally with the US' principle military opponent and have its military assets installed on its territory?

>Did terrorists based in the Ukraine fly hijacked airplanes into Moscow's skyscrapers? Because that's why the USA invaded Afghanistan.

This is laughable. Those were Saudi terrorists, funded by the Saudi kingdom. By your (admittedly dubious American) logic, Russia should have invaded Hungary and destroyed its infrastructure entirely, just because Georgia sent some terrorists to Russian territory.

Honestly, I find the American propensity to blame Russia for its actions in Crimea to be of the most blatant hypocrisy one can imagine. Russia has better arguments for defending its naval bases in Crimea from Ukraine hostility, than America has for .. Iraq .. Afghanistan .. Libya .. and so on.

Do Americans just not see their own hypocrisy on this issue? Russia didn't invade and destroy entire nation(s) (PLURAL) in order to exercise global military power - it invaded Crimea to secure its own resources in the region. Ukraine did not fall, it has not been utterly destroyed, its infrastructure not-related to offensive actions against the Russian naval bases in Crimea is still intact.

But we cannot say that about America's actions in the forementioned countries, nor can we say that Russian interference in the American 'election' is anywhere near the same order of magnitude as American interference in .. 20+ different democracies around the world. I shan't make a list - this is an exercise for the average American reader to demonstrate for themselves that there is no hypocrisy here.

And .. NATO. The military organization currently doing its best to ensure Russia is encircled by heavy military assets. Tell me again: when was the last time Russia established full operational, offensive bases within 30 km's of the borders of the USA with any of its clients and their military?

Please, do not play this game. It makes no sense and it just makes you sound utterly ill-informed. Russia is in no way on par with the USA when it comes to military aggression. Not even close.

No, I truly think we are beyond that at this point: it is pure, profit-driven, hatred-based evil. In fact I am positive that the culture of war-mongering is SO entrenched that it has reached a pitch akin to religious fervor among America's (and Russias) elite, who utterly worship death, its instruments, and its application in driving us all into fear.

The reason I think that is because there is so much GOOD technology out there that would solve our crises of cultures in a heartbeat; we are being prevented from applying this, with every $billion-dollar bomber we build in the heartland, instead of schools, hospitals, universities, infrastructure.

EDIT: btw, I don't think its a "big invisible hand", but that's because I pay attention. I think its more of a "the people are cowards and cannot face up to the facts of their own complicity in the death cult".

The same is true of Americas' ruling elite, yo. Stop blaming Russia - start blaming Lockheed Martin ($29.4 billion), Boeing ($14.6 billion), Raytheon ($12.3 billion), General Dynamics ($11.8 billion), Northrup Grumman ($9.5 billion), and so on .. ($number in brackets represents value of war-related contracts awarded and currently under obligation...)

These companies need the Russian threat to justify their existence.

I've always considered the idea that the Cold War was "over" to be nothing but propaganda designed to prevent people from wondering why their nation is spending $Trillion on their military.

Of course the Cold War is still happening: America has been exporting war wholesale for decades. Just because Russia hasn't been doing it at the same scale as well, doesn't mean squat.

The US and Russia have had plenty of opportunities to leave each other in peace over the last 30 years. The trouble is, they're not the only parties to this farce. Incredibly powerful, massively entrenched super-power-like military industrial multinational corporations are involved as well, and there is no way in HELL they are going to let their number one revenue source dry up just because we all want peace.

Its quite simple: stop assuming that its sovereign nation states doing all the fire-lighting. We are way, way beyond that point now. If you want to get a grip on war economy you have to stop allowing your politicians to push you - the people - into more and more heinous debt, for more and more heinous reasons (imperialist warfare against innocents), without repercussion.

This is going to be a tough sell. Pretty much everyone using computers to establish themselves in the technology markets today is going to have to deal with a multinational, war-mongering, mega-corporate military-industrial giant. We're well and truly being dominated by those who are quite happy having us all in the abyss, trembling in fear at what would happen if we stopped buying from General Electric, Samsung and co.

Lua, LuaJIT provide the same sort of kick, in my opinion. The language supports easy integration with pretty much any syslib, and well .. its a fine way of doing a lot of things. Anyway, its my '21st Century' Delphi, anyway .. haven't written much Delphi code since the late 90's, but I'm sure glad its still around and kicking.

A thought-provoking and masterful positioning on a subject that must be dealt with the only possible peaceful way: with communication.

What if the 'net, instead of being used to commit heinous crimes against humanity, instead continues to grow, and prosper, and flourish as a peace mechanism? After all, a lot of people do want to share intimate details about themselves with anyone who wants to listen. There is a peaceful use of this, isn't there? And doesn't it hinge on the ability of the individual to make the decision, as opposed to the state yanking the privilege from you as a sovereign, hmm .. ?

Off to find out more about Cyber Peace initiatives ..

I'm personally not finding that to be the case - or, if there is a more 'critical mass' in the desktop/server language, at least its a single language to deal with.

Its the context-switching that bothers me most about the web technologies that have evolved over the years (and I've been watching, as an Internet user for over 30+ years, this evolution quite closely) .. going from HTML5 -> CSS -> Javascript results in too much cognitive dissonance for this old salty developers eyes. Plus there are just too many platform issues to deal with - not just per-OS, but per-browser.

Whereas I'm perfectly happy building real desktop apps (which can incidentally be deployed to the web) in languages such as Lua, I really can't be bothered with the alphabet-soup of CSS, the peculiarities of HTML5 .. although I do find Javascript to be aesthetically pleasing at times (must be my C background). I hope to one day just do away with the web layer entirely and focus only on the app level, and there are fortunately enough tools like that out there to get along with in that regard.

Still, Coder is a fresh way to address the problem, and I definitely appreciate the effort made by its developers to make things a lot more approachable to younger, less crusty minds.

I've been playing with Coder for the last few days .. and the thing I like most about it is that the majority of the knowledge imparted is done through the comments .. I think this not only teaches kids good programming practice, but it also gives them the perfect distraction-free environment to be involved with what they're doing - just like commerical developers.

Also, it should be noted that the whole Coder package can be run on any Unix-ish machine (Linux/OSX/BSD) with ease; it doesn't require a rPi in order to get value out of it.

One conclusion I've made after 48 hours with Coder, is that developing for the Web sure is a lot more convoluted than it should be, alas. On the other hand, if I can fork Coder for my own needs (I'd like to use it to build a blog app) it'll be a lot less complicated.

>Doing this kind of thing is pretty new for servers. Even massive HPC clusters tend to boot from persistent disk.

Not really, no. Servers all over the IT world have been using PXE and tftpboot for decades - in fact it was a very common method of booting a server even in the 80's. I know of quite a few Rail/Transportation companies whose track-side computers are booted over the network using these techniques, and there are about 250,000 of those things just in Europe alone ..

What's new is that another generation are discovering this technique.

Aescetic Narcissism takes many forms, but once you start to recognize it for what it is (empty), creating value as a means of life becomes some sort of Art. From nothing, something.

I don't think Conan gets the point here, much. This is all about 'how to overcome ones weakness', but the question is still left lacking: to what end does it matter?

What matters, is: The User

If you don't have someone else agreeing with you that the widget is a widget and can be used to do blah, whether that widget is a meme, a joke, something electronic, physical, or whatever, then there isn't any chance for the Ideation to Perpetuate.

Without another human being agreeing that you are the value you assign to something, or that the value 'is', there isn't any value. Everything that leads up to that point in time in the universe is merely a shadow, reflection, or bump towards what has to happen: at least one other person has to agree with you, what is, is.

It may be true that one has to push hard to overcome the more base and banal afflictions upon the entrepreneurial spirit, but it simply does not matter if you have at least found one, then another, then many, to agree with you on subject 'x'.

I think that there is much to be said of the cult of the entrepreneur, but the word itself is merely an introduction to economy, at and of scale. If you really consider yourself an entrepreneur, but don't have a single user of something you have created, I don't think it matters who, or what you think you are.

There are debug pins exposed on the standard iOS connector, yes - they may not be 'full JTAG' but they are there for manufacturing and testing purposes, and accomplish pretty much the same thing as you would normally use JTAG.

And yes, you can do a full block copy - with the cooperation of the OS - if you know the back door. A lot of these Border Patrol devices depend on it.

Thats really not true - its quite possible to build an editor for MOAI .. in fact, I would wager that it'll be easier to build an editor for MOAI now, than it was to build the environment for Unity...

Sorry, but no. You may be correct about the incompetent developers of these devices, but the truly competent developers simply use JTAG and do a block-by-block NAND/Flash transfer. There is no protection against this.

And MOAI, which is far better than Cocos2D, imho, although requires a bit of effort to truly 'grok' properly so that you can get things happening ..

That said, you can't deny that Unity has the toolset market pretty much cornered. If someone came up with some editors for MOAI, it might be an interesting world indeed ..

The only way for Germany to close the US bases is for Germany to declare war on the US. Seriously! US bases in Germany are US territory ..

Border Control Agents have been issued with devices that can copy the entire contents of your cell phone in a few minutes - the entire contents, using JTAG, of every storage device onboard.

If you've got bits encrypted, great - but there's a lot of stuff you can't encrypt in iOS and Android, in general, unless you work really hard at it ..

The same place all human activity would be without sex: nowhere. Sex is what makes us all human.

Perhaps there is more to be understood here: Snowden didn't blow the whistle on the US Government, he blew the whistle on the US People, and what they have allowed their government to become.

Big difference.

>I guess I'm one of the few people(?) who like the OOM killer.

Diff'rent strokes. I also like the OOM killer, its a dastardly wonderful thing to tie lots of safety-critical things to .. and in the SIL-4 OS business (my domain), it is indeed a crash imperative to understand how to use the OOM properly. Or: not.

So in this light .. I know Erlang is "the thing" right now, but I feel I must just mention that:

>Of course, this works better when you have many small processes rather than few monolithic ones. But now you're designing an Erlang system :)

.. one could also be designing a Lua-based distribution, or JVM, or whatever you like, essentially, and integrating with oom_killer. There's nothing Erlang'y about it. Because if you're playing with the oom_killer, you're really making a distribution choice, in the topology.

If your app cares about oom, well kiddo .. you better not be doing anything less than excercising complete control over your distro, its launch policies, its use of the TextSegment as installed, and so on. Absolutely you're making Distribution decisions about the functionality of the combined system. oom_killer isn't useful by itself.

My point being, worrying about oom_killer isn't just something Erlang users need think about, nor are they the only ones who really 'get' why an oom_killer can be used nicely .. if you're building a distro, either for use as an embedded machine, a tight secure server image, or indeed even as a desktop user, well .. careful memory integration is, as you say, a harsh pass.

Incidentally, I use the oom_killer exactly as you mention, in a few embedded distro applications, specifically indeed, a kill of whatever 'lua' is hogging resources. Its an extraordinarily functional mechanism for recovery ..

>>>It's an interesting niche tech, but spaceflight is just so expensive that I doubt it'll ever be viable.

Harvest the energy in space. Microwave it to the wing-surface receivers of ultra-light high-altitude gliders which use the energy to stay aloft.

Use the gliders as a platform from which to deliver rockets.

What fascinates me most about these data is a single data point: Thailand.

The relationship between Thailand and Europe, and say .. Australia and Europe, over the last 2 decades, to my naive thinking, really shows details of clear product demand/response according to world incidents.

It'd be interesting to be able to overlay War/Conflict Data on top, body-count stats, and a few other relevant data of the world, to see how all this is tied to a market reality.

Perhaps we, the people, need to do our own data-mining.

>What went wrong? That's the real question.

I work in the OS world, so I have thought about this question.

What I think 'went wrong' with Microsoft - as is happening with other "Operating Systems" developers, is that they have forgotten that they are there to serve their users, not an onboard business-model.

Seriously, think about it. Let us take the example of shared filesystems, a common 'posession' of the OS in certain terms .. OS, filesystem, network, its all right there in the kernel .. but .. Why, on gods green earth, are we relying on 'startups' and 'upstarts' to deliver us peer-to-peer networking at the front-end user interface instead of actually having it, de-branded, at the operating system level as a matter of course?

Things Dropbox, if Microsoft was awake, wouldn't have happened, because the peer-network shared filesystem thingy was sorted out .. in the 80's, I might add .. and then promptly forgotten about.

Because the OS vendors have lost the plot on what is an operating system (hint: its the source, stupid!) and what is a 'branded service which produces other revenues for the OS vendor', and because the anti-trust thing happened, in the first place: OS vendors have lost the plot.

Also, the very first sign that things were going awry was when someone decided that a user operating system should not ship with its own compiler(s), onboard! The separation of those tools, and the sheer bloat that results from not having a tight Build/OS binding, means that things got out of control on the developer, developer, developer(s), side of things, imho.

I think this disconnect of the User-is-the-Developer mentality from the "what service is sold -outside- the box of the OS" profit excuse, with the ease of device manufacturing these days, OS vendors have new challenges ahead, and the crux of the argument is this: Its damned easy to make a new OS, for your own device, and then serve the hell out of your customers. In a very real sense, who needs a desktop if all you have to do is turn something on, and press play, in the first place.. ? With the way things are going, cheap light computing built-for-task is the new hotness, and .. well at least imho .. There may well come a point where the new hot OS ships with everything you could possibly need, already onboard and working, to build something new for the platform, itself.

Put that ethos back, and lets talk again in a year about it ..

Australia/New Zealand are pretty attractive, citizenship-wise. As an Australian, I get the 'reciprocal' treatment - i.e., we will treat you as you treat our citizens, and since thats pretty good right now (Australia lets many European citizens in for a working-visa, two years on average), this means I can move around most of the western world without too much fuss.

I cringe at the hassle my American friends have to go through whenever they travel through a densely-packaged country region such as Europe .. whereas we Australians seem to get treated pretty well.

I strongly urge you to look outside your box. When you hear the words 'our world' do you take it to mean "us here in our western paradise"?

Because if you look at North Korea: definitely. If you look at the wars in Syria and Libya: definitely. If you look at the NSA in the USA: oh hell yes. Doubleplus1984, brother. No question about it: you can be taken away and disappeared, in most Western societies, for not thinking like the Party wants you to think. Russia: sexcrime!

Thoughtcrime? You're probably committing one right now, just arguing with a stranger on the Internet.

Look, lets just go away and come back when we're actually really living in a world like 1984, shall we? Or - while we still have the capacity, lets talk about the similarities and what we can do to prevent the downward slide. Because there is very little doubt that we are, rapidly, sliding into the hole as painted by Orwells' warning, and without those of us with the intellect to do something about it actually DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT, we're going to see things get a lot, lot worse.

I'd pay for a Lua port of this. Anyone interested? Drop me a PM.

Re-engage the RC world:

http://rcgroups.com/ http://flitetest.com/

RCGroups - contains endless gold for enthusiasts and hobbyists and mad scientists, alike. I suggest you get right into the forums in whatever subject interests you, and start looking for the build threads. This site, alone, contains enough information to get you seriously hooked on RC again.

FliteTest - fun, easy to watch videos on getting into the hobby. Also, these guys produce easy to make planes that will give you all the basics - me and my 6 year old recently got the FT Basics kit (nutball, delta, flyer) along with an FT Spitfire 2-pack, and we're having the best time of our lives flying a nice variety of cheap, easy to build/repair, planes. We'll probably go FPV in a little while ..

In my days in the 80's, I had one of these:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/hardware/Oric_Atmos_MCP4...

.. and used it as a general work-buffer for expressing routines and dumping assembly .. my parents called it my "bogroll homework" since I usually took rolls of plotted product to the head with me, light reading ..