Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Space, Technology and Society

3-D Printing

1 Comment

Finally goes true 3-D.

It’s finally starting to feel like the 21st century.

[Update a while later]

Aaaaaannnd, self-flying cars by 2017?

Seems a little optimistic, but if we’re going to have flying cars, they’ll have to be self flying.

[Mid-morning update]

Aaaaand, molecular 3-D printers. The future is looking very interesting. Both in the conventional and the Chinese sense.

[Late-morning update]

Aaaaannnd, lab-grown chicken meat?

That would be huge breakthrough for both earth and space. I’d really like to see it for pork, though. Technically, would lab-grown pork be kosher? Or halal?

Business, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Windows Question

10 Comments

I have an old Windows 7 installation on an old drive, that I can no longer boot because I changed the motherboard (it’s an HP OEM). While I haven’t tried, I assume that if I take a new licensed installation disk of 8.1, I could recover and upgrade to the new hardware.

Question, if that is the case, is it possible to copy it to an SSD, but without the data, just the Windows installation and the software (I’ve already got data backed up elsewhere). If so, how?

Harder question: If I can do that, can I do it to a virtual machine? I know I can do a clean install on a VM, but I’d like to recover the existing software on the old OS.

[Update a while later]

Well, from what I’m seeing here, looks like it’s not really feasible. The only way to recover the old Windows (as opposed to install a new one) is to dual boot. But I’ll probably recover the machine anyway, just to see what’s on it, and if some of the licensed software (like Malwarebytes) can be migrated to the new one.

[Late-evening update]

Look, here is my conceptual idea.

1) I copy the old Windows drive, then delete data, to eliminate everything that isn’t software.
2) I create a virtual machine with a sized partition.
3) I somehow copy the Windows drive sans data to the virtual partition.
4) I then try to update from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 using my Windows install disk (full license, not OEM).
5) I then hook up the old data as a network drive, so I’m not putting data on the SSD.

That’s the top-level plan. I’m just not sure how possible it is. I think that Step (3) is where the miracle occurs. Step (5) is a problem if I can’t get Samba working, and if I can’t get it working between a virtual and physical machine.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

California’s Social Priorities

2 Comments

…are pretty screwed up:

California continues to lead the country, and by some measures even the world, in environmental quality and climate change initiatives. But public policy must evolve to leverage these environmental achievements into corresponding improvements in educational attainment and middle class job creation. With more than 18% of the nation’s poor, and less than 1%3 of global greenhouse gas emissions, California should also embrace the challenge of leading the world in the creation of middle class manufacturing jobs for the rapidly evolving clean and green technology that California’s laws mandate, California’s educational and technology sectors invent, and California’s venture capital investors bring to the global market.

Instead, California’s policies, and regulatory and legal costs and uncertainties, tend to divert thousands of middle class jobs even in emerging green industries (including those not requiring high school diplomas) to other locations, including the Tesla battery manufacturing facility, which moved to Nevada. The loss of projects that help achieve important environmental objectives, create high quality jobs, and comply with California’s strict environmental and public health protection mandates, continues to occur in part because well-funded special interest groups ranging from business competitors to labor unions file “environmental” lawsuits as leverage for achieving narrow political or pecuniary objectives rather than to protect the environment and public health. This study suggests that the state must work much harder to ensure that California’s landmark environmental laws are not misused or pursued in a manner that adversely affects other, equally important policy priorities for California’s large undereducated and underemployed population.

The idiotic carbon law is going to do huge harm to the economy and the middle class, while doing nothing about “climate change.”

[Monday-morning update]

A tale of four droughts. All true, but, as Paul Dietz notes in comments, the biggest problem is that there is no rational water market in the state.

[Bumped]

Humor, Mathematics, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Odds Of Survival

10 Comments

I’ve often (only half) joked that there are billions of people alive who have never died, so why should we consider it inevitable?

Well, someone has actually worked out the ratio. Hey, 7% odds of survival beats zero.

Mortality Hourglass

[Update a couple minutes later]

Speaking of which Peter Thiel seems to finally be getting serious about longevity, not only funding non-profit research, but actually investing in companies pursuing it.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Chrome And Systemd

4 Comments

Just did an upgradedate in Fedora. Looks like the new systemd has broken Chrome. Anyone have any ideas? Nothing about it at the site that I saw, at least based on a Google search. This is sort of a PITA, because Chrome is the only way I can access Tweetdeck, which I need for my multiple Twitter accounts.

[Update a while later]

This is the error message I get when I run from command line: “Failed to create /home/*****/.pki/nssdb directory.”

[Update late afternoon]

I realize the title may be a little cryptic. Every time Chrome fails to open, I get a message that systemd had a problem. Before the update, no problem, after the update, borked.

[Late-afternoon update]

OK, partially solved problem. If I disable SELinux, I can fire it up. Then I can re-enable. Here’s the errors when I run it:

ATTENTION: default value of option force_s3tc_enable overridden by environment.
[7630:7630:0315/162457:ERROR:sandbox_linux.cc(325)] InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process
[7571:8329:0315/162710:ERROR:get_updates_processor.cc(240)] PostClientToServerMessage() failed during GetUpdates
[7571:7605:0315/162710:ERROR:mcs_client.cc(644)] Failed to log in to GCM, resetting connection.

And there about about ten instances of chrome sandbox process running. Not sure what this means, but at least I can use it for now, until I figure out what’s going on. Unfortunately, I lost all recent history.