It’s the hundred and tenth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ achievement. On the Centennial, a decade ago, I wrote three pieces to commemorate it, here, here and here.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
China On The Moon
Will it make a claim?
I sort of hope it does. It would bring things to a head with the problematic Outer Space Treaty.
[Update a few minutes later]
I haven’t looked at the pictures myself, but a reader has emailed me wondering if they’re potentially faked, based on inconsistent shadows, and similarity to past images (while not wanting to sound like the “Apollo moon hoax” people). I don’t have an opinion, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Printer Hate
Lileks has bought another buck-sucking fail box:
The aforementioned cord situation is miserable – unless i turn it around, so the control panel faces away. But: it has wifi, so I think: put it in the unheated porch which is sorta-kinda my wife’s office, except A) it isn’t, because it’s unheated and bone-cold half the year, and B) she’s a kitchen-table-iPad after-hours worker now. So i could put it there and communicate with it, wirelessly.
Except you know how that goes. You know. You send a document to the printer. You hear nothing. You get up and walk over to the next room and make sure it’s on. Wifi light is blinking red, because the tech has an attention span that makes Dory from “Finding Nemo” look like the fargin’ Sphinx, and it can’t remember networks, or forgets it was connected, or gets all confused because there’s a box for the city’s wifi system down the block and it keeps saying things and making it lose its place!!!! And then you have to enter your password on a printer touchscreen, which ought to be a field-sobriety test, and then you go back and send the document again and wait for the sullen complaining sound of plastic crap feeding a piece of paper into the machine, and the sudden shocked kadunk! as the print heads swing into place, and then silence, because it jammed.
Like wi-fi, this is a really screwed-up technology.
The World’s Smallest Pacemaker
…can be implanted without surgery.
It’s an age of miracles, if the government doesn’t screw it up.
WTF, Windows?
What fresh hell is this? Why is Win 8.1 on my laptop telling me a five gigabyte file is too large for an empty 16G flash drive?
Is There A Fedora Doctor In The House?
I’ve been having hardware issues with my Fedora 20 installation (yes, I know it’s still beta until tomorrow). I had it on a new WD 2T drive, but occasionally I was having boot problems, and having to repair the filesystem. I noticed that it was making strange noises and running hot, and taking a long time to even get to GRUB, indicating that it was hanging up the BIOS itself. I was on the verge of returning it, when I tried moving it from the first to the second SATA interface on the MB (I have six). The problems went away, so apparently it’s a motherboard problem on that interface (at least that’s what I’m inferring). Unfortunately, it refuses to boot now, dropping into emergency mode, and telling me that it can’t switch root, because /sysroot/etc/os-release is missing (which it does seem to be). I tried copying /etc/os-release to /sysroot/etc/os-release, but it wouldn’t let me (and etc doesn’t seem to currently exist on /sysroot).
Any ideas how to fix this?
[Update a while later]
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently Anaconda can’t be bothered to load logical volumes before looking for linux partitions. But why?
And what do I do about it? When I do a ‘vgchange -ay’ it loads them, but if I then run anaconda, it still doesn’t work, and when I go back to shell, they’re no longer mounted. I can’t believe I’m the only person having this problem, but I’ve done searches and can’t find any useful information about it.
[Late afternoon update]
Someone on twitter asked me to post the contents of grub.cfg, so here it is, after the fold:
Continue reading Is There A Fedora Doctor In The House?
How Corrupt Is The Environmental Movement?
Of course cronyism is “unusually safe.” If you have to actually compete by producing energy at the lowest price, all kinds of things can go wrong. But if you can get in with the government, so that legislation requires everyone to pay extra for your product whether they want to or not, your investment is “unusually safe.” This is what cronyism–a polite word for corruption–is all about. It is the principal purpose of the modern environmental movement.
So dhey’re doing very well by doing “good.”
Which is both ironic and hypocritical, as Mark Morano pointed out on CNN the other night, given that they’re always accusing skeptics of taking money from the fossil industry.
Smartphone Subsidies
The downside.
I’m currently month-to-month on my three-year-old two-year Verizon contract with a Droid Global 2. I think that if I upgrade, I’ll just buy it outright, but right now, I don’t see anything on the new phones that I can’t live without. Of course, I only use my phone when I’m traveling, or out of the house, so since I usually work at home, it’s no biggie.
Space Business Accelerators
Another Kick To Malthus
Huge amounts of freshwater reserves have been found, under the ocean:
Water scarcity has been a favorite topic for the Chicken Littles of the world. Just 18 years ago the vice president of the World Bank was ominously warning that “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” It’s easy to drum up fears of “water wars” some undetermined time in the future, but studies like this one, and discoveries of new water sources like this one in Kenya, or this one under the Sahara, suggest that these fears that have gripped Malthusians — and that Malthusians have in turn used to push through otherwise unworkable policy recommendations — are a lot less serious.
One less excuse for socialism.