Recent Comments

I wanted to mod you up but I could not find an appropriate option... I was looking for something like "sad but true" or "we are so fucked"...

Soon we will be paying for our own government to spy on us by metadata collection. Come on down Google! No doubt Google could do the same job for much cheaper.

Don't forget college radio. It can be a crapshoot, but even in rural areas if you're near a college town there's a good chance at finding more eclectic playlists than ClearChannel.

(Is there such a thing as college radio in other parts of the world?)

Just restore from yesterday's daily offsite backup. What's that? You don't do that? Guess your data wasn't all that important to you then.

You'd be surprised to know that the source code of Windows is actually already available (and has been for quite a while) to various governments, companies and universities. It is distributed under very restrictive license and non-disclosure agreements for research (security, new technologies, etc.) and new product integration purpose.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source for more info (Microsoft Enterprise Source Licensing Program, Microsoft Windows Academic Program, Microsoft Government Security Program, Most Valuable Professionals Source Licensing Program)

disclaimer: I swear that I've never ever had a look at Windows source code (that way or another).

Or that the lines delineating human and proto-human species are blurrier than traditional taxonomy is adequate to describe. We don't have DNA samples from specimens that ancient, AFAIK.

The US is easily the best-position country for renewable power. It has some of the best locations for solar, wind, hydro, biomass & geothermal. Plenty of other resources, too. Canada isn't so lucky when it comes to solar and needs much more power for heating, while India has far too many people on too little land-area. Thermal-storage solar power plants are being developed and deployed in the US, as is pumped-hydro and wind. There are federal (and most states) tax incentives, as well as feed-in tariffs and other regulatory preferential treatment for those who wish to install their own roof-top small-scale solar power. At least two cities require them on all new homes.

California is deploying solar as fast as possible with a mandate for 33 percent renewables by 2020, and is second only to Texas in wind power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California
If you want renewables, now, you just need to move to WA, where they have more hydro power than people. California got 30% of its electricity from hydro a few years back, but growing demand (and drought) keeps making that an ever-smaller fraction of the energy mix, while wind and solar deployments expand rapidly.

iHeartRadio had a fix for this problem several years ago... Their service includes a dial you can adjust from only playing familiar artists, to exploring a wider range of music, or somewhere in-between.

Pandora lets you keep adding more and more artists to a station, which will similarly keep including a larger range of related music than when you just specify a single artist.

Interesting conversation going on in parallel, on Reddit, that seems like a germane response to my own post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/33hben/does_anyone_else_feel_that_music_streaming/

There is almost certainly a different in the "FM" experience between European and American listeners, too. The EU has more aggressive regulators that have kept the market more competitive. Most of the FM stations got bought out by ClearChannel, which has a lot to do with the awful homogeneity of the FM spectrum in the USA. The same shit, from coast to coast. It's enough to make you slit your wrists. Ipod + Bluetooth connection to my car's sound system is the best thing ever invented, and it's commercial free. (On the other hand, I don't get exposed to new music. I rely on recommendations from itunes for that).

Thanks a lot for your detailed answers!

The variety you hear on FM radio in the US depends on where you live. In rural areas, you pretty much just have country music, conservative or religious talk radio, and maybe a top 40 station if you aren't that rural. But in large cities you get a nice mix. I have several jazz radio stations to choose from, a few folk, a couple classical music, several rock variations, several top 40, several urban/r&b channels. I really do cherish the folk, jazz and classical stations. Some really obscure americana/ upcomming artists that haven't been popular enough to make spotify/pandora/google play music.

How do the ransomware hackers not get rounded up with extreme prejudice?

... of both India and Canada.

The few FM music stations we have in my area seem to have the equivalent music selection of a single disc CD player.

I get a couple of classical music stations on FM and there is a rich wealth to hear. I hear some pieces that are old friends (gladly), but also a huge selection of pieces that are new to me, or I haven't heard in a long long time. I have been listening to classical on FM since the 1950s.

I am kind of glad there is almost zero chance I will live to see this wonderful, free resource disappear entirely.

P.S. - I have also listened to shortwave since the 1950s. Political, cultural, general-interest and other transmissions from a wondrous variety of locations. In its heyday I devoured Radio Moscow, Radio Havana Cuba, Radio Deutsche Welle, Canada, the Netherlands, RAI and the Vatican, Iran (pre insanity), Egypt, Israel, Australia, China, Japan, Quito Ecuador. The drying up of transmissions and terrible RFI problems from modern gadgets have decimated availability, but I still get some interesting stuff.

...is that tool-using humans are older than they think, but that fossil specimens have not been recovered (and might never be).

Never eaten one and don't plan to, but I love the expression "gateway bug."

Which tastes disgusting. Yes, I went on a health kick once.

The few FM music stations we have in my area seem to have the equivalent music selection of a single disc CD player. Seriously. They play the same few songs over and over again, ad nauseam. Also, there are far more ads than songs played in any given hour.

What I find promising is the independently selected streaming services, like Spotify, that just use your wifi Internet connection (or eat some of you LTE data plan) to send you only the music that you actually want to hear.

• all songs are on demand and selectable by the user
• the playback is perfect (no static or crosstalk with other stations like FM)
• subscriber based with no ads (I would rather pay a few bucks a month instead of listening to hours and hours of ads)
• can make use of prefetching (queue up some data while on the strong wifi connection) and even storing your favorite songs (for when you have no data connection)
• you can see the cover art and other meta information about the song
• Spotify uses the Vorbis audio codec and has hinted on (eventually) switching to the Opus audio codec

P.S. Everyone knows that DRM stands for Direct Rendering Manager.

I think the proliferation of divergent standards is what has kept digital radio from taking-off, and giving streaming services the upper-hand. DAB in Europe, DMB (based on DVB-H) in parts of Asia, proprietary HDRadio in the US, DAB+ trying to usurp DAB, then DRM on shortwave making little headway.

If everyone would have standardized on DRM for their SW & MW frequencies, China would be turning out dirt-cheap recievers for it, it would be cheap enough to be built-in to almost every radio sold, so most everyone would have one.

For FM replacements, there's no clear winner. DAB and DAB+ requires several (independent) broadcasters to all operate together from the same broadcast tower, making it a difficult conversion. It does potentially offer CD quality audio thanks to the lossy codec, but that makes it a poor choice for squeezing in lots of lower-quality sub-channels. DAB+ fixes this latter issue, but takes away the advantage of the former, and being completely incompatible destroys the installed-base. DMB has too much overhead and no particular benefits. The IBOC (in-band on-channel) standards are much better options, but HDRadio is expensive and proprietary for no good reason. So once again, I'd be happy to see DRM adapted to operate on those higher FM frequencies as well. But countries that chose DAB are planning on repurposing their FM bands, so not even the frequency range is close, world-wide, and proliferating incompatibilites even more.

The ability of a broadcaster to merge their FM, MW (AM), & SW offerings into a single, seamless data stream would be incredible. Driving away from the city, your radio would just seemlessly jump from the FM station to a longer-range AM station carrying the same content, at slightly lower quality, without a hiccup. When going back into a city, the switch to higher-quality FM channels would be seamless as well.

A nation-wide network of MW transmitters with the same content would be relatively easy to do, thanks to their huge footprint, taking the band from the least valuable, to the more valuable spectrum for broadcasters. And potentially having a SW station or two as a backup even further out, would mean you'd have satellite-radio like coverage at pretty good quality, without the fees.

BUT, since DRM hasnt caught-on yet, I'd rather see a new IBOC transmission standard which uses patent-free modulation and error correction, the better & patent-free Opus codec, and require radios to include SD card slots for dowloading data broadcasts, as well as optional video screens, so radio stations can occasionally send images to listeners, wheter just album cover-art, traffic maps, personality headshots, relevant news images. etc

I really should get into shortwave again. My grandfather used to spend hours trying to get different stations. I used to do the same when I had a shortwave radio, but I think it broke when I was a teenager and never had the money to get it replaced.

Digital radio in the US is primarily limited to large metro areas. I don;t know when if ever they will try to switch over completely to digital. We still have AM going strong. I absolutely love the sound of AM radio. It has a certain fuzz around it. You can still hear everything well, but its not crystal clear uncanny valley effect you get with high quality FM these days.

I'm probably one of the last shortwave fans out there. Not the only one, obviously, but we are certainly a dying breed. And I've lived the last decade in the poorer parts of Africa, where you'd think shortwave and similar would still be big hits. Nope. Not only is there precious little on the shortwave bands anymore (except for some Chinese and way too many evangelists) but even poor Africans aren't listening to it.

What Africans ARE listening to is FM on their feature phones or smartphones. As a shortwave fan, this is hugely disappointing to me.

I've been on the mailing list of the DRM group for ages now - unfortunate acronym, it actually stands for Digital Radio Mondiale and I wish they'd change it. And it's been really interesting to watch them progress. Dig Radio replaces your radio with what's basically a small computer that processes the digital signal at relatively low expense. This was unheard of a decade ago when all we had were Pentium IIs, but modern systems on a chip make it possible and not that expensive, either computationally or economically. Dig Radio promises the propogation qualities of shortwave with the audio quality of FM. That's really huge, when you think about it.

By the way, I think this has implications for democratic promotion and the like. Despite jamming wars, it was possible at one time to beam a broadcast into a nation, where people could essentially listen to it without being tracked. TCP/IP as we all no know too well doesn't offer that same anonymity.

Will this new tech get coopted by the likes of ClearChannel and their buddies? Maybe, but Dig Radio offers huge promise, I think. The BBC and some other stations are experimenting with it; this move by the Scandinavians is promising. Maybe teh USA will wise up and give it a try too (maybe not).

At any rate, this is good news.

Researchers measured the biomass output and feed conversion ratios of crickets (Acheta domesticus) that were reared on foods ranging from grain-based to high in cellulose. Crickets fed on processed food waste grew to harvestable size with conversion efficiency similar to industrial-scale production broiler chickens.

So... with just a few? years of industrial scale testing, they are as efficient as one of the highest min/max'd meats on the market? That we've spent decades grinding efficiency on? That sounds ready.

Antennas obviously.

Garbage in.. garbage out.

I'd be interested to see if they could be used in a larger scale system, obviously, straight garbage isn't particularly useful, but for example, if they were fed plant material like algae grown in the natural sewage processing farms as part of the process?

It's not 1+1 =2 obviously.. and that probably wouldn't be enough alone.

Looks like we'll have to stick to the more nutritive, cheaper, less "icky," and already being consumed, spirulina.

This new link teaches us that Rutan will unveil the Skigull at airventure!

I can not wait to see what he has come up with!

I would assume that the police are easy targets the same reason grandma is: computer illiteracy.

Considering your questions, I realize I had taken on the care of a property that I believed was best run as a hobby farm, rather then a domestic home; however, I initially just followed the practices of the previous owners who had mowed most of it for domestic use for the previous several decades; once installed, the goats were amazing at keeping the lawns looking great. Around here, I think one goat could easily tend 0.5-1 acre without too much trouble. The property was in an agricultural district, agriculturally zoned, with lots of both rain and sun, however; so as you say, absolutely not the circumstances presented to many Californians. I lived in Pasadena, California while doing my post-doc and spent the first six months of my time there marvelling how weird it was to feel like you were in a desert, yet seeing lush green in most places -- people appeared to spend a lot more time, money, water making vegetation grow there, then trying to keep grass cut.

* How big is a lawn that takes 6+ hours to mow? ~3-4 acres, used a ride-on mower for the "first pass" which would take ca. 4 hours, the extra hours came from using push mowers and whipper snippers to clean up the parts closest to the road, etc; the lawn would need to be mowed once per week on average lest the grass get too long to mow the next time round
* How many goats does that support? After 1 year of the above and basically spending the majority of my free time mowing, I installed 2-4 goats on 2+ acres to keep the grass like a meadow.
* What kind of weather do you have that you can support goats on your property? lots of rain and warm sun; the grass grows fast most weeks of the summer (3-5 months)
* Where do you live that that's allowed? eastern Canada, rural
* What do you do about the plants you don't want the goats to eat (veggie bed, flowers, etc)? fenced them off or let things play out as the did; in most cases, the lawns/fields had pre-existing apple, plum, peach, cherry trees, etc. with leaves too high for the goats to kill and the drops which added to their food supply and their "cleaning" role.
* How much does it cost/goat (vet, whatever else goats need)? I can't remember the details; I would pay on the order of $20-$100 per goat at the start of summer; I bought male goats that I would butcher and eat in the fall; startup expenses were fencing and a shelter for the goats, but I don't recall much other expenses otherwise (salt blocks for the goats?)

However, in my experience men and women and ratios of men and women do make a difference at work because of different styles of individual and group behaviors, communication, etc. Whether the ultimate cause of this is nature or nurture. I am actually surprised at the implication that gender is a completely neutral factor in your workplaces because that hasn't been my experience.

Sure, from communication or social interaction points of view, the ratio absolutely does make a difference. But from a work quality point of view (e.g. code quality and research results), not so much. YMMV.

Here in CA, I've seen 2 goats on just 1 acre. No idea how much supplemental feeding was required, though. And I am often surprised just how often cities' zoning regs allow horses, pigs, chickens, goats, etc., provided you meet some fairly modest minimum lot size.

A few questions:
* How big is a lawn that takes 6+ hours to mow?
* How many goats does that support?
* What kind of weather do you have that you can support goats on your property?
* Where do you live that that's allowed?
* What do you do about the plants you don't want the goats to eat (veggie bed, flowers, etc)?
* How much does it cost/goat (vet, whatever else goats need)?

I really would like to know!

I live in California, and I'm sure:
* My property is too small to support goats.
* There isn't enough water to keep enough grass for the goats to eat consistently.
* It'd be illegal where I live.
* They'd eat our young trees, veggies, flowers.
* etc etc

Robot mowers seem like a more likely solution. Nonetheless, I'd like to know how well the natural solution is working for you.

I would like to see if Windows source is as bad as rumour says

Dear Strongba...I mean Tanuki64,

How do you type with boxing gloves on your hands?

Sincerely,

That Guy

How do authorities know if someone is using a forbidden frequency band, in any case? In other words, what would it take to confirm that a band is not being used by average citizens?

Twenty years ago, I spent 6+ hours a week mowing a large lawn until I got sick of it and installed fences and goats instead. I like the idea of this Roomba lawn-mowing device, but we don't always need a technological solution.

Police departments across the United States are easy targets for hackers who infect their computers,

Sneak into the police departments and manipulate the computer without the police noticing it. Respect!

Or is this not the way it happened? I wonder how the police computer got infected, if they are used as intended: For work.

Yeah. No worries. I really like pipedot. I've just been trying to put some stories in the pipe the past few days because it had been slowing down. I am personally interested in this issue... However, in the context of pipedot I'm mostly interested in posting stories that inspire positive and educational exchanges. I can respect that this kind of topic is common elsewhere and look for different topics therefore.

I take your point about pipedot and I will respect it in the future.

It is my point. Nothing more. Topics are voted on in pipe. ;-)

I take your point about pipedot and I will respect it in the future. Thank you for responding on the topic in this case.

The ones with the most difficulties are all diminutive women, it made me wonder if we were being treated differently principally on the basis of gender.

Sure we are. So what? This would only be a problem is one side only gets all the pros and the other side all the cons. Do you believe that is true?

Here is a nice parody. Unconditional equality? Sure, fine with me, but then, please, exactly like in this film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_PTxpIjGXE

In my opinion we should ignore this topic at all and mostly the people who bring it up (*). It is simply a non issue. Women are not more or less welcome in IT than blue eyed people, red haired people, fat people, people with mustaches, or people who lisp. The only thing that matter is skills and interest. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot and/or has an agenda.

(*) In this case I don't mean you, but people who constantly claim women are discriminated or even hated. Still I'd prefer not to see topics like this on pipedot. For this /. is good enough and their articles constantly draw in all the sjw scum and feminazis. I can live with out them here.

You make a good point. However, in my experience men and women and ratios of men and women do make a difference at work because of different styles of individual and group behaviors, communication, etc. Whether the ultimate cause of this is nature or nurture. I am actually surprised at the implication that gender is a completely neutral factor in your workplaces because that hasn't been my experience. Maybe that reflects on me though.For what it's worth, here is an example anecdote from my workplace. We have a male Commissionaire at the entrance to our building. I have always had an easy experience in my interactions with him, but other colleagues of mine have not. The ones with the most difficulties are all diminutive women, it made me wonder if we were being treated differently principally on the basis of gender.

Fair enough. I probably just typed a bad joke. My question was worded vaguely to allow for variety of responses. In the vein of seriousness, I was actually interested in your implied view that one/we would have no interest in extending ourselves to welcome women to an IT workplace if their possible non-participation was based on a false impression of how unwelcome women are/were in this context. I am generally motivated to address false impressions where I think they exist, at least modestly so.

I don't care. I don't go to work to meet women there.

Why would he ?

I know it sounds tongue-in-cheek, but the question is nonetheless a very valid one, me think.

I don't care if there are more or less women in my working environment, I just want people who do their job right, be it 10%, 50% or 90% of women. Gender is irrelevant to that, at least as far as my own experience in IT goes.

I hope your point wasn't that "more women equals a higher likelihood to get a date after hours" ?

I find the economic pressures are too real for many folks and jurisdictions to move away from fossil fuels too much too fast. It is surprising how many divestment-promoting folks appear to not actually refrain from using fossil fuel energy in their daily lives. Oil prices dropped here in Canada and truck sales went up and I really wanted to know the demographics of the truck buyers relative to their views on climate change and global energy choices.

But seriously get scared about the security challenges of the modern webserver now. I don't have time to administer with diligence, so I guess its about using one of the major hosts like Amazon or Google or having a website that justifies paying for full time care.

anyone see the new Divergent movie: Insurgent? I really liked it, but it was incredibly shallow. I wonder if the new Star Wars movie will live up to Episodes 4-6.

would want to dive into the Windows source code if given the opportunity?