EVERYTHING I've submitted has already been on Soylent... I submitted them there, first. That didn't stop several of them making the front-page of |. just fine, and getting positive comments. And I certainly wouldn't like |. just to be an "overflow" site, of topics Soylent didn't find interesting enough to cover.

Open hardware doesn't mean project boards, it means stuff like the Nexus 7... You might notice the Nexus 7 has sold pretty well.

It can still come with Android, it just needs to have documentation so a non-proprietary Linux kernel can be bootstrapped, and drivers for video/wifi/etc. can be written.

Nothing about Android forces OEMs to be "open", they're allowed to keep the specs secret, and depending on binary-blob drivers, but as long as there are manufacturers of open hardware, the community can unite behind their devices as a platform, and provide Linux and perhaps other OSes for it.

The Nexus 7 absolutely already exists, and it is a nice place to start...

Yeah, that's basically the argument I just had over at SoylentNews.

Specifically, they're posting lots of political flamebait and other crap stories, and clearly have no interest in sticking to sci/tech. While my comment did (eventually) get modded-up to +5, it seems apparent that my plea fell on completely deaf ears:

http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3912&cid=93644

Examples such as paulej72 saying science stories just don't get enough (whatever that is) comments:

http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3912&cid=93940

That, plus my repeated reasoned and fully-cited pleas for the same, from back to the start of the site, clearly having no positive effect:

http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=188&cid=3808

As well as incidents, such as them asking for community input, such as the poll asking how frequently stories should be posted to the front-page, then stating that they reached a different answer internally, and blatantly disregarding the community input.

In short (too late!), I sincerely hope pipedot doesn't post a story about "Science, Atheism, and Captain Kirk" like Slashdot and SoylentNews both did, which essentially caused me to abandon all hope for them both, and come here...

I don't understand the pessimism in the summary. It even mentioned that the Nexus 7 can be re-purposed by anyone who wants to. Just buy one, and install Linux on it.

http://liliputing.com/2013/02/how-to-install-ubuntu-touch-on-a-nexus-7-with-windows-mac-or-linux.html

http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-Ubuntu-on-Nexus-7-323489.shtml

As long as the tablet hardware is open, those who are interested in Linux will be able to install and use it. And supporting open hardware is a far more important goal than (locked-down) Linux preloaded on a tablet.

In addition, there are convertible x86 laptops that can look and work an awful lot like a tablet.

Personally, I'm happy to skip the fad... I always get my phone with a hardware keyboard, and I'm hardly going to be interested in a bigger and more expensive device without one. Chromebooks look like a good source of cheap laptop hardware for Linux aficionados to me.

Most fascinating is the energy source different from anything else believed to exist. Life was first thought to depend entirely on sunlight, then creatures living near submarine volcanic vents were discovered, and those were thought to be the only two sources.

Now we've got a 3rd completely new form... Living off of minerals floating in the water, with no sources of geothermal heat nor sunlight at all. And not just a few hardy bacteria struggling to survive, but an extensive ecosystem as densely populated as tropical waterways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Uses

Batteries are the big ones... Increasing numbers of hybrid and electric cars will drive an astronomical spike in demand for the element, exhausting current sources.

That kind of hypothetical is always nonsense. If the current population of the US all built log-cabins like the first settlers, there wouldn't be enough trees on the Earth...

The market takes care of such thing. You can hardly fault people for eating tasty steaks when they cost about an hour of labor... When there's 2 billion more people demanding steaks, and the price shoots up through the roof, Americans will eat far fewer of them, and maybe a lot more rice.

But in the mean-time, trying to shame Americans into changing their habits today, to match some distant future hypothetical scenario is silly and futile, and also completely unnecessary.

It's still in the submission queue at SN. The submission wasn't very good, just a couple links without text, which greatly slows-down how long it takes to get published, but I expect it'll get there.

FSCK is mostly a thing of the past. Smarter backup tools can do instantaneous snapshots with deduplication and more. "dd" is the WORST way to read or write a hard drive, whatever you might be trying to accomplish. And hard drive throughput does keep getting faster as capacities increase, so it's not as big of a hit as you might expect.

If you've got a 6TB drive packed with a few large files (like Blu-ray or HDTV rips) and they don't completely change from day to day, a simple rsync over the network could still be extremely fast.