Dale Questions 3D Gun Robots at Mach 5

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Lyle is alone in this episode of GeekSpeak – covering UN suggestions about robot overlords, Google loves Palestine, printing guns in your home, Facebook lawsuit, many phone calls – and some web update news.

This episode was dedicated to Dale Owen, who we will miss at KUSP. If you do not love classical music – go watch this Benjamin Zander’s TED talk about loving Classical music.

Robots Shouldn't Kill People?

Isaac Asimov’s first rule for robots in the 1942 story ”Runaround – ”A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

The UN seems to agree.

Fast, Fast Plaine

The 14-foot-long (or as Boom would say 4.3-meter-long), scramjet-powered vehicle hit a top speed of Mach 5.1 during just over six minutes of flight on May 1, the Air Force said.

Google Loves Palestine

Google recently changed their Palestine home page from “Palestine Territories” to “Palestine”

It follows a UN decision in October to name Palestine a non-member, observer state. This allows Palestinians to join UN debates and, in theory, join global bodies such as the International Criminal Court.

Home Printed 3D Gun

It was bound to happen – printing guns at your home is scary, but what do you do about it?

GeekBit: Velvet Geek Pictures

You never knew how much you need this art in your life!

Calls, Calls, Calls

Tony – San Jose – Barnes & Noble changed OS on Nook to alllow Google play. B&N also changed the default browser. How to change back

MaryAnn – Felton – Windows 8 loading and taking it off

Susan – Los Gatos – publishing community magazine – what kind of tech can use related to publishing

Ciaran – SC – old airport extreme (the ones that are round) and ipod apps.

OFFAIR – Charlie – there is no upgrade path [migration assistant] from XP to either 7 or 8. Meaning, … you don’t lose data … but you’ll have to reinstall all your programs

OFFAIR – Elizabeth – Aptos – loves the ”adolescent banter”

Margaret – Culver City CA – (but traveling in 101 .. as passenger) wants to buy PC to donate to non-profit. Mac user, so don’t know about PCs. What to recommend?

Rich – Pacific Grove – PC guy for many years, switched to Mac. Do I need to defrag??

New Open Source JavaScript Video Codec

OTOY and Mozilla making a JavaScript module to play back full HD content in modern browsers! Sweet, super sweet!

MathML works fully in new Firefox

MathML is a way to structure math equations – it is a recommendation from the W3C and part of HTML5 – and now Firefox actually renders it correctly!

Turbulenz and HTML5 Game engin is now Open Source

This is exciting because having a good HTML5 engin is esentail to create cool HTML5 games – and Turbulenz is a cool engin – and their open source license if very “free”.

For more information on free software watch the Richard Stallman on Free Software
episode of GeekSpeak.


Feedback from Bruce

For the magazine/online publisher who called, I would recommend that she listen to some of the podcasts by the editors of Macworld magazine. Their editors and writers are distributed all across the country and have really worked out a good workflow for collaborating over long distances that seems like it would be beneficial for her. I would start by listening to Mac Power Users episode 135 interview with Macworld editor Serenity Caldwell and Macworld podcast number 341, “The Alternative Publishing Roundtable”.

For the Windows to Mac switcher, your statement that it is unnecessary to defrag OSX because the O.S. does it for you is correct. However, launching Disk Utilities every once in a while and running “repair disk permissions” can be beneficial. Also, perhaps once or twice a year, booting from another disk and running Disk Utilities’ “repair disk” can help, especially if you routinely create and delete very large files (I am trying this for our video encoders which have hundreds of gigs of video recorded on them and deleted every week).

Cheers,

Bruce Horn

-Thanks Bruce! – Lyle