Strange Places To Find Open Source 118
itwbennett writes "Open source is about more than code: It's also about tractors, prosthetics, Christmas lights, and the poor old U.S. Postal Service. If you don't believe that open source changes everything, take a gander at Marcin Jakubowski's Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a set of 50 industrial machines that are required to build and maintain a small, sustainable civilization. The open source aspect covers designs, instructions, schematics, budgets — everything anyone needs to know to build their own machines, and it is all freely available and free to share."
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hello mr stallmen
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Knowing someone who was involved in that project I'm just sitting back and waiting for the place to crumble. Apparently they're trying to build it by simply stacking blocks on top of each other instead of following any known good practice of house construction.
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you mean like, houses constructed from rock?
funny you should mention that, structures build from rocks are really really sturdy.
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Okay, my problem here is related to English not being my primary language.
Imagine Legos. What happens if you build a house out of 2x4s that are all stacked on top of each other, not alternating? Each little 'tower' of 2x4s has nothing to actually attach it to the other little towers on either side of it. Eventually you lean on it wrong and the wall crumbles.
They got rid of their only real construction worker when he pointed this out, since apparently the project leader (an astrophysicist? At least I think t
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A wall built of blocks stacked directly on top of each other forming unconnected adjacent columns can have some strength, depending on its mass and thickness (relative to its height), but will certainly be less strong than a s
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I saw that in one of their videos and couldn't figure out if the wall of unconnected bricks was just storage for them to be used properly later on, or if they were really intending that to be a structural wall. It was so wrong on so many levels. It was unreinforced, it had no running bond or tie pattern in it, there was little to no "mortar" between the bricks, it didn't even look like they had been dried properly. Even with a proper tie pattern and bricks, from what I've read unreinforced masonry [wikipedia.org] is a l
Africa Test Case (Score:1)
Negroponte should be focusing his efforts more broadly than just a cheap computer. Why has he not filled those 'chuted in tablets with ideas like this. Self directed education is nothing without the seeds of ideas like this.
Unfortunately, the GVCS seems to be missing a core idea of defense, seeing as how it is far easier for people to destroy any good that could be realized.
Where is the Open Source Defense Kit: OSDK? THAT could be the missing piece from our lofty open source ideals.
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You can convert most of those tools into weapons given the right mindset, otherwise just pick up a rock and throw it.
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The world might be a better place if we used martial arts more often against the worst offending lawyers.
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Ninjas vs Warlords. Hollywood has probably already stolen the idea.
Seriously though. GVCS takes an interesting approach of building a society. There needs to be some thought behind defending what is created. Take the situations in Mexico and Somalia for examples. Instead of captive populations or towns just hunkering down in scattered huts and praying the tiger comes for your neighbor instead, what designs for communities could successfully defend against warlords/gangs? Would fort designs from the Br
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Community defense is more about defending against infiltration and sabotage than actual overt attack.
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Agreed, which is why that should be part of any overall design. An OSDK would have to incorporate strategies/tactics as well as hardware.
How was the problem of infiltration handled in medieval castles and such? Can't believe that it wasn't an issue throughout history.
Apologies for the thought exercise. Just always wondered why OS has always tended towards idealist exercises without pragmatically thinking about the part of human nature that wants to smash everything to bits.
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Layers of trust. Most castles had maybe a hundred close residents. That's part of why trust and church and fealty were so important. In the middle ages a battle with 100 fighters was epic until the Crusades created massive armies.
The situation you describe is exactly like Europe from 800-1100 or so. That's exactly what made Vikings so terrible because the could field 40 guys that were practiced fighters on scattered villagers or maybe a city of a few hundred.
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Thanks for pointing this out.
HEAP (Score:2)
Hollywood has probably already stolen the idea.
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon [wikipedia.org] beat them to it. One of the protagonists in the book is trying to set up a repository of information called the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP), which is an open source guide "for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare." The HEAP project includes instructions for a do-it-yourself assault-rifle that can be easily manufactured by a local population.
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The AK family of weapons are definitely analog.
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Ah, but there's a threshold level where you've definitely been shot vs you definitely have not.
So, you could argue that they are binary.
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Their control mechanism is distinctly 'digital' - and the interface is point and click.
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Ah, but there's a threshold level where you've definitely been shot vs you definitely have not.
if worse comes to worse I just hope there is a scientist nearby to observe me at the time
Re:Africa Test Case (Score:4, Insightful)
I like how the GVCS has all these computer controlled tools.... and nowhere in the list is a computer.
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Is anyone actually manufacturing these things? Because that's the hard part. Tooling, quality control, even just the cost of the steel. Then put them to use and find out what doesn't work, what breaks easily. Caterpillar, Kubota, and other heavy equipment makers are in business because they've got a decades of experiance building things and they also have the manufacturing infrastructure. You could take a Cat bulldozer apart and clone it piece by piece. That's not very difficult. Reliably producing t
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You can watch Marcin's TED speech to get an idea of his motivations and experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsHKrP-66s [youtube.com]
But the short answer is, yes, he is building and testing some of them at least. And the point is that it doesn't need to be "industrial scale".
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The Romans survived without medicine, but there were some real downsides to it. The primary ones were:
1. Average life expectancy about 20 because of horrific high infant / child mortality rates.
2. Women were married as soon as they hit puberty and were expected to be either pregnant or nursing until they died in childbirth in order to keep the population level up.
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Roman life expectancy had little to do with their medicine. They had a cultural practice of infant exposure. They would kill unhealthy (born) children. Naturally this affected the statistics for life expectancy at birth. Roman life expectancy at age 5 was 48, [utexas.edu] higher than almost anywhere else at the time. It was deliberate. And it produced the most dominant military force the world has ever seen.
They also had a cultural practice of cutting unborn children from mothers who died in childbirth. This prod
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They also had a cultural practice of cutting unborn children from mothers who died in childbirth. This produced people with unnaturally large heads. Again, deliberate. And today known as Caesarian section.
I would love to see a link providing evidence that Caesarian births produce (long term) larger heads and thereby increased intelligence or martial prowess or whatever you are claiming.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093169/ [nih.gov]
The cesarean delivery group had significantly higher IQ test scores.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10047/ [nih.gov]
Based on morphological and behavioral criteria and on comparisons with other primates, Portmann (1941,1945) suggested that human gestation should really last 21 months instead of 9. However, no woman could deliver a 21-month-old fetus because the head would not pass through the birth canal; thus, humans give birth at the end of 9 months. Montagu (1962) and Gould (1977) have suggested that during our first year of life, we are essentially extrauterine fetuses, and they speculate that much of human intelligence comes from the stimulation of the nervous system as it is forming during that first year.*
Portmann A. Die Tragzeiten der Primaten und die Dauer der Schwangerschaft beim Menschen: Ein Problem der vergleichen Biologie. Rev. Suisse Zool. 1941;48:511–518.
Portmann A. Die Ontogenese des Menschen als Problem der Evolutionsfor-schung. Verh. Schweiz. Naturf. Ges. 1945;125:44–53.
Montagu, M. F. A. 1962. Time, morphology, and neoteny in the evolution of man. In M. F. A. Montagu (ed.), Culture and Evolution of Man. Oxford University Press, New York.
Gould, S. J. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Re:Africa Test Case (Score:4, Informative)
No other metals/materials, no glass, no plastics,
They do have a machine for making plastics, and there is nothing wrong with using wood in a sustainable culture, if you do so at a replaceable rate.
And there is no plan for how to construct that construction kit in the first place.
There doesn't need to be. The goal isn't to bootstrap civilization after it has collapsed. It is to find the smallest set of machines needed to recreate themselves, and thus allow civilization at say 1930's level to be maintained in as small of economy as possible.
Rather a shame.. (Score:2)
There wasn't a moratorium on software patents after the introduction of the personal computer, to allow good ideas to surface and everyone to share, before people started glomming onto things. Stand on the shoulders of giants sort of thing, rather than having your legs cut out from under you at every turn.
Open Source would be pretty much universal.
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Interestingly, the first years of the PC revolution effectively DID have a de-facto moratorium on patents AND copyright (it took several years for the courts to decide software could be copyrighted).
The industry hasn't grown nearly as fast since that party ended.
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Yeah, right.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,136,359.PN.&OS=PN/4,136,359&RS=PN/4,136,359 [uspto.gov]
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Yeah, RIGHT! Any suits over that? Like I said, de-facto. Even Bill Gates chose to write a nastygram rather than sue back in the day.
The first signs of the oncoming legal storm was the suits over the Franklin Ace and the sabre rattling over the PC BIOS. Then the hell inspired look and feel suits hit.
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That's a machine patent, not a software patent, so I don't count your citation as relevant. IIRC the first software-related patent was to Honeywell, for a building HVAC system that included software control, in the 1970s. At that time a physical system that included software as part of the control structure was first considered patentable. But pure software was still considered algorithmic, and algorithms were math, which is discovered, not patented. IIRC the change came in 1986 but I don't recall the d
Shoulders of Giants (Score:2)
But some are standing on the shoulders of giants. To kick them in the face. Especially other giants. We call that "patent wars".
We've already had this article (Score:1)
not really sustainable. (Score:2)
... i suppose they think magic fairy's produce the parts for the machines the machines can't make. or the fossil fuel made lube and the quality Hydraulic oil that is needed for them to run.. that metal press doesn't look like it can make most of the parts of the other machines and you sure as heck can't print his strength steel with a 3d printer. i also would not want to work on that CNC Precision Multimachine for both the safety hazards of having high speed rotating belts uncovered as well as how weak they
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Yeah - I thought the same thing at first ... BUT ...
It looks like what he is trying to do is make it so that once you obtain the raw resources, you can "recycle" the materials into new stuff, what he calls a "closed loop" system. I think this makes sense - sure, you will need a "seed" of a lot of steel and such, but beyond that you can incrementally build. I think it's really about cost and maintainability, and making it possible to truly DYI a town from the ground up - a key concept being the ability to su
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You need far more energy to smelt steel than any amount of windmills will provide. Not to mention carbon.
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Oh look, here's a 50 kW electric-arc furnace [doe.gov] capable of smelting steel. I imagine that would work well with a 50 kW windmill...
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No kidding. It's really easy to criticize when everyone is framing this like the guys' goals are to start with dirt and make tires and steel. His intention is clearly to make open source, practical designs for equipment with resources that are - frankly - easy to maintain. I really don't get all the criticism. He's working his ass off and giving all his designs away, and asking for donations. There's a lot of assholes out there, he really doesn't appear to be one of them. Maybe if he made really impressive
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I think the gripe is that their website says "The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts."
Now, I'm all for open sourcing useful stuff like everything on the list. However, I'm under no illusions that it only takes 50 machines to run a society.
I also think the 3D printer is there more to please the hobbyist crowd than anything else.
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magic fairy's produce the... quality Hydraulic oil that is needed
http://www.soyclean.biz/household_products/biosoy-food-grade-hydraulic-fluid.html [soyclean.biz]
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Something tells me the machines to process the soy into oil weren't on that list.
Usually the process involves use of petroleum based hexane in a solvent extraction chain, or the use of a high pressure expeller press.
Good luck building that with your tractor.
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They have a pelletizer. Which could easily be a screw-type. And which could also be used as an expeller to press soy oil, with a few modifications.
Regardless, we're talking about a few tens of gallons of hydraulic oil. It's simply not a fundamental limiting factor of human civilization for an entire village of people to have to import a single barrel of oil in order to bootstrap it's existence.
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Yeah, but chemicals are so, ugh, non-appealing to the kinds of people who send money who fund initiatives like these. Ecology is nice and green. Antibiotics are tolerable even though they're made by evil profiteering pharmaceutical companies, but I suspect that every time somebody looked into them they kept finding these things called "solvents" used in their manufacture and decided that it wouldn't do for fundraising.
I'm not sure what the 3D printer would even be used for - just about everything in that
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Vault 13 (Score:1)
G.E.C.K. anyone?
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Actually I've never played Fallout, but that reminds me that the Gasifier Experimenter's Kit [gekgasifier.com] is also Open Source.
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I've never seen the GEK before, but I'm not sure that their logo is open source.
Is it open source or patent expired? (Score:2)
Ridiculous (Score:2)
There are many major technology areas missing from this list. For example where the heck are you going to get the copper for the windmill and power supplies? There is no mining and refining chain. And I guess this civilization isn't going to be long on medical treatment or drugs. There is no chemistry for drugs, no way to make X-Rays, no cryo for MRI superconducting magnets, etc.
The windmill looks nice but for that to work you need something to baseload the grid. And how do you make concrete from that colle
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For example where the heck are you going to get the copper for the windmill and power supplies? There is no mining and refining chain.
Recycling? This is a pretty ludicrous basis for your criticism. Why would you be posting on Slashdot if you can't refine silicon yourself? You should stop.
I guess this civilization isn't going to be long on medical treatment or drugs.
Most aren't. With adequate diet and exercise, it's not a big hindrance.
The windmill looks nice but for that to work you need something to baseload the grid.
Like a resistance heating element? A lightbulb? Some nichrome wire?
And how do you make concrete from that collection of equipment?
Why do 4 billion people on the planet need concrete exactly?
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1. Recycling? If you are going to recycle you have to have a way of making it once the first time. This doesn't provide it.
2. Drugs are needed if you aren't willing to accept decrease in life expectancy to 35 that the lack of drugs would result in. And this did say MODERN civilization.
3. Baseload != resistance element. It's a way of providing power when the wind isn't blowing. Sort of important if you are going have a modern civilization.
4. Yes concrete. Please explain how you are going to build any foundat
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And this did say MODERN civilization.
It says modern comforts, not civilization. That generally includes things like fresh food, shelter and indoor plumbing, not pharmaceuticals, strip-mines and iPads. They only want to be able to support a village of a couple hundred people.
Is this whole tirade really just caused by your inability to comprehend what you read and perform the critical thinking necessary to realize that, no, in fact this group of a dozen or so people has not set out to replicate downtown New York or the interstate highway syste
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I don't think anybody is suggesting that they aren't doing useful work. However, claiming that it only takes 50 tools to create a civilization with modern comforts really isn't true. No doubt those tools are very useful in getting there, but it takes more. For starters, it takes more than those 50 tools to produce the materials necessary to maintain them.
Again, these are 50 nice useful tools, but the number 50 seems a bit arbitrary and I think that it was chosen so that sponsors can be pitched with "hey,
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Uh, without drugs you can die from an infected stubbed toe. Believe it or not disease isn't exclusively God's punishment on people who eat too much. Also, you'll find that a good number of villages do have access to basic pharmaceuticals, and a little goes a long way.
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Penicillin is simple enough to make. Tough equally simple to screw up of course.
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Yes and no. You probably need solvents to extract it. Modern techniques use very refined solvents (we like our drugs to be clean), and those which are best suited to the job. If you're willing to deal with lots of waste/etc you could probably find some way to make it using less ideal materials.
If you just want to eat raw mold or whatever then that is pretty easy to manage, but of course allergies/etc will be even more of a problem than they already are.
I think the real issue is that the website seems to
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You don't eat the mold you grow it in an environment in which is will produce penicillin and you then extract that penicillin by simple filtration. You don't use modern techniques you use basic simple
Yes it won't be very "clean" - though being penicillin it self-cleans a bit :)
And you'd be a moron to use it if you had another option. But there's no reason for infections to have as a high a mortality rate as they did in the past given penicillin is so easy to make. Of course some people are allergic to it, i
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I do agree that when it comes to the 3rd world we shouldn't sacrifice the 80% solution for the sake of the 99% solution that nobody can afford.
Actually, that applies in general to medicine - sometimes the "do no harm" philosophy holds us back a little. In the present climate I'm surprised we even have pain-killers, since in terms of outcomes they don't cure any disease and yet they still can have side-effects.
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The windmill looks nice but for that to work you need something to baseload the grid.
No you don't. That is like saying that our industrial revolution (I'm dutch) with all our wooden windmills never happened. But even if you do want a grid and to baseload that grid, you can do so with stored (solar) heat and a stirling engine (like in Tamera). Or with water power.
No Fun (Score:2)
These third world peasants are supposed to drive tractors and get maimed on punch presses all day? While we first-worlders occupy Wall Street while sipping cappucino?
How about something to enrich their leisure time? An open-source microbrew machine? A ?? [redneckpoolheater.com]
www.ferrite-cores.net (Score:1)
Forgetting a few things? (Score:2)
Forgetting a few things?
Don't get me wrong--I am fully supportive of open source ideals--but the people behind this whole GVCS thing, as it stands, are incredibly naive.
First and foremost, no single place on the planet can currently supply all the resources for maintaining all of that technology. Shit breaks, it wears down, it grinds itself into dust that is flushed away with precious lubricants, lubricants that also becomes prone to chemical degradation and must be replaced. There is no accommodation in th
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variety of foods (you can't grow everything in one climate/soil)
With a suitable greenhouse in a moderate climate you can come very very close. And soil is not as important as you might think. You're not going to be growing fine wines everywhere, of course, but that's not the goal.
I don't think anyone on that team has done any serious math as far as energy requirements of something as simple as smelting aluminum.
The energy requirements are high, true. But the power requirements are only a function of scale. The difference between retail feasibility and industrial profitability is close to an order of magnitude. So you can scale down a lot and have it still make sense. And aluminum is easy enough
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I think the issue is that the list seems rather arbitrary. They have fancy single-purpose stuff like a machine to extract aluminum from clay, but just a generic induction furnace to handle every other metal that exists.
No society with ONLY these 50 machines and only token imports would be able to exist with what most people would call "modern comforts." Sure, you might be able to make a few of them, but your CNC mill isn't going to work too well when a transistor in your power supply dies. You couldn't e
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But in our society a lot of this stuff could be cannibalized from other stuff either in junk yards, or built up front. Figure you would eithr plan for this, or be survivor of some "depopulating event" with lots of broken stuff available.
I find this intreguing because there's a long way from playing in the SCA to actually building a society. I think what they are looking for are "things to build things".. Even the Amish have a pretty impressive array of "technology" to get by every day.
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Maybe that is why "Farmville" was such a hit--the simple life on a farm appeals to many.
Yes, to many people who have never had to work on a fucking farm.
At least nowadays you get some money to cover the basics of existence, but in its original form, if your crops failed, your family died.
Really romantic.
Sid Meier is gonna be hacked off (Score:1)
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What's really missing is the catalog of "ingredients" you'd need for this stuff. A more interesting project would be to develop a "cookbook" for technology, and use the most basic pieces possible. This is a start to built non-agrarian technology moving past what the Amish are doing to live at bare minimum.
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Hey, I realize it isn't fashionable to appreciate things around here, but at least use complete quotes.
"The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts." Emphasis mine.
They're not claiming civilization isn't possible.
But you keep on with your fashionably cynical self.
you don't actually use machine shop tools, right? (Score:3)
Repost (Score:2)
From way back in April [slashdot.org].
Nothing is in metric... (Score:2)
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Hey, you got a problem with systems based on binary arithmetic (gallons/quarts/pints/etc. - there's a full range from fractions of an ounce to barrels, though some of the units have fallen out of use) and base-twelve (OK, it's only 12 inches to a foot - but the foot is the length of MY foot!)? Working with liquid measures as a binary system is very nice.
In fact, in the grand scheme of things, the metric system is just as arbitrary. Use of base-10 is probably just descended from the number of fingers on m
"Build your own lathe", etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a classic "Build a Complete Metalworking Shop from Scrap" [lindsaybks.com] set of books. This set of books really does describe how to build machine tools starting from scrap and hand tools. The author was originally thinking of recovery after a nuclear war, when there would be plenty of scrap around.
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On the topic of weird places to find open-source (Score:1)
I was once in the arcade of a Dave&Buster's with my family and one of the picture booths failed to work when my sister was using it with her boyfriend. An employee came over and restarted the machine for her and I was able to watch it boot up. It turned out to actually be running an older version of Fedora (I'm not sure the exact version but it was back when the name was "Fedora Core").
So much information, so little comprehension (Score:1)