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tin foil hats won't save you

D'oh! Three minutes of googling while I composed the post, and nothing. As soon as I hit submit, I came across the telecom digest intro FAQ that explains it.

I think that someone has finally made an automatic /. submission generator, similar to the automatic paper generator http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/. You can't blame Cliff for being duped into thinking there was actually a human behind this absurdity. It's a bunch of keywords thrown together to make it sound like there's actually a question:
      Windows
      1200 Linux Based Servers
      ssh
      alias
      remote server

Comments about the pejorative connotation of "infectious" as used in this article should be read in light of why the authors say they use that word. They reference this paper as justification for their terminology. Seems reasonable to me; that document is informative and useful, as is the one from down under.

In the United States, in the late
1970s, three-quarters of all VCR owners bought no pre-recorded tapes. [15] 9/9/78,
10/16/78, 4/12/79. In 1983, several years after the beginning of the tape-rental
business, 40% of VCR owners never used such tapes and only 8% identified them as
"important."

Or maybe, because Betamax didn't offer somthing that VHS did at the beginning - Betamax only had one hour tapes to (home) record on. By the time it had longer, VHS had too big a market to be stopped.

This is a popular myth, but false. Beta matched VHS for length within 5 months. Beta's loss to VHs was a gradual slide over years

This is a misreading of what happened with Betamax. IIRC, the marketshare figures went something like this:

Year 1: 40% VHS 60% Beta (Beta was out first)
Year 2: 50% VHS 50% Beta (Tie -- either format could win!)
Year 3: 90% VHS 10% Beta (Cheap VHS players destroy Beta quickly)

No, they didn't. It was a slow slide for beta, with VHS gaining a bit every year. Here are the real sales percentages by year
year beta VHS
1975 100 --
1976 61 39
1977 56 44
1978 40 60
1979 39 61
1980 34 66
1981 32 68
1982 28 72
1983 25 75
1984 20 80

From the FAQ:

Synthetic biology studies how to build artificial biological systems for engineering applications, using many of the same tools and experimental techniques. But the work is fundamentally an engineering application of biological science, rather than an attempt to do more science. The focus is often on ways of taking parts of natural biological systems, characterizing and simplifying them, and using them as a component of a highly unnatural, engineered, biological system.

Neat comic strip by Drew Endy: http://mit.edu/endy/www/scraps/comic/AiSB.vol1.pdf

I remain skeptical. While this CNet article matches what researches have been studying for years, for example, this paper from MIT published originally in 1991, it's only measuring people's perceptions, rather than hard economic data. The economic indicators of the last 5 years have shown huge boosts in worker productivity in the US (ignoring last quarter's results). That directly contradicts the CNet article.

Yes, the paper from MIT makes the case that there are many factors which can increase a person's productivity, and our gains in productivity could have come from other sources than technology, but the question remains: is this true, or simply a matter of perception?

What We Can Learn From BSD

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

and Paul Krugman defends this very idea of Comparative Advantage against the anti-intellectuals:

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

it's funny how few parents above knocks Paul Krugman for not being "respectable." We did a full circle.

You are referring to the infamous Po-210 issue that IBM had. It actually originated from a faulty bottle-washing machine for one of the acids used in the fab process. The machine was using Po-210 to ionize a jet of air and there was a busted seal that was leaking Po-210 into the empty bottles. It took them years and millions of dollars to figure out what was going wrong. All chips have problems with soft errors, but when there is a problem in your fab and you put a highly radioactive isotope directly into the packaging... well soft errors become a nightmare. If contaminants are well controlled, then the primary soft error source is cosmic high energy neutrons. It's a bigger deal at higher elevations, and even worse in aircraft. If you find such things interesting, check out the references at the end of my thesis: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/papers/softecc:ddopson -meng/softecc_ddopson-meng.pdf Especially IBM's summary of their soft-error experience from 78-94 http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/401/tocpdf. html

I don't have time to give the derivation now, but when it's a wire antenna, it will be less than 1/r^2. If the antenna were a wire, it would be just 1/r. People should use Google before modding people informative.

Someone who isn't busy with EE homework should Google for it.

Here's something close: [MIT] http://space.mit.edu/RADIO/research/config.html "It is interesting to understand how the sensitivity to the power spectrum changes with different radial distributions of antennas. Here are four distributions which have uniform density of antennas on the ground (antennas per square meter), an antenna density that goes as 1/r, an antenna density that goes as 1/r^2, and an antenna density that goes as 1/r^3. In the central regions of the array the antennas are not allowed to overlap, so they don't exactly follow the power law distributions in the center. The array diameter is 1.5 km as is planned for the MWA."

Check out "Scratch" from MIT:
http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/llk/scratch/index.htm l
which is based off of:
http://www.squeakland.org/

The squeak smalltalk VM can run on the more machine archs than any thing else, puts Java to shame.

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

(Care of this site.)

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

(Care of this site.)

RSI and similar problems are widely believed to be much more likely to occur when working at a laptop for extended periods. In my opinion, any institution that is mandating the use of laptops, should be seriously considering what advice and facilities it is providing to its students. For more info see relevant advice to students at MIT and Is your laptop a pain in the neck?.

So how do you feel about the argument that LISP's power comes from the ease in which one can create inline DSL's (Macros)

"MDA's central failing is that current implementations use UML. "

MIT's Alloy Analyzer doesn't, and yet here we are several years later. IMHO I simply think that we're not ready for anything beyound "cowboy programming" level. Just read all the responses to this "ask slashdot", and read between the lines.

Wrong

...It included not shooting at UN ordered flights over souther Iraq...

Wrong

A more accurate list of Teslas accomplishments.

A more accurate list of Teslas accomplishments.

i recently went through this drill in searching for my first job after graduate school. i did an extensive amount of research in the process, based on which i can state the following (general--YMMV) observations:

a) average pay for a person with given qualifications can vary widely (>20%), even within a given industry.

b) average pay can, and does, vary widely between industries (e.g. aerospace vs. electrical engineering).

c) despite how they may act upon initial contact, HR people are not your friends. their job is to make you feel like they're your buddy, and to create the appearance of "it's you and me against The Man," where "The Man" is the company in question, early on in the negotiation process.

d) after getting the go-ahead from the hiring manager, HR's job is to get you on board for the lowest possible amount of money. if you think about it, doing things significantly differently would be financially irresponsible from the company's standpoint in most cases.

e) do your homework. that way you can counter glib and/or arbitrary assertions from the HR person about salary with tangible facts. even then they will likely not concede an inch verbally, but it does make a difference.

f) in case it is not clear from points b) through e) above, HR people are weasels. i was incredibly lucky to receive seven offers from seven interviews. with one small exception, this was the case in all of them.

g) whoever names a number first during the negotiation process generally loses.

although the title makes it sound very much like a huckster's manual, jack chapman's book is actually pretty decent and worth a look. some of its advice may be inapplicable or unworkable for you, but it's a good place to start. you can find it at most big bookstores for about $10. (no, i have no affiliation whatsoever with him.)

some universities' career offices publish historical starting salaries for their graduates online. if this isn't your first job, these numbers may not be directly relevant to you, but it's another piece of information. stanford MIT.

other salary links: the wall street journal published two surveys in the november 5, 2004 issue, one showing average salary by location, another by degree/education, for computer engineers. my two links are both dead, but if you have access to a library or a subscription to the WSJ archives, those are worth a look.

cost-of-living calculators one, two, three, four, five. that last one is a general link to the ACCRA index. it is not published for free on the web AFAIK, but if you google around you may find snapshots posted in various places.)

finally, general salary negotiation advice links: one, two, three.

be prepared, and good luck! /CF

If you won't take my word for it, how about the words of an MIT mesh network study:

[...] We also show that the traffic pattern determines whether an ad hoc network's per node capacity will scale to large networks. In particular, we show that for total capacity to scale up with network size the average distance between source and destination nodes must remain small as the network grows. Non-local traffic patterns in which this average distance grows with the network size result in a rapid decrease of per node capacity. Thus the question ``Are large ad hoc networks feasible?'' reduces to a question about the likely locality of communication in such networks.

In other words, the highly nonlocal traffic patterns of today's Internet are simply not feasible over a wireless mesh; it only works if you talk to people close to you, and then what's the point? You could do that with slightly more powerful wireless.

Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory, died of Alzheimer's just a few years ago. He was certainly very well educated, and apparantly did indeed suffer quite a bit with the disease.

Your conclusion is a bit off; for most of what you say, I reply: "Exactamundo." That last paragraph, though, is an environmentalist's wet dream and suggests a need for lessons in basic economics and engineering.

Where there is a demand there will probably be a supply. Given coal and the sun (and all the myriad ways of harnessing energy therefrom) as well as existing and severalpotential nuclear energies there is no reason to expect "mini-mansions", modern manufacturing nor "agri-business" to decline alongside petroleum and its' distillates. While I've taken blacksmithing as a hobby, I fully expect that my other hobbies, automotive repair, photography, welding, woodworking and programming (I don't sleep well) to continue to be inexpensive diversions for my sons and daughters well into the next millenium.

Perhaps you've been bitten by the year 2000 bug and not quite healed the infection, or, alternately you've spent too much time buried in your Foxfire books, or perhaps you've read Friday once too often. In any regard, there's not cause to worry that society is going to collapse any time soon. There's quite enough energy to keep us entertained and heated (or air conditioned) for a century or twelve, assuming we don't breed ourselves into extinction (albeit not necessarily as cheaply as you and I enjoy).

p.s. Strip-mining isn't necessarily an environmental nightmare. (Having grown up in Alaska fairly close to Healy, I was aware of Usibelli Coal Mine and their efforts, but I was shocked at the grammar of the page I referenced; what are they teaching those kids in Healy? I don't profess to be an english professor, but I am shocked!)

With this http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&sear ch=0x4B2700B9
The Professors PGP key to keep his e-mail private.

Are we cynical yet?

Lightman's scientific research has focused on gravitation theory, the structure and behavior of accretion disks, stellar dynamics, radiative processes, and relativistic plasmas. His research articles have appeared in The Physical Review, The Astrophysical Journal, Reviews of Modern Physics, Nature, and other journals of physics and astrophysics. For his contributions to physics, he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1989 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science the same year. In 1990, he chaired the science panel of the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee for the 1990s. He is a past chair of the High Energy Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Lightman has also been interested in science education and the philosophy of science. His work in science studies and in science education has been published in The American Scholar, The Physics Teacher, Science, Science and Children, The Science Teacher, and Social Studies of Science.

In that article, perhaps none. But on his website you can find that he has a doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech, has been an astronomy professor and research scientist at Harvard, and is now a professor at MIT in the science writing program.

See Splotch for what 3D diffraction synthesis looks like. In '95 it took 3.0 seconds to synthesize a 36MB fringe-buffer - apparently a throughput of 200MFLOPS. Given that the '360 and ps3 are 5x and 10x that speed, I'm hopeful to see a piece of their hardware dangling off my console sometime soon. :)

Love is a neurochemical suppression of criticism triggered by pattern recognition.

It's defintely not his observation ;-), Einstein himself presented the famous formula in the for m = E/c^2.

There is a nice lecture by Frank Wilczek, http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/204/, elaborating on this subject.

I believe that the fraction of churches that are opposed to Darwinian evolution (and, eg, the big bang, etc) is in fact extremely small. At one point, Max Tegmark was going to do the statistics; he told me that he was finding that the number of believers represented by anti-Darwin churches is small.

Western companies like Google, Microsoft, and the like could present a unified front in dealing with Beijing. They could agree to Western Principles (WP), an expanded version of the SP. Specifically, these companies agree to not assist the Chinese government, in any way, to abridge human rights. If Beijing retaliates by kicking Google out of China, then Beijing will expel all the other signatories to the WP. In this way, no Western company will gain an economic advantage over any other Western company.

How should we handle Taiwanese companies? Long before Yahoo's indifference to human rights in China, Taiwanese companies have routinely ignored human rights in China. In fact, when Western governments and companies curtailed their investments in order to punish Beijing for the incident at Tienanmen Square in 1989, the Taiwanese actually accelerated investments into China, thwarting Western economic sanctions against Beijing.

If Western companies abided by WP but Taiwanese companies ignored WP and human rights, then the Taiwanese companies would enjoy an economic advantage (in China) over Western companies. How can we deal with this situation? We boycott all products manufactured by or sold by Taiwanese companies. The boycott will level the playing field.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

I was reminded of this interesting post I had found on an mit email archive a few months back... http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/archives/old/gsb -archive/gsb2001-06-29.html Its the Itanic... she sinkin n draggin everyone with her. So much for the MIPS.

For example, he is apparently an MIT graduate, but at MIT Community Home Pages only his alumnus email address is listed, not a web page. More significantly, a search for his name on the MIT web site turns up nothing.

Finally, a thesis search for his name on Barton, the MIT library catalog, also turns up nothing.

So let's assume he didn't submit a thesis at MIT. Where did he get his PhD to qualify as a visting scholar at Stanford? And why isn't there any trace of it available via the web? Maybe he doesn't have one. Just speculation on my part... Maybe Alexander F. Mayer does have a PhD in physics, but there is no trace of it on the web.

PS. We are not talking about Alexandre Mayer.

For example, he is apparently an MIT graduate, but at MIT Community Home Pages only his alumnus email address is listed, not a web page. More significantly, a search for his name on the MIT web site turns up nothing.

Finally, a thesis search for his name on Barton, the MIT library catalog, also turns up nothing.

So let's assume he didn't submit a thesis at MIT. Where did he get his PhD to qualify as a visting scholar at Stanford? And why isn't there any trace of it available via the web? Maybe he doesn't have one. Just speculation on my part... Maybe Alexander F. Mayer does have a PhD in physics, but there is no trace of it on the web.

PS. We are not talking about Alexandre Mayer.

Mythbusters is not bad as entertainment - certainly better than that 70s show - but science?

It is to laugh!

My favorite was when they proved that hitting a wooden dowel with an arrow always resulted in a split down the grain, regardless of speed, point of impact, or any other factor they managed to notice. From that, they concluded that Robin Hood could not possibly split one arrow with another. Amount of time spent doing historical/archeological research to determine whether 14 century archers preferred end-to-end straight-grained wood for their arrows? Zero. Zip. Nada.

The one where they "prove" Archimedes' mirror couldn't work is almost as funny, though. They actually used a previously sunken ship for a target without considering the effect that total saturation might have on the flammability of wood!

I love watching those guys with actual scientists in the room. It's just like MST3K!

But you are right that corrupt politicians are ancient history. The real problem is that they are current history as well ;)

Second, these images of Muhammad are as offensive to muslims as it would be to christians to depict the Virgin Mary getting fucked by a pig with the caption "Technically, she's still a virgin."

If it were simply economics, Solar PV would not have been chosen. According to BP (page 46 of following PDF), its cost is about $400 per Megawatt-hour, compared to about $45 for new gas and about $66 for onshore wind power.

You can get some wonderful information off of slides from MIT theoretical physicist and BP's chief scientist, Steven Koonin, PhD. (Warning: PDF!)

There is way too much information in the slides about energy trends to summarize here, so check it all out.

I was quite amazed when I first stumbled upon this page. Imagine that, Marvin Minsky himself invented this microscope. He invented this microscope, (co-)founded AI, a whole lot more, and had so many students - including Gerald Sussman himself. We live with some really brilliant people today.

Sometimes when you wished "I wish I was there when da Vinci did this", or when someone else did that, well, it's happening here today, at faster rates than ever, and we don't even realise it sometimes. We live in interesting times.

I was quite amazed when I first stumbled upon this page. Imagine that, Marvin Minsky himself invented this microscope. He invented this microscope, (co-)founded AI, a whole lot more, and had so many students - including Gerald Sussman himself. We live with some really brilliant people today.

Sometimes when you wished "I wish I was there when da Vinci did this", or when someone else did that, well, it's happening here today, at faster rates than ever, and we don't even realise it sometimes. We live in interesting times.

like how many motorized couches have there been in geek history?
burning man
mit
alabama-huntsville

Meet last year's winner of the tech fashion contest. Layered Tech is going to explode with these high rez images of the clothing to be used at the MIT event, although I am pretty sure that MIT can handle the bandwidth used by the streaming video. (More Tron Guy Pix HA! HA!)

What the hell is this guy doing? Don't answer that . I'm going to get this one for those days when I want to look like Snuffaluffagus. Oh and whenever I update my blog, I'm going to wear this blogger hoodie. It's a blogger hoodie because...

The problem with the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it requires that all thought be restricted to language

I admittedly am interested but ignorant on this whole topic, but why does this follow? I am thinking on a much too high level here, and maybe there is some unavoidable issue in brain and/or language structures, , but why wouldn't my language influence me, even though not everything is language? I'm sure the music that is played in different parts of the world has an influence on the brain's perceptions too. Dunno, seems so obvious :)

we do not think entirely in pure language. Some of our thoughts are non-linguistic.

Sure, totally agreed. Is this also disputed? A strange world linguists seem to live in ;) Dunno, seems entirely obvious from simple introspection, and. Many meditation techniques try to get a handle on the neverending stream of voices and make it stop, and if someone had doubts, he simply could practice one or two.
Btw, I seem to plug this book a lot, but it's worth it: Zen and the Brain. A hard but fascinating read. Being no neurologist, much of the hard science part went over my head, but it's not that bad. Oh, thanks for the train of thought, Zen-Brain Reflections, the sequel will be out shortly :)

while sometimes we may fail at being able to express a notion that we're thinking, it doesn't mean that we're incapable of thinking it

On its own that isn't proven that our language doesn't prevent some thoughts from being thought.

All linguists agree that some effect of language is on how we think, and some effect of how we think is in our language, but the real sticking point is just how much?

That sentence and the whole last paragraph I can agree with.

The problem with the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it requires that all thought be restricted to language

I admittedly am interested but ignorant on this whole topic, but why does this follow? I am thinking on a much too high level here, and maybe there is some unavoidable issue in brain and/or language structures, , but why wouldn't my language influence me, even though not everything is language? I'm sure the music that is played in different parts of the world has an influence on the brain's perceptions too. Dunno, seems so obvious :)

we do not think entirely in pure language. Some of our thoughts are non-linguistic.

Sure, totally agreed. Is this also disputed? A strange world linguists seem to live in ;) Dunno, seems entirely obvious from simple introspection, and. Many meditation techniques try to get a handle on the neverending stream of voices and make it stop, and if someone had doubts, he simply could practice one or two.
Btw, I seem to plug this book a lot, but it's worth it: Zen and the Brain. A hard but fascinating read. Being no neurologist, much of the hard science part went over my head, but it's not that bad. Oh, thanks for the train of thought, Zen-Brain Reflections, the sequel will be out shortly :)

while sometimes we may fail at being able to express a notion that we're thinking, it doesn't mean that we're incapable of thinking it

On its own that isn't proven that our language doesn't prevent some thoughts from being thought.

All linguists agree that some effect of language is on how we think, and some effect of how we think is in our language, but the real sticking point is just how much?

That sentence and the whole last paragraph I can agree with.

Here's an excerpt from a particularly informative old post.

There were NO area codes of the N10 nor N00 format in the 1940s/50s. The N10 format codes first were used for Telco Dial-TWX for new 4-Row Keyboard 7/8-level ASCII 100-speed TWX, starting in the early 1960s. 3-Row Kybd 5-level Baudot 60-speed TWX which had existed since 1931 was automated at the same time by adding modems and dials to the TTYs and integrating them into the DDD telephone network by giving them POTS-like telephone numbers using "POTS" area codes. 3-Row TWX began to disappear as 4-Row TWX devloped. Western Union took over the marketing of TWX by US Federal Government orders in the early 1970's but it wasn't until 1981 when TWX in the US was completely removed from the US-portion of the DDD telephone network and instead completely re-routed over Western Union's own Telex network. The N10 format codes no longer had *ANY* meaning on the US-part of the DDD telephone network (although WUTCO still had TWXes numbered with N10 format codes on the WUTCO Telex-I/II network), but it wasn't until the early 1990s when Bellcore first assigned real POTS telephone area codes of the N10 format.

If you were assessing the prospects of a 60-year-old man, how much longer would
you expect him to live? If you were an executive evaluating the performance of a movie
that had made 40 million dollars at the box office so far, what would you estimate for its
total gross?

Well, you say they will have different IR signatures.. of course they will. But what kind of differences? I mean, if you encounter 10 different objects with 10 different signatures, how do you tell which are real. You can't just say they differ by IR, and claim that they can be discrimiated against.Remember, you don't know what they will look like compared to the real one(s).

Also, of course decoys are deployed outside of the atmosphere. What do you suggest, use low trajectory shots? You do relize how fast these things are going right? If the defence waits until the bombs have reentered atmosphere, then the range that a given station can stop is small. Even the US doesn't have enough money to build that many stations.

I will admit I don't have personal knowledge of this, this is from attending a lecture Postol gave, who has serious credentials in ballistics: http://web.mit.edu/sts/faculty/info/Postol_Theodor e-css.html

He also seemed to have turned out to be largely correct in the scud affair, so I don't think you can really write him off as a lunatic.