I recall way back when windows 2003 server (I believe) started shipping, it caused a lot of problems, because its DNS server requested EDNS0 by default. That meant that sites that had crafted their DNS replies to be *exactly* 512 bytes (I know Yahoo was one) replied with 512 bytes *plus* an acknowledgement of the EDNS0 flag, which pushed it over 512. Older PIX firewalls would drop this, and there was no way to get around it. Shortly, there was a version that came out where you could change the inspection parameters.
*now*, if you've upgraded your PIX to an ASA (or to version 7.X or 8.X), then it will helpfully convert that DNS inspection to a migrated DNS policy map, like thus:
policy-map type inspect dns migrated_dns_map_1
parameters
message-length maximum 512
Something I've considered, it seems that SSN's are being used very similarly to passwords. Make sure to use good security practices and change yours every 60 days.
adoption of 'Three Strikes' policies requiring the termination of Internet access after repeat allegations of copyright infringement
Now, on the face of it, that sounds terrible, but think about it: it could be so much worse than we imagine, that it's actually better. So there's little or no penalty for false allegations (I'm sure Big Content, doing massive numbers of allegations, wouldn't stand for penalties when they do so poorly), and you don't actually have to prove infringement, just allege it. So it's sort of like the middle eastern countries where you can divorce your wife by saying "I divorce you" three times. Except instead of getting divorced, they get banned from the Internet. And instead of being their husband, all you have to be is someone who holds a copyright. "I allege you've infringed my copyright, I allege you've infringed my copyright, I allege you've infringed my copyright, POOF! Goodbye." Note here that, as I understand it, everyone holds implicit copyright to every work they create. So this is kind of like giving everyone a "nuke" button.
So, on the one hand, you've got thousands of employees of RIAA, MPAA, MediaSentry, et al, sending out infringement allegations with little to no regard for truth or justice... and on the other hand, you've got millions of pissed off geeks more than happy to play whack-a-mole with every ISP that RIAA/MPAA goes to, sending in allegations that "RIAA totally infringed the copyright I hold on the video I put up on my website of my cat licking it's balls for half an hour". How long before MediaSentry is lucky to be able to find a dial-up account in Uzbekistan to try and do their investigations from? How much uptime will the RIAA's website have once it can be, not technically hacked, but legally hacked within 5 minutes them finding an ISP foolish enough to host it?
I say, Rock on! It's the end of the Internet as we know it, and I feel fine.
Cheap healthy food is much like free software - Far better in most ways, but only cheap if your time is worth nothing. And much like free software, it's almost always well worth the time. And once you put some effort into understanding how it works, the time requirements go down significantly. Fortunately, unlike financial budgets, everyone has a guaranteed income of time. You get 24 hours a day, no more, no less (DST notwithstanding...), and spending some of that on doing active things and making good food will pay off both in terms of how much you enjoy that time, and how many days you get, most likely.
Now, the interesting thing about this legislation would be to see if it could be used to fine legislators that put impediments in the way of enjoyable active exercise. Wouldn't it be nice if we could add an addendum to the widely distributed bumper-stickers that says "...but now not skateboarding is a crime."
I agree completely, and I'll also say that I think he's missing the point entirely. There are lots of wonderful and important reasons to gather data about remote locations in the universe. Once you have that data, one small kind of "cool" thing you could do with it (in addition to actual scientific research) is to create a virtual world modeled after the reality of that place.
There may be some people who would want to have the sort of telepresence experience he's talking about, and would be happy if that were the greatest extent that human exploration of space ever went. But I know that for myself, and I suspect for many others, the desire to feel an alien worlds wind in our face, and to step foot on alien soil has little to do with the coolness of seeing something awesome looking, and has everything to do with understanding that when an asteroid or CME or global thermonuclear war or zombie apocalypse or whatever destroys all life on the planet Earth, it doesn't necessarily mean an end to the human race. Telepresence can't really help with that. He can stand there with his sensory gloves and his VR goggles and his smellovision and think "this is so much more awesome than the bother and expense of actually going there" all day, but when the wave of fiery molten death comes across the horizon, I believe the salient quotation will be "The goggles! They do nothing!"
There's a staggering lack of respect for other people's wishes being shown in the comments here.
And there may well be a staggering lack of respect in the community for those who actually want their house in Google StreetView. Maybe there was unanimity in the neighborhood, probably they didn't have time to take a vote, but we'll never really know... I know I'd like my house to be in StreetView (Actually, I'd really like for the road my house is on to be in Google Maps, or better yet NavTeq so that people other than professional couriers might be able to find it. But I think that would be a prerequisite of being in StreetView). However, if I lived in this neighborhood, I might be a bit hesitant to voice those desires, after watching the angry mob chase Google away.
The really ironic thing is that, if it's anything like the affluent neighborhoods around here, there are probably restrictions that prevent the homeowners from erecting a 12 foot opaque fence on their property line to keep Google (and everyone else) from observing and photographing their private property.
You know, I spent a significant portion of my teen years trying to find women who were interested in sex before marriage. In retrospect, I think my energies would have been much better spent (in terms of the integral of happiness over my entire lifespan) if I had focused more on finding a woman who was interested in sex after marriage.
Actually, I'm probably wrong. I suspect that search is a variant of the halting problem, except with infinite input and an incomplete understanding of the "program" in question.
And you know, I'm kind of bothered by the statement that 70% is "exactly correct". I tend to assume that only non-zero numbers are significant digits (and I'm right 90% of the time.), so I would interpret 70% as 7E1%, not 7.0E1%. My answer would be 70%, but I wouldn't be overly incredulous if someone told me the answer was 71.6%. My suspicion is that seasonal and tidal changes probably don't make more than a single percentage point difference, but I'm certain they make some difference. I certainly am curious what the responses in that gap between the 15% who were "exactly" correct and the 47% who were "close enough". If those 32% said "65 to 75 %", to me that's equivalent to 7E1%. If they said "68.92%", then their precision is too high and their accuracy is too low... and I'd be very curious where they got their number.
And then there's the matter of a poorly worded question. When asked what percentage of the earth was covered in water, some might assume the question referred only to liquid water. The percentage of earth covered by liquid or solid water is significantly higher. And then the percentage of earth covered by liquid, solid, or gaseous water (i.e., those areas covered by an atmosphere whose partial water vapor pressure is greater than zero) is higher still. (and if you're talking just liquid water, do clouds count?)
Interesting... my random scribbles and weird drawings usually are my notes. Anything I decide to capture in text form is merely to get more brain regions (beyond auditory processing) in on the game. The result is not actually legible, nor is it intended to be.
If you're searching for Russian Extremophiles, and you decide to use Google to do it, I haven't tried it myself, but it sounds like the sort of query where You might just want to turn SafeSearch "on".
A card with "See ID" or similar in the signature both isn't a valid card, and is unenforceable, due to the above.
That's it! I'm naming my next child "See ID". Not only is it an amusing bit of recursion, but keeps him from ever having a valid credit card.
He'll probably be just as less-than-amused as his brother, "For Deposit Only".
But, in a feeble attempt to wrench this back to on-topicness, long ago I had a dog that liked to chew on power cables. While I felt that 120V to the tongue should be a sufficient deterrent, my wife disagreed. We found some stuff specifically for that purpose that was used to coat wires and tasted like a cross between cedar sap and earwax. If there exists something that rats don't like the taste of, then coating the cables with something that tastes similar might be effective.
In the case of our dog, it didn't work, but I'm just throwing it out there as a possibility.
I find it quite odd that this article was written by Bob Mitchell. Usually when someone writes about how they've discovered that google knows everything about them, the byline is something like Corvus McLazerpants. Although I don't personally know of this guy, I'm guessing that he must be popular enough that the other few thousand Bob Mitchells of the world providing chaff for him have an insufficient pagerank to be effective.
You know, it would be kind of amusing to offer a trade. When the teacher asks for the notes, say "I will trade you my notes for a signed statement affirming your assertion that nothing you have taught any of your students will ever be of use to any of them for the rest of their lives and that your entire professional career has been a meaningless sham. If you want to add an addendum about how you are a charlatan and scam artist, you are free to do so."
I believe that, immediately before a disaster, everyone else will be stocking up on canned goods. Which will leave the store's stock of flour, sugar, and other baking basics for me to buy, along with a whole bunch of charcoal to actually run the smoker.
Sounds like a good plan, assuming there's any warning of imminent disaster. Flour becomes less good over the course of a month or two, but doesn't usually actually become indedible for a really long time. Add some water and heat, and you can make hard tack, which I believe will last even longer. I guess part of it depends on what kind of smoker you have, and how easy it is to make it produce less smoke and more heat.
(I'll also be letting my 300-gallon hot tub, that I never use, drain so that I can refill it and skip the chlorine so I can use it as a stock of drinking water.)
Word to the wise: drinking water whithout chlorine won't be drinking water for long.
Your boss's plan wasn't that bad, actually - nicotine addiction is horrible to try to overcome, and I bet he would have found a few people to trade with in the event of a disaster on a scale that would return the US to a barter system. But given that that hasn't happened, did he end up throwing the cigarettes away, or giving them away, or what?
Nicotine addiction is probably even harder to overcome in the middle of a disaster. Reference the movie Airplane for an example. I'm not sure what he did with them after the storms passed. My guess would be either thrown them away or returned them to the store. Could be he kept them in preparation for the next emergency. Year-old cigarettes are pretty awful, but probably still tradeable.
Anyhow, now I can say that quitting smoking wasn't just a matter of health and cost, it was part of my disaster preparedness plan.
Can the smoker I got for Christmas be used to bake bread?
Well, yes it can. You can bake bread in just about anything that you can keep sufficiently hot for sufficiently long. But I'm curious why you believe flour would be more easily obtainable than other foodstuffs? I know that in my area, there are a few farms that I believe have wheat in their crop rotation. I have no idea where the closest mill is, but any non-electrical mills are likely to be historical sites that are probably non-functional.
And then there's the big question: between you and all of your neighbors, what do you have that's so much more valuable to that farmer and miller that he will choose to trade the portion of his wheat in excess of his own needs to you for instead of them?
Here's something to chew on: From a little bit of research, it appears that in the US, there are approximately 4 acres of farmland per capita. Given a long-term transportation failure, look around you (if you live anywhere near a city), and think about how many people would have to die (through starvation, violence, plague, whatever) before you could devote 16 acres to feeding a family of four. Granted, those 4 acres include farms for things like timber and cotton, which you might not need immediately, but it's also 4 acres of land being farmed by a professional farmer using modern farming techniques and machinery. If civilization does falter, an incomprehensibly huge number of people will die, and those that are left will learn a whole lot about how to make food.
And what other essentials should I stock up on?
I remember my old boss would, whenever a temporary disaster seemed likely (hurricanes or elections, mostly), stock up on three basics: ammunition, whiskey, and cigarettes. The ammo makes some sense, as it can be used both for defense and, at least in theory, hunting. Alcohol has at least some use recreationally, medically, and as a trade good. Given that he didn't smoke, the cigarettes were purely for trade. Not saying that's a good plan, but it is an interesting one.
Actually, the real reason for attaching names is fairly obvious: In 100 years, when they reconstruct these people from their recorded genomes, it'll be nice to know what to call them. Well played.
What's really interesting to me about the wikipedia list is how many red links there are. So, apparently, there are a fairly large number of programmers who are famous enough to be listed on wikipedia's list of famous programmers, but not famous enough to actually have a wikipedia article about them. That seems an odd sort of limbo to be in...
It's also not just about resale at used game stores... Gamers do have a limited monetary budget, and secondhand games at a game store *do* have a lower price, but the other important factor is the time budget that gamers have. Our salaries and expenses may ebb and flow, but when it comes to time, we receive a fixed income of 24 hours each day, never more, and our only choice lays in how we spend those hours. If Spore is so incredibly awesome that I'm still spending all my free time playing it next year when EA puts out their next big game, I may well not buy it. There are three possible solutions to this:
1) build an MMOG, and charge per month. That's worked out fairly well for Blizzard, for some others, not so much.
2) build short games with no lasting allure or replayability. Unfortunately, a popular option.
3) turn off the activation servers. If your game activates every time it's run, then gamers have two options: stop playing it, which frees up some spare time, or download a crack. In the first case, they may well buy something new, and unfortunately, human nature being what it is, if they had a yearning to play your old game, they'll probably think that your new game might scratch that itch and buy it. In the second case, the game company hasn't actually lost anything...
Interestingly, some companies have made the statement (I wouldn't quite call it a promise...) that if they go out of business or turn off their activation servers, they'll release a patch that allows the game to play without activation. That puts people like me in a strange position: I'll be more than happy to buy their game once they release that patch, which is likely after they have either gone out of business or stopped selling the game. Either way, chances are I *can't* buy the game at that point.
You're absolutely right. What I said didn't quite match up to what I was thinking. I'm not quite sure of the right way to say what I was thinking, but it boils down to: given the constraint of only being able to get an initial vector in the equatorial plane, there will probably be one or two times a year that are optimal for doing either a minimum-energy or minimum-time orbit transfer to some other body (i.e., Mars). That's true today using conventional rocketry as well, but my gut feeling is that the addition of an equatorial constraint on the "bonus" initial velocity might change when that optimal launch time occurs each year.
You're mostly right. A weight in geosync with a tether hanging down would fall, due to the weight of the tether. What you actually have is a system where the center of mass of the entire system is in geosynchronous orbit. There are two ways you can do this, one is to have a big chunk of mass just the other side of the orbit you want, the other is to have another tether extending outward from the geosynchronous midpoint. There are some advantages to that idea. If you want to go somewhere further than earth orbit, you can go out to the end of the outer tether and start off with a fairly healthy velocity, although constrained to being in the plane of the equator. (although, given that the plane of the equator varies considerably with respect to the plane of the ecliptic over the course of the year, you actually have a fair amount of, well, latitude for lack of a better term, with your initial vector if you have the ability to move around your launch date some.) Second, it makes it fairly easy to run masses up and down the external tether to counteract the mass/acceleration of the elevator on the inner tether. Third, if you for some reason want an environment with near-earth-normal gravity, but want it to be 70k km (that's an ugly nomenclature. and 70 Mm looks too much like 70 mm. How about 7E7 m?) away from the earth, there's a perfect place for it, just hang your lab off the end of the outer tether.
The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to make two long, expensive tethers, as opposed to making one tether and a big block of steel (or whatever) as a counterweight.
Unless someone already hacked your DNS server and are serving you a fake OpenDNS page that points to their own server...
Good point. Try this: https://www.opendns.com/. If your browser doesn't complain about a mis-matched certificate, then either you're going to the OpenDNS servers, or whoever's hacked your upstream DNS server has either hacked your list of trusted root CA certificates, or has hacked Thawte's private key. If either of those latter is true, you're pretty much screwed, DNS flaw or not.
Very simply, if your gear is using 100 watts of power, then it's producing a maximum of 100 watts of heat. I'd guess that the EM radiation, sound, etc. that's making it out of the room is fairly negligible, most likely the difference between energy use and heat produced is smaller than the measurement error in how much energy is being used, so I'd just use that number.
Now, as far as the power required for the AC, that depends on the efficiency of your AC unit and the outside temperature, but my recollection of the EER of modern air conditioners under reasonably normal conditions is that one watt of air conditioning can move somewhere around 10 watts of heat from inside to outside. As a note of comparison, you generate about 500 watts of heating just sitting around. So, if you have a computer that uses 300 watts of power, then adding in the AC cost means that it costs 330 watts total. If you're in there with it, make it more like 380. And if you have a LAN party where a bunch of people bring all of their PC's too, you're just screwed. At least as far as power use goes.
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I recall way back when windows 2003 server (I believe) started shipping, it caused a lot of problems, because its DNS server requested EDNS0 by default. That meant that sites that had crafted their DNS replies to be *exactly* 512 bytes (I know Yahoo was one) replied with 512 bytes *plus* an acknowledgement of the EDNS0 flag, which pushed it over 512. Older PIX firewalls would drop this, and there was no way to get around it. Shortly, there was a version that came out where you could change the inspection parameters.
*now*, if you've upgraded your PIX to an ASA (or to version 7.X or 8.X), then it will helpfully convert that DNS inspection to a migrated DNS policy map, like thus:
policy-map type inspect dns migrated_dns_map_1
parameters
message-length maximum 512
Which, as I read this, may well break things.
Looks like now it will be possible to be half Irish, half English, and half German.
Also, this comic.
Something I've considered, it seems that SSN's are being used very similarly to passwords. Make sure to use good security practices and change yours every 60 days.
adoption of 'Three Strikes' policies requiring the termination of Internet access after repeat allegations of copyright infringement
Now, on the face of it, that sounds terrible, but think about it: it could be so much worse than we imagine, that it's actually better. So there's little or no penalty for false allegations (I'm sure Big Content, doing massive numbers of allegations, wouldn't stand for penalties when they do so poorly), and you don't actually have to prove infringement, just allege it. So it's sort of like the middle eastern countries where you can divorce your wife by saying "I divorce you" three times. Except instead of getting divorced, they get banned from the Internet. And instead of being their husband, all you have to be is someone who holds a copyright. "I allege you've infringed my copyright, I allege you've infringed my copyright, I allege you've infringed my copyright, POOF! Goodbye." Note here that, as I understand it, everyone holds implicit copyright to every work they create. So this is kind of like giving everyone a "nuke" button.
So, on the one hand, you've got thousands of employees of RIAA, MPAA, MediaSentry, et al, sending out infringement allegations with little to no regard for truth or justice... and on the other hand, you've got millions of pissed off geeks more than happy to play whack-a-mole with every ISP that RIAA/MPAA goes to, sending in allegations that "RIAA totally infringed the copyright I hold on the video I put up on my website of my cat licking it's balls for half an hour". How long before MediaSentry is lucky to be able to find a dial-up account in Uzbekistan to try and do their investigations from? How much uptime will the RIAA's website have once it can be, not technically hacked, but legally hacked within 5 minutes them finding an ISP foolish enough to host it?
I say, Rock on! It's the end of the Internet as we know it, and I feel fine.
Cheap healthy food is much like free software - Far better in most ways, but only cheap if your time is worth nothing. And much like free software, it's almost always well worth the time. And once you put some effort into understanding how it works, the time requirements go down significantly. Fortunately, unlike financial budgets, everyone has a guaranteed income of time. You get 24 hours a day, no more, no less (DST notwithstanding...), and spending some of that on doing active things and making good food will pay off both in terms of how much you enjoy that time, and how many days you get, most likely.
Now, the interesting thing about this legislation would be to see if it could be used to fine legislators that put impediments in the way of enjoyable active exercise. Wouldn't it be nice if we could add an addendum to the widely distributed bumper-stickers that says "...but now not skateboarding is a crime."
I agree completely, and I'll also say that I think he's missing the point entirely. There are lots of wonderful and important reasons to gather data about remote locations in the universe. Once you have that data, one small kind of "cool" thing you could do with it (in addition to actual scientific research) is to create a virtual world modeled after the reality of that place.
There may be some people who would want to have the sort of telepresence experience he's talking about, and would be happy if that were the greatest extent that human exploration of space ever went. But I know that for myself, and I suspect for many others, the desire to feel an alien worlds wind in our face, and to step foot on alien soil has little to do with the coolness of seeing something awesome looking, and has everything to do with understanding that when an asteroid or CME or global thermonuclear war or zombie apocalypse or whatever destroys all life on the planet Earth, it doesn't necessarily mean an end to the human race. Telepresence can't really help with that. He can stand there with his sensory gloves and his VR goggles and his smellovision and think "this is so much more awesome than the bother and expense of actually going there" all day, but when the wave of fiery molten death comes across the horizon, I believe the salient quotation will be "The goggles! They do nothing!"
There's a staggering lack of respect for other people's wishes being shown in the comments here.
And there may well be a staggering lack of respect in the community for those who actually want their house in Google StreetView. Maybe there was unanimity in the neighborhood, probably they didn't have time to take a vote, but we'll never really know... I know I'd like my house to be in StreetView (Actually, I'd really like for the road my house is on to be in Google Maps, or better yet NavTeq so that people other than professional couriers might be able to find it. But I think that would be a prerequisite of being in StreetView). However, if I lived in this neighborhood, I might be a bit hesitant to voice those desires, after watching the angry mob chase Google away.
The really ironic thing is that, if it's anything like the affluent neighborhoods around here, there are probably restrictions that prevent the homeowners from erecting a 12 foot opaque fence on their property line to keep Google (and everyone else) from observing and photographing their private property.
You know, I spent a significant portion of my teen years trying to find women who were interested in sex before marriage. In retrospect, I think my energies would have been much better spent (in terms of the integral of happiness over my entire lifespan) if I had focused more on finding a woman who was interested in sex after marriage.
Actually, I'm probably wrong. I suspect that search is a variant of the halting problem, except with infinite input and an incomplete understanding of the "program" in question.
And you know, I'm kind of bothered by the statement that 70% is "exactly correct". I tend to assume that only non-zero numbers are significant digits (and I'm right 90% of the time.), so I would interpret 70% as 7E1%, not 7.0E1%. My answer would be 70%, but I wouldn't be overly incredulous if someone told me the answer was 71.6%. My suspicion is that seasonal and tidal changes probably don't make more than a single percentage point difference, but I'm certain they make some difference. I certainly am curious what the responses in that gap between the 15% who were "exactly" correct and the 47% who were "close enough". If those 32% said "65 to 75 %", to me that's equivalent to 7E1%. If they said "68.92%", then their precision is too high and their accuracy is too low... and I'd be very curious where they got their number.
And then there's the matter of a poorly worded question. When asked what percentage of the earth was covered in water, some might assume the question referred only to liquid water. The percentage of earth covered by liquid or solid water is significantly higher. And then the percentage of earth covered by liquid, solid, or gaseous water (i.e., those areas covered by an atmosphere whose partial water vapor pressure is greater than zero) is higher still. (and if you're talking just liquid water, do clouds count?)
Interesting... my random scribbles and weird drawings usually are my notes. Anything I decide to capture in text form is merely to get more brain regions (beyond auditory processing) in on the game. The result is not actually legible, nor is it intended to be.
If you're searching for Russian Extremophiles,
and you decide to use Google to do it,
I haven't tried it myself, but it sounds like the sort of query where
You might just want to turn SafeSearch "on".
A card with "See ID" or similar in the signature both isn't a valid card, and is unenforceable, due to the above.
That's it! I'm naming my next child "See ID". Not only is it an amusing bit of recursion, but keeps him from ever having a valid credit card.
He'll probably be just as less-than-amused as his brother, "For Deposit Only".
But, in a feeble attempt to wrench this back to on-topicness, long ago I had a dog that liked to chew on power cables. While I felt that 120V to the tongue should be a sufficient deterrent, my wife disagreed. We found some stuff specifically for that purpose that was used to coat wires and tasted like a cross between cedar sap and earwax. If there exists something that rats don't like the taste of, then coating the cables with something that tastes similar might be effective.
In the case of our dog, it didn't work, but I'm just throwing it out there as a possibility.
I find it quite odd that this article was written by Bob Mitchell. Usually when someone writes about how they've discovered that google knows everything about them, the byline is something like Corvus McLazerpants. Although I don't personally know of this guy, I'm guessing that he must be popular enough that the other few thousand Bob Mitchells of the world providing chaff for him have an insufficient pagerank to be effective.
You know, it would be kind of amusing to offer a trade. When the teacher asks for the notes, say "I will trade you my notes for a signed statement affirming your assertion that nothing you have taught any of your students will ever be of use to any of them for the rest of their lives and that your entire professional career has been a meaningless sham. If you want to add an addendum about how you are a charlatan and scam artist, you are free to do so."
I believe that, immediately before a disaster, everyone else will be stocking up on canned goods. Which will leave the store's stock of flour, sugar, and other baking basics for me to buy, along with a whole bunch of charcoal to actually run the smoker.
Sounds like a good plan, assuming there's any warning of imminent disaster. Flour becomes less good over the course of a month or two, but doesn't usually actually become indedible for a really long time. Add some water and heat, and you can make hard tack, which I believe will last even longer. I guess part of it depends on what kind of smoker you have, and how easy it is to make it produce less smoke and more heat.
(I'll also be letting my 300-gallon hot tub, that I never use, drain so that I can refill it and skip the chlorine so I can use it as a stock of drinking water.)
Word to the wise: drinking water whithout chlorine won't be drinking water for long.
Your boss's plan wasn't that bad, actually - nicotine addiction is horrible to try to overcome, and I bet he would have found a few people to trade with in the event of a disaster on a scale that would return the US to a barter system. But given that that hasn't happened, did he end up throwing the cigarettes away, or giving them away, or what?
Nicotine addiction is probably even harder to overcome in the middle of a disaster. Reference the movie Airplane for an example. I'm not sure what he did with them after the storms passed. My guess would be either thrown them away or returned them to the store. Could be he kept them in preparation for the next emergency. Year-old cigarettes are pretty awful, but probably still tradeable.
Anyhow, now I can say that quitting smoking wasn't just a matter of health and cost, it was part of my disaster preparedness plan.
Can the smoker I got for Christmas be used to bake bread?
Well, yes it can. You can bake bread in just about anything that you can keep sufficiently hot for sufficiently long. But I'm curious why you believe flour would be more easily obtainable than other foodstuffs? I know that in my area, there are a few farms that I believe have wheat in their crop rotation. I have no idea where the closest mill is, but any non-electrical mills are likely to be historical sites that are probably non-functional.
And then there's the big question: between you and all of your neighbors, what do you have that's so much more valuable to that farmer and miller that he will choose to trade the portion of his wheat in excess of his own needs to you for instead of them?
Here's something to chew on: From a little bit of research, it appears that in the US, there are approximately 4 acres of farmland per capita. Given a long-term transportation failure, look around you (if you live anywhere near a city), and think about how many people would have to die (through starvation, violence, plague, whatever) before you could devote 16 acres to feeding a family of four. Granted, those 4 acres include farms for things like timber and cotton, which you might not need immediately, but it's also 4 acres of land being farmed by a professional farmer using modern farming techniques and machinery. If civilization does falter, an incomprehensibly huge number of people will die, and those that are left will learn a whole lot about how to make food.
And what other essentials should I stock up on?
I remember my old boss would, whenever a temporary disaster seemed likely (hurricanes or elections, mostly), stock up on three basics: ammunition, whiskey, and cigarettes. The ammo makes some sense, as it can be used both for defense and, at least in theory, hunting. Alcohol has at least some use recreationally, medically, and as a trade good. Given that he didn't smoke, the cigarettes were purely for trade. Not saying that's a good plan, but it is an interesting one.
Actually, Google probably just realized the truth: People actually click on search results. Ads, not so much.
Eliminating the malware from search results is far more important.
Actually, the real reason for attaching names is fairly obvious: In 100 years, when they reconstruct these people from their recorded genomes, it'll be nice to know what to call them. Well played.
What's really interesting to me about the wikipedia list is how many red links there are. So, apparently, there are a fairly large number of programmers who are famous enough to be listed on wikipedia's list of famous programmers, but not famous enough to actually have a wikipedia article about them. That seems an odd sort of limbo to be in...
It's also not just about resale at used game stores... Gamers do have a limited monetary budget, and secondhand games at a game store *do* have a lower price, but the other important factor is the time budget that gamers have. Our salaries and expenses may ebb and flow, but when it comes to time, we receive a fixed income of 24 hours each day, never more, and our only choice lays in how we spend those hours. If Spore is so incredibly awesome that I'm still spending all my free time playing it next year when EA puts out their next big game, I may well not buy it. There are three possible solutions to this:
1) build an MMOG, and charge per month. That's worked out fairly well for Blizzard, for some others, not so much.
2) build short games with no lasting allure or replayability. Unfortunately, a popular option.
3) turn off the activation servers. If your game activates every time it's run, then gamers have two options: stop playing it, which frees up some spare time, or download a crack. In the first case, they may well buy something new, and unfortunately, human nature being what it is, if they had a yearning to play your old game, they'll probably think that your new game might scratch that itch and buy it. In the second case, the game company hasn't actually lost anything...
Interestingly, some companies have made the statement (I wouldn't quite call it a promise...) that if they go out of business or turn off their activation servers, they'll release a patch that allows the game to play without activation. That puts people like me in a strange position: I'll be more than happy to buy their game once they release that patch, which is likely after they have either gone out of business or stopped selling the game. Either way, chances are I *can't* buy the game at that point.
You're absolutely right. What I said didn't quite match up to what I was thinking. I'm not quite sure of the right way to say what I was thinking, but it boils down to: given the constraint of only being able to get an initial vector in the equatorial plane, there will probably be one or two times a year that are optimal for doing either a minimum-energy or minimum-time orbit transfer to some other body (i.e., Mars). That's true today using conventional rocketry as well, but my gut feeling is that the addition of an equatorial constraint on the "bonus" initial velocity might change when that optimal launch time occurs each year.
You're mostly right. A weight in geosync with a tether hanging down would fall, due to the weight of the tether. What you actually have is a system where the center of mass of the entire system is in geosynchronous orbit. There are two ways you can do this, one is to have a big chunk of mass just the other side of the orbit you want, the other is to have another tether extending outward from the geosynchronous midpoint. There are some advantages to that idea. If you want to go somewhere further than earth orbit, you can go out to the end of the outer tether and start off with a fairly healthy velocity, although constrained to being in the plane of the equator. (although, given that the plane of the equator varies considerably with respect to the plane of the ecliptic over the course of the year, you actually have a fair amount of, well, latitude for lack of a better term, with your initial vector if you have the ability to move around your launch date some.) Second, it makes it fairly easy to run masses up and down the external tether to counteract the mass/acceleration of the elevator on the inner tether. Third, if you for some reason want an environment with near-earth-normal gravity, but want it to be 70k km (that's an ugly nomenclature. and 70 Mm looks too much like 70 mm. How about 7E7 m?) away from the earth, there's a perfect place for it, just hang your lab off the end of the outer tether.
The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to make two long, expensive tethers, as opposed to making one tether and a big block of steel (or whatever) as a counterweight.
Unless someone already hacked your DNS server and are serving you a fake OpenDNS page that points to their own server...
Good point. Try this: https://www.opendns.com/. If your browser doesn't complain about a mis-matched certificate, then either you're going to the OpenDNS servers, or whoever's hacked your upstream DNS server has either hacked your list of trusted root CA certificates, or has hacked Thawte's private key. If either of those latter is true, you're pretty much screwed, DNS flaw or not.
That was almost my thought too. Although, I was thinking "we're going to use up all the hafnium, and half the aluminum."
Very simply, if your gear is using 100 watts of power, then it's producing a maximum of 100 watts of heat. I'd guess that the EM radiation, sound, etc. that's making it out of the room is fairly negligible, most likely the difference between energy use and heat produced is smaller than the measurement error in how much energy is being used, so I'd just use that number.
Now, as far as the power required for the AC, that depends on the efficiency of your AC unit and the outside temperature, but my recollection of the EER of modern air conditioners under reasonably normal conditions is that one watt of air conditioning can move somewhere around 10 watts of heat from inside to outside. As a note of comparison, you generate about 500 watts of heating just sitting around. So, if you have a computer that uses 300 watts of power, then adding in the AC cost means that it costs 330 watts total. If you're in there with it, make it more like 380. And if you have a LAN party where a bunch of people bring all of their PC's too, you're just screwed. At least as far as power use goes.