So we can see the problem coming... so instead of doing something about it now and being ready, you advocate doing nothing? Perhaps a little short sighted? (Especially since ARIN, APNIC and RIPE will probably run out of IPv4 addresses this year)
Back in my school days, we used to talk about the mythical VAX in hushed tones, due to its awesomeness (at least we thought so). I never really used one in anger, they were already on their way out by the time I left school and went to university, but the uni still had a VAX cluster (on which we were forced to write COBOL, which soured the experience somewhat).
I actaully have a small VAX now, something I take to vintage computing shows and use as a fileserver for a network of Sinclair Spectrums...
(Unfortunately they've now introduced their (deeply flawed and truly terrible) oAuth implementation, which makes this sort of thing much harder, although the amount of data remains small).
No cars are WAY cheaper. Let's compare cars (highly automated) with light aircraft (almost completely hand-built). A light plane with the conveniences of say, a Ford Contour costs around $300,000. Mechanically, the light aircraft is *vastly* simpler, too.
More to the point, it's simply impractical for a skript kiddie to scan an entire/64 for machines, the subnet allocation you get has 4 billion times the address space than the entire IPv4 internet.
This is how IPv6 is designed to work, the smallest allocation given to a user is a/64 to allow stateless autoconfiguration. It's why the address is 128 bits in the first place.
The 64 bits left for the network is still incredibly huge. You may be falling for the (intuitive) fallacy that 64 bits is just twice as big as 32 bits, but it's not. 64 bit subnets mean there are 2^32 *times as many* subnets than there are entire addresses in the whole of IPv4, that's to say, you can have *4 billion* networks the size of the entire IPv4 internet today before exhausting your address space. 2^64 subnets is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) subnets. To put that in perspective, allocating by/64 means there are up to 2.6 billion subnets available for each human currently alive today before exhaustion.
So no, it's nothing like the old A/B/C classful allocations. Nothing like it at all. Not is it wasteful.
No you can't -- when the vespene geyser is out, your peons won't enter the extractor/assimilator/refinery any more. 0 vespene extraction from that geyser.
The rankling thing about the ID card project (apart from the masses of irrelevant and intrusive data it was to collect) was that the outgoing Labour government said it was "self financing". So, does the financing fairy come along and sprinkle some pixie dust around, and as if by magic the hundreds of millions needed show up?
No, what they mean is ID cards were to be paid for by those who hold them. Given that the cards were to eventually be compulsory, how is this different from having cards given out for "free" but paid by general taxation? It doesn't (in fact it makes it worse since now they would have needed a completely new payment infrastructure to handle the payments from 60 million people who are compelled by law to buy a card).
It may in itself not bring down a plane but it can cause a lot of distraction.
A few years ago I was flying with a friend, and it was a dark (but not stormy, just rainy) night. We were just intercepting the localizer (the horizontal component of an instrument landing system) when all the audio was suddenly replaced by:
"bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!"
as his phone began to ring. I took over and turned onto the final approach course while he dug his phone out of an inside pocket to shut the damned thing off, something that seemed to take forever at the time (it can be really hard to access an inside pocket when you've got seat belts on and don't have much space to move around and it's pitch dark). It was an unnecessary distraction in a critical phase of flight.
Had ATC asked us to do something else at that point (for example, if another aircraft had called a mayday, or the plane ahead of us had had its landing gear collapse or whatever, or worse still - ATC had made an error and we were heading for a mid-air) we wouldn't have heard the instruction from ATC because the interference from the cell phone blocked all audio, we couldn't even understand each other over the intercom the interference was so loud. While in this case ATC would probably just repeat their instruction if we didn't respond (by which time the cell phone would have been shut off) it would be yet another unnecessary distraction. Incidentally, it did NOT interfere with any flight instruments, just with audio (and GSM phones interfering with audio is pretty common). While planes fly on the principles of Bernoulli and Newton and not on the principles of Marconi, when flying IFR contact with ATC is quite important when making an approach...
Turning off a cell phone is easy, why add the risk even though it's small? The risk may be very small but the consequences if it goes wrong are really nasty.
'This kind of system would also require a complete change in motoring culture for drivers to hand over control.'
And sadly this is why it is doomed to failure. The problems aren't technical, the problems are cultural. We already know that many people's personality changes as soon as they get behind the wheel (normally polite people become aggressive and rude) and that motoring culture already doesn't accept the simple low-hanging fruit of better economy: no one really needs a 235bhp V6 car when the speed limit is only 70 mph.
But unlike the Russians, the US claims to be a country that wants freedom and justice. So when they act contrary to what they want everyone else in the world to do, it is newsworthy and worthy of criticism.
Low 5 figures is about the entire cost of my aircraft. Also there isn't space for anything 3U sized without having one fewer seats. 17lbs is an overnight bag I can no longer take.
About 90% of registered aircraft weigh less than two metric tonnes and have four or fewer seats.
I'm actually using a BBC Master now to do some data preservation of a project I did at school in the late 1980s. I've got the data off the SJResearch MDFS-formatted floppies, now just need to get it onto the USB stick (yes, my Master has a USB interface!) I'm actually writing a program in 6502 asm to do the job.
The same thing has been done to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ULA.
Little remains of the original Ferranti technical documentation of the Ferranti ULA (which was used for the ZX Spectrum, the 5C- and 6C- series, the same ULA technology was used in the BBC Microcomputer and other European machines during the 1980s). At the time Ferranti was the leader in custom logic until they sat on their laurels and let other companies transistion to CMOS and field programmable logic and eat their lunch.
The guy who did the reverse engineering (Chris Smith, a friend of mine) has written a book about the Spectrum ULA which details the Ferranti ULA and how it was used in the Spectrum. It has quite a lot on the Ferranti ULAs, including how they were made, the process for making the IC, etc. as well as its particular implementation in the Spectrum. This was also done by de-encapsulation (which I think involves fuming nitric acid, rather than H2SO4).
Chris's work can be found here (if you want to buy the book, he gets more of the money if you order it through his website rather than Amazon, but it's also available under the GFDL):
I think it's very important that this kind of thing is preserved, the early personal computers are a bit like the equivalent of the early Industrial Revolution textile machinery, but fortunately can be preserved at an individual level rather than needing a huge rich museum.
At school (tr.US: high school) I used to develop my own C-41 *and* print it. I must have been obssessed, printing it was a bastard of a process of getting the colour balance right (usually by making up a test print and exposing several parts with different filters), then stumbling around in complete darkness because the safelight couldn't be used for colour paper.
I also did some E-6 process, now that was easy. Also using Ilford Cibachrome paper to make prints of slides was much easier than doing prints of colour negatives, the colour balance was easy to do and the process didn't require such high temperatures (if you were a bit patient, room temperature was fine, but 25 centigrade was best) and the colour rendition far better.
Spam to my mail server has increased quite significantly the last three months. The most recent low was about the middle of this year (when my personal email address was "only" getting 600 spam emails per day on average), currently the average is closer to 1200 spam emails per day (About a year ago, it was around 1000 spam mails per day on average). Fortunately SpamAssassin catches pretty much everything.
Some interesting things I've noted from the count of spam:
* It drops markedly over weekends (sometimes by as much as two thirds). Either spammers take the weekends off, or the machines with the botnets installed are typically in businesses and are switched off over the weekend. * I noted a big drop in spam when that "false positive" story broke with one of the antivirus vendors (I don't remember which one it was) which rendered a large number of Windows machines unbootable - perhaps these machines were infected after all. * I see a dent in the spam numbers every time there's an announcement about some botnet being taken down. However, the numbers only drop off for perhaps a week or two, after that the spam is back with a vengeance, usually at an even higher rate than before. * The highest single day amount of spam to my personal email address this year was over 1900 spam messages.
I always got the impression that the multi-choice test (IIRC, it's actually 60 questions) was more of a filter to make sure those who really had no business flying because they lacked the intellectual aptitude got filtered out reasonably early. The *real* knowledge test is when the examiner does the oral part, because you just can't bullshit the examiner (or at least, you can't bullshit any DE that I've met).
Of course the instructor has to recommend the student for them to be able to take either the written or practical, and instructors generally want their students to pass and most only sign off people they really think are ready.
Ignoring that France is 75% nuclear for electricity, it's much easier to clean up the output from a handful of big chimneys on power stations than tens of millions of very small ones (car exhausts).
Slashdot Mirror
The sequence could have been this:
* Facebook updated at 07:54:03
* Crash occurs at 07:54:06
* 911 call occurs at 07:54:47
It's quite possible that the update, collision and 911 called happened within the same minute.
The firmware is still there, it's just been moved into the non-free repos (where it belongs because, well, it's non-free).
So we can see the problem coming... so instead of doing something about it now and being ready, you advocate doing nothing? Perhaps a little short sighted? (Especially since ARIN, APNIC and RIPE will probably run out of IPv4 addresses this year)
Back in my school days, we used to talk about the mythical VAX in hushed tones, due to its awesomeness (at least we thought so). I never really used one in anger, they were already on their way out by the time I left school and went to university, but the uni still had a VAX cluster (on which we were forced to write COBOL, which soured the experience somewhat).
I actaully have a small VAX now, something I take to vintage computing shows and use as a fileserver for a network of Sinclair Spectrums...
Using the API, twitter is *very* lightweight.
I've demonstrated using Twitter from a 48K Sinclair Spectrum at various vintage computing events.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ECnN7jdgA4
(Unfortunately they've now introduced their (deeply flawed and truly terrible) oAuth implementation, which makes this sort of thing much harder, although the amount of data remains small).
No cars are WAY cheaper. Let's compare cars (highly automated) with light aircraft (almost completely hand-built). A light plane with the conveniences of say, a Ford Contour costs around $300,000. Mechanically, the light aircraft is *vastly* simpler, too.
More to the point, it's simply impractical for a skript kiddie to scan an entire /64 for machines, the subnet allocation you get has 4 billion times the address space than the entire IPv4 internet.
This is how IPv6 is designed to work, the smallest allocation given to a user is a /64 to allow stateless autoconfiguration. It's why the address is 128 bits in the first place.
The 64 bits left for the network is still incredibly huge. You may be falling for the (intuitive) fallacy that 64 bits is just twice as big as 32 bits, but it's not. 64 bit subnets mean there are 2^32 *times as many* subnets than there are entire addresses in the whole of IPv4, that's to say, you can have *4 billion* networks the size of the entire IPv4 internet today before exhausting your address space. 2^64 subnets is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) subnets. To put that in perspective, allocating by /64 means there are up to 2.6 billion subnets available for each human currently alive today before exhaustion.
So no, it's nothing like the old A/B/C classful allocations. Nothing like it at all. Not is it wasteful.
It's not a sodium reactor that China is planning. It uses thorium(IV) fluoride (a fluorine salt which has nothing to do with elemental sodium).
No you can't -- when the vespene geyser is out, your peons won't enter the extractor/assimilator/refinery any more. 0 vespene extraction from that geyser.
The rankling thing about the ID card project (apart from the masses of irrelevant and intrusive data it was to collect) was that the outgoing Labour government said it was "self financing". So, does the financing fairy come along and sprinkle some pixie dust around, and as if by magic the hundreds of millions needed show up?
No, what they mean is ID cards were to be paid for by those who hold them. Given that the cards were to eventually be compulsory, how is this different from having cards given out for "free" but paid by general taxation? It doesn't (in fact it makes it worse since now they would have needed a completely new payment infrastructure to handle the payments from 60 million people who are compelled by law to buy a card).
It may in itself not bring down a plane but it can cause a lot of distraction.
A few years ago I was flying with a friend, and it was a dark (but not stormy, just rainy) night. We were just intercepting the localizer (the horizontal component of an instrument landing system) when all the audio was suddenly replaced by:
"bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!"
as his phone began to ring. I took over and turned onto the final approach course while he dug his phone out of an inside pocket to shut the damned thing off, something that seemed to take forever at the time (it can be really hard to access an inside pocket when you've got seat belts on and don't have much space to move around and it's pitch dark). It was an unnecessary distraction in a critical phase of flight.
Had ATC asked us to do something else at that point (for example, if another aircraft had called a mayday, or the plane ahead of us had had its landing gear collapse or whatever, or worse still - ATC had made an error and we were heading for a mid-air) we wouldn't have heard the instruction from ATC because the interference from the cell phone blocked all audio, we couldn't even understand each other over the intercom the interference was so loud. While in this case ATC would probably just repeat their instruction if we didn't respond (by which time the cell phone would have been shut off) it would be yet another unnecessary distraction. Incidentally, it did NOT interfere with any flight instruments, just with audio (and GSM phones interfering with audio is pretty common). While planes fly on the principles of Bernoulli and Newton and not on the principles of Marconi, when flying IFR contact with ATC is quite important when making an approach...
Turning off a cell phone is easy, why add the risk even though it's small? The risk may be very small but the consequences if it goes wrong are really nasty.
And sadly this is why it is doomed to failure. The problems aren't technical, the problems are cultural. We already know that many people's personality changes as soon as they get behind the wheel (normally polite people become aggressive and rude) and that motoring culture already doesn't accept the simple low-hanging fruit of better economy: no one really needs a 235bhp V6 car when the speed limit is only 70 mph.
So I don't see it ever happening.
[citation needed]
But unlike the Russians, the US claims to be a country that wants freedom and justice. So when they act contrary to what they want everyone else in the world to do, it is newsworthy and worthy of criticism.
Low 5 figures is about the entire cost of my aircraft. Also there isn't space for anything 3U sized without having one fewer seats. 17lbs is an overnight bag I can no longer take.
About 90% of registered aircraft weigh less than two metric tonnes and have four or fewer seats.
I'm actually using a BBC Master now to do some data preservation of a project I did at school in the late 1980s. I've got the data off the SJResearch MDFS-formatted floppies, now just need to get it onto the USB stick (yes, my Master has a USB interface!) I'm actually writing a program in 6502 asm to do the job.
The same thing has been done to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ULA.
Little remains of the original Ferranti technical documentation of the Ferranti ULA (which was used for the ZX Spectrum, the 5C- and 6C- series, the same ULA technology was used in the BBC Microcomputer and other European machines during the 1980s). At the time Ferranti was the leader in custom logic until they sat on their laurels and let other companies transistion to CMOS and field programmable logic and eat their lunch.
The guy who did the reverse engineering (Chris Smith, a friend of mine) has written a book about the Spectrum ULA which details the Ferranti ULA and how it was used in the Spectrum. It has quite a lot on the Ferranti ULAs, including how they were made, the process for making the IC, etc. as well as its particular implementation in the Spectrum. This was also done by de-encapsulation (which I think involves fuming nitric acid, rather than H2SO4).
Chris's work can be found here (if you want to buy the book, he gets more of the money if you order it through his website rather than Amazon, but it's also available under the GFDL):
http://www.zxdesign.info/book/
I think it's very important that this kind of thing is preserved, the early personal computers are a bit like the equivalent of the early Industrial Revolution textile machinery, but fortunately can be preserved at an individual level rather than needing a huge rich museum.
Given that MM in Roman numerals is 2000, not 1,000,000 - I think "MM" really means "I claim to be an expert about money"
At school (tr.US: high school) I used to develop my own C-41 *and* print it. I must have been obssessed, printing it was a bastard of a process of getting the colour balance right (usually by making up a test print and exposing several parts with different filters), then stumbling around in complete darkness because the safelight couldn't be used for colour paper.
I also did some E-6 process, now that was easy. Also using Ilford Cibachrome paper to make prints of slides was much easier than doing prints of colour negatives, the colour balance was easy to do and the process didn't require such high temperatures (if you were a bit patient, room temperature was fine, but 25 centigrade was best) and the colour rendition far better.
Turn your geek card in now. If you're on any sort of geek-dominated subject, there are no girls let alone in short skirts!
Spam to my mail server has increased quite significantly the last three months. The most recent low was about the middle of this year (when my personal email address was "only" getting 600 spam emails per day on average), currently the average is closer to 1200 spam emails per day (About a year ago, it was around 1000 spam mails per day on average). Fortunately SpamAssassin catches pretty much everything.
Some interesting things I've noted from the count of spam:
* It drops markedly over weekends (sometimes by as much as two thirds). Either spammers take the weekends off, or the machines with the botnets installed are typically in businesses and are switched off over the weekend.
* I noted a big drop in spam when that "false positive" story broke with one of the antivirus vendors (I don't remember which one it was) which rendered a large number of Windows machines unbootable - perhaps these machines were infected after all.
* I see a dent in the spam numbers every time there's an announcement about some botnet being taken down. However, the numbers only drop off for perhaps a week or two, after that the spam is back with a vengeance, usually at an even higher rate than before.
* The highest single day amount of spam to my personal email address this year was over 1900 spam messages.
I always got the impression that the multi-choice test (IIRC, it's actually 60 questions) was more of a filter to make sure those who really had no business flying because they lacked the intellectual aptitude got filtered out reasonably early. The *real* knowledge test is when the examiner does the oral part, because you just can't bullshit the examiner (or at least, you can't bullshit any DE that I've met).
Of course the instructor has to recommend the student for them to be able to take either the written or practical, and instructors generally want their students to pass and most only sign off people they really think are ready.
Ignoring that France is 75% nuclear for electricity, it's much easier to clean up the output from a handful of big chimneys on power stations than tens of millions of very small ones (car exhausts).
You might be good at it, but many people aren't (and an awful lot of Chinese are functionally illiterate owing to their byzantine writing system).
This says it all really: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html