Re:Doublespeak ?
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
treat a collection of people as an individual (Is there a fallacy name for this too?)
Yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy anytime you create an 'excluded middle' it's a flase dichotomy, so treating the actions of a group of individualas as a 'collective' with a single opinion and trying to point out where they are being 'inconsistant' is ignoring the fact that it's possible for a large group to have two or more subsets of people who believe different points of view are correct.
It also ignores that the opinion is that 'open source allows more people to discover the vulnerabilities so they can be 'repaired' more quickly', that makes 'open source' more secure. it's not some intrinsic nature of open source, it's simply that if an open source project is dedicated to securing code there are plenty fo white hats who will help them find and secure the holes in a timely manner.
An orginization who prefers to favor 'security through obscurity' such as microsoft and would have no intention of 'patching every hole they know about even if it breaks probgram X Y or Z' there is no valid reason to consider open source. One has to Desire to make the code more secure with open source, or else one simply makes exploiting the code easier.
well, I've been on a very sucesful diet myself for the past month.
I've been focusing on getting protien and fiber, fresh veggies and fruit, but have also taken a multi vitamin and an amino acid complex and some omega-3s (since my 'diet' is low-fat, and low carb) even though i'm only eating about 1400 calories a day, I'm not feeling that hungry, probably because of the supplements... and my activity level isn't that great, walking about 1-3 miles a day.
so far i've lost 12 lbs this month, that's a loss of almost 1500 calories in fat per day. obesity a virus? I'll buy it when someone eating a healthy diet full of protien, fiber, and essential nutrients such as amino acids and omega-3's and omega-6's. which are fatty acids, contained in most fatty foods in a limited nature but a very limited subset of foods in 'high concentration', normally one needs to consume loads of fat to get much omega-3's except that fish oil and flax seed oil are so abnormally high in omega-3s that just a few grams of the oil can provide an entire daily dose.
if you dislike fish, definitely go for the flax seed oil, you can even use it to incorperate 'stir fry*' and other pan fried foods into one's diet.
I have to agree with the modded funny comments though, the only 'virus' i see causing obesity is the 'viral marketing' of mc donald's and bk. If you must eat fast food do yourself a favor, and go to a subway, and pick up one of their '7 grams of fat or less' subs on wheat bread.
Subway sells quite a bit of food that isn't that great for you too, but who goes to a 'burger joint' for salads? which are usually the only thing with half-way decent nutrition values. at least subway has a line of 7 subs that can be eaten without feeling too bad about it.
*= although in a modern non-stick pan, a little water and/or vinegar will work, as long as you add small amounts every few minutes and increase cooking time slightly
I have a better solution, switch all your Air conditioners etc, to Natural Gas models. then you're billed by the commodity rate they sell for, rather than 'when' peak consumption hours fall. of course the cost of the equipment, the cost of natural gas, the infrastructure changes etc could well add up to a big cost, and i don't know what the bottom line in savings would be (if any)
since a good data center should have back up generators anyways, you could run the cooling subsystem from those backup generators (during peak hours) and use diesel/brew your own biodiesel from waste veggie oil depending on whatever is cheaper.
As landg as you're giving out spoilers you may as well mention they grey haired retired street boxer making his 9th comback from retirment who suddendly becomes a commando in the south american jungles, where he has to defuse a bomb on a safari bus going 35 MPH while a little boy cries about releasing a captive whale back into the ocean when suddenly a fleet of giant alian saucers raze washinton DC, and subjegate the planet to steal all our hydrogen, when some ancient egyptian artifact is discovered that leads to different worlds via wormholes, and then we meet up with a friendly race of aliens who save us, only to bring about the destruction of their civilization meanwhile we find a new galaxy or rtwo and make a group of ascended beings intent on conquest of our galaxy, and unleash a horde of life sucking vampires to life in yet another galaxy, meanwhile a poor nasa astronaut testing a new orbital module gets sucked into a natural wormhole and kills the brother of a vengful officer and runs around that part of the galaxy on a living ship. which it turns out is related to bambi. but then bembi gets stuck in a maze of endless interconnected rooms, some of which move, and which noone has ever escaped from, because it's impossible, except bambi does, but then falls asleep from eating a poised apple and is awoken by a royal buck and then lives happily ever after with a bunch of dwarves.
i wonder how long it will take moderators to get sick of modding up the balmer throwing chairs joke every time it's made in every microsoft related story. can't we come up with something better?
the laptop will be using a standard keyboard, but since it's linux can be using any keymap linux supports. perhaps they will use stickers or an overlayment that are region specific. or perhaps they will just teach people tha 'u' is how you type certain characters on the computer (varying by country) and offer only a simple print out of which character correlates to which qwerty letter, etc.
agreed, safer computing is a good step, but there are vast tracts of the web that can't be accessed without some kind of 'adware' running on your system to 'authenticate' your access to the site, etc. so, the problem doesn't just lie with end users, it's the content providers who opt to rely on adware to 'profit' who wind up creating intersting but adware only supported sites, too.
of course they have to make money somehow, but google manages just fine relying on the data aggregation they perform on server, without needing some 'fancy' system resident piece of adware.
- Is pointing a gun at somebody not a crime if you don't shoot them (or say you had no intention to)?
It's a misdimeanor, not a felony. crossing the street in the middle of the road is a misdemeanor, it's called 'jay walking' if by your standards a misdemeanor is a crime, then everyone in america is a criminal...
Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google.
Oh I know *raises hand* Spent 8.2 trillion dollars the united states government didn't have! almost half of that during the current administrations watch!
Obligitory quote: "Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error. "
amd has athlon 64 processors from $65 (a manchester semptron) to $1,200 (a toledo FX-60) so um yeah somewhere in there they have a price point of more than 3x the cost for 'newer/better' core designs. actually the price difference for a manchester semptron vs a fx 60 is more like 20x fold, but then again the performance and capabilites are pretty night and day too.
and i never said this isn't an initial core design, just that to my knowledge AMD has a 6 month cycle for redesigns to take care of the bugs that crop up, where this article doesn't state what type of cycle Intel is on, or if they even bother to fix bugs in silicon. after all for every 100 bugs fixed 3 new, unknown bugs are introduced, perhaps intel is designing with the logic that 'known bugs are better than unknown bugs' until someone states otherwise i really don't have a clue what intel does about silicon bugs.
Isn't that part of the reason why AMD redesigns their core every 6 months or so? so that they can 'fix' those silicon bugs? leaving them in there for a production run is one thing, but leaving them in there in the next core revision seems well, stupid.
it also helps estabilsh price points, 'oh here is the old design with all these features disabled by software because they're buggy, or you can get this brand new all shiney and fixed and 20% faster because all these features now work chip for 3X the price'
well wikepedia neve read popular science fiction anthologies dating back to the early 1900's and beyond so um yeah, sheesh I'm a geek I know for sure i picked up the defintion from lterature, and i mainly read sci-fi anthologies etc.
i already posted my definition, it's slang, deragatory, and apparently much out of fashion. which just makes me more of a geek for knowing obsolete slang.
my bad it's not in wikipedia yet, but a whineo is a type of drunk, usually a hobo, who has a preference for cheap wines over the vodkas and whiskeys etc.
even urban dictionary lacks an entry stuf to do stuff to do!
you're partially right. the new bankruptcy laws make chapter 7 bankruptcy much harder to qualify for. you need to have a very low income, and a very low set of declared assets. however, the debts arre still unsecured, they cannot take your TV set etc. what the new law has changed is that now people must file underchapter 13 bankruptcy if they make more than $25,000 a year in income, or have assets worth more than $50,000.
Under chapter 13 bankrupcy you're allowed to have around a $100,000 home(if you include it on the bankruptcy, most people opt not to), a $3,000 car, per spouse if married, and around $15,000 worth of 'exempt' assets. anythen else, or anything exceeding the set values, but be taken by the court and sold with the alloted $ value for the item given back to the creditors (if they owned it) and the remaining dollar value given to creditors. after all this, the court assigns a 5 year repayment plan, based on the income of the debtors, after considering living costs such as a morgage payment (only a certain dollar value max is allowed), so as you see, with the exception of cars and homes (homes don't have to be included) and the fact that the court will assign a 5-year repayment plan based on the debtors ability to repay (banks may still wind up getting pennies on the dollar if for instance the debtor had lived large buying 'frivolous' consumables)
unsecured debt is still unsecured, it's just the law has changed so that oinstead of getting $0 on the dollar they now are almost guarenteed to get $.50-$.30 on the dollar... since most people don't and won't file bankruptcy until it's 2-3 times their annual income, and with a 'reasonable' $700 a month morgage, and a 'typical midwest' hosehold income of ~30-40k year... they will typically only take about 60 easy payments of $600-$800 to repay '$120,000' in debts.
the debtor usually gets to keep most everything they own, but it's definitely a raw deal. some of the limits ($3,000 for a car?) are rediculous... and should be at least doubled to compensate for the difficulty of Getting a 'reliable' vehicle for under $3,000 today... dropping the earning limit that people could have to file chapter 7 was basically 'enabling' the credit dcard companies to continue 'business as usual' instead of having to adapt and stop offering people double their annual incomes in total credit lines.
I am not an attorney but at least three people in my family have filed bankruptcy, myself included, i was in before the law change, but would have qualified for chapter 7 even AFTER the law change. sadly my sister would have qualified for 7 before the law change, but now can only consider chapter 13.
my parents have half a million dollars in total debts (secured and unsecured) with about 400k in assets, which is likely related to the amount of credit my siblings and myself have recieved, but with 75% of us having filed on being in the process of filing i think it goes to show that the credit card companies simply over estimated our abilities to repay when they continually upped our credit limits.
Re:Ok, what happens to Renderman now?
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 1
I should say that the golden age of CG movies are now over. Now come the crap movies...the "me too" movies. you're about 5 years late in that prediction. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/
the point is, unlike chernoble which tripled the _global_ backround radiation, a fusion reactor failing would only have local consequences. yes, hard radiation is bad, can cause sterility, and increase the risk of cancer. but it's unlikely that the amount given off in a fusion reactor failure would have noticable long-term effects on many people outside a 1km radius.
but yeah, it would be a bitch to be at the core of the plasma ball rapidly expanding and as it expanded rising... it would loose fusion very fast, but how fast? until it happens we don't actually know. has any scientist working on such a reactor deliberately simulated a total containment field failure? it's quite likely that the reason for the 20X cost difference is that the chinese facility is using unshielded, basic construction techniques. for the 'outer' facility, which means once the plasma melts the shielded 'generator core' any hard radiatition still coming from the plasma has little to stop it from radiating outwards. but the farther you are the exponentially less radiation one is exposed to, so unless this artificial sun is the size of the superdome when contained there isn't going to be a huge consequence for the local community should something go wrong.
Just to remind you but this ball of plasma is going to be about 20 times hotter than the sun, so when it begins thermal expansion, Yes there is going to be an explosion. think a popcorn kernel what happens when it reaches the right temperature? *pop* now think this magnetically contained artificial star, which is about 5 million times hotter than that popcorn kernel, and is being compressed (by magnetic fields) to a tight enough density to enable fusion. the instant the plasma breaches the containment core the entire building will become super heated, and pop like a giant ballon.
fusion generates a lot of high energy radiation, but almost no radioactive particles. fission on the other hand leaves around all these radioactive isotopes, which will be radioactive for the next billion years. if a fusion reactor lost containment and went kaboom the facility might be destroyed and if so residents of the nearby city would have recieved about 5 years worth of x-rays and, some other hard radiation that few except astronauts have even been close to. but due to the short intense burst, the side effects would likely be nil. contrary to anything you may have heard about bruce bannon, the incredible hulk.
actually, having an old *bsd 486 as a dialup router can _increase_ speed. because the BSD socket layer supports full header and packet compression on the packets. that means on good copper from a good site 7.0 killobytes per second downstream on dial-up, of a binary file. sometimes you could get a good 15 killobytes per second off of a usenet feed, including binary groups*.
Not sure how to do this with linux, but with freebsd all i did was change a single line in the ppp.conf** file
*= when i last did this uuencode was the standard, not sure what speeds you'd get with the 'modern' encoding types.
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treat a collection of people as an individual (Is there a fallacy name for this too?)
Yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy anytime you create an 'excluded middle' it's a flase dichotomy, so treating the actions of a group of individualas as a 'collective' with a single opinion and trying to point out where they are being 'inconsistant' is ignoring the fact that it's possible for a large group to have two or more subsets of people who believe different points of view are correct.
It also ignores that the opinion is that 'open source allows more people to discover the vulnerabilities so they can be 'repaired' more quickly', that makes 'open source' more secure. it's not some intrinsic nature of open source, it's simply that if an open source project is dedicated to securing code there are plenty fo white hats who will help them find and secure the holes in a timely manner.
An orginization who prefers to favor 'security through obscurity' such as microsoft and would have no intention of 'patching every hole they know about even if it breaks probgram X Y or Z' there is no valid reason to consider open source. One has to Desire to make the code more secure with open source, or else one simply makes exploiting the code easier.
well, I've been on a very sucesful diet myself for the past month.
I've been focusing on getting protien and fiber, fresh veggies and fruit, but have also taken a multi vitamin and an amino acid complex and some omega-3s (since my 'diet' is low-fat, and low carb) even though i'm only eating about 1400 calories a day, I'm not feeling that hungry, probably because of the supplements... and my activity level isn't that great, walking about 1-3 miles a day.
so far i've lost 12 lbs this month, that's a loss of almost 1500 calories in fat per day. obesity a virus? I'll buy it when someone eating a healthy diet full of protien, fiber, and essential nutrients such as amino acids and omega-3's and omega-6's. which are fatty acids, contained in most fatty foods in a limited nature but a very limited subset of foods in 'high concentration', normally one needs to consume loads of fat to get much omega-3's except that fish oil and flax seed oil are so abnormally high in omega-3s that just a few grams of the oil can provide an entire daily dose.
if you dislike fish, definitely go for the flax seed oil, you can even use it to incorperate 'stir fry*' and other pan fried foods into one's diet.
I have to agree with the modded funny comments though, the only 'virus' i see causing obesity is the 'viral marketing' of mc donald's and bk. If you must eat fast food do yourself a favor, and go to a subway, and pick up one of their '7 grams of fat or less' subs on wheat bread.
Subway sells quite a bit of food that isn't that great for you too, but who goes to a 'burger joint' for salads? which are usually the only thing with half-way decent nutrition values. at least subway has a line of 7 subs that can be eaten without feeling too bad about it.
*= although in a modern non-stick pan, a little water and/or vinegar will work, as long as you add small amounts every few minutes and increase cooking time slightly
I have a better solution, switch all your Air conditioners etc, to Natural Gas models. then you're billed by the commodity rate they sell for, rather than 'when' peak consumption hours fall. of course the cost of the equipment, the cost of natural gas, the infrastructure changes etc could well add up to a big cost, and i don't know what the bottom line in savings would be (if any)
since a good data center should have back up generators anyways, you could run the cooling subsystem from those backup generators (during peak hours) and use diesel/brew your own biodiesel from waste veggie oil depending on whatever is cheaper.
We already had it, It's called '1984' War is peace, freedom is slavery, Ignorance is Strength. http://www.freemasonrywatch.org/1984.html
As landg as you're giving out spoilers you may as well mention they grey haired retired street boxer making his 9th comback from retirment who suddendly becomes a commando in the south american jungles, where he has to defuse a bomb on a safari bus going 35 MPH while a little boy cries about releasing a captive whale back into the ocean when suddenly a fleet of giant alian saucers raze washinton DC, and subjegate the planet to steal all our hydrogen, when some ancient egyptian artifact is discovered that leads to different worlds via wormholes, and then we meet up with a friendly race of aliens who save us, only to bring about the destruction of their civilization meanwhile we find a new galaxy or rtwo and make a group of ascended beings intent on conquest of our galaxy, and unleash a horde of life sucking vampires to life in yet another galaxy, meanwhile a poor nasa astronaut testing a new orbital module gets sucked into a natural wormhole and kills the brother of a vengful officer and runs around that part of the galaxy on a living ship. which it turns out is related to bambi. but then bembi gets stuck in a maze of endless interconnected rooms, some of which move, and which noone has ever escaped from, because it's impossible, except bambi does, but then falls asleep from eating a poised apple and is awoken by a royal buck and then lives happily ever after with a bunch of dwarves.
i wonder how long it will take moderators to get sick of modding up the balmer throwing chairs joke every time it's made in every microsoft related story. can't we come up with something better?
the laptop will be using a standard keyboard, but since it's linux can be using any keymap linux supports. perhaps they will use stickers or an overlayment that are region specific. or perhaps they will just teach people tha 'u' is how you type certain characters on the computer (varying by country) and offer only a simple print out of which character correlates to which qwerty letter, etc.
agreed, safer computing is a good step, but there are vast tracts of the web that can't be accessed without some kind of 'adware' running on your system to 'authenticate' your access to the site, etc. so, the problem doesn't just lie with end users, it's the content providers who opt to rely on adware to 'profit' who wind up creating intersting but adware only supported sites, too.
of course they have to make money somehow, but google manages just fine relying on the data aggregation they perform on server, without needing some 'fancy' system resident piece of adware.
- Is pointing a gun at somebody not a crime if you don't shoot them (or say you had no intention to)?
It's a misdimeanor, not a felony. crossing the street in the middle of the road is a misdemeanor, it's called 'jay walking' if by your standards a misdemeanor is a crime, then everyone in america is a criminal...
Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google.
Oh I know *raises hand* Spent 8.2 trillion dollars the united states government didn't have! almost half of that during the current administrations watch!
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Obligitory quote:
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error. "
amd has athlon 64 processors from $65 (a manchester semptron) to $1,200 (a toledo FX-60) so um yeah somewhere in there they have a price point of more than 3x the cost for 'newer/better' core designs.
actually the price difference for a manchester semptron vs a fx 60 is more like 20x fold, but then again the performance and capabilites are pretty night and day too.
and i never said this isn't an initial core design, just that to my knowledge AMD has a 6 month cycle for redesigns to take care of the bugs that crop up, where this article doesn't state what type of cycle Intel is on, or if they even bother to fix bugs in silicon. after all for every 100 bugs fixed 3 new, unknown bugs are introduced, perhaps intel is designing with the logic that 'known bugs are better than unknown bugs' until someone states otherwise i really don't have a clue what intel does about silicon bugs.
i shoulda said .5 Athlon 64 FX-60's but ah well :)
more importantly it's about 0.75 Athlon 64 FX-55's or equivalent to about 1.0tb in SATA raid, or about 6 GB in good performance RAM.
Isn't that part of the reason why AMD redesigns their core every 6 months or so? so that they can 'fix' those silicon bugs? leaving them in there for a production run is one thing, but leaving them in there in the next core revision seems well, stupid.
it also helps estabilsh price points, 'oh here is the old design with all these features disabled by software because they're buggy, or you can get this brand new all shiney and fixed and 20% faster because all these features now work chip for 3X the price'
yeah nowadays they have up to 4 MB flashable BIOS that run linux http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page.
"when i was a kid, to set the CPU clock we had to manually insert jumpers, And we Loved it!"
hey well i can spell at least as good as the slashdot editors! isn't that good enough?
well wikepedia neve read popular science fiction anthologies dating back to the early 1900's and beyond so um yeah, sheesh I'm a geek I know for sure i picked up the defintion from lterature, and i mainly read sci-fi anthologies etc.
i already posted my definition, it's slang, deragatory, and apparently much out of fashion. which just makes me more of a geek for knowing obsolete slang.
my bad it's not in wikipedia yet, but a whineo is a type of drunk, usually a hobo, who has a preference for cheap wines over the vodkas and whiskeys etc.
even urban dictionary lacks an entry stuf to do stuff to do!
apparently you've never heard of whinoeshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whinoes.
hey sure for your $20,000 bottle of wine you'll never see this stuff used, but for that $2-$5 bottle? very doable.
you're partially right. the new bankruptcy laws make chapter 7 bankruptcy much harder to qualify for. you need to have a very low income, and a very low set of declared assets. however, the debts arre still unsecured, they cannot take your TV set etc. what the new law has changed is that now people must file underchapter 13 bankruptcy if they make more than $25,000 a year in income, or have assets worth more than $50,000.
Under chapter 13 bankrupcy you're allowed to have around a $100,000 home(if you include it on the bankruptcy, most people opt not to), a $3,000 car, per spouse if married, and around $15,000 worth of 'exempt' assets. anythen else, or anything exceeding the set values, but be taken by the court and sold with the alloted $ value for the item given back to the creditors (if they owned it) and the remaining dollar value given to creditors. after all this, the court assigns a 5 year repayment plan, based on the income of the debtors, after considering living costs such as a morgage payment (only a certain dollar value max is allowed), so as you see, with the exception of cars and homes (homes don't have to be included) and the fact that the court will assign a 5-year repayment plan based on the debtors ability to repay (banks may still wind up getting pennies on the dollar if for instance the debtor had lived large buying 'frivolous' consumables)
unsecured debt is still unsecured, it's just the law has changed so that oinstead of getting $0 on the dollar they now are almost guarenteed to get $.50-$.30 on the dollar... since most people don't and won't file bankruptcy until it's 2-3 times their annual income, and with a 'reasonable' $700 a month morgage, and a 'typical midwest' hosehold income of ~30-40k year... they will typically only take about 60 easy payments of $600-$800 to repay '$120,000' in debts.
the debtor usually gets to keep most everything they own, but it's definitely a raw deal. some of the limits ($3,000 for a car?) are rediculous... and should be at least doubled to compensate for the difficulty of Getting a 'reliable' vehicle for under $3,000 today... dropping the earning limit that people could have to file chapter 7 was basically 'enabling' the credit dcard companies to continue 'business as usual' instead of having to adapt and stop offering people double their annual incomes in total credit lines.
I am not an attorney but at least three people in my family have filed bankruptcy, myself included, i was in before the law change, but would have qualified for chapter 7 even AFTER the law change. sadly my sister would have qualified for 7 before the law change, but now can only consider chapter 13.
my parents have half a million dollars in total debts (secured and unsecured) with about 400k in assets, which is likely related to the amount of credit my siblings and myself have recieved, but with 75% of us having filed on being in the process of filing i think it goes to show that the credit card companies simply over estimated our abilities to repay when they continually upped our credit limits.
I should say that the golden age of CG movies are now over. Now come the crap movies...the "me too" movies.
you're about 5 years late in that prediction. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/
the point is, unlike chernoble which tripled the _global_ backround radiation, a fusion reactor failing would only have local consequences. yes, hard radiation is bad, can cause sterility, and increase the risk of cancer. but it's unlikely that the amount given off in a fusion reactor failure would have noticable long-term effects on many people outside a 1km radius.
but yeah, it would be a bitch to be at the core of the plasma ball rapidly expanding and as it expanded rising... it would loose fusion very fast, but how fast? until it happens we don't actually know. has any scientist working on such a reactor deliberately simulated a total containment field failure? it's quite likely that the reason for the 20X cost difference is that the chinese facility is using unshielded, basic construction techniques. for the 'outer' facility, which means once the plasma melts the shielded 'generator core' any hard radiatition still coming from the plasma has little to stop it from radiating outwards. but the farther you are the exponentially less radiation one is exposed to, so unless this artificial sun is the size of the superdome when contained there isn't going to be a huge consequence for the local community should something go wrong.
Just to remind you but this ball of plasma is going to be about 20 times hotter than the sun, so when it begins thermal expansion, Yes there is going to be an explosion. think a popcorn kernel what happens when it reaches the right temperature? *pop* now think this magnetically contained artificial star, which is about 5 million times hotter than that popcorn kernel, and is being compressed (by magnetic fields) to a tight enough density to enable fusion. the instant the plasma breaches the containment core the entire building will become super heated, and pop like a giant ballon.
fusion generates a lot of high energy radiation, but almost no radioactive particles. fission on the other hand leaves around all these radioactive isotopes, which will be radioactive for the next billion years. if a fusion reactor lost containment and went kaboom the facility might be destroyed and if so residents of the nearby city would have recieved about 5 years worth of x-rays and, some other hard radiation that few except astronauts have even been close to. but due to the short intense burst, the side effects would likely be nil. contrary to anything you may have heard about bruce bannon, the incredible hulk.
actually, having an old *bsd 486 as a dialup router can _increase_ speed. because the BSD socket layer supports full header and packet compression on the packets. that means on good copper from a good site 7.0 killobytes per second downstream on dial-up, of a binary file. sometimes you could get a good 15 killobytes per second off of a usenet feed, including binary groups*.
Not sure how to do this with linux, but with freebsd all i did was change a single line in the ppp.conf** file
*= when i last did this uuencode was the standard, not sure what speeds you'd get with the 'modern' encoding types.
**= or something like that pppd.conf whatever