>California seems to have the most uniformly good & adequate roads
Not my experience. It might seem that way with comfortable automobile suspension, but when I drive my RV (truck suspension) the contrast when I cross the border -- any border, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon -- is astonishing. "It's suddenly quiet... Must be in Arizona now."
There's a stretch of I-280 between Highway 87 and Highway 85 that is just plain horrific. The first time I hit that in the RV, I thought I'd blown a tire. I have to drop to 45 mph just to keep from getting my fillings rattled loose. I've never encountered this on any Interstate highway in any other state. (Several long road trips -- California->DC->Florida->Texas loop, Glacier NP ->Banf->BC->Washington loop, round trip to Olympic Peninsula)
I won't even answer the phone if I don't recognize the Caller-ID, and a lot of people I know are doing the same thing, especially in this season of incessant flood of bogus political "push poll" calls. (One of the reasons I stopped picking up the phone for any caller I don't recognize. The other was gadzillions of "handyman" cold callers. Not to mention the "You owe the IRS $$$, send us a Moneygram" and "I am calling from Microsoft, your computer be having a virus" callers.) That may be skewing the polling numbers a bit. (So, in my case, there's either a vote for Johnson or a write-in for Cthulhu they're missing; i haven't decided yet.)
Trump would be a very soft target impeachment bait. At least half the Republicans, and all the Democrats, would be aching for any excuse to remove him from office. The moment he does the first thing that can be construed as a "high crime or misdemeanor", the impeachment in the House and the removal from office vote in the Senate will bounce him out of the White House so fast he'll crack the sidewalk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Neither my wife nor I answer the phone if the Caller-ID isn't one we recognize, so I've just seen these things in the voicemail transcripts that get emailed to me, but they're relentless high-volume callers. Or (past-tense, I hope) were. The few I listened to did sound computer generated.
Depends on the scenario -- In Niven & Pournelle's "Footfall", the aliens were not much advanced over us; the success they had was mostly due to "holding the high ground". Their interstellar trip was kind of an act of desperation, as I recall.
One of the major things that needs to be fixed is to put an end to IP address spoofing. Generally, the worst of these attacks are some sort of amplification attack, where the attacker sends requests to some legitimate service that comes back with a large amount of data, and spoofs his IP address to the target of the DDoS. The first thing every ISP router should check on any packet is "Is it reasonable for a packet from this IP address to come in on this wire?" and if not, drop it. And at some point, "If you allow packets with spoofed IP addresses out of your network, we won't talk to you. At all."
Yeah, there may be some legitimate uses of spoofed IP addresses for diagnostic purposes, but as has been said elsewhere, "This is why we can't have nice things."
Kill files based on keywords and users would be a boon. It's not so much about being "offended", it's more about killing a lot of crap.
This. I want to kill file , for starters, any mention of Trump, Clinton, anyone associated however remotely with the Kardumassians, football, and celebrity gossip.
Maybe some of the outer walls would fall off, but there would be a central core at least 1/2 to 1/3 of the height of the building sticking up.
I don't know why I'm attempting the hopeless task of trying to educate a "loose change" type person, but this shows you don't know how the Twin Towers were constructed. The outer walls were the structure. It was not hanging off of a central core. And before you do the tired old "fire can not soften steel" thing, google "Sherman's Neckties".
My modest proposal -- if a company does the "lay people off and replace them with H1B workers" thing, they completely lose the right to hire ANY H1B workers, not now, not in the future, not ever. And any H1B workers they already have on their payroll get converted to green cards, so they are free to go elsewhere.
Beats me why many people think one of these is a great thing and the other is a problem.
One reason: Compulsion. "You are not permitted to have a job unless you join the union, submit to all our rules, work based on strict seniority as if everyone in each particular job were identical interchangeable worker-units, and activities rigidly controlled by job description, including requiring you to call a Union Electrician when you want to unplug your desk lamp and plug it in on the other side of your desk, you must walk off the job and bad-mouth the employer when and how we tell you to, and pay us a substantial percentage of your pay for the privilege, much of which goes to political candidates you despise. And if you don't like it, tough cookies, you don't get to have a job unless we say so."
Remove the compulsion, and I don't have a problem with them. Cue shrieks of outrage about "freeloaders" from all the totalitarians at this point.
Oracle's antics caused me to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, not from any "GPL Purity" reasons (which I care little about) but from a reasonable suspicion that Oracle, being Evil, would soon do something I did not like.
When it was given to Apache, I'd basically consider it a toss-up between the two, but I was already on LibreOffice, and didn't have any particular reason to go back. Since then, Libre seems to be a more active project than Open, so I prefer it on that basis.
I suspect that's a lot of the issue -- People left "because Oracle" (makes Signs against Evil) they're very close to the same software, one is getting more work done on it than the other, no particular reason to prefer OpenOffice.
A treasurer or controller likely knows the CEO personally, or has at least talked to him in person. The thief would have to be able to convincingly impersonate the CEO. Especially since these tend to be targeting small-to-mid size companies, organizations, and charities.
This has been going on for at least three years that I know of. There's no real "hacking" involved here at all. Just solid research and social engineering.
The thief finds out the name of the CEO, and possibly his email address.
He then finds the name and email address of the treasurer or controller, someone who can transfer funds.
The thief may register a look-alike domain, for instance, "RealCeoName@cornpany.com" instead of "RealCeoName@company.com". (Depending on your font, you might not be able to tell the difference between those two without a magnifying glass. Or even with one.) Or, he may send the email forged as "from" the CEO's real email address with a Reply-To header diverting replies to a Gmail, Hotmail, or Rob-U-Blind.ru email address. (We all know how easy it is to forge email addresses, right?) Or, he may just have a normal-looking Yahoo address. Usually, the "human readable name" of the From header is the CEO's real name, so MS Outbreak will helpfully not show the victim that the email address is not right.
The thief addresses the treasurer or controller by name. Sometimes the initial email is nothing more than "Hey, Bob, are you in the office today?" If Bob bites, then the pitch for the transfer is sent. Or, the transfer request might be right up front. A common phrase is "I'm in meetings and can't take calls, kindly email me." If the thief gets no answer, he'll often send a "Bob, did you get my last email?" ping.
Amounts are usually in the few tens of thousands of dollars. If the financial officer falls for it, more transfer requests are likely to follow until they finally wise up.
I saw one where the thief somehow knew about a legitimate transaction, and inserted himself, saying "We changed banks, send the payment for that shipment of widgits to our new account,..." That one I suspect was an inside job.
A related scam is "Hey, Bob, I'm in China, and this fantastic merger opportunity came up. It is absolutely imperative you keep this completely quiet, and tell NO ONE about it! The lawyer who is handling this will be contacting you in a separate email." This scam can go for hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Defense: Everyone who handles money, and everyone who says how money is to be handled, most especially the CEO, must agree and sign off on an absolutely inflexible rule that financial transactions are NEVER NEVER NEVER done just on the basis of email. Actual voice confirmation should be required, or the request must go through the company's normal accounting application, etc.
Though, if the cosmos is a simulation, one way to prove it would be to find a way to hack it.
On the other hand, if you do, THEY will likely save the state, halt the simulation, debug their code, then re-start it with the vulnerability closed, and we'll never be the wiser, except "That's funny, that worked yesterday..."
Eppur si muove trumps "Known Laws of Physics", Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and everything else.
Assuming, of course, it actually does muove. I'm not convinced. But if they've gotten this far, I say, launch the thing, run it in space, and see if the anomalous thrust still happens.
If it does, then it's the "Known Laws of Physics" that have to bend to reality.
Yeah, I mentioned the Second Amendment because it's really a question of do the actual words of the Constitution have any actual meaning, or is the Constitution just some Rorschach blot that means whatever five out of nine black-robed oligarchs happen to want it to mean this week? If it needs to be amended or repealed, do so. That's the process.
All the other things... Yeah, Hillary is horrible on them, too, but The Donald isn't any better. ("Boycott Apple if they don't provide a backdoor!") It's flip a coin... or flush the coin down the toilet and look for a better coin.
Oh, I can readily believe that The Donald's whole campaign has been a sham. With perhaps a dose of narcissistic personality disorder; I think that's the remote diagnosis that I've heard bandied about that doesn't seem entirely unlikely to me. (Please do not confuse me with someone who would ever under any circumstances vote for Trump.)
Shuttle ETs never got up to a stable orbit. It would have been possible to use the OMS to take them up there, but then the Shuttle would have had basically no payload capacity on that mission.
On that issue, the shuttle actually used the OMS engines to steer the ET into a quick re-entry, then dropped it and used the OMS engines to get into the orbit they wanted. They used extra fuel to do this. (This doesn't address the other issues with the concept, of course.)
It's a damn shame they didn't do it with the shuttle external fuel tanks. Those things were huge. How many would we have in use now if that was part of the design?
A lot of people lobbied hard for that. My understanding is that the biggest barrier standing in the way was that the spray-on foam insulation on the external tanks would likely "popcorn" in vacuum, filling LEO with more little bits of debris. (I'm not sure where I read that; it was ages ago.) Junk in LEO is already a big enough problem.
Hillary has not been convicted of a crime, true. And Donald has not been examined and declared insane by a psychiatrist. Also true. Neither of these are exactly ringing endorsements of their regard for the law or their sanity.
Just reprocessing fuel from ordinary reactors and putting the unburnt plutonium and U235 back into new fuel rods greatly increases the years of proven reserves we have of uranium. Breeders ups it another order of magnitude. Beyond that, ion exchange processes have demonstrated extraction of uranium from sea water. This was demonstrated by the Japanese back in 1970something, at a cost of a few hundred dollars per pound. Not economical now, but at some point it would be.
Not to mention thorium. My CRC Handbook says that the available energy in the earth's crust from thorium is greater than uranium and all fossil fuels put together; thorium is about as common as lead.
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>California seems to have the most uniformly good & adequate roads
Not my experience. It might seem that way with comfortable automobile suspension, but when I drive my RV (truck suspension) the contrast when I cross the border -- any border, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon -- is astonishing. "It's suddenly quiet... Must be in Arizona now."
There's a stretch of I-280 between Highway 87 and Highway 85 that is just plain horrific. The first time I hit that in the RV, I thought I'd blown a tire. I have to drop to 45 mph just to keep from getting my fillings rattled loose. I've never encountered this on any Interstate highway in any other state. (Several long road trips -- California->DC->Florida->Texas loop, Glacier NP ->Banf->BC->Washington loop, round trip to Olympic Peninsula)
I won't even answer the phone if I don't recognize the Caller-ID, and a lot of people I know are doing the same thing, especially in this season of incessant flood of bogus political "push poll" calls. (One of the reasons I stopped picking up the phone for any caller I don't recognize. The other was gadzillions of "handyman" cold callers. Not to mention the "You owe the IRS $$$, send us a Moneygram" and "I am calling from Microsoft, your computer be having a virus" callers.) That may be skewing the polling numbers a bit. (So, in my case, there's either a vote for Johnson or a write-in for Cthulhu they're missing; i haven't decided yet.)
Trump would be a very soft target impeachment bait. At least half the Republicans, and all the Democrats, would be aching for any excuse to remove him from office. The moment he does the first thing that can be construed as a "high crime or misdemeanor", the impeachment in the House and the removal from office vote in the Senate will bounce him out of the White House so fast he'll crack the sidewalk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Neither my wife nor I answer the phone if the Caller-ID isn't one we recognize, so I've just seen these things in the voicemail transcripts that get emailed to me, but they're relentless high-volume callers. Or (past-tense, I hope) were. The few I listened to did sound computer generated.
Depends on the scenario -- In Niven & Pournelle's "Footfall", the aliens were not much advanced over us; the success they had was mostly due to "holding the high ground". Their interstellar trip was kind of an act of desperation, as I recall.
One of the major things that needs to be fixed is to put an end to IP address spoofing. Generally, the worst of these attacks are some sort of amplification attack, where the attacker sends requests to some legitimate service that comes back with a large amount of data, and spoofs his IP address to the target of the DDoS. The first thing every ISP router should check on any packet is "Is it reasonable for a packet from this IP address to come in on this wire?" and if not, drop it. And at some point, "If you allow packets with spoofed IP addresses out of your network, we won't talk to you. At all."
Yeah, there may be some legitimate uses of spoofed IP addresses for diagnostic purposes, but as has been said elsewhere, "This is why we can't have nice things."
I love Big Brother. Don't you love Big Brother? Maybe you need re-education.
Kill files based on keywords and users would be a boon. It's not so much about being "offended", it's more about killing a lot of crap.
This. I want to kill file , for starters, any mention of Trump, Clinton, anyone associated however remotely with the Kardumassians, football, and celebrity gossip.
Maybe some of the outer walls would fall off, but there would be a central core at least 1/2 to 1/3 of the height of the building sticking up.
I don't know why I'm attempting the hopeless task of trying to educate a "loose change" type person, but this shows you don't know how the Twin Towers were constructed. The outer walls were the structure. It was not hanging off of a central core. And before you do the tired old "fire can not soften steel" thing, google "Sherman's Neckties".
My modest proposal -- if a company does the "lay people off and replace them with H1B workers" thing, they completely lose the right to hire ANY H1B workers, not now, not in the future, not ever. And any H1B workers they already have on their payroll get converted to green cards, so they are free to go elsewhere.
Beats me why many people think one of these is a great thing and the other is a problem.
One reason: Compulsion. "You are not permitted to have a job unless you join the union, submit to all our rules, work based on strict seniority as if everyone in each particular job were identical interchangeable worker-units, and activities rigidly controlled by job description, including requiring you to call a Union Electrician when you want to unplug your desk lamp and plug it in on the other side of your desk, you must walk off the job and bad-mouth the employer when and how we tell you to, and pay us a substantial percentage of your pay for the privilege, much of which goes to political candidates you despise. And if you don't like it, tough cookies, you don't get to have a job unless we say so."
Remove the compulsion, and I don't have a problem with them. Cue shrieks of outrage about "freeloaders" from all the totalitarians at this point.
Except that flying didn't actually violate the known laws of physics...
Eppur si muove trumps all the "laws of physics" in all the textbooks in all the universe.
If it works, it'll prove we don't have as absolutely complete and comprehensive a knowledge of the actual laws of physics as we think we do.
Assuming it does work, which I would not put any money on. But if it does work, that will be very exciting
Putting it in space should settle the "does it work" issue.
Oracle's antics caused me to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, not from any "GPL Purity" reasons (which I care little about) but from a reasonable suspicion that Oracle, being Evil, would soon do something I did not like.
When it was given to Apache, I'd basically consider it a toss-up between the two, but I was already on LibreOffice, and didn't have any particular reason to go back. Since then, Libre seems to be a more active project than Open, so I prefer it on that basis.
I suspect that's a lot of the issue -- People left "because Oracle" (makes Signs against Evil) they're very close to the same software, one is getting more work done on it than the other, no particular reason to prefer OpenOffice.
A treasurer or controller likely knows the CEO personally, or has at least talked to him in person. The thief would have to be able to convincingly impersonate the CEO. Especially since these tend to be targeting small-to-mid size companies, organizations, and charities.
This has been going on for at least three years that I know of. There's no real "hacking" involved here at all. Just solid research and social engineering.
The thief finds out the name of the CEO, and possibly his email address.
He then finds the name and email address of the treasurer or controller, someone who can transfer funds.
The thief may register a look-alike domain, for instance, "RealCeoName@cornpany.com" instead of "RealCeoName@company.com". (Depending on your font, you might not be able to tell the difference between those two without a magnifying glass. Or even with one.) Or, he may send the email forged as "from" the CEO's real email address with a Reply-To header diverting replies to a Gmail, Hotmail, or Rob-U-Blind.ru email address. (We all know how easy it is to forge email addresses, right?) Or, he may just have a normal-looking Yahoo address. Usually, the "human readable name" of the From header is the CEO's real name, so MS Outbreak will helpfully not show the victim that the email address is not right.
The thief addresses the treasurer or controller by name. Sometimes the initial email is nothing more than "Hey, Bob, are you in the office today?" If Bob bites, then the pitch for the transfer is sent. Or, the transfer request might be right up front. A common phrase is "I'm in meetings and can't take calls, kindly email me." If the thief gets no answer, he'll often send a "Bob, did you get my last email?" ping.
Amounts are usually in the few tens of thousands of dollars. If the financial officer falls for it, more transfer requests are likely to follow until they finally wise up.
I saw one where the thief somehow knew about a legitimate transaction, and inserted himself, saying "We changed banks, send the payment for that shipment of widgits to our new account, ..." That one I suspect was an inside job.
A related scam is "Hey, Bob, I'm in China, and this fantastic merger opportunity came up. It is absolutely imperative you keep this completely quiet, and tell NO ONE about it! The lawyer who is handling this will be contacting you in a separate email." This scam can go for hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Defense: Everyone who handles money, and everyone who says how money is to be handled, most especially the CEO, must agree and sign off on an absolutely inflexible rule that financial transactions are NEVER NEVER NEVER done just on the basis of email. Actual voice confirmation should be required, or the request must go through the company's normal accounting application, etc.
Oh, for a mod point to mark this "funny".
Though, if the cosmos is a simulation, one way to prove it would be to find a way to hack it.
On the other hand, if you do, THEY will likely save the state, halt the simulation, debug their code, then re-start it with the vulnerability closed, and we'll never be the wiser, except "That's funny, that worked yesterday..."
Eppur si muove trumps "Known Laws of Physics", Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and everything else.
Assuming, of course, it actually does muove. I'm not convinced. But if they've gotten this far, I say, launch the thing, run it in space, and see if the anomalous thrust still happens.
If it does, then it's the "Known Laws of Physics" that have to bend to reality.
What I want is Kill Files, as in Usenet/trn4.0
/Hillary/k
/Trump/k
/Clinton/k
/Kardassian/k
Just for starters.
Also, I want to add to the kill file Every. Single. Damn. Web page... that does that click-bait abomination
OK, who else heard "wafer thin probe" in John Cleese's fake French accent?
Yeah, I mentioned the Second Amendment because it's really a question of do the actual words of the Constitution have any actual meaning, or is the Constitution just some Rorschach blot that means whatever five out of nine black-robed oligarchs happen to want it to mean this week? If it needs to be amended or repealed, do so. That's the process.
All the other things... Yeah, Hillary is horrible on them, too, but The Donald isn't any better. ("Boycott Apple if they don't provide a backdoor!") It's flip a coin... or flush the coin down the toilet and look for a better coin.
Oh, I can readily believe that The Donald's whole campaign has been a sham. With perhaps a dose of narcissistic personality disorder; I think that's the remote diagnosis that I've heard bandied about that doesn't seem entirely unlikely to me. (Please do not confuse me with someone who would ever under any circumstances vote for Trump.)
Shuttle ETs never got up to a stable orbit. It would have been possible to use the OMS to take them up there, but then the Shuttle would have had basically no payload capacity on that mission.
On that issue, the shuttle actually used the OMS engines to steer the ET into a quick re-entry, then dropped it and used the OMS engines to get into the orbit they wanted. They used extra fuel to do this. (This doesn't address the other issues with the concept, of course.)
It's a damn shame they didn't do it with the shuttle external fuel tanks. Those things were huge. How many would we have in use now if that was part of the design?
A lot of people lobbied hard for that. My understanding is that the biggest barrier standing in the way was that the spray-on foam insulation on the external tanks would likely "popcorn" in vacuum, filling LEO with more little bits of debris. (I'm not sure where I read that; it was ages ago.) Junk in LEO is already a big enough problem.
Hillary has not been convicted of a crime, true. And Donald has not been examined and declared insane by a psychiatrist. Also true. Neither of these are exactly ringing endorsements of their regard for the law or their sanity.
This.
Just reprocessing fuel from ordinary reactors and putting the unburnt plutonium and U235 back into new fuel rods greatly increases the years of proven reserves we have of uranium. Breeders ups it another order of magnitude. Beyond that, ion exchange processes have demonstrated extraction of uranium from sea water. This was demonstrated by the Japanese back in 1970something, at a cost of a few hundred dollars per pound. Not economical now, but at some point it would be.
Not to mention thorium. My CRC Handbook says that the available energy in the earth's crust from thorium is greater than uranium and all fossil fuels put together; thorium is about as common as lead.