Unlike most people here, I have been using IPv6 for years. I started with a tunnel to Sprint back when the 6bone was the only way to get access, and I now have a tunnel to Freenet6, which even usually works although I get maybe a dozen IPv6 connections per month over it. I honestly don't think that NAT should be given the bulk of the blame for the lack of IPv6 adoption. To be sure, NAT and the general environment of scarcity associated with IPv4 addresses (which turns out to be the primary thing encouraging NAT adoption--and slowing down the rate of increase in the numbers of IPv4 addresses being assigned) are important, but I think that the way that the IPv6 promoters went about trying to get folks to use IPv6 should bear the bulk of the blame.
When the folks who invented IPv6 wanted to give people a chance to use the new protocol in a test environment, they created the 6bone. They then spent years getting the folks who make backbone routers to implement the new protocol on those routers, and when the backbone routers had firmware that would do IPv6, they declared victory and went home. One of the last exchanges I participated in on the 6bone mailing list talked about how, since everyone in the world now had access to IPv6, there was no more need for this test network.
The only problem is that protocol adoption and demand for addresses typically happen from the leaf nodes first, and then they move to the backbones. The sole focus on the backbone providers meant that IPv6 became a solution looking for a problem. Yes, I could have gotten native IPv6 service....if I had been willing to get an OC-512 backhauled from Germany. The problem is, I was (and am) a user with a SOHO LAN and I can't justify paying better than commercial cablemodem rates for access and, as far as I am aware, native IPv6 transport is still not available from Time Warner or Comcast or whoever does the service in my area.
Of course, the news isn't all bad. All the operating systems I routinely run now speak IPv6 natively. The thing is, if I can't buy transport for the protocol, it doesn't matter how cool it is, how cheap the addresses are, or how easy the autoconfig is, it's not at all useful in the real world.
They already make power supplies that do 12V on one side and all of the ATX voltages on the other. As you might expect, they're mostly designed to go into Car PC's, although they've got applications in robotics and other embedded applications. Anything where you might want to power a computer from a battery as a regular thing.
My understanding is that the part of the CRT that's hard (and, therefore, expensive) to manufacture is the shadow mask, and SED's don't have a shadow mask, so a lower manufacturing cost is still something that could be hoped for. We'll have to see what happens. I've been watching the SED technology for a decade, and it's been a couple of years off that whole time.
On the other hand, you can get some really excellent deals on totally huge CRT's right now (like the 23 inch display I'm looking at right now that was bought refurbished for $110) as people convert to LCD's to get their desk back. I'm hoping to be able to buy a matched set of those for a dual-head computer I intend to get real soon now.
The only thing I can find to argue about with your post is that Intel (who, by definition, has the sort of financial resources that Intel had to build a better chip) has been trying to kill the x86 architecture for more than 25 years. Originally, the 8086 and 8088 were intended to be a stopgap, which they just created so that they would have something to release after the 8085 and which would naturally die once the 432 was released in the early 1980's. The 80860, 80960, and the Itanium were all attempts by Intel to kill the x86. So far, it hasn't worked.
Science is not about consensus (which is a political thing) nor is it about an appeal to authority (which is a religious thing) but about data and the conclusions that can be drawn from that data. Now, I'll admit that the gp botched the argument, but at least he's talking about data and conclusions that can be drawn from them and not saying that we should believe in anthropogenic global warming because everybody whose opinion matters believes in it.
What causes the higher carbon dioxide pressure in warm beer than in cold beer is the fact that gasses generally dissolve more poorly in warm liquids than in cold ones. (I think they covered that in the chemistry course I had my third year of high school.) Since a great deal of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the oceans, the ocean's surface temperature will affect the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
It's been months and months (more than a year, as I recall) since I ran the NDISWrapper driver for the wireless interface in my HP laptop. When using the native driver (which I have not had a lick of trouble with since it got included in the stock kernels those months and months ago) I can do things, like run Kismet, or change the SSID without rebooting, that were impossible, or at least appeared impossible, with NDISWrapper.
Actually, the question you quote is a legitimate question, and an important one. Without compensation associated with the act of creation, it's difficult for would-be creators to spend the time to develop the skills needed to create. That's the point of this editorial from Issue 2 of Jim Baen's universe, an on-line science fiction magazine. That editorial makes reference Macaulay's speeches on copyright given in the House of Commons in 1841, in which Macaulay makes the same point The first is quoted here, but it's also in the magazine. The Baen folks don't believe that DRM is the answer, and they put their money where their mouth is with things like the Baen Free Library.
The question is whether or not the additional income from increased ticket sales at live shows and merchandise sold (even additional recordings) to people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of the band more than compensates for the potential income lost from sales of DRM-protected recordings to people who have already heard of the band. My own personal belief is that those people who have tried it (like Janis Ian) have found that it does. In any case, as Cory Doctorow put it in a speech to Microsoft:
No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music."
Apparently, Microsoft wasn't listening when he was talking.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
The reason it hasn't run into anything is because space is basically empty. There's very little out there to hit and what is there is a long way from anything else. So, not it's not *VERY* lucky to have not hit anything. If it had hit something, it would have been very *UN*lucky.
Each pound of paper that goes into landfills and which does not degrade is three pounds of carbon dioxide that had been taken out of the atmosphere.
The discussion about whether or not a different sort of plant would be a better choice as a source of the fiber is interesting, but misses the point, at least partially. It seems likely to me that, should a different fiber be used instead of wood, much of the same land that is under cultivation for wood pulp would also be under cultivation for whatever plant you chose to replace it with, or some other cash crop.
Oh? Upon what is that conclusion based? You might want to examine your underlying assumptions. "Oil" is just an arrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms. If there was sufficient incentive, someone could invent multiple ways of turning sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into a substance that was as identical to petroleum as you could wish. Nobody's going to do that, of course, because the there are already ways to convert the output of plants into replacements for the three main uses for petroleum (as a fuel, as a chemical feedstock, and as lubricant) so there's no point in attempting to duplicate petroleum.
Now, the reason that plant products haven't replaced petroleum for those three main uses is primarily economic: Petroleum is still cheaper than the plants required to turn the plants into biodiesel, lubricating oil, and plastics. Further, the current high prices are viewed by a lot of people as being temporary which limits the willingness to invest in improving the technology to the point where it would even be cost-effective with oil at the prices being paid for it two years ago.
The thing that sticks in my craw is the fact that I would be a prime target for an electric vehicle, but they cost too damn much. I pay $400 per month for the minivan (because I need the seats for all the people in my family) I just bought (because some idiot in a pickup truck didn't know you shouldn't drive 70 mph in a parking lot) and it burns $150 per month in gasoline. Even if I were to entirely eliminate the cost of fuel, I could only justify paying $550 per month for an electric vehicle. That's not enough to buy an $80,000 car, not unless the note is for substantially longer than six years. (My current car note is a sixty-month note.)
Anyway, that leaves me with the option of buying a gasoline-powered car and converting it. That actually is cost-effective (and here is a link to some information about building your own electric car) and I've been interested in that option since I read the article about it in Make but that requires a commitment to the effort (in time, energy, and a reasonably stocked workshop) that I'm not currently willing to make.
It's hard to make sense when talking about performance when computers are involved, and the more general the topic, the more difficulty is encountered. I once dramatically improved the performance of a gas flow computer (meaning: "The system spent considerably more time performing the idle loop.") by re-writing an assembly-language interrupt service routine in C because of the way that the system worked originally.
I don't think it is possible to get any sense out of the topic "programs written in language <x> are necessarily going to be faster than the same programs written in langauge <y>".
First, if you're going to do a design that involves a "big number", it is helpful for the number to actually be "big". If you're going to have addresses of a fixed size (and there are good technical reasons for doing so) then your addresses should all be "big" so that you don't have to change your addressing scheme at some point. Among the numbers that were thought to be "big" but which didn't turn out to be are the number of cylinders in an ST-506 hard drive, the number of bytes in an 8086 segment, and the number of IPv4 addresses.
Second, initial experience with IPv4 showed that addresses would be assigned very inefficiently. It was initially expected that most networks would assign fewer than 1% of their addresses to computers. In fact, the allocation efficiency of IPv6 addresses is tiny by design, as the promoters of IPv6 expect that the minimum allocation of addresses to a single host to be a/64, which means that there are really enough addresses to give 92,000/64's to every square meter of the earth's surface. Actually, I think that 92,000 is wrong. The number I have for the earth's surface area is 510.0501e6 square kilometers which works out to about 36,000/64's for each square meter of earth's surface. Maybe you were thinking millionths of a square mile, because then 92,000 would be about right, but that's kind of an odd unit.
Anyway, of course when people started allocating addresses willy-nilly, people learned to use IPv4 addresses more efficiently, (my home network has more than 2 computers on it for each real live IPv4 address I get with my feed) but IPv6 will always assign addresses inefficiently. I would expect that people will make use of that fact should use of IPv6 ever become widespread.
I've had Web servers up on IPv6 addresses up for most of the last decade and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone has used IPv6 to access those sites that wasn't either connected to my own network or part of a test of the IPv6 connectivity. Now, those sites are not exactly the hottest on the Internet, but there's steady traffic to them, so I'd have to conclude that there are damn few people running IPv6 in the wild.
I've never been particularly impressed with the whole argument behind concentrating on developing the IPv6 backbone capability and presuming that the end user will naturally follow. Historically, demand for addresses come from the leaves of the network, not the trunk of the tree. While there is an environment of scarcity surrounding IPv4 addresses, plenty of addresses are available if you're willing to pay for them. (How much do you think MIT would want for their class-A address block? I'm sure there are plenty of governments, and quite a number of businesses, that would be willing to pay that much, if addresses really were that scarce.)
The argument that routers did not have the resources to handle the available routes may have been compelling when a large router might have 16 megabytes of RAM in it. However, you can fit every/24 on the Internet into 192 MB and 192 MB is a tiny amount of memory for a computer nowadays and a router is just a computer with one or more network interfaces and software that can be configured to forward packets.
It works anywhere the local laws are based on English Common Law. (I would expect it to apply in at least 49 of the 50 United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India, but I am Not a Lawyer. You should consult with an attorney for actual legal advice.) The case that I linked to was where an Austin, TX company and their ISP sued a spammer because the spammer used "flowers.com" in the return address of the spam they sent out. This caused, well, a server meltdown because of the additional load.
Sorry I can't help you track them down. That would require some detective work, but shouldn't be too hard to find someone with both reasonably deep pockets and demonstrable culpability. Since what I'm talking about is based in civil law rather than criminal law, the burden of proof is a lot lower.
I submitted a half-dozen of the documents I've written over the last few years (mostly business reports of one sort or another) and never got a score higher than 35% for any whole document.
It's just you. To me, that answer sounds like the answer I gave (back when I owned an ISP) when asked if I would reveal one of my users: Get a court to agree that I should tell you, and I will. You have to look at it from the perspective of the provider. Other than the reasonable expectation of privacy that any customer expects, they don't have a dog in this fight.
Fans of Starship Troopers (the novel) may recall when Rico is undergoing his MI testing and there are both physical and psychological portions . I always liked the part where he says "I don't understand what they can learn about you from having a secretary jump up on her desk and yell 'Snake!'"
That's not in Starship Troopers, that's in Farmer in the Sky, where the main character (William Lermer, I think) is being evaluated for emigration to Ganymede. Starship Troopers talked about what Rico says under hypnosis at some point.
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I guess it depends on exactly what's wrong. One of my cow-orkers reports a conversation with Dell support whose relevant portion went like this:
CW: This computer wont boot because its hard drive is bad.
Dell: What happens when you run the diagnostics?
CW: There's no way to run the diagnostics because the hard drive is bad and it won't boot.
Dell: What happens when you run the diagnostics?
CW: There's no way to run the diagnostics because the hard drive is bad and it won't boot.
Dell: What happens when you run the diagnostics?
...and so forth.
For my own part, I prefer to deal with a local "white box" dealer. Forget this "overnight the parts" crap. If I have a problem during business hours (and, with desktops, that's the only time that matters) I can have a replacement part in my hot little hands within 20 minutes of observing the problem and it'll be installed within an hour, and that's if I choose to install it myself.
And they're not going to want me to ship it somewhere so they can install XP on it to diagnose a problem that I'm having. I consider that to be an advantage. Not that there aren't downsides. For example, it's a lot of work to get all of the computers exactly the same, so I generally don't even try. For a small number of workstations, the effort required to deal with differing hardware configurations isn't worth trying to make them all the same. Larger companies would have to worry about that. Fortunately, I'm not them.
Actually, helping to make the US a world 'superpower' is what NASA is for. That is why it was created from the NACA, which also wasn't particularly science-oriented (but which was technology-oriented, although I expect most people couldn't tell the difference.) NASA is, after all, an arm of the US government and, therefore, is a political entity. It always has been.
I also bristle at Dr. Friedman's quote. At NASA, spaceflight, especially manned spaceflight, has never really been about science, but has always had a strong political component. That's why I kept telling people to write their congresscritters to get funding for the initiatives proposed a few years back. NASA does, or doesn't do, what it does, or doesn't do, primarily for political reasons, not technical or scientific reasons. The "now" implies that there was some time in the past where science drove spaceflight at NASA and I don't think that time ever existed.
I do have some sympathy with the fact that the meaning of your submission was changed. That's a bummer, dude.
At least you got a chance to correct it.
I realize the columnist's mini-bio at the end says he spent 22 years at JSC as a Mission Control operator, but anyone who says an ignited LOX/Hydrogen mixture -- which formed a huge fireball -- does not constitute an "explosion" in the commonly understood sense of the word is definitely splitting hairs.
And what makes you think that's just his opinion, and what makes you think yours is any better? As it happens, at the time of the events in question I was in college and taking 1-d gas dynamics from a professor who had literally spent 50 years doing design and construction of rocket and jet engines and vehicles powered by those engines (and who wrote the thermodynamics text that the aero e's at the university in question used at that time.) It is not possible to overstate the regard with which this fellow was held. As I recall, that day's class was simply a discussion of that morning's events, and in his expert opinion there was no detonation at all.
My opinion is not nearly so expert, for my only understanding of the differences between detonation and deflagration came from that course, but it sure looks like a deflagration to me, too. So, it's not "splitting hairs", it's describing a completely different phenomenon and any combustion that may have happened from the liquid fuel occurred well after the actual damage the orbiter vehicle happened.
Now, if there's a question of believing an "anonymous coward" on slashdot as opposed to Rudolph Edse. I know who I'm going to go with. I've also read the book in question and, although it accurately describes Dr. Feynman's involvement in the Rogers Commission, it hardly gives the engineering details of the failure. Dr. Edse's conclusions, based upon a simple viewing of the same video that everyone else has seen, differed in no significant way from what would eventually become the conclusions of the commission.
Back when I owned my own business, it was so totally cool to have the letter carrier deliver a fistful of checks in the mail. That was an explicit validation that other people valued what I was doing. In addition to the very real practical considerations of rent and such, it was an egoboost of the first magnitude.
The thing is, there are practical considerations. People need food and shelter to survive and materials to create whatever it is they're driven to create. The people who produce the food and shelter and materials needed to create stuff deserve to be compensated for their time. (Time is, after all, the only real wealth you've got.) That means that if you want to just create full time, you need to somehow derive at least the cost of your expenses from your creations. I don't think that reasonable people will disagree with this. The questions that have to be asked are these: "What is a fair way for creative people to be reasonably compensated for their creations?" and "What is the correct balance between the requirement that the creator be compensated for his time and the purchaser, who should get something for what he gives up, as well as society as a whole?"
That last bit, the one about what society gets, is actually quite an important issue, and one which hasn't get nearly enough attention over the last century or so. It is that benefit which is what encouraged the creation of the whole concept of "intellectual property" in the first place. The idea is that once the creator has been fairly compensated for his effort, then society can take that creation and make other ideas.
On the other hand, people should be allowed to give their stuff away. That's where the various free and open-source licenses come from. They make it easy for people to do just that.
On my computers,/dev/hda is owned by root.disk with permissions of 660, and none of these computers has any real users in the disk group. So, it doesn't matter if I try it at home or not, it's not going to do anything. I suppose that if I routinely ran as root, it would be different, but I don't and it's not.
My experience is that the primary difficulty in learning a programming language has to do with the problem selection. You want to pick problems that are hard enough to require some effort to learn (otherwise, why bother) but you don't want to pick problems that are so hard that you don't know how to begin them. That's the real advantage of taking a course: Working out what problems are the right ones to work on is someone else's problem.
Of course, it's not clear how that experience applies to the problem at hand, but I think it likely that you're right. If you do a lot of extraneous stuff, (and, at least for the case in question, installing Debian is certainly extraneous) it just gets in the way of the actual goal, which is to do some programming. The fellow is looking for a hobby, not a vocation.
If this were 20 years ago, I'd tell whoever it is to get a microcomputer with BASIC-in-ROM and a book on microcomputer BASIC and to try to do something interesting. That system handled enough of the gory details that you could do some simple stuff without worrying about too many extraneous details. Today, the equivalent to that sort of thing would be Perl or Python or Ruby. The precise language doesn't matter because a beginner doesn't know any of the details that make programming in those various languages so different.
I also think that trying to set up a fancy IDE would probably lead to more frustration than it's worth, but maybe that's just me. (All I really need is an 029 keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer. Fortunately, either EMACS or vi blow the heck out of keypunches, I've got gfortran--which can be coerced into compiling do-loops correctly--if I get tired of C, and $90K/year buys a lot of beer.) What's important isn't the language or development system or whatever, it's having enough of a tutorial to do get bootstrapped until you can figure out what problems look interesting.
Why would any company be interested in turning good programmers into bad managers? How many managers does a company need, anyway? If the company wants programmers to have a promotion path, then they should set up a two-track thing like Boeing and TI do. I'm a programmer, I'm 41, and I'm 20+ years from retirement.
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When the folks who invented IPv6 wanted to give people a chance to use the new protocol in a test environment, they created the 6bone. They then spent years getting the folks who make backbone routers to implement the new protocol on those routers, and when the backbone routers had firmware that would do IPv6, they declared victory and went home. One of the last exchanges I participated in on the 6bone mailing list talked about how, since everyone in the world now had access to IPv6, there was no more need for this test network.
The only problem is that protocol adoption and demand for addresses typically happen from the leaf nodes first, and then they move to the backbones. The sole focus on the backbone providers meant that IPv6 became a solution looking for a problem. Yes, I could have gotten native IPv6 service....if I had been willing to get an OC-512 backhauled from Germany. The problem is, I was (and am) a user with a SOHO LAN and I can't justify paying better than commercial cablemodem rates for access and, as far as I am aware, native IPv6 transport is still not available from Time Warner or Comcast or whoever does the service in my area.
Of course, the news isn't all bad. All the operating systems I routinely run now speak IPv6 natively. The thing is, if I can't buy transport for the protocol, it doesn't matter how cool it is, how cheap the addresses are, or how easy the autoconfig is, it's not at all useful in the real world.
They already make power supplies that do 12V on one side and all of the ATX voltages on the other. As you might expect, they're mostly designed to go into Car PC's, although they've got applications in robotics and other embedded applications. Anything where you might want to power a computer from a battery as a regular thing.
On the other hand, you can get some really excellent deals on totally huge CRT's right now (like the 23 inch display I'm looking at right now that was bought refurbished for $110) as people convert to LCD's to get their desk back. I'm hoping to be able to buy a matched set of those for a dual-head computer I intend to get real soon now.
The only thing I can find to argue about with your post is that Intel (who, by definition, has the sort of financial resources that Intel had to build a better chip) has been trying to kill the x86 architecture for more than 25 years. Originally, the 8086 and 8088 were intended to be a stopgap, which they just created so that they would have something to release after the 8085 and which would naturally die once the 432 was released in the early 1980's. The 80860, 80960, and the Itanium were all attempts by Intel to kill the x86. So far, it hasn't worked.
What causes the higher carbon dioxide pressure in warm beer than in cold beer is the fact that gasses generally dissolve more poorly in warm liquids than in cold ones. (I think they covered that in the chemistry course I had my third year of high school.) Since a great deal of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the oceans, the ocean's surface temperature will affect the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
It's been months and months (more than a year, as I recall) since I ran the NDISWrapper driver for the wireless interface in my HP laptop. When using the native driver (which I have not had a lick of trouble with since it got included in the stock kernels those months and months ago) I can do things, like run Kismet, or change the SSID without rebooting, that were impossible, or at least appeared impossible, with NDISWrapper.
Apparently, Microsoft wasn't listening when he was talking.The question is whether or not the additional income from increased ticket sales at live shows and merchandise sold (even additional recordings) to people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of the band more than compensates for the potential income lost from sales of DRM-protected recordings to people who have already heard of the band. My own personal belief is that those people who have tried it (like Janis Ian) have found that it does. In any case, as Cory Doctorow put it in a speech to Microsoft:
The reason it hasn't run into anything is because space is basically empty. There's very little out there to hit and what is there is a long way from anything else. So, not it's not *VERY* lucky to have not hit anything. If it had hit something, it would have been very *UN*lucky.
The discussion about whether or not a different sort of plant would be a better choice as a source of the fiber is interesting, but misses the point, at least partially. It seems likely to me that, should a different fiber be used instead of wood, much of the same land that is under cultivation for wood pulp would also be under cultivation for whatever plant you chose to replace it with, or some other cash crop.
Oh? Upon what is that conclusion based? You might want to examine your underlying assumptions. "Oil" is just an arrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms. If there was sufficient incentive, someone could invent multiple ways of turning sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into a substance that was as identical to petroleum as you could wish. Nobody's going to do that, of course, because the there are already ways to convert the output of plants into replacements for the three main uses for petroleum (as a fuel, as a chemical feedstock, and as lubricant) so there's no point in attempting to duplicate petroleum.
Now, the reason that plant products haven't replaced petroleum for those three main uses is primarily economic: Petroleum is still cheaper than the plants required to turn the plants into biodiesel, lubricating oil, and plastics. Further, the current high prices are viewed by a lot of people as being temporary which limits the willingness to invest in improving the technology to the point where it would even be cost-effective with oil at the prices being paid for it two years ago.
The thing that sticks in my craw is the fact that I would be a prime target for an electric vehicle, but they cost too damn much. I pay $400 per month for the minivan (because I need the seats for all the people in my family) I just bought (because some idiot in a pickup truck didn't know you shouldn't drive 70 mph in a parking lot) and it burns $150 per month in gasoline. Even if I were to entirely eliminate the cost of fuel, I could only justify paying $550 per month for an electric vehicle. That's not enough to buy an $80,000 car, not unless the note is for substantially longer than six years. (My current car note is a sixty-month note.)
Anyway, that leaves me with the option of buying a gasoline-powered car and converting it. That actually is cost-effective (and here is a link to some information about building your own electric car) and I've been interested in that option since I read the article about it in Make but that requires a commitment to the effort (in time, energy, and a reasonably stocked workshop) that I'm not currently willing to make.
I don't think it is possible to get any sense out of the topic "programs written in language <x> are necessarily going to be faster than the same programs written in langauge <y>".
First, if you're going to do a design that involves a "big number", it is helpful for the number to actually be "big". If you're going to have addresses of a fixed size (and there are good technical reasons for doing so) then your addresses should all be "big" so that you don't have to change your addressing scheme at some point. Among the numbers that were thought to be "big" but which didn't turn out to be are the number of cylinders in an ST-506 hard drive, the number of bytes in an 8086 segment, and the number of IPv4 addresses.
Second, initial experience with IPv4 showed that addresses would be assigned very inefficiently. It was initially expected that most networks would assign fewer than 1% of their addresses to computers. In fact, the allocation efficiency of IPv6 addresses is tiny by design, as the promoters of IPv6 expect that the minimum allocation of addresses to a single host to be a /64, which means that there are really enough addresses to give 92,000 /64's to every square meter of the earth's surface. Actually, I think that 92,000 is wrong. The number I have for the earth's surface area is 510.0501e6 square kilometers which works out to about 36,000 /64's for each square meter of earth's surface. Maybe you were thinking millionths of a square mile, because then 92,000 would be about right, but that's kind of an odd unit.
Anyway, of course when people started allocating addresses willy-nilly, people learned to use IPv4 addresses more efficiently, (my home network has more than 2 computers on it for each real live IPv4 address I get with my feed) but IPv6 will always assign addresses inefficiently. I would expect that people will make use of that fact should use of IPv6 ever become widespread.
I've never been particularly impressed with the whole argument behind concentrating on developing the IPv6 backbone capability and presuming that the end user will naturally follow. Historically, demand for addresses come from the leaves of the network, not the trunk of the tree. While there is an environment of scarcity surrounding IPv4 addresses, plenty of addresses are available if you're willing to pay for them. (How much do you think MIT would want for their class-A address block? I'm sure there are plenty of governments, and quite a number of businesses, that would be willing to pay that much, if addresses really were that scarce.)
The argument that routers did not have the resources to handle the available routes may have been compelling when a large router might have 16 megabytes of RAM in it. However, you can fit every /24 on the Internet into 192 MB and 192 MB is a tiny amount of memory for a computer nowadays and a router is just a computer with one or more network interfaces and software that can be configured to forward packets.
Sorry I can't help you track them down. That would require some detective work, but shouldn't be too hard to find someone with both reasonably deep pockets and demonstrable culpability. Since what I'm talking about is based in civil law rather than criminal law, the burden of proof is a lot lower.
But there is. According to English Common Law it is clearly trespass.
I submitted a half-dozen of the documents I've written over the last few years (mostly business reports of one sort or another) and never got a score higher than 35% for any whole document.
It's just you. To me, that answer sounds like the answer I gave (back when I owned an ISP) when asked if I would reveal one of my users: Get a court to agree that I should tell you, and I will. You have to look at it from the perspective of the provider. Other than the reasonable expectation of privacy that any customer expects, they don't have a dog in this fight.
That's not in Starship Troopers, that's in Farmer in the Sky, where the main character (William Lermer, I think) is being evaluated for emigration to Ganymede. Starship Troopers talked about what Rico says under hypnosis at some point.
If SF Fandom appeals to you, and you're near Houston, TX, please consider attending ApolloCon
CW: This computer wont boot because its hard drive is bad.
Dell: What happens when you run the diagnostics?
CW: There's no way to run the diagnostics because the hard drive is bad and it won't boot.
Dell: What happens when you run the diagnostics?
CW: There's no way to run the diagnostics because the hard drive is bad and it won't boot.
Dell: What happens when you run the diagnostics?
For my own part, I prefer to deal with a local "white box" dealer. Forget this "overnight the parts" crap. If I have a problem during business hours (and, with desktops, that's the only time that matters) I can have a replacement part in my hot little hands within 20 minutes of observing the problem and it'll be installed within an hour, and that's if I choose to install it myself.
And they're not going to want me to ship it somewhere so they can install XP on it to diagnose a problem that I'm having. I consider that to be an advantage. Not that there aren't downsides. For example, it's a lot of work to get all of the computers exactly the same, so I generally don't even try. For a small number of workstations, the effort required to deal with differing hardware configurations isn't worth trying to make them all the same. Larger companies would have to worry about that. Fortunately, I'm not them.
I also bristle at Dr. Friedman's quote. At NASA, spaceflight, especially manned spaceflight, has never really been about science, but has always had a strong political component. That's why I kept telling people to write their congresscritters to get funding for the initiatives proposed a few years back. NASA does, or doesn't do, what it does, or doesn't do, primarily for political reasons, not technical or scientific reasons. The "now" implies that there was some time in the past where science drove spaceflight at NASA and I don't think that time ever existed.
I do have some sympathy with the fact that the meaning of your submission was changed. That's a bummer, dude. At least you got a chance to correct it.
And what makes you think that's just his opinion, and what makes you think yours is any better? As it happens, at the time of the events in question I was in college and taking 1-d gas dynamics from a professor who had literally spent 50 years doing design and construction of rocket and jet engines and vehicles powered by those engines (and who wrote the thermodynamics text that the aero e's at the university in question used at that time.) It is not possible to overstate the regard with which this fellow was held. As I recall, that day's class was simply a discussion of that morning's events, and in his expert opinion there was no detonation at all.
My opinion is not nearly so expert, for my only understanding of the differences between detonation and deflagration came from that course, but it sure looks like a deflagration to me, too. So, it's not "splitting hairs", it's describing a completely different phenomenon and any combustion that may have happened from the liquid fuel occurred well after the actual damage the orbiter vehicle happened.
Now, if there's a question of believing an "anonymous coward" on slashdot as opposed to Rudolph Edse. I know who I'm going to go with. I've also read the book in question and, although it accurately describes Dr. Feynman's involvement in the Rogers Commission, it hardly gives the engineering details of the failure. Dr. Edse's conclusions, based upon a simple viewing of the same video that everyone else has seen, differed in no significant way from what would eventually become the conclusions of the commission.
The thing is, there are practical considerations. People need food and shelter to survive and materials to create whatever it is they're driven to create. The people who produce the food and shelter and materials needed to create stuff deserve to be compensated for their time. (Time is, after all, the only real wealth you've got.) That means that if you want to just create full time, you need to somehow derive at least the cost of your expenses from your creations. I don't think that reasonable people will disagree with this. The questions that have to be asked are these: "What is a fair way for creative people to be reasonably compensated for their creations?" and "What is the correct balance between the requirement that the creator be compensated for his time and the purchaser, who should get something for what he gives up, as well as society as a whole?"
That last bit, the one about what society gets, is actually quite an important issue, and one which hasn't get nearly enough attention over the last century or so. It is that benefit which is what encouraged the creation of the whole concept of "intellectual property" in the first place. The idea is that once the creator has been fairly compensated for his effort, then society can take that creation and make other ideas.
On the other hand, people should be allowed to give their stuff away. That's where the various free and open-source licenses come from. They make it easy for people to do just that.
On my computers, /dev/hda is owned by root.disk with permissions of 660, and none of these computers has any real users in the disk group. So, it doesn't matter if I try it at home or not, it's not going to do anything. I suppose that if I routinely ran as root, it would be different, but I don't and it's not.
Of course, it's not clear how that experience applies to the problem at hand, but I think it likely that you're right. If you do a lot of extraneous stuff, (and, at least for the case in question, installing Debian is certainly extraneous) it just gets in the way of the actual goal, which is to do some programming. The fellow is looking for a hobby, not a vocation.
If this were 20 years ago, I'd tell whoever it is to get a microcomputer with BASIC-in-ROM and a book on microcomputer BASIC and to try to do something interesting. That system handled enough of the gory details that you could do some simple stuff without worrying about too many extraneous details. Today, the equivalent to that sort of thing would be Perl or Python or Ruby. The precise language doesn't matter because a beginner doesn't know any of the details that make programming in those various languages so different.
I also think that trying to set up a fancy IDE would probably lead to more frustration than it's worth, but maybe that's just me. (All I really need is an 029 keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer. Fortunately, either EMACS or vi blow the heck out of keypunches, I've got gfortran--which can be coerced into compiling do-loops correctly--if I get tired of C, and $90K/year buys a lot of beer.) What's important isn't the language or development system or whatever, it's having enough of a tutorial to do get bootstrapped until you can figure out what problems look interesting.
Why would any company be interested in turning good programmers into bad managers? How many managers does a company need, anyway? If the company wants programmers to have a promotion path, then they should set up a two-track thing like Boeing and TI do. I'm a programmer, I'm 41, and I'm 20+ years from retirement.