The Islamic countries do that stuff all the time. So does China. So do various other third-world countries. We ignore it, because it's _over there_, in the third world, where it belongs.
We like to think of Greece as being a first-world country, one of the most advanced and enlightened countries in the world, because Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Alexander the Great and Euclid were all Greek and because the Library of Alexandria was Greek and because we're all taught in school that democracy was invented in Athens (a dubious assertion, but a popular one) and so on and so forth -- Classical Antiquity. Greece was a major source of culture...
But that was more than a thousand years ago. Greece today is actually rather a mess.
Do the things any intelligent network administrator will tell you to do.
First, most important, keep offsite backups of your data. You should be doing this anyway, even if you have the best anti-virus software in the world, because anti-virus fundamentally cannot protect you from hard drive failure or a building fire. (Yes, the latter *does* sometimes happen in college dorms.) If you've got someone you can trust (and vice versa) living in a different building, a good way to do backups is to each get a spare hard drive (or agree to each use only half the capacity of the smaller hard drive) and use an automated process (e.g., rsync -- I don't think Windows comes with this out of the box, but I'm sure there must be an equivalent available) to back up each other's data: thus, your computer has a spare drive with your friend's data, and your friend's computer has a spare drive with your data. Set it up to happen at a time of day when you're both either asleep or away from your computer.
Second, create a non-administrative user account and use it. Only use an account with admin privileges when you specifically need to do system administration tasks. The rest of the time, use a non-admin account. (If you're a Windows user, do *not* make your files "private". That sounds good on the face of it, but in practice it makes your data more difficult to recover if something goes wrong with your account. Ordinarily, you can just log in as administrator, create a new account, and copy your data over from the old account to the new one. If you tell Windows to make your files private, then you end up jumping through extra hoops your data back. Of course, you have backups, but they were probably made last week and so don't have the paper you wrote yesterday that's due tomorrow. It's important to have them, because in a real crunch they're all you've got, but ideally you want to avoid losing even the data since your last backup.)
Do not swap floppies with other students' computers or the school's, and if you're going to be using other kinds of removable media (CDs, USB Flash drives, whatever) you should set your BIOS to not boot from those media. Also, make very sure you turn off anything that runs programs from removable media by default (*cough* Windows AutoPlay *cough*). College campuses are often a festering cesspit of assorted malware. You do not want your computer to execute anything that comes from there. Oh, also don't execute anything that anybody sends you as an email attachment, ever. Data files are usually safe, but be sure you can tell the difference. (Among other things, if Windows Explorer is set to hide extensions of known file types from you -- which I think is the default lately -- that's very bad. Uncheck that box immediately.)
*Do* install the security updates and service packs that have been released for your operating system. Use the system's built-in automatic update facility if possible.
Only install software that you obtain from the people who created it. If you want to install the latest Internet Explorer, for example, go directly to Microsoft's website and get it from there. Do not get it from anywhere else. (This implies that if there's any commercial software you want, you should actually pay for it, or else use a genuinely-free alternative. Avoid warez. It's unsafe. For example, getting OpenOffice.org directly from www.openoffice.org is much safer than downloading a pirated cracked version of Microsoft Office.) Similarly, if you want to install Firefox, go to mozilla.org and get it from there. Do not install any executable software that you get from a third-party site, especially one with a disreputable-sounding name like awesomedownloadfiles.com or free.hackedsoftware.cc or www.mozilla.org.downloads.k2swongy9vidwl.info.
Finally, if you can possibly manage it, put an external hardware firewall between your computer and the campus network, and configure it to only forward the kinds of traffic you actually need and block everything else by defa
> Anybody here know at what rate [helium formation due > to radioactive decay] happens, like, in liters per year?
I don't think that's currently known. We haven't even really figured out the rate of oil or coal formation yet, let alone natural gas or helium.
I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit faster than the millions of years originally speculated, and I'm also pretty sure it's quite a bit slower than the rate at which we're currently using the stuff up, but there's a very large range of possible formation rates in between.
At a rough guess, I'd speculate that we've perhaps used a thousand years' worth of most of these things in the last century. But that's a VERY rough guess. It could easily be off by an order of magnitude or more.
The other thing is, some deposits are quite a bit easier than others to find, extract, and exploit.
> The US government keeps the price of helium artificially low.
You make it sound like making helium prices low was the express purpose of selling off the reserve. That was merely a side effect. Mostly, they didn't want to maintain the reserve any more, since it had long since become obvious that it was not going to be needed for military dirigibles after all, and its use as a coolant had also waned in importance, and it was costing a lot of money to maintain, and it just plain wasn't necessary. (In fact, knowing what we know now, it wasn't necessary to ever create the reserve in the first place. Also, the Vietnam war was essentially pointless. Isn't hindsight cool?) Frankly, the government would've been happier if there were more demand for the helium, so as to keep the price high, so they could recover more of their investment. They're not getting out what they put into it, which has to rankle. But what can you do? If there's not enough demand to support a higher price, how can you sell your stock for a higher price?
The artificially low price is also temporary, of course. It'll go back to where it was as soon as the reserve is sold off.
> How long do you need for a party balloon to stay filled?
Need, or want?
(Even if it stays aloft for three weeks, some kids are still going to cry when it comes down. Maybe someday they'll invent a hydrogen-based foam that will keep the balloon aloft for a year.)
> There is some danger in the handling of cylinders.
Compressed gas cylinders are dangerous no matter what gas you put in them. Sure, some compressed gases are particularly nasty (HF springs immediately to mind), but even a compressed air cylinder is dangerous if you handle it improperly, or if the valve is in less than perfect condition, or if there's a fire, or if anything unexpected happens that suddenly changes its situation (e.g., by knocking it over on the ground). If a particular gas is only dangerous in a compressed gas cylinder, then it's not the gas that's dangerous: it's the cylinder.
Pure hydrogen, to be fair, is significantly more dangerous than air. Given a source of ignition, it reacts rather vigorously with oxygen, including the oxygen in the air, or any other high-quality oxidizer that's available. It's at least as reactive as gasoline. (If anything, being a room-temperature gas, it burns faster than gasoline, because it doesn't have to vaporize first to mix with the oxidizer.)
This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea to use hydrogen in balloons. We use gasoline to power our cars, lawn mowers, etc. Practically every household in the developed world has some of the stuff sitting around. We keep it in specially marked containers, and we know it's flammable, and we treat it as such, but we don't refuse to use it.
> (So neon would also work, but it has problems similar to helium.)
Actually, neon is sufficiently dense that it doesn't escape the atmosphere at anywhere near the rate helium dues; consequently, it can be recovered in quantity by fractional distillation of air. Even if we use up 100% of the natural gas deposits and all the helium floats away into the upper atmosphere and drifts off into space, we'll still be able to obtain neon. It's more expensive to get than helium currently is, because the current method of getting helium is significantly cheaper than fractional distillation of air.
For noble-gas applications where density doesn't really matter (e.g., in light bulbs), we can use argon, which is significantly denser than air and thus relatively easy to keep contained and to recover for re-use. Argon is effectively inert, being only just very barely more reactive than neon. It wasn't until 2000 that somebody finally figured out how to get it to form a compound with fluorine under highly exotic conditions, and the resulting compound breaks apart and gives you your plain old argon back if you let it warm up to 40 whole kelvins. Basically, argon is inert. (The fact that this compound can be formed says more about fluorine than it does about argon, IMO. I believe neon is the only element not yet known to form any compounds with fluorine, unless you count metastable elements with such short half-lives that their chemistry cannot be studied at all. Essentially, if you're trying to show that something is not entirely chemically inert, reacting it with fluorine is cheating. Yeah, it can be forced to react with fluorine. It could probably be made to react with antimatter too. So what?)
For low-density applications where chemical reactivity is unimportant, we can use hydrogen, which can be easily obtained in bulk by electrolysis of water. (I'm not sure if that's the cheapest way to get it, but it's a way that I know will work and can reliably provide preposterously large quantities of hydrogen.)
The applications we really have to worry about, in terms of running out of helium, are the ones where the non-reactivity and the low density are both important.
Technically it would be more accurate to say that "flammable" means "inflammable".
(Really. "Inflammable" is the older word, obtained by adding -able to a Latin verb that basically means burn. "Flammable" was coined later, derived from "inflammable" by shortening it, probably influenced also by the English word "flame". It means inflammable. Now you know.)
Oh, there was flame, believe me. When you react H2 and O2 with one another, there's flame.
However, if might not have been a particularly _visible_ flame (depending on what impurities there were in the hydrogen; if it was really pure, the primary color would be ultraviolet, I think), and, perhaps more relevantly, it would not have lasted very long. Individual party balloons are not large (so there's not much distance between the center and the edge), and there's plenty of oxygen in the surrounding air, so the reaction would have run its course in a relatively short period of time -- perhaps even too fast to catch the balloons themselves on fire (if they were even flammable -- traditional latex balloons would be, but foil party balloons might not).
> Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless > you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well.
There are other ways to make it unsafe besides that particular example. Taking the hydrogen balloons into the hospital room of somebody who's on oxygen, for example, would not be a particularly good idea, especially in dry weather (when static is more likely than average).
But yeah, in the general case, hydrogen in a tied-off balloon is no more dangerous than e.g. gasoline in a closed gas can, and we carry that stuff around all the time and use it to power our lawn mowers, no big deal. No big deal, as long as you make sure everybody knows it's significantly flammable. Gas cans are generally labeled in red and/or yellow, at least in the US, with the words "gasoline" and/or "flammable". This is a sensible precaution. Hydrogen balloons could have, I don't know, little neon orange "flammable hydrogen" collars tied onto the inflation nozzle, which as an added bonus could be designed to anchor the string. As long as people treat them with a modicum of respect (probably not a big problem for most Americans -- no more so than gas cans anyway -- since everybody's heard of the Hindenberg), the risks should remain pretty well controlled.
> You don't realise how big a 128-bit address space is.
I think you underestimate people's desire to obtain larger blocks of addresses than they could ever possibly have any use for in their wildest imaginings. I'd say "wait and see", except realistically I don't think IPv6 will ever see mainstream use. If it did, the addresses would be over-allocated to the point where they would eventually run out, just like with IPv4.
> As for a 1024-bit address space, why would every atom in the > observable universe need over 10^200 IP addresses?
Why would the English government *need* a Class-A block they aren't even using?
Need has nothing to do with anything. We mindlessly rubber stamp any application for any size of allocation without questioning whether it's needed or charging anything per address. We don't *need* 1024-bit addresses. We don't *need* 128-bit addresses.
There are some valid points there and some important improvements that could be made to the way things are handled in the Linux world. There *should* be a standard base against which packages can be developed. Apps should *not* have to be recompiled in order to be installed on a newer version of the OS. These would be improvements. There are others too.
However, I don't for one minute believe the presence of usable package management with a centralized update mechanism is the cause of these problems. There are other causes. Dynamically linking against absolutely everything, as opposed to just key stable system APIs, is one cause. The _lack_ of stable APIs for important things like widget sets, so that a binary compiled against one point release will frequently not work with another, is another cause. The culture that says it's normal for developers to distribute only source and let the downstream vendors each compile everything themselves is another cause.
There's nothing inherent about centralized application upgrade management that won't work with Windows, except for the fact that Microsoft hasn't bothered to implement it.
> Well, with only 32 bits of address space, that's only 4,294,967,296 possible > addresses, and there are already more people on the planet. We do need more.
An IP address is not your personal ID number for some kind of sci-fi dystopian society. What on earth would give you the idea that we need one for each person on the planet?
We need one IP address for every non-virtual public server (more than one for the few domains that need to have their traffic go to multiple different places), a few hundred thousand for IT professionals who need to be able to shell into their home systems from work, at least one per ISP (more for large ISPs that have divisions in diverse geographical areas) for their NAT gateways, and a few for hobbyists who want to mess around with peer-to-peer. Add that all up and pad it by a couple thousand percent for good measure (to cover things like allocating power-of-two-sized blocks to simplify routing), and you're still _well_ within the bounds of what IPv4 can handle for the forseeable future.
> The implication being that for such a question you would get a more accurate > representation of their position by flipping a coin than by actually asking them
Having seen the sample question in the article summary, that wouldn't greatly surprise me. It appears to have been designed specifically to confuse anyone who doesn't bother to think about such things analytically -- i.e., most of the population.
However, it's also true that a lot of people, when taking a test, just write down anything they think will be counted as a good answer, without regard for whether it is _true_ or not. This allows people to pass tests on subject matter they don't actually believe or understand at all, much less care about. It's ingrained behavior for most people starting in about third grade.
When asked to defend one of their earlier answers, most test subjects on the whole probably weren't thinking "Is this what I believe?" I mean, come on, my sixth-grade teacher taught me how to write lame supporting arguments that don't hold water under scrutiny for either side of any argument, so this part of the test is no problem. Unless it's an issue that the test-taker has particularly strong feelings about, noticing whether it's a position they agree with is not part of most people's test-taking thinking.
Also, just in general, most people don't think very hard about most things most of the time.
Bottom line, about 75% of the population on any given day puts no significant effort into any attempt to understand anything. I'm not talking about being _unable_ to understand due to genuine mental handicap. I'm talking about not seriously _attempting_ to understand anything. It's an epidemic in our society.
The exact percentage of course varies somewhat by geographic area -- it tends to be low around colleges, for example (especially four-year colleges that don't have popular sports teams, some of which can run as low as 20% on campus, although 40% is more typical), and the number is often high (above 80%) in blue-collar urban areas. Again, there's variation from place to place; these are just trends.
Since this test only managed to pull one over on 53% of the participants, I'm guessing the design of their test was suboptimal (when viewed as a means of fooling the test participants). Their sample may also have been constructed poorly -- e.g., if the research was conducted out of a four-year liberal arts college, you would expect lower numbers, even if none of the participants were actually enrolled at the school at the time of the study.
Also, 84.2% of all statistical percentages are made up on the spot. Most of the rest are made up ahead of time.
My question would be, how on earth are you going to make a wind-powered ship take only one extra week to get across the ocean?
As a rule, for a wind-powered ship carrying any significant amount of cargo, 6 knots is about the best you can expect to do with any consistency at all, and that's with a tail wind. A modern panamax container ship can easily do twice that speed against a head wind, fully loaded. On a trans-Pacific voyage, that difference will add up to at least 40 days, perhaps half again that.
> There will certainly be winners as well as losers in climate change.
This implies, of course, that if we could get a pretty good handle on how it works -- enough to be able to have any significant amount of control over it and to know what impact our actions would have -- we could then develop climate change technology into a competitive platform for pushing things in a direction that benefits us and our allies at the expense of our enemies. Perhaps in the twenty-third century wars will be fought using climate change as a strategic vector.
Currently, however, we appear to be groping around in the dark taking wild guesses, not able to clearly determine what effect if any has already resulted from what we have done in the past and completely unable to predict with any clarity what the results will be if we do X, Y, or Z in the future. Even if we could agree on what objective we wanted to achieve, we would not know how to go about it.
> For instance, no one misses the old CRT monitors. Flat > screens are so much better in pretty much every way
Actually, I'm still waiting for LCD technology to advance to the point where it can produce a display I can stand to use. Granted, most people don't seem to notice that they can't reproduce color worth beans, that indeed the same color looks very different at the bottom of the display versus at the top of the display and changes quite a lot if you move your head even an inch. Most people must be more than half blind, I guess.
For those of us with actual *working* vision, CRT monitors are fortunately still around, although they are admittedly becoming something of a specialty item.
> Some researchers are contending that half the sea level rise we've seen to date
We've seen sea level rise?
Where?
Based on every map comparison I've ever seen, the coastlines have changed since three thousand years ago in only three notable ways: rivers have washed a bunch of sediment into their deltas; volcanic activity and coral have changed some islands; and humans have made some small-scale changes on purpose (turning Tyre into a peninsula, digging canals across certain notable isthmuses, draining about a quarter of the Zuiderzee, building airports off the Kansai coast, etc.)
(There's also tectonic drift, but that seems to be fairly slow these days.)
Where is this "sea level rise" of which you speak?
> Greenland is actually turning green again it's getting so warm as of late.
Yes, but note that "again" part. It's not global warming so much as global rewarming.
A thousand years ago, Greenland was farmland; then the Little Ice Age came along and buried it under ice and snow. That's coming to an end now. This is not happening suddenly. Out climate has been in a warming phase for about half a millennium. For all we know it could be another half millennium before it starts cooling again. Or not. The only thing that's really predictable about weather and climate is that they change over time.
Personally, winter is my favorite time of year, so I'd kind of prefer a cooling phase, where the winters get better and better and the summers milder and milder. Ever since I was in third grade, I've had this dream that one fine November morning we'll wake up to find the snow reaches up to the second-story windows, and school will be canceled, and we can play in the deep, deep snow and dig tunnels through it all over town, for weeks and weeks and weeks. It would be awesome.
However, I now fear that may not happen. Also, I'm now too old to care very much one way or the other about school being canceled, anyway.
(Of course, if the US would only ratify the Kyoto protocol and other preposterous liberal action points then we'd get cold winters back, obviously. Because, umm, see, we have to protect the environment, and, umm, scientists have done studies, and, umm, haven't you seen Al Gore's exciting movie? Yes, yes, it's a natural cycle that's been going on since well before recorded history, granted, but [waves hands] don't you see, it's our fault, and we have to fix it, by passing laws that make no sense! Anybody who disagrees with our politics must hate the environment and want to drown everything like in the movie Water World, or turn it all into a waterless desert, or one great big worldwide glacier, or maybe all three of those things at once. Terrorists.)
> Err...do they not make mechanical typewriters any longer?
Not in my lifetime (or, at any rate, not in the part of my lifetime that I can remember), and I'm pushing forty. I suppose there's probably some geek out there somewhere who _rebuilds_ old mechanical typewriters, but new ones, to the best of my knowledge, have not been manufactured for several decades.
Used ones might be possible to obtain, but I would not recommend using them as a tool for teaching typing. You'll end up with people who thunk the keys down so deliberately, they'll be doing well to hit ten words a minute, and eevverrrryyythhiiingg wwwill ccommme ouuut lllikkke thhhiss. You might about as well get them a Linotype machine. Yes, yes, they could learn the QWERTY layout. They could also learn the QWERTY layout, and finger positioning for that matter, from a printout on a piece of paper, which would be somewhat cheaper to ship to Bangladesh, as compared with fifty-pound typewriters. Any actual typing skill they learn from the mechanical typewriters will do them more harm than good.
New typewriters were electric when I was a kid. Notice I said electric, not electronic. These old beasts didn't have any logic circuitry (transistors or the like), but they did have an electric motor, which was responsible for causing the little letter thingies to swing up and whack the paper (through the ribbon) significantly harder than would have been the case with just the force of your fingers hitting the keys. Depressing a key just _released_ the relevant lever: it was the electric motor that smacked it up onto the carriage. There were also the ones that used a ball instead of levers, which was particularly useful in academia, because you could substitute in e.g. a Greek ball and type letters and symbols that were not available on the standard ball. Those had somewhat more complicated circuitry than the kind with levers, to control the rotation of the ball to select the right character, but they still were not electronic in the modern sense. Either way, no electrical power meant no typing.
People who learned to type on electric typewriters often have problems typing on a modern cheap membrane keyboard, because they press the keys down too hard. It's like switching from buckling springs to a touchscreen interface, only worse. It's not nearly as bad as having learned on one of the ancient purely-mechanical monstrosities, though. With *those* things you practically had to *hammer* the keys down to get the lever to hit the ribbon hard enough to fully strike the letter onto the paper.
Electronic typewriters (the kind with actual logic circuitry and, usually, little LCD built in) came along in the mid-to-late eighties I think, and by the wall came down practically all _new_ typewriters were electronic. The early ones had keyboards with some tactile feedback (maybe about comparable to a Model M keyboard I guess), but they were much more like a computer keyboard than their older electronic and manual counterparts. Later ones may have actually adopted computer-keyboard technology, because by the mid nineties computers were overwhelmingly more common than typewriters. At some point typewriters switched over to dot matrix technology (which was also very popular in computer printers at the time), so then the ability to type exotic characters was purely a matter of software (or, err, firmware). If there are typewriters still made these days, they probably use inkjet printing technology and have spellcheck. I wouldn't be surprised if they use OpenType fonts.
Dedicated "word processor" electronic devices came along around the same time (as the electronic typewriters) and might've really caught on if they'd had a few more years in the market, but microcomputers all started getting WYSIWYG interfaces just about then, and that was much better, and simultaneously microcomputers were getting to be rather a lot more affordable than previously and the notion of every household having one no longer seemed entirely ridiculous (in the developed world), and the rest is history.
Of course, kids these days do word processing on their phones. Try explaining *that* to somebody back in the era of mechanical typewriters.
> Just apply the real cure already... This is so ridiculous.
The real cure -- the ONLY real cure -- for IP address scarcity is to stop allocating huge blocks of addresses that aren't needed or used. This/8 allocated to the English government is a drop in the bucket. Most entities that have address blocks assigned to them (by any mechanism other than DHCP lease) have much larger blocks than they can possibly use -- several times larger, in the typical case.
IPv6, in particular, would not solve the problem even if everyone switched over to using it exclusively tomorrow. It would push back the critical date, but if we over-allocate IPv6 addresses the way we have done with IPv4 ("Nevermind what we need: addresses are basically free, so get the largest block you can"), it would only push back the critical date by 10-20 years at most.
Go ahead, laugh. Medium-sized businesses will want at least a/16, just in case they ever grow to Fortune-500 size and then need to assign a separate/32 to each employee. Governments will want separate/8 for each department, just because they can get it. If we skip IPv6 and go straight to IPv8, with 1024-bit addresses, people will want to assign a block of 18446744073709551616 addresses to each of their iPhones, just in case they ever want to use them as server farms.
The demand for free addresses that you can get even if you don't have any real use for them is effectively infinite. If ICANN charged fifty cents a year per address, to be marked up slightly (say, to seventy-five cents) by the regionals and in turn by ISPs, the whole problem would just go away.
Actually, this kind of "gaming" of the system (called "arbitrage" in economics circles (although this is kind of a special case of arbitrage, because currencies are not traditionally viewed in exactly the same way as other goods and services)) is essentially unpreventable. Requiring an international transaction just makes it a two-step process instead of a one-step process (and perhaps also assures that in most cases there will be more than one person involved), but it doesn't change anything that matters. If they shut down Paypal altogether (in Argentina, or using their currency), other mechanisms will surface. As long as the Argentine peso is worth one amount inside Argentina and a different amount in the rest of the world, people will be buying it in the cheaper place and selling it in the place where it's worth more. The people who do this turn a profit, and either the prices in the two places are brought closer together or, if someone is artificially keeping them apart, doing so costs money, which goes into the pockets of whoever is doing the arbitrage.
Fundamentally, forcing an unnatural exchange rate on a fiat currency is not sustainable. I thought maybe the Argentine government had learned their lesson about dorking around with fundamental economic forces after their little hyperinflation fiasco in the second half of the twentieth century, but perhaps they needed to be reminded. You can't fight fundamental economic forces. Well, you can try, but the fight will not go well for you. It's like trying to fight the laws of physics, only your fate arrives slowly and painfully instead of swiftly.
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The Islamic countries do that stuff all the time. So does China. So do various other third-world countries. We ignore it, because it's _over there_, in the third world, where it belongs.
We like to think of Greece as being a first-world country, one of the most advanced and enlightened countries in the world, because Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Alexander the Great and Euclid were all Greek and because the Library of Alexandria was Greek and because we're all taught in school that democracy was invented in Athens (a dubious assertion, but a popular one) and so on and so forth -- Classical Antiquity. Greece was a major source of culture...
But that was more than a thousand years ago. Greece today is actually rather a mess.
Do the things any intelligent network administrator will tell you to do.
First, most important, keep offsite backups of your data. You should be doing this anyway, even if you have the best anti-virus software in the world, because anti-virus fundamentally cannot protect you from hard drive failure or a building fire. (Yes, the latter *does* sometimes happen in college dorms.) If you've got someone you can trust (and vice versa) living in a different building, a good way to do backups is to each get a spare hard drive (or agree to each use only half the capacity of the smaller hard drive) and use an automated process (e.g., rsync -- I don't think Windows comes with this out of the box, but I'm sure there must be an equivalent available) to back up each other's data: thus, your computer has a spare drive with your friend's data, and your friend's computer has a spare drive with your data. Set it up to happen at a time of day when you're both either asleep or away from your computer.
Second, create a non-administrative user account and use it. Only use an account with admin privileges when you specifically need to do system administration tasks. The rest of the time, use a non-admin account. (If you're a Windows user, do *not* make your files "private". That sounds good on the face of it, but in practice it makes your data more difficult to recover if something goes wrong with your account. Ordinarily, you can just log in as administrator, create a new account, and copy your data over from the old account to the new one. If you tell Windows to make your files private, then you end up jumping through extra hoops your data back. Of course, you have backups, but they were probably made last week and so don't have the paper you wrote yesterday that's due tomorrow. It's important to have them, because in a real crunch they're all you've got, but ideally you want to avoid losing even the data since your last backup.)
Do not swap floppies with other students' computers or the school's, and if you're going to be using other kinds of removable media (CDs, USB Flash drives, whatever) you should set your BIOS to not boot from those media. Also, make very sure you turn off anything that runs programs from removable media by default (*cough* Windows AutoPlay *cough*). College campuses are often a festering cesspit of assorted malware. You do not want your computer to execute anything that comes from there. Oh, also don't execute anything that anybody sends you as an email attachment, ever. Data files are usually safe, but be sure you can tell the difference. (Among other things, if Windows Explorer is set to hide extensions of known file types from you -- which I think is the default lately -- that's very bad. Uncheck that box immediately.)
*Do* install the security updates and service packs that have been released for your operating system. Use the system's built-in automatic update facility if possible.
Only install software that you obtain from the people who created it. If you want to install the latest Internet Explorer, for example, go directly to Microsoft's website and get it from there. Do not get it from anywhere else. (This implies that if there's any commercial software you want, you should actually pay for it, or else use a genuinely-free alternative. Avoid warez. It's unsafe. For example, getting OpenOffice.org directly from www.openoffice.org is much safer than downloading a pirated cracked version of Microsoft Office.) Similarly, if you want to install Firefox, go to mozilla.org and get it from there. Do not install any executable software that you get from a third-party site, especially one with a disreputable-sounding name like awesomedownloadfiles.com or free.hackedsoftware.cc or www.mozilla.org.downloads.k2swongy9vidwl.info.
Finally, if you can possibly manage it, put an external hardware firewall between your computer and the campus network, and configure it to only forward the kinds of traffic you actually need and block everything else by defa
> Anybody here know at what rate [helium formation due
> to radioactive decay] happens, like, in liters per year?
I don't think that's currently known. We haven't even really figured out the rate of oil or coal formation yet, let alone natural gas or helium.
I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit faster than the millions of years originally speculated, and I'm also pretty sure it's quite a bit slower than the rate at which we're currently using the stuff up, but there's a very large range of possible formation rates in between.
At a rough guess, I'd speculate that we've perhaps used a thousand years' worth of most of these things in the last century. But that's a VERY rough guess. It could easily be off by an order of magnitude or more.
The other thing is, some deposits are quite a bit easier than others to find, extract, and exploit.
> If there isn't a renewing source of helium, why hasn't all of it escaped into space yet?
There is a renewable source of helium, just as there are renewable sources of petroleum and coal and natural gas and whatever else.
However, it renews more slowly than we are currently using it, by a significant margin.
> The US government keeps the price of helium artificially low.
You make it sound like making helium prices low was the express purpose of selling off the reserve. That was merely a side effect. Mostly, they didn't want to maintain the reserve any more, since it had long since become obvious that it was not going to be needed for military dirigibles after all, and its use as a coolant had also waned in importance, and it was costing a lot of money to maintain, and it just plain wasn't necessary. (In fact, knowing what we know now, it wasn't necessary to ever create the reserve in the first place. Also, the Vietnam war was essentially pointless. Isn't hindsight cool?) Frankly, the government would've been happier if there were more demand for the helium, so as to keep the price high, so they could recover more of their investment. They're not getting out what they put into it, which has to rankle. But what can you do? If there's not enough demand to support a higher price, how can you sell your stock for a higher price?
The artificially low price is also temporary, of course. It'll go back to where it was as soon as the reserve is sold off.
> How long do you need for a party balloon to stay filled?
Need, or want?
(Even if it stays aloft for three weeks, some kids are still going to cry when it comes down. Maybe someday they'll invent a hydrogen-based foam that will keep the balloon aloft for a year.)
> There is some danger in the handling of cylinders.
Compressed gas cylinders are dangerous no matter what gas you put in them. Sure, some compressed gases are particularly nasty (HF springs immediately to mind), but even a compressed air cylinder is dangerous if you handle it improperly, or if the valve is in less than perfect condition, or if there's a fire, or if anything unexpected happens that suddenly changes its situation (e.g., by knocking it over on the ground). If a particular gas is only dangerous in a compressed gas cylinder, then it's not the gas that's dangerous: it's the cylinder.
Pure hydrogen, to be fair, is significantly more dangerous than air. Given a source of ignition, it reacts rather vigorously with oxygen, including the oxygen in the air, or any other high-quality oxidizer that's available. It's at least as reactive as gasoline. (If anything, being a room-temperature gas, it burns faster than gasoline, because it doesn't have to vaporize first to mix with the oxidizer.)
This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea to use hydrogen in balloons. We use gasoline to power our cars, lawn mowers, etc. Practically every household in the developed world has some of the stuff sitting around. We keep it in specially marked containers, and we know it's flammable, and we treat it as such, but we don't refuse to use it.
> (So neon would also work, but it has problems similar to helium.)
Actually, neon is sufficiently dense that it doesn't escape the atmosphere at anywhere near the rate helium dues; consequently, it can be recovered in quantity by fractional distillation of air. Even if we use up 100% of the natural gas deposits and all the helium floats away into the upper atmosphere and drifts off into space, we'll still be able to obtain neon. It's more expensive to get than helium currently is, because the current method of getting helium is significantly cheaper than fractional distillation of air.
For noble-gas applications where density doesn't really matter (e.g., in light bulbs), we can use argon, which is significantly denser than air and thus relatively easy to keep contained and to recover for re-use. Argon is effectively inert, being only just very barely more reactive than neon. It wasn't until 2000 that somebody finally figured out how to get it to form a compound with fluorine under highly exotic conditions, and the resulting compound breaks apart and gives you your plain old argon back if you let it warm up to 40 whole kelvins. Basically, argon is inert. (The fact that this compound can be formed says more about fluorine than it does about argon, IMO. I believe neon is the only element not yet known to form any compounds with fluorine, unless you count metastable elements with such short half-lives that their chemistry cannot be studied at all. Essentially, if you're trying to show that something is not entirely chemically inert, reacting it with fluorine is cheating. Yeah, it can be forced to react with fluorine. It could probably be made to react with antimatter too. So what?)
For low-density applications where chemical reactivity is unimportant, we can use hydrogen, which can be easily obtained in bulk by electrolysis of water. (I'm not sure if that's the cheapest way to get it, but it's a way that I know will work and can reliably provide preposterously large quantities of hydrogen.)
The applications we really have to worry about, in terms of running out of helium, are the ones where the non-reactivity and the low density are both important.
Wait, so if you set something alight, that doesn't mean you make it heavy?
> Inflammable means flammable?
Technically it would be more accurate to say that "flammable" means "inflammable".
(Really. "Inflammable" is the older word, obtained by adding -able to a Latin verb that basically means burn. "Flammable" was coined later, derived from "inflammable" by shortening it, probably influenced also by the English word "flame". It means inflammable. Now you know.)
Oh, there was flame, believe me. When you react H2 and O2 with one another, there's flame.
However, if might not have been a particularly _visible_ flame (depending on what impurities there were in the hydrogen; if it was really pure, the primary color would be ultraviolet, I think), and, perhaps more relevantly, it would not have lasted very long. Individual party balloons are not large (so there's not much distance between the center and the edge), and there's plenty of oxygen in the surrounding air, so the reaction would have run its course in a relatively short period of time -- perhaps even too fast to catch the balloons themselves on fire (if they were even flammable -- traditional latex balloons would be, but foil party balloons might not).
> Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless
> you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well.
There are other ways to make it unsafe besides that particular example. Taking the hydrogen balloons into the hospital room of somebody who's on oxygen, for example, would not be a particularly good idea, especially in dry weather (when static is more likely than average).
But yeah, in the general case, hydrogen in a tied-off balloon is no more dangerous than e.g. gasoline in a closed gas can, and we carry that stuff around all the time and use it to power our lawn mowers, no big deal. No big deal, as long as you make sure everybody knows it's significantly flammable. Gas cans are generally labeled in red and/or yellow, at least in the US, with the words "gasoline" and/or "flammable". This is a sensible precaution. Hydrogen balloons could have, I don't know, little neon orange "flammable hydrogen" collars tied onto the inflation nozzle, which as an added bonus could be designed to anchor the string. As long as people treat them with a modicum of respect (probably not a big problem for most Americans -- no more so than gas cans anyway -- since everybody's heard of the Hindenberg), the risks should remain pretty well controlled.
> You don't realise how big a 128-bit address space is.
I think you underestimate people's desire to obtain larger blocks of addresses than they could ever possibly have any use for in their wildest imaginings. I'd say "wait and see", except realistically I don't think IPv6 will ever see mainstream use. If it did, the addresses would be over-allocated to the point where they would eventually run out, just like with IPv4.
> As for a 1024-bit address space, why would every atom in the
> observable universe need over 10^200 IP addresses?
Why would the English government *need* a Class-A block they aren't even using?
Need has nothing to do with anything. We mindlessly rubber stamp any application for any size of allocation without questioning whether it's needed or charging anything per address. We don't *need* 1024-bit addresses. We don't *need* 128-bit addresses.
There are some valid points there and some important improvements that could be made to the way things are handled in the Linux world. There *should* be a standard base against which packages can be developed. Apps should *not* have to be recompiled in order to be installed on a newer version of the OS. These would be improvements. There are others too.
However, I don't for one minute believe the presence of usable package management with a centralized update mechanism is the cause of these problems. There are other causes. Dynamically linking against absolutely everything, as opposed to just key stable system APIs, is one cause. The _lack_ of stable APIs for important things like widget sets, so that a binary compiled against one point release will frequently not work with another, is another cause. The culture that says it's normal for developers to distribute only source and let the downstream vendors each compile everything themselves is another cause.
There's nothing inherent about centralized application upgrade management that won't work with Windows, except for the fact that Microsoft hasn't bothered to implement it.
> Well, with only 32 bits of address space, that's only 4,294,967,296 possible
> addresses, and there are already more people on the planet. We do need more.
An IP address is not your personal ID number for some kind of sci-fi dystopian society. What on earth would give you the idea that we need one for each person on the planet?
We need one IP address for every non-virtual public server (more than one for the few domains that need to have their traffic go to multiple different places), a few hundred thousand for IT professionals who need to be able to shell into their home systems from work, at least one per ISP (more for large ISPs that have divisions in diverse geographical areas) for their NAT gateways, and a few for hobbyists who want to mess around with peer-to-peer. Add that all up and pad it by a couple thousand percent for good measure (to cover things like allocating power-of-two-sized blocks to simplify routing), and you're still _well_ within the bounds of what IPv4 can handle for the forseeable future.
> The implication being that for such a question you would get a more accurate
> representation of their position by flipping a coin than by actually asking them
Having seen the sample question in the article summary, that wouldn't greatly surprise me. It appears to have been designed specifically to confuse anyone who doesn't bother to think about such things analytically -- i.e., most of the population.
However, it's also true that a lot of people, when taking a test, just write down anything they think will be counted as a good answer, without regard for whether it is _true_ or not. This allows people to pass tests on subject matter they don't actually believe or understand at all, much less care about. It's ingrained behavior for most people starting in about third grade.
When asked to defend one of their earlier answers, most test subjects on the whole probably weren't thinking "Is this what I believe?" I mean, come on, my sixth-grade teacher taught me how to write lame supporting arguments that don't hold water under scrutiny for either side of any argument, so this part of the test is no problem. Unless it's an issue that the test-taker has particularly strong feelings about, noticing whether it's a position they agree with is not part of most people's test-taking thinking.
Also, just in general, most people don't think very hard about most things most of the time.
Bottom line, about 75% of the population on any given day puts no significant effort into any attempt to understand anything. I'm not talking about being _unable_ to understand due to genuine mental handicap. I'm talking about not seriously _attempting_ to understand anything. It's an epidemic in our society.
The exact percentage of course varies somewhat by geographic area -- it tends to be low around colleges, for example (especially four-year colleges that don't have popular sports teams, some of which can run as low as 20% on campus, although 40% is more typical), and the number is often high (above 80%) in blue-collar urban areas. Again, there's variation from place to place; these are just trends.
Since this test only managed to pull one over on 53% of the participants, I'm guessing the design of their test was suboptimal (when viewed as a means of fooling the test participants). Their sample may also have been constructed poorly -- e.g., if the research was conducted out of a four-year liberal arts college, you would expect lower numbers, even if none of the participants were actually enrolled at the school at the time of the study.
Also, 84.2% of all statistical percentages are made up on the spot. Most of the rest are made up ahead of time.
My question would be, how on earth are you going to make a wind-powered ship take only one extra week to get across the ocean?
As a rule, for a wind-powered ship carrying any significant amount of cargo, 6 knots is about the best you can expect to do with any consistency at all, and that's with a tail wind. A modern panamax container ship can easily do twice that speed against a head wind, fully loaded. On a trans-Pacific voyage, that difference will add up to at least 40 days, perhaps half again that.
> There will certainly be winners as well as losers in climate change.
This implies, of course, that if we could get a pretty good handle on how it works -- enough to be able to have any significant amount of control over it and to know what impact our actions would have -- we could then develop climate change technology into a competitive platform for pushing things in a direction that benefits us and our allies at the expense of our enemies. Perhaps in the twenty-third century wars will be fought using climate change as a strategic vector.
Currently, however, we appear to be groping around in the dark taking wild guesses, not able to clearly determine what effect if any has already resulted from what we have done in the past and completely unable to predict with any clarity what the results will be if we do X, Y, or Z in the future. Even if we could agree on what objective we wanted to achieve, we would not know how to go about it.
> For instance, no one misses the old CRT monitors. Flat
> screens are so much better in pretty much every way
Actually, I'm still waiting for LCD technology to advance to the point where it can produce a display I can stand to use. Granted, most people don't seem to notice that they can't reproduce color worth beans, that indeed the same color looks very different at the bottom of the display versus at the top of the display and changes quite a lot if you move your head even an inch. Most people must be more than half blind, I guess.
For those of us with actual *working* vision, CRT monitors are fortunately still around, although they are admittedly becoming something of a specialty item.
> Some researchers are contending that half the sea level rise we've seen to date
We've seen sea level rise?
Where?
Based on every map comparison I've ever seen, the coastlines have changed since three thousand years ago in only three notable ways: rivers have washed a bunch of sediment into their deltas; volcanic activity and coral have changed some islands; and humans have made some small-scale changes on purpose (turning Tyre into a peninsula, digging canals across certain notable isthmuses, draining about a quarter of the Zuiderzee, building airports off the Kansai coast, etc.)
(There's also tectonic drift, but that seems to be fairly slow these days.)
Where is this "sea level rise" of which you speak?
> Greenland is actually turning green again it's getting so warm as of late.
Yes, but note that "again" part. It's not global warming so much as global rewarming.
A thousand years ago, Greenland was farmland; then the Little Ice Age came along and buried it under ice and snow. That's coming to an end now. This is not happening suddenly. Out climate has been in a warming phase for about half a millennium. For all we know it could be another half millennium before it starts cooling again. Or not. The only thing that's really predictable about weather and climate is that they change over time.
Personally, winter is my favorite time of year, so I'd kind of prefer a cooling phase, where the winters get better and better and the summers milder and milder. Ever since I was in third grade, I've had this dream that one fine November morning we'll wake up to find the snow reaches up to the second-story windows, and school will be canceled, and we can play in the deep, deep snow and dig tunnels through it all over town, for weeks and weeks and weeks. It would be awesome.
However, I now fear that may not happen. Also, I'm now too old to care very much one way or the other about school being canceled, anyway.
(Of course, if the US would only ratify the Kyoto protocol and other preposterous liberal action points then we'd get cold winters back, obviously. Because, umm, see, we have to protect the environment, and, umm, scientists have done studies, and, umm, haven't you seen Al Gore's exciting movie? Yes, yes, it's a natural cycle that's been going on since well before recorded history, granted, but [waves hands] don't you see, it's our fault, and we have to fix it, by passing laws that make no sense! Anybody who disagrees with our politics must hate the environment and want to drown everything like in the movie Water World, or turn it all into a waterless desert, or one great big worldwide glacier, or maybe all three of those things at once. Terrorists.)
> Err...do they not make mechanical typewriters any longer?
Not in my lifetime (or, at any rate, not in the part of my lifetime that I can remember), and I'm pushing forty. I suppose there's probably some geek out there somewhere who _rebuilds_ old mechanical typewriters, but new ones, to the best of my knowledge, have not been manufactured for several decades.
Used ones might be possible to obtain, but I would not recommend using them as a tool for teaching typing. You'll end up with people who thunk the keys down so deliberately, they'll be doing well to hit ten words a minute, and eevverrrryyythhiiingg wwwill ccommme ouuut lllikkke thhhiss. You might about as well get them a Linotype machine. Yes, yes, they could learn the QWERTY layout. They could also learn the QWERTY layout, and finger positioning for that matter, from a printout on a piece of paper, which would be somewhat cheaper to ship to Bangladesh, as compared with fifty-pound typewriters. Any actual typing skill they learn from the mechanical typewriters will do them more harm than good.
New typewriters were electric when I was a kid. Notice I said electric, not electronic. These old beasts didn't have any logic circuitry (transistors or the like), but they did have an electric motor, which was responsible for causing the little letter thingies to swing up and whack the paper (through the ribbon) significantly harder than would have been the case with just the force of your fingers hitting the keys. Depressing a key just _released_ the relevant lever: it was the electric motor that smacked it up onto the carriage. There were also the ones that used a ball instead of levers, which was particularly useful in academia, because you could substitute in e.g. a Greek ball and type letters and symbols that were not available on the standard ball. Those had somewhat more complicated circuitry than the kind with levers, to control the rotation of the ball to select the right character, but they still were not electronic in the modern sense. Either way, no electrical power meant no typing.
People who learned to type on electric typewriters often have problems typing on a modern cheap membrane keyboard, because they press the keys down too hard. It's like switching from buckling springs to a touchscreen interface, only worse. It's not nearly as bad as having learned on one of the ancient purely-mechanical monstrosities, though. With *those* things you practically had to *hammer* the keys down to get the lever to hit the ribbon hard enough to fully strike the letter onto the paper.
Electronic typewriters (the kind with actual logic circuitry and, usually, little LCD built in) came along in the mid-to-late eighties I think, and by the wall came down practically all _new_ typewriters were electronic. The early ones had keyboards with some tactile feedback (maybe about comparable to a Model M keyboard I guess), but they were much more like a computer keyboard than their older electronic and manual counterparts. Later ones may have actually adopted computer-keyboard technology, because by the mid nineties computers were overwhelmingly more common than typewriters. At some point typewriters switched over to dot matrix technology (which was also very popular in computer printers at the time), so then the ability to type exotic characters was purely a matter of software (or, err, firmware). If there are typewriters still made these days, they probably use inkjet printing technology and have spellcheck. I wouldn't be surprised if they use OpenType fonts.
Dedicated "word processor" electronic devices came along around the same time (as the electronic typewriters) and might've really caught on if they'd had a few more years in the market, but microcomputers all started getting WYSIWYG interfaces just about then, and that was much better, and simultaneously microcomputers were getting to be rather a lot more affordable than previously and the notion of every household having one no longer seemed entirely ridiculous (in the developed world), and the rest is history.
Of course, kids these days do word processing on their phones. Try explaining *that* to somebody back in the era of mechanical typewriters.
> Just apply the real cure already... This is so ridiculous.
/8 allocated to the English government is a drop in the bucket. Most entities that have address blocks assigned to them (by any mechanism other than DHCP lease) have much larger blocks than they can possibly use -- several times larger, in the typical case.
/16, just in case they ever grow to Fortune-500 size and then need to assign a separate /32 to each employee. Governments will want separate /8 for each department, just because they can get it. If we skip IPv6 and go straight to IPv8, with 1024-bit addresses, people will want to assign a block of 18446744073709551616 addresses to each of their iPhones, just in case they ever want to use them as server farms.
The real cure -- the ONLY real cure -- for IP address scarcity is to stop allocating huge blocks of addresses that aren't needed or used. This
IPv6, in particular, would not solve the problem even if everyone switched over to using it exclusively tomorrow. It would push back the critical date, but if we over-allocate IPv6 addresses the way we have done with IPv4 ("Nevermind what we need: addresses are basically free, so get the largest block you can"), it would only push back the critical date by 10-20 years at most.
Go ahead, laugh. Medium-sized businesses will want at least a
The demand for free addresses that you can get even if you don't have any real use for them is effectively infinite. If ICANN charged fifty cents a year per address, to be marked up slightly (say, to seventy-five cents) by the regionals and in turn by ISPs, the whole problem would just go away.
Actually, this kind of "gaming" of the system (called "arbitrage" in economics circles (although this is kind of a special case of arbitrage, because currencies are not traditionally viewed in exactly the same way as other goods and services)) is essentially unpreventable. Requiring an international transaction just makes it a two-step process instead of a one-step process (and perhaps also assures that in most cases there will be more than one person involved), but it doesn't change anything that matters. If they shut down Paypal altogether (in Argentina, or using their currency), other mechanisms will surface. As long as the Argentine peso is worth one amount inside Argentina and a different amount in the rest of the world, people will be buying it in the cheaper place and selling it in the place where it's worth more. The people who do this turn a profit, and either the prices in the two places are brought closer together or, if someone is artificially keeping them apart, doing so costs money, which goes into the pockets of whoever is doing the arbitrage.
Fundamentally, forcing an unnatural exchange rate on a fiat currency is not sustainable. I thought maybe the Argentine government had learned their lesson about dorking around with fundamental economic forces after their little hyperinflation fiasco in the second half of the twentieth century, but perhaps they needed to be reminded. You can't fight fundamental economic forces. Well, you can try, but the fight will not go well for you. It's like trying to fight the laws of physics, only your fate arrives slowly and painfully instead of swiftly.