Moon energy. I know there must be some way that we can harvest this great natural resource. Maybe attach a rope to it that pulls a gear or burn it or something.
It's called "tidal power". There are some large power plants running on it already, and more being considered.
The moon's gravity drags the oceans around, creating a bulge on the side of the earth toward the moon and one on the side opposite. The earth rotates faster than the moon so the oceans appear to go up and down. This creates massive flows of water into and out of bays and other holding areas. Turbines in these flows can be used to generate electricity, while seawalls, dams, and other structures can be built to guide the flows for efficient harvesting.
The friction of the tides (either against the Earth or against energy harvesting turbines) slows the rotation of the Earth and raises the orbit of the Moon. This power will continue to be available until the Earth's rotation is slowed to where the Earth is tide-locked to the Moon - one side always facing the Moon, just as one side of the moon always faces the Earth - and further until the Earth stops rocking back-and-forth relative toward the Moon (as the Moon still does a little bit relative to the Earth). This will take geologic time, whether this "moon energy" is harvested or not.
I'm the citation. I saw it. I was young enough that I was slightly over eye-high to the photocell - which was white-light, had an aperture of about an inch, and would be about hip-high now, which is why I'm not dead-sure of the year.
It was on a store in Michigan - and I don't recall the town because we were visiting relatives at the time. It was also a very unusual thing.
It was Little Boy, the [Hiroshima] uranium gun-type device, that was untested. The physicists thought they knew the physics so well, and the mechanism was so straight-forward, that there was no need for a test.
Nevertheless: All the more reason not to risk a failed demo. (Remember that these decisions are made by executives - politicians and generals with lots of experience having things not proceed as planned - not engineers.)
It doesn't work if the library is GPLv3 or LGPLv3 and your hardware's operating system requires all code to have been digitally signed by the hardware maker, unless you provide external hardware to run the covered code. (Example: DVRs and video game consoles)
Part of the POINT of the GPL is to prevent things like that. B-)
Code signing is only OK if the owner of the box has sufficient control that he can get the box to run stuff HE signed. If the manufacturer of the box has to sign it the owner of the box is locked out of his own box. So the manufacturer has to do without GPLv3 code.
Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones,...
(Actually, self-opening doors were around at least as early as 1952 or so. Almost got hit in the head by one as a kid when trying to look at the phototube assembly.)
I hear that the first clamshell cellphone was consciously modeled on the Star Trek communicators. (Motorola named it the "Star Tak" - hint, hint! B-) )
... if I remember correctly, Tesla's wireless transmission of power was based on the conductive properties of the ionosphere and earth with the atmosphere acting as a dielectric - or in other words, using the earth + air + ionosphere as a giant capacitor. His theory was that you could charge the earth using this capacitance and retrieve the energy from any other point on the earth with nearly 70% efficiency.
Thanks for that. I'd never heard the explanation and that makes a lot of sense. (Might be interesting to look at it as a concentric sphere resonant cavity, too...)
That explains his building devices with large rounded (to avoid arcs) structures on top and referring to them as "elevated capacitances": He was trying for capacitive coupling to a conductor above him, as opposed to emitting/absorbing electromagnetic waves from the electric dipole field between the "capacitive hat" and ground and/or the current in the structure between them.
= = =
All of which is not germane to my previous post, which was trying to explain the "can spot weld with power collected by an unconnected transmission line" in terms of collected static electricity.
It would be interesting to look at the waveforms on such a line to see how much of the power was DC from static collection and how much / what frequencies AC.
Other potential sources would be Tesla-style capacitive coupling to any excursions in the ionosphere and acting as an antenna for any (long-wave) electromagnetic stuff in the vicinity. (Construction crane operators working within a mile or so of AM radio transmitters with a crane boom even remotely near a quarter-wavelength for the signal have been known to be knocked out when getting on/off their vehicles and completing the circuit at the base of the crane-as-antenna.)
He could not be convinced that FOSS was legal and genuinely free. There had to be a catch.
There is a catch (with most of the licenses): If you improve the code and distribute your improvements you have to distribute the source of your improvements, too, and can't keep others from distributing it further. (The ones without the catch often started out with institutional funding - where somebody's taxes or endowments came with a "distribute it to benefit society" string, like many other research projects.)
The people who built it are being paid in kind by those who chose to do more coding, and all the coders get far more code from others than they write themselves. Meanwhile everybody else who drops by gets to "use the mall's elevator and drink at the drinking fountain" for free, as the coders try to bait other coders into doing neat stuff for them. B-)
Especially given that we had only the two bombs. Blow one off in a nice, symbolic way, and we only have one left.
Further, the second one was a drastically different design that had never been tested. Nagasaki WAS the test.
The Japanese knew what a nuclear bomb was - because they were working on one, intending to use it on San Francisco. Hiroshima proved we could do it. That convinced some, but not all, of the generals - with others arguing that we didn't have the resources to make more any time soon. Nagasaki proved we could do it more than once and settled that argument.
An additional downside to the "demo" advocates: It was the second machine of its type. What happens if you run the demo and it's a dud? (If you drop it and it's a dud the opposition might think you were just trying to use a "dirty bomb" to contaminate the area.)
In fact (if I've got this right) we had enough material to build some very small number more (one?) and then it would have been a couple years before still more could be delivered. So the "keep fighting" generals were almost right.
World hunger is actually caused by politics. America's Midwest produces (or is capable of producing) enough food to feed the entire world.
Not any more.
Politics and economics have led to a situation where the US is now a net IMPORTER of food.
(Thank the nice politicians for the inheritance tax: Family farms are a thing of the past, now that every new generation (and the last couple old ones) have to sell off enough land to give about half the value of it - as land for urban development - to Uncle Sam when mom and pop pass away.)
The atmosphere has a considerable potential gradient across it. If you put up a raised, insulated, conductor, it will become charged to the average potential at the elevations it runs through. When it runs for tens of miles it will also have enough capacitance to store a considerable charge, able to draw a considerable arc to a ground.
Unfortunately the available current is so low that it doesn't pay to string one to collect power. And it is subject to wild variations in the amount of power it provides depending on weather. (Extremely wild, when you consider that it's a lightning rod miles long... B-) )
Some people have experimented with down-converting it using a buck converter built with a "doorknob" capacitor for the input filter and relaxation oscillator's capacitive component, a spark plug for the switch (also a voltage regulator and the oscilator's negative-resistance element), an automotive spark coil for a step-down transformer, and an ordinary power supply diode for the rectifier. They claim to pull enough power to gradually charge small batteries from collection wires they string up on their property.
You can also use the "near field" by building an antenna that cancels in all directions. There are fields near it, from which you can grab power. But the waves don't propagate away from it.
It's similar to the region just outside the surface of a prism that has a light beam doing total internal reflection. The fields extend beyond the surface of the prism but can't propagate away. But put another prism close enough (essentially touching in the case of visible light) and they'll couple across so the light beams away inside it. Use a wavelength on the order of the distance you want to send the power or longer and you can do the same thing.
Not too useful for long-distance transmission, of course.
Short answer: we have metro areas that are almost as dense as anything in Korea. Density is not the issue.
There's a BIG difference between just being dense and having SINGLE BUILDINGS that are each the residence of all the people in a telephone exchange - with something like 95% of the population in such buildings - and a conduit already installed from the phone exchange rooms to each apartment.
I believe the idea is to just use the satellite STB as a way to present the video on the TV. The video would not be streamed via satellite. Standard internet connection would be used.
I was referring to satellite internet services such as DirecWave, which would normally be packaged with their Satellite TV service. Sorry I wasn't clear.
Yes, if you have a separate landline internet service suitable for unicast transport of Netflix it becomes a matter of whether the box supports Netflix, not a satellite bandwidth issue.
(Of course it still competes with the Satellite company's premium movie services. So don't expect them to subsidize their competition and risk losing premium subscriptions by including Netflix support in their subsidized settop boxes.)
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy.
Korea had a much easier job. Virtually all of the population lives in giant apartment buildings, big enough to have their own telephone exchange in the basement utility rooms. When the "last mile" is a few hundred feet of indoor conduit and every building has enough customers to rate its own carrier-grade switch it's trivial to string fiber to every home.
The US, on the other hand, is VERY spread out. There are states with counties bigger than many European countries. There are areas - with non-trivial population - where you never pass a gas station without filling up, because the next one may be more than half-a-tank away. There are places where nearly everybody is armed for their own defense (against both human and furry hazards) because the nearest lawman or Animal Control department may be a 5 hour drive away - in PERFECT weather - days if it's just snowed.
Wiring an old city involves digging up a LOT of expensive stuff to get a FEW customers per building. Wiring a suburb requires strings a LOT of cable to get ONE customer per building. Wiring a rural area - where the houses are far enough apart that the phone lines were subsidized by ratepayers in cities - may cost far more than could ever be recovered by subscriptions (which is what WISPs are about.)
... due to bandwidth issues. Satellite bandwidth is limited and WAY oversold. A bunch of customers downloading Netflix movies individually (in direct competition with the satellite companys' premium services) would saturate it - along with their individual bandwidth caps.
A multicast-anything-anybody-ordered / catch-on-the-fly / maybe-fill-in-errors-with-unicast mode would solve the bandwidth problem - and could potentially be integrated with the satellite carrier's own transmission of the same movies to shrink bandwidth almost to nill. But that would probably require a deal between Netflix and the satellite company in question (unless the company starts supporting multicast, perhaps to save itself from drowning). So it seems unlikely any time soon.
... running a confidence scam, successfully robbing banks, the finer points of mugging, or the detailed design of a botnet/phishing/money laundering operation could be similarly defended as "art". B-)
Not that I have anything against freedom of speech. But I bet this "art work" is in direct violation of a number of laws and is about to get the "artists" into a lot of legal difficulty.
Yert: It is not clear that the original post was a joke.
"Whoooosh" is fun for playing elitist games. But I'm more interested in helping people avoid being "whoooosh"ed into a lot of lost time, effort, and perhaps compromised data because they missed something that another poster thought was obvious and funny.
The Moore's Law has absolutely nothing to do with software. The Moore's Law states that the economically optimal level of integration doubles each set period of time. There's absolutely no way software can fit into this picture.
Another form of Moore's law is that it's price/performance that doubles in some set period of time. Up to about now the two have tracked, but now they're starting to diverge.
Their gripe is that single-chip gate counts have gotten large enough that they're bigger than a single core. You can't find anything interesting to do with many of the gates. So the "economically optimal level of integration" becomes multicore processors. But to use them effectively you have to modify your programming style - otherwise you end up with the performance of a single core, which didn't go up in proportion to the POTENTIAL performance of the gang of cores.
Thus the two formulations keep tracking only if you go to parallelizable coding techniques. If you stay with serial coding only the price/performance formulation falls off the exponential curve.
As has been pointed out elsewhere: Writing to the USB drive gradually burns it out. So you don't want to do a lot of swapping to it. (Also: It's REALLY slow for a swap device.)
The best thing to do is make a ram disk and use that as swap space.
So the OS can use part of the memory as swap, rather than memory, and when the part it is using as memory is full it can copy it to the part it is using as disk? (Except it won't, because if I recall correctly the RAM disk, along with disk buffers, are all dynamically assigned in memory, so when you need to swap there's nowhere to swap to.)
Were you trying to be funny? Or just unintentionally managed it?
Delete it on unmount (as part of your shutdown process) -- if you're truly paranoid you can even take the time to scrub the sectors your swap was using.
He's running his flash drive using full-disk encryption. So he's concerned about leaving his data lying around. If that's the case he should not be swapping in the clear, then hoping it gets properly scrubbed later. The swapping should also be encrypted.
It should be possible to do the same loopback-though-encryption hack to the swap file on the Windows disk as you use to encrypt the whole disk. (Make the swap file, mount an encrypted loop on it, declare that to be swap for Linux.)
I haven't done this myself yet so I won't try to give a detailed how-to. But it shouldn't be too hard to figure it out from how the encrypted-disk is done, and set up a script to do all the mounts and file creations in one shot to add the swap file.
But insistence on using landlines for discussions of this issue are pretty laughable. It's true that analog cell conversations were open to anybody with the right kind of radio receiver. But by 2002, nobody who lived in an urban area was still using analog.
Not all "bad guys" are individuals. Some are governments.
We already KNOW the NSA can tap any GSM phone they want, anywhere, from satellites. Any bets on whether the Russians can, to? Or whether the Russian Mafia can get the info from them? Or whether there are other players with the capability.
IMHO Vixie did exactly the right thing. Better to secure against a leak that doesn't really exist (when that security doesn't immobilize you) than not secure against one that does.
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Moon energy. I know there must be some way that we can harvest this great natural resource. Maybe attach a rope to it that pulls a gear or burn it or something.
It's called "tidal power". There are some large power plants running on it already, and more being considered.
The moon's gravity drags the oceans around, creating a bulge on the side of the earth toward the moon and one on the side opposite. The earth rotates faster than the moon so the oceans appear to go up and down. This creates massive flows of water into and out of bays and other holding areas. Turbines in these flows can be used to generate electricity, while seawalls, dams, and other structures can be built to guide the flows for efficient harvesting.
The friction of the tides (either against the Earth or against energy harvesting turbines) slows the rotation of the Earth and raises the orbit of the Moon. This power will continue to be available until the Earth's rotation is slowed to where the Earth is tide-locked to the Moon - one side always facing the Moon, just as one side of the moon always faces the Earth - and further until the Earth stops rocking back-and-forth relative toward the Moon (as the Moon still does a little bit relative to the Earth). This will take geologic time, whether this "moon energy" is harvested or not.
Meh, the 3 dozen IBM desktops/laptops I administer, ... all suspend just fine.
But do they UNsuspend?
I'm the citation. I saw it. I was young enough that I was slightly over eye-high to the photocell - which was white-light, had an aperture of about an inch, and would be about hip-high now, which is why I'm not dead-sure of the year.
It was on a store in Michigan - and I don't recall the town because we were visiting relatives at the time. It was also a very unusual thing.
It was Little Boy, the [Hiroshima] uranium gun-type device, that was untested. The physicists thought they knew the physics so well, and the mechanism was so straight-forward, that there was no need for a test.
Nevertheless: All the more reason not to risk a failed demo. (Remember that these decisions are made by executives - politicians and generals with lots of experience having things not proceed as planned - not engineers.)
Thanks for the correction.
It doesn't work if the library is GPLv3 or LGPLv3 and your hardware's operating system requires all code to have been digitally signed by the hardware maker, unless you provide external hardware to run the covered code. (Example: DVRs and video game consoles)
Part of the POINT of the GPL is to prevent things like that. B-)
Code signing is only OK if the owner of the box has sufficient control that he can get the box to run stuff HE signed. If the manufacturer of the box has to sign it the owner of the box is locked out of his own box. So the manufacturer has to do without GPLv3 code.
Boo Hoo.
Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones, ...
(Actually, self-opening doors were around at least as early as 1952 or so. Almost got hit in the head by one as a kid when trying to look at the phototube assembly.)
I hear that the first clamshell cellphone was consciously modeled on the Star Trek communicators. (Motorola named it the "Star Tak" - hint, hint! B-) )
... if I remember correctly, Tesla's wireless transmission of power was based on the conductive properties of the ionosphere and earth with the atmosphere acting as a dielectric - or in other words, using the earth + air + ionosphere as a giant capacitor. His theory was that you could charge the earth using this capacitance and retrieve the energy from any other point on the earth with nearly 70% efficiency.
Thanks for that. I'd never heard the explanation and that makes a lot of sense. (Might be interesting to look at it as a concentric sphere resonant cavity, too...)
That explains his building devices with large rounded (to avoid arcs) structures on top and referring to them as "elevated capacitances": He was trying for capacitive coupling to a conductor above him, as opposed to emitting/absorbing electromagnetic waves from the electric dipole field between the "capacitive hat" and ground and/or the current in the structure between them.
= = =
All of which is not germane to my previous post, which was trying to explain the "can spot weld with power collected by an unconnected transmission line" in terms of collected static electricity.
It would be interesting to look at the waveforms on such a line to see how much of the power was DC from static collection and how much / what frequencies AC.
Other potential sources would be Tesla-style capacitive coupling to any excursions in the ionosphere and acting as an antenna for any (long-wave) electromagnetic stuff in the vicinity. (Construction crane operators working within a mile or so of AM radio transmitters with a crane boom even remotely near a quarter-wavelength for the signal have been known to be knocked out when getting on/off their vehicles and completing the circuit at the base of the crane-as-antenna.)
He could not be convinced that FOSS was legal and genuinely free. There had to be a catch.
There is a catch (with most of the licenses): If you improve the code and distribute your improvements you have to distribute the source of your improvements, too, and can't keep others from distributing it further. (The ones without the catch often started out with institutional funding - where somebody's taxes or endowments came with a "distribute it to benefit society" string, like many other research projects.)
The people who built it are being paid in kind by those who chose to do more coding, and all the coders get far more code from others than they write themselves. Meanwhile everybody else who drops by gets to "use the mall's elevator and drink at the drinking fountain" for free, as the coders try to bait other coders into doing neat stuff for them. B-)
Explain it this way and maybe he'll get it.
Especially given that we had only the two bombs. Blow one off in a nice, symbolic way, and we only have one left.
Further, the second one was a drastically different design that had never been tested. Nagasaki WAS the test.
The Japanese knew what a nuclear bomb was - because they were working on one, intending to use it on San Francisco. Hiroshima proved we could do it. That convinced some, but not all, of the generals - with others arguing that we didn't have the resources to make more any time soon. Nagasaki proved we could do it more than once and settled that argument.
An additional downside to the "demo" advocates: It was the second machine of its type. What happens if you run the demo and it's a dud? (If you drop it and it's a dud the opposition might think you were just trying to use a "dirty bomb" to contaminate the area.)
In fact (if I've got this right) we had enough material to build some very small number more (one?) and then it would have been a couple years before still more could be delivered. So the "keep fighting" generals were almost right.
World hunger is actually caused by politics. America's Midwest produces (or is capable of producing) enough food to feed the entire world.
Not any more.
Politics and economics have led to a situation where the US is now a net IMPORTER of food.
(Thank the nice politicians for the inheritance tax: Family farms are a thing of the past, now that every new generation (and the last couple old ones) have to sell off enough land to give about half the value of it - as land for urban development - to Uncle Sam when mom and pop pass away.)
The atmosphere has a considerable potential gradient across it. If you put up a raised, insulated, conductor, it will become charged to the average potential at the elevations it runs through. When it runs for tens of miles it will also have enough capacitance to store a considerable charge, able to draw a considerable arc to a ground.
Unfortunately the available current is so low that it doesn't pay to string one to collect power. And it is subject to wild variations in the amount of power it provides depending on weather. (Extremely wild, when you consider that it's a lightning rod miles long... B-) )
Some people have experimented with down-converting it using a buck converter built with a "doorknob" capacitor for the input filter and relaxation oscillator's capacitive component, a spark plug for the switch (also a voltage regulator and the oscilator's negative-resistance element), an automotive spark coil for a step-down transformer, and an ordinary power supply diode for the rectifier. They claim to pull enough power to gradually charge small batteries from collection wires they string up on their property.
You can also use the "near field" by building an antenna that cancels in all directions. There are fields near it, from which you can grab power. But the waves don't propagate away from it.
It's similar to the region just outside the surface of a prism that has a light beam doing total internal reflection. The fields extend beyond the surface of the prism but can't propagate away. But put another prism close enough (essentially touching in the case of visible light) and they'll couple across so the light beams away inside it. Use a wavelength on the order of the distance you want to send the power or longer and you can do the same thing.
Not too useful for long-distance transmission, of course.
Short answer: we have metro areas that are almost as dense as anything in Korea. Density is not the issue.
There's a BIG difference between just being dense and having SINGLE BUILDINGS that are each the residence of all the people in a telephone exchange - with something like 95% of the population in such buildings - and a conduit already installed from the phone exchange rooms to each apartment.
I believe the idea is to just use the satellite STB as a way to present the video on the TV. The video would not be streamed via satellite. Standard internet connection would be used.
I was referring to satellite internet services such as DirecWave, which would normally be packaged with their Satellite TV service. Sorry I wasn't clear.
Yes, if you have a separate landline internet service suitable for unicast transport of Netflix it becomes a matter of whether the box supports Netflix, not a satellite bandwidth issue.
(Of course it still competes with the Satellite company's premium movie services. So don't expect them to subsidize their competition and risk losing premium subscriptions by including Netflix support in their subsidized settop boxes.)
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy.
Korea had a much easier job. Virtually all of the population lives in giant apartment buildings, big enough to have their own telephone exchange in the basement utility rooms. When the "last mile" is a few hundred feet of indoor conduit and every building has enough customers to rate its own carrier-grade switch it's trivial to string fiber to every home.
The US, on the other hand, is VERY spread out. There are states with counties bigger than many European countries. There are areas - with non-trivial population - where you never pass a gas station without filling up, because the next one may be more than half-a-tank away. There are places where nearly everybody is armed for their own defense (against both human and furry hazards) because the nearest lawman or Animal Control department may be a 5 hour drive away - in PERFECT weather - days if it's just snowed.
Wiring an old city involves digging up a LOT of expensive stuff to get a FEW customers per building. Wiring a suburb requires strings a LOT of cable to get ONE customer per building. Wiring a rural area - where the houses are far enough apart that the phone lines were subsidized by ratepayers in cities - may cost far more than could ever be recovered by subscriptions (which is what WISPs are about.)
... due to bandwidth issues. Satellite bandwidth is limited and WAY oversold. A bunch of customers downloading Netflix movies individually (in direct competition with the satellite companys' premium services) would saturate it - along with their individual bandwidth caps.
A multicast-anything-anybody-ordered / catch-on-the-fly / maybe-fill-in-errors-with-unicast mode would solve the bandwidth problem - and could potentially be integrated with the satellite carrier's own transmission of the same movies to shrink bandwidth almost to nill. But that would probably require a deal between Netflix and the satellite company in question (unless the company starts supporting multicast, perhaps to save itself from drowning). So it seems unlikely any time soon.
... running a confidence scam, successfully robbing banks, the finer points of mugging, or the detailed design of a botnet/phishing/money laundering operation could be similarly defended as "art". B-)
Not that I have anything against freedom of speech. But I bet this "art work" is in direct violation of a number of laws and is about to get the "artists" into a lot of legal difficulty.
Yert: It is not clear that the original post was a joke.
"Whoooosh" is fun for playing elitist games. But I'm more interested in helping people avoid being "whoooosh"ed into a lot of lost time, effort, and perhaps compromised data because they missed something that another poster thought was obvious and funny.
The Moore's Law has absolutely nothing to do with software. The Moore's Law states that the economically optimal level of integration doubles each set period of time. There's absolutely no way software can fit into this picture.
Another form of Moore's law is that it's price/performance that doubles in some set period of time. Up to about now the two have tracked, but now they're starting to diverge.
Their gripe is that single-chip gate counts have gotten large enough that they're bigger than a single core. You can't find anything interesting to do with many of the gates. So the "economically optimal level of integration" becomes multicore processors. But to use them effectively you have to modify your programming style - otherwise you end up with the performance of a single core, which didn't go up in proportion to the POTENTIAL performance of the gang of cores.
Thus the two formulations keep tracking only if you go to parallelizable coding techniques. If you stay with serial coding only the price/performance formulation falls off the exponential curve.
As has been pointed out elsewhere: Writing to the USB drive gradually burns it out. So you don't want to do a lot of swapping to it. (Also: It's REALLY slow for a swap device.)
else you are in deep trouble when the patient is open and the battery runs down or the net fails.
The best thing to do is make a ram disk and use that as swap space.
So the OS can use part of the memory as swap, rather than memory, and when the part it is using as memory is full it can copy it to the part it is using as disk? (Except it won't, because if I recall correctly the RAM disk, along with disk buffers, are all dynamically assigned in memory, so when you need to swap there's nowhere to swap to.)
Were you trying to be funny? Or just unintentionally managed it?
Delete it on unmount (as part of your shutdown process) -- if you're truly paranoid you can even take the time to scrub the sectors your swap was using.
He's running his flash drive using full-disk encryption. So he's concerned about leaving his data lying around. If that's the case he should not be swapping in the clear, then hoping it gets properly scrubbed later. The swapping should also be encrypted.
It should be possible to do the same loopback-though-encryption hack to the swap file on the Windows disk as you use to encrypt the whole disk. (Make the swap file, mount an encrypted loop on it, declare that to be swap for Linux.)
I haven't done this myself yet so I won't try to give a detailed how-to. But it shouldn't be too hard to figure it out from how the encrypted-disk is done, and set up a script to do all the mounts and file creations in one shot to add the swap file.
But insistence on using landlines for discussions of this issue are pretty laughable. It's true that analog cell conversations were open to anybody with the right kind of radio receiver. But by 2002, nobody who lived in an urban area was still using analog.
Not all "bad guys" are individuals. Some are governments.
We already KNOW the NSA can tap any GSM phone they want, anywhere, from satellites. Any bets on whether the Russians can, to? Or whether the Russian Mafia can get the info from them? Or whether there are other players with the capability.
IMHO Vixie did exactly the right thing. Better to secure against a leak that doesn't really exist (when that security doesn't immobilize you) than not secure against one that does.
He had a lot to be modest about.
Seems to me he earned the right to brag.