I have to agree with the parent - neutral or just shut the key off (though obviously not all the way to lock - that too would be seriously bad). Neutral has the downside of possibly leading to engine destruction depending on the failure mode (though very unlikely with modern ECUs and injection), but it's better than destroying the whole car and killing people in a wreck. I know some dingbats might not think of that in a crisis (my ex wife being a great example), but surely the police would think of that as a better idea than trying to clear miles and miles of freeway for this guy to burn up all the gas.
Quite frankly, solar energy isn't that dense (only a couple kW per square meter) and aircraft require a tremendous amount of power to actually be able to move useful loads at useful speeds. Jet engines are usually rated in pounds of thrust, which I'm too lazy to go find the thrust-speed-altitude relationship to convert that to power. A number I could find was that a single C-130 turboprop engine is rated at about 3.3MW of output. So with four of them for one of these cargo haulers, that's about 13MW of power. Even assuming 100% conversion efficiency and 3 kW/m^2 at cruising altitude (it's roughly 1kW/m^2 at sea level, and 1.5kW/m^2 at 6000 feet, so this is probably close or a bit generous), you'd need 4333 square meters to collect enough power. The wingspan of a C-130 is 40 meters, so you've basically only got at most maybe 160 square meters of collecting area on the wings. And that's at 100% efficiency. Now consider that the overall system efficiency for photovoltaics would be around 10%, and that you'd need storage so you could take off, land, fly in the dark, and fly through clouds, and you've created something about the size of that flying quad-copter fortress from Avengers without all the actual coolness (or, say, adequate lift).
Nothing beats good old liquid hydrocarbons as fuel sources in terms of flexiblity and energy density.
Or that you don't give a rat's ass about 99% of the stupid shit your "friends" post on FB. Most of those people who instantly tried to friend me were people from high school, many of whom were too cool to talk to my nerdy self back then. I didn't like them then, and they've been out of my life for 15 years. I couldn't care less that their baby did something today. Heck, my aunts, uncles, and grandparents use it all the time, so I don't think age is the delineating factor. It's more that I have way more things in my real life than I can keep up with, and I'd much rather be social over a pint at a pub or a MakerFaire or a reprap get-together than on some website with people that don't matter in my life anymore.
I kept my account for about three months, mostly to see if I could find a couple old girlfriends and see what they were up to after my ex and I split. After that, I removed any content I could (I basically only ever uploaded one bland picture and some trivial details) and then told them to delete it. It was just adding to the noise side of the SNR in my life, so I just decided I was done with it. It does seem to be deactivated, but I suspect the Eagles were right on this one - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Oh, and just for good measure... GET OFF MY LAWN, YA DAMN KIDS!
If you're sitting down and not wearing your seatbelt, you're a dumbass. I fly all the time (and used to fly jumpset on cargo jets, who don't tend to take the "easier on the passengers" route), and have lost two laptops over the last twenty years to sudden drops and ceiling impacts. I've also seen my coworkers hit the ceiling and then drop to the floor, often resulting in at least a nasty headache. This shit happens; wear your seatbelt. And yes, if you're instructed by the flight crew while in US airspace, the FAR dictates that it's a lawful order you must obey.
Selfish in what way? Does the world not have enough individuals breeding like rabbits?
As a former DINK and now one of a pair of SINKs (divorced a couple years back, still friends), I have to agree that I don't see what the big deal is with kids, or why people think we should all have them. WTF do I care if my genetic lineage carries on? I'm dead eventually regardless. Makes absolutely no difference to me. I share with the future generations in other ways - I create, I share, I teach, I mentor. I just don't do it on my own biological spawn. I have no great and noble family line to carry on and I'm just a pretty average guy (and one with a congenital genetic defect that doesn't matter until after the usual kid-producing cycle, and then kills you slowly and painfully - not looking forward to my 60s). It's in fact better that I proceed with being a rich capitalist yuppie pigdog and let my particular mutation die with me.
The core of it really was that we both wanted to do things with our lives that didn't involve taking an 18 year break to raise kids, so we did.
>Time to join the 21st century grandpa. FILE* leaks.
Hell no. And get off my lawn.
printf() isn't typesafe, but it's a fuckton more readable than all that cout formatting stuff. Also, the fact that it's not typesafe isn't really an issue if you don't suck - trivial unit testing will pretty much show any problems immediately. Besides, gcc/g++ is nice enough to warn you about egregious ones now.
FILE* leaks? I assume by this you mean when sloppy programmers fail to close their files and you start burning through file descriptors. Sounds like a bug to me, and again, stop sucking. Or do what we do - throw an object with a destructor containing fclose() around it. Then you get all the awesomeness of of FILE* (including those awesome formatting commands like fprintf and fscanf) without the danger of your file staying open when something goes nuts.
Why on earth would you want memcpy() to call anything? It's a low level byte move. Anybody with five minutes of familiarity with it should know that. If you wanted something different, use the assignment operator.
void* have all sorts of applications, most recently to me in writing architecture neutral VMs where really all the native machine knows is that it's moving around some sort of pointer.
Now the custom string and array classes? That I'll agree on. Troll on.
If your compiler is doing anything different with p++ and ++p in that expression, it has a sucktastic optimizer. There's no reason it should create a copy when the value of the expression is thrown away.
One of my coworkers was asked to sign something similar when he joined the company, and he just amended the agreement to say that work only owned what was developed on work time or with work resources. Legal just signed off without any argument.
Clarifying this stuff up front would have been best, but you can approach your HR/legal department and explain what you're doing. Most of the time it's just there to keep you from developing something great related to your field and then running off selling it to whomever, rather than keeping it in house as a competitive advantage (or selling it through the company). My employer could care less if I design/sell stuff on my personal time, as long as it's not related to work.
Seriously? The entire Rio Grande Valley - which pretty much covers a north-south line right down the middle of the state - is a rift valley. The continent has been splitting and spreading here for millions of years. It's an interesting measurement, to be sure, and it's nice to have confirmation, but it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Well partially, but I'd argue the addresses have a lot to do with it, too. My home subnet is 192.168.77.0/24. My firewall blocks anything coming from the outside world bound for 192.168.77.0/24. That's nice, but doesn't really ever do anything because damn near every router between me and a potential attacker drops packets that are to or from the reserved networks, because it has no idea where to send them. About the only way it would be a viable attack is from somebody who had control at my upstream ISP.
A non-NAT scheme depends - almost entirely - on my firewall not sucking. I try, but I have in the past screwed that up when changing rules and haven't realized it for days until something seems to be a bit wonky. My motto is if you can't get a packet to it, you can't attack it.
Likewise - I don't understand why the current trend is to throw away time-tested interface metaphors for something completely different that - as best I can tell - nobody likes.
Raising a big scene is exactly the wrong thing to do. Gets everybody worked into a pissing match. The correct answer is just to know your rights, assert them, and calmly call in bigger guns if really necessary.
And yes, I speak as someone who has raised the stakes with a rent-a-goon when I was being harassed on a public sidewalk. I called the real cops. They showed up, asked a few questions, and told the rent-a-goon to take a hike and learn that his authority ended at the edge of their property several hundred feet away.
I take any erosion of my photography rights very seriously, given the irrational paranoia society we've lived in here in the US for the last decade. I mean for fuck's sake, in the case above I was standing on a public sidewalk in broad daylight with a giant f'ing SLR (1Ds III and a 28-300L, which isn't a small combo for those who know their Canon gear). It's not like I'm trying to hide or be stealthy about anything, yet the rent-a-thug seemed to think I was some sort of imminent security threat.
CmdrTaco - it's been a great fourteen years, and of the sites I started reading when the web really started exploding,/. is the only one of the original batch I check at least once a day (and sometimes just sit in the reload button, waiting on new stuff). You've provided millions of us with interesting reading and commentary, and built something (along with Hemos, CowboyNeal, Roblimo and all the other infamous editors of the past) that's acted as a common nerd meeting ground for years. Can't thank you enough for the thousands of hours of my own personal and my corporate overlord's time that this site has stolen. Best wishes for the future.
I remember trading emails with you back in 1998 or 99, when a group of us at Iowa State were trying to get slashcode to run on our machine. Eventually got it with some of your input, but mostly we were just honored that one of the internet's first nerd celebrities would actually respond and try to help. Ah, the good old days.
Dude, goal 1 and goal 2 are contradictory. If I write to a standard, it should be write and forget. Anything adhering to that standard should "just work". The point of standards is to provide interoperability and stability.
I believe exactly the opposite, and I call my model "don't break shit". I quite frankly couldn't care less if my html or java is technically correct yet doesn't work on the browsers of half my customers. It has to *work* first. If it fails that, I might as well have stayed at home watching internet porn, because the results would be just as productive for the business. Obviously I'm going to start with something standards compliant, but if I have to put in hacks to make it work everywhere, I will.
I haven't looked at the Moz plugin interface, but I (professionally) support a business logic library with 15+ years of cruft in there. Why? Because it's easier and cheaper for me to absorb all of that with versioned interfaces and the like than to break 100+ different classes of systems and force them all to make changes. I believe that interfaces should be versioned, you should have damn good reasons for breaking backwards compatibility, and if you do, you strongly consider providing X months/years of support for the deprecated one. Not everybody has the luxury of sitting around waiting for the latest version of X to break their code so they have something to entertain themselves.
Likewise, I can't imagine anybody actually designing such an incredibly stupid clock. You've already got a rather accurate clock source to run the clock's micro (even if it's a ceramic resonator with a +/-0.5% accuracy, rather than a quartz crystal with accuracies in the ppm) or ASIC. It's extra parts to use zero crossings on the mains as a time reference, and these things are designed as cheaply as possible internally. For those devices using a separate realtime clock chip (VCRs, computers, etc.), I guarantee they don't give a rats ass about the mains frequency.
Old mechanical clocks using synchronous motors are doomed. Maybe some very early electronic clocks. 99.9% of modern gear will be just fine.
Unity bites ass. I tried it for a few days and found it to have exactly the same problem as the MS Office "Ribbon" crap - it was change for the sake of change when the old UI metaphor we've been using for decades worked just fine. (Yes, for those wondering, I use both Windows and Ubuntu, depending on what I'm trying to do.) It slowed me down, it annoyed me, and fortunately there were easy ways to make it bugger off.
The car control computers are going to have to be doing what humans should be doing today - being situationally aware and discarding routes that conflict with direct observations. Just like a car shouldn't turn left into a pedestrian, it also shouldn't turn left into a bridge guardrail or off the pavement. GPS maps are going to have to be used for routing, and local, realtime sensors and vision algorithms are going to be needed for operation. It's just that rather than being biological, they'll be electromechanical.
Personally I love the stories about people who wind up in rivers and the like due to just following the GPS. Seriously, wake up and look the fuck around. Turns out water looks like water, and driving into large bodies of it is still stupid. It's not like Indiana Jones - there's no invisible bridge, I promise.
I'd say it'll take at least a couple decades to make the switch, given the ever-rising cost of cars, the longer finance cycles that most people are on, and the longer lifespan of modern vehicles. My two daily drivers are both 16+ years old, and I have no intention of getting rid of them any time soon. They're cheap to operate. My 2008 truck largely sits in the driveway, but when I need to move big stuff or drive through a blizzard, it's darn handy.
Actually that brings up a good point. Teaching a computer to drive on dry or even wet pavement is one thing. I'm waiting until somebody tries one of these self driving cars on black ice. They're both going to need to know what kind of surface they're on and what lies ahead of them within their stopping range.
Actually I'd agree. The average densely packed freeway moves at a rate and a following distance where pretty much the only choice in the event of anything bad happening is to plug the brakes. That causes a cascade effect, and you wind up with a slow spot that takes hours to dissipate. We need more space between vehicles and drivers trained to do something other than panic stop, or lower speeds to give people time to react more rationally. Or computerized drivers.
Goddammit, I sound like a fucking eco-hippie. I'm a single guy with six cars, four of which are purely for fun, and I'm arguing for lower speed limits. Actually, I guess I'm arguing for better drivers.
Personally, I wouldn't mind being able to hand control over to a computer in dense traffic, but I want control back when I exit onto surface roads or get out of congested freeway areas. I drive as much for the fun of it as to actually go anywhere.
No kidding - if one of those had been one of my cars, I'd be calling for blood. I like my stuff way more than I like 99.999% of humanity, and if you're one of the rioting whackjobs that thinks damaging other people's stuff without any provocation is acceptable, then I personally think you should be removed from society or possibly existence. I've never understood why people think property crimes are somehow trivial. My stuff represents an investment of my time and effort to acquire, and a lot of it has a lot of sentimental value to me. I'd feel personally violated if somebody just destroyed it.
Denyhosts is the bomb. Seriously, I get weeks where I used to get hammered with ssh login dictionary attacks. Now, denyhosts nicely bans them, and best of all, it can share back with a central server so once somebody starts attacking a couple people, we all ban their asses. It's one of the first things I install on any new server. Seriously, I think I'm going to go send the DH guys another donation because they're so damned awesome.
DH is ssh-centric, though. For your FTP problem, fail2ban is better.
Unless you're experimenting with some really, really interesting stuff at home, I'd strongly recommend looking through eBay for some slightly used Tektronix gear. I have a TDS420A that I picked up for just over $400, and it does everything I really need. (I do wish it had a USB port for saving screenshots - I hate keeping floppies around just for the scope.) Seriously, it's a great little scope. Save some cash and put it towards other gear, like a used programmable power supply, or a function generator, or a used logic analyzer. I've picked up some awesome gear on eBay dirt cheap - the trick is just keep watching and have patience.
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I have to agree with the parent - neutral or just shut the key off (though obviously not all the way to lock - that too would be seriously bad). Neutral has the downside of possibly leading to engine destruction depending on the failure mode (though very unlikely with modern ECUs and injection), but it's better than destroying the whole car and killing people in a wreck. I know some dingbats might not think of that in a crisis (my ex wife being a great example), but surely the police would think of that as a better idea than trying to clear miles and miles of freeway for this guy to burn up all the gas.
Yup, but your shiny new AP1000 runs day or night, rain or shine. Also, 16GW of nuclear is going to take up a whole lot less space than 16GW of PV.
Quite frankly, solar energy isn't that dense (only a couple kW per square meter) and aircraft require a tremendous amount of power to actually be able to move useful loads at useful speeds. Jet engines are usually rated in pounds of thrust, which I'm too lazy to go find the thrust-speed-altitude relationship to convert that to power. A number I could find was that a single C-130 turboprop engine is rated at about 3.3MW of output. So with four of them for one of these cargo haulers, that's about 13MW of power. Even assuming 100% conversion efficiency and 3 kW/m^2 at cruising altitude (it's roughly 1kW/m^2 at sea level, and 1.5kW/m^2 at 6000 feet, so this is probably close or a bit generous), you'd need 4333 square meters to collect enough power. The wingspan of a C-130 is 40 meters, so you've basically only got at most maybe 160 square meters of collecting area on the wings. And that's at 100% efficiency. Now consider that the overall system efficiency for photovoltaics would be around 10%, and that you'd need storage so you could take off, land, fly in the dark, and fly through clouds, and you've created something about the size of that flying quad-copter fortress from Avengers without all the actual coolness (or, say, adequate lift).
Nothing beats good old liquid hydrocarbons as fuel sources in terms of flexiblity and energy density.
Or that you don't give a rat's ass about 99% of the stupid shit your "friends" post on FB. Most of those people who instantly tried to friend me were people from high school, many of whom were too cool to talk to my nerdy self back then. I didn't like them then, and they've been out of my life for 15 years. I couldn't care less that their baby did something today. Heck, my aunts, uncles, and grandparents use it all the time, so I don't think age is the delineating factor. It's more that I have way more things in my real life than I can keep up with, and I'd much rather be social over a pint at a pub or a MakerFaire or a reprap get-together than on some website with people that don't matter in my life anymore.
I kept my account for about three months, mostly to see if I could find a couple old girlfriends and see what they were up to after my ex and I split. After that, I removed any content I could (I basically only ever uploaded one bland picture and some trivial details) and then told them to delete it. It was just adding to the noise side of the SNR in my life, so I just decided I was done with it. It does seem to be deactivated, but I suspect the Eagles were right on this one - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Oh, and just for good measure...
GET OFF MY LAWN, YA DAMN KIDS!
If you're sitting down and not wearing your seatbelt, you're a dumbass. I fly all the time (and used to fly jumpset on cargo jets, who don't tend to take the "easier on the passengers" route), and have lost two laptops over the last twenty years to sudden drops and ceiling impacts. I've also seen my coworkers hit the ceiling and then drop to the floor, often resulting in at least a nasty headache. This shit happens; wear your seatbelt. And yes, if you're instructed by the flight crew while in US airspace, the FAR dictates that it's a lawful order you must obey.
Selfish in what way? Does the world not have enough individuals breeding like rabbits?
As a former DINK and now one of a pair of SINKs (divorced a couple years back, still friends), I have to agree that I don't see what the big deal is with kids, or why people think we should all have them. WTF do I care if my genetic lineage carries on? I'm dead eventually regardless. Makes absolutely no difference to me. I share with the future generations in other ways - I create, I share, I teach, I mentor. I just don't do it on my own biological spawn. I have no great and noble family line to carry on and I'm just a pretty average guy (and one with a congenital genetic defect that doesn't matter until after the usual kid-producing cycle, and then kills you slowly and painfully - not looking forward to my 60s). It's in fact better that I proceed with being a rich capitalist yuppie pigdog and let my particular mutation die with me.
The core of it really was that we both wanted to do things with our lives that didn't involve taking an 18 year break to raise kids, so we did.
>Time to join the 21st century grandpa. FILE* leaks.
Hell no. And get off my lawn.
printf() isn't typesafe, but it's a fuckton more readable than all that cout formatting stuff. Also, the fact that it's not typesafe isn't really an issue if you don't suck - trivial unit testing will pretty much show any problems immediately. Besides, gcc/g++ is nice enough to warn you about egregious ones now.
FILE* leaks? I assume by this you mean when sloppy programmers fail to close their files and you start burning through file descriptors. Sounds like a bug to me, and again, stop sucking. Or do what we do - throw an object with a destructor containing fclose() around it. Then you get all the awesomeness of of FILE* (including those awesome formatting commands like fprintf and fscanf) without the danger of your file staying open when something goes nuts.
Why on earth would you want memcpy() to call anything? It's a low level byte move. Anybody with five minutes of familiarity with it should know that. If you wanted something different, use the assignment operator.
void* have all sorts of applications, most recently to me in writing architecture neutral VMs where really all the native machine knows is that it's moving around some sort of pointer.
Now the custom string and array classes? That I'll agree on. Troll on.
Holy shit - we finally get strongly-typed enums? Finally. No, I'm not the type to RTFA. :)
If your compiler is doing anything different with p++ and ++p in that expression, it has a sucktastic optimizer. There's no reason it should create a copy when the value of the expression is thrown away.
One of my coworkers was asked to sign something similar when he joined the company, and he just amended the agreement to say that work only owned what was developed on work time or with work resources. Legal just signed off without any argument.
Clarifying this stuff up front would have been best, but you can approach your HR/legal department and explain what you're doing. Most of the time it's just there to keep you from developing something great related to your field and then running off selling it to whomever, rather than keeping it in house as a competitive advantage (or selling it through the company). My employer could care less if I design/sell stuff on my personal time, as long as it's not related to work.
Seriously? The entire Rio Grande Valley - which pretty much covers a north-south line right down the middle of the state - is a rift valley. The continent has been splitting and spreading here for millions of years. It's an interesting measurement, to be sure, and it's nice to have confirmation, but it shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Well partially, but I'd argue the addresses have a lot to do with it, too. My home subnet is 192.168.77.0/24. My firewall blocks anything coming from the outside world bound for 192.168.77.0/24. That's nice, but doesn't really ever do anything because damn near every router between me and a potential attacker drops packets that are to or from the reserved networks, because it has no idea where to send them. About the only way it would be a viable attack is from somebody who had control at my upstream ISP.
A non-NAT scheme depends - almost entirely - on my firewall not sucking. I try, but I have in the past screwed that up when changing rules and haven't realized it for days until something seems to be a bit wonky. My motto is if you can't get a packet to it, you can't attack it.
Likewise - I don't understand why the current trend is to throw away time-tested interface metaphors for something completely different that - as best I can tell - nobody likes.
Raising a big scene is exactly the wrong thing to do. Gets everybody worked into a pissing match. The correct answer is just to know your rights, assert them, and calmly call in bigger guns if really necessary.
And yes, I speak as someone who has raised the stakes with a rent-a-goon when I was being harassed on a public sidewalk. I called the real cops. They showed up, asked a few questions, and told the rent-a-goon to take a hike and learn that his authority ended at the edge of their property several hundred feet away.
I take any erosion of my photography rights very seriously, given the irrational paranoia society we've lived in here in the US for the last decade. I mean for fuck's sake, in the case above I was standing on a public sidewalk in broad daylight with a giant f'ing SLR (1Ds III and a 28-300L, which isn't a small combo for those who know their Canon gear). It's not like I'm trying to hide or be stealthy about anything, yet the rent-a-thug seemed to think I was some sort of imminent security threat.
CmdrTaco - it's been a great fourteen years, and of the sites I started reading when the web really started exploding, /. is the only one of the original batch I check at least once a day (and sometimes just sit in the reload button, waiting on new stuff). You've provided millions of us with interesting reading and commentary, and built something (along with Hemos, CowboyNeal, Roblimo and all the other infamous editors of the past) that's acted as a common nerd meeting ground for years. Can't thank you enough for the thousands of hours of my own personal and my corporate overlord's time that this site has stolen. Best wishes for the future.
I remember trading emails with you back in 1998 or 99, when a group of us at Iowa State were trying to get slashcode to run on our machine. Eventually got it with some of your input, but mostly we were just honored that one of the internet's first nerd celebrities would actually respond and try to help. Ah, the good old days.
Dude, goal 1 and goal 2 are contradictory. If I write to a standard, it should be write and forget. Anything adhering to that standard should "just work". The point of standards is to provide interoperability and stability.
I believe exactly the opposite, and I call my model "don't break shit". I quite frankly couldn't care less if my html or java is technically correct yet doesn't work on the browsers of half my customers. It has to *work* first. If it fails that, I might as well have stayed at home watching internet porn, because the results would be just as productive for the business. Obviously I'm going to start with something standards compliant, but if I have to put in hacks to make it work everywhere, I will.
I haven't looked at the Moz plugin interface, but I (professionally) support a business logic library with 15+ years of cruft in there. Why? Because it's easier and cheaper for me to absorb all of that with versioned interfaces and the like than to break 100+ different classes of systems and force them all to make changes. I believe that interfaces should be versioned, you should have damn good reasons for breaking backwards compatibility, and if you do, you strongly consider providing X months/years of support for the deprecated one. Not everybody has the luxury of sitting around waiting for the latest version of X to break their code so they have something to entertain themselves.
Likewise, I can't imagine anybody actually designing such an incredibly stupid clock. You've already got a rather accurate clock source to run the clock's micro (even if it's a ceramic resonator with a +/-0.5% accuracy, rather than a quartz crystal with accuracies in the ppm) or ASIC. It's extra parts to use zero crossings on the mains as a time reference, and these things are designed as cheaply as possible internally. For those devices using a separate realtime clock chip (VCRs, computers, etc.), I guarantee they don't give a rats ass about the mains frequency.
Old mechanical clocks using synchronous motors are doomed. Maybe some very early electronic clocks. 99.9% of modern gear will be just fine.
Oh, and I forgot to mention...
STAY OFF MY LAWN, YOU DAMN KIDS!
Damn filter, won't even let me be a cranky old SOB.
Unity bites ass. I tried it for a few days and found it to have exactly the same problem as the MS Office "Ribbon" crap - it was change for the sake of change when the old UI metaphor we've been using for decades worked just fine. (Yes, for those wondering, I use both Windows and Ubuntu, depending on what I'm trying to do.) It slowed me down, it annoyed me, and fortunately there were easy ways to make it bugger off.
The car control computers are going to have to be doing what humans should be doing today - being situationally aware and discarding routes that conflict with direct observations. Just like a car shouldn't turn left into a pedestrian, it also shouldn't turn left into a bridge guardrail or off the pavement. GPS maps are going to have to be used for routing, and local, realtime sensors and vision algorithms are going to be needed for operation. It's just that rather than being biological, they'll be electromechanical.
Personally I love the stories about people who wind up in rivers and the like due to just following the GPS. Seriously, wake up and look the fuck around. Turns out water looks like water, and driving into large bodies of it is still stupid. It's not like Indiana Jones - there's no invisible bridge, I promise.
I'd say it'll take at least a couple decades to make the switch, given the ever-rising cost of cars, the longer finance cycles that most people are on, and the longer lifespan of modern vehicles. My two daily drivers are both 16+ years old, and I have no intention of getting rid of them any time soon. They're cheap to operate. My 2008 truck largely sits in the driveway, but when I need to move big stuff or drive through a blizzard, it's darn handy.
Actually that brings up a good point. Teaching a computer to drive on dry or even wet pavement is one thing. I'm waiting until somebody tries one of these self driving cars on black ice. They're both going to need to know what kind of surface they're on and what lies ahead of them within their stopping range.
Actually I'd agree. The average densely packed freeway moves at a rate and a following distance where pretty much the only choice in the event of anything bad happening is to plug the brakes. That causes a cascade effect, and you wind up with a slow spot that takes hours to dissipate. We need more space between vehicles and drivers trained to do something other than panic stop, or lower speeds to give people time to react more rationally. Or computerized drivers.
Goddammit, I sound like a fucking eco-hippie. I'm a single guy with six cars, four of which are purely for fun, and I'm arguing for lower speed limits. Actually, I guess I'm arguing for better drivers.
Personally, I wouldn't mind being able to hand control over to a computer in dense traffic, but I want control back when I exit onto surface roads or get out of congested freeway areas. I drive as much for the fun of it as to actually go anywhere.
No kidding - if one of those had been one of my cars, I'd be calling for blood. I like my stuff way more than I like 99.999% of humanity, and if you're one of the rioting whackjobs that thinks damaging other people's stuff without any provocation is acceptable, then I personally think you should be removed from society or possibly existence. I've never understood why people think property crimes are somehow trivial. My stuff represents an investment of my time and effort to acquire, and a lot of it has a lot of sentimental value to me. I'd feel personally violated if somebody just destroyed it.
Denyhosts is the bomb. Seriously, I get weeks where I used to get hammered with ssh login dictionary attacks. Now, denyhosts nicely bans them, and best of all, it can share back with a central server so once somebody starts attacking a couple people, we all ban their asses. It's one of the first things I install on any new server. Seriously, I think I'm going to go send the DH guys another donation because they're so damned awesome.
DH is ssh-centric, though. For your FTP problem, fail2ban is better.
Unless you're experimenting with some really, really interesting stuff at home, I'd strongly recommend looking through eBay for some slightly used Tektronix gear. I have a TDS420A that I picked up for just over $400, and it does everything I really need. (I do wish it had a USB port for saving screenshots - I hate keeping floppies around just for the scope.) Seriously, it's a great little scope. Save some cash and put it towards other gear, like a used programmable power supply, or a function generator, or a used logic analyzer. I've picked up some awesome gear on eBay dirt cheap - the trick is just keep watching and have patience.