i have experience in similar math-driven environments so can offer relevant thoughts.
a math-centric or faff-minimising prototyping environment is crucial whilst constructing the math models which you'll later be putting into Production. you want to absolutely minimise the Drag of the tool on the thought process. you can use MatLab or Excel or a piece of paper.
then take the result as being the Specification (Logical) which will feed into your development. your Production-ready code's particular Physical architecture will be influenced by that nasty thing called reality: performance, time/functionality tradeoffs, clients' hardware, legal requirements, that sort of thing.
you can use C++ if you want but i would advise against it unless you have strong historical/legacy lockins. for Maths work, Python's "NumPy" library actually runs faster than the standard C++ libraries (plus it can near-transparently use C/C++ libraries), and you avoid 99% of the time-wasting faff that C++ forces on the coders. so you develop several orders of magnitude faster. a lovely lovely language which slots straight into your mathematical environment.
Hmm. Looking at the formula's definition, that would imply "The Brittas Empire" would be the most successful sitcom on earth.
Maybe not.
(incidentally, "proves" in "the exception that proves the rule" is used in the old sense of "tests" -- not in the modern sense of "demonstrates the truth of")
america has very weak protection against most anti-competitive behaviour. this is because the courts/bodies have very few powers beyond breaking up the company.
a man whose only weapon is a nuclear bomb is not much good in a knife fight.
>I think that one of the most interesting parts of this new iMac is the fact that it has air holes in the top of it so that the hot air can rise out. Now why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
:) It's not a new concept, but yeah, not one very often used.
Essentially, it's a tradeoff between the heat benefits when switched on and the dust problems when switched off.
Historical Note:
Silent convection-driven cooling was one of the design goals of the very first macs: they had no fans at all.
When fans finally became necessary, for a while you could buy a "Mac Hat" which was like a turbine tail/funnel you put on top of a mac with the fan unplugged: this passively created the extra airflow required.
The growth in chip heat has pretty much killed the fanless idea (the mid90s performas drew a MAXIMUM of 5 watts... not the chip, the whole machine), but the Apple Engineers seem to keep it in mind. The Cube, for example, blew air up a central column.
of course you can jump into orbit, and out of orbit. you seem to be assuming you can run faster than you can jump. in low-gravity, running is very difficult, jumping is easy. and in low-gravity, escape velocity is very low.
quake always blitzed marathon from the perspective of 3D & realism & so on.
but quake was as boring as hell unless you played other humans
marathon sucked you in
PHENOMENALLY well-designed as a GAME
people playing marathon would get physically nervous as they snuck into new areas, shout out loud when they were surprise-attacked by a critter, flee when they heard the critters gathering for attack. awesome game. i fired it up recently on X, of all things, and despite the now-crappy graphics, got badly sucked into it. had to delete it after an hour for the good of my life...:)
LifeBalance is an outliner with top-down schedule-influenced prioritisation.
Awesomely well designed. Elegant in every sense of the word. All interface designers should study this app.
I LOATHE to-do apps as they are more time-consuming than time-enabling.
LifeBalance I have used daily since I downloaded it about 4 years ago. It's utterly different.
check out http://www.llamagraphics.com/ , in particular the walk-through.
scout for e-deal on internet, deliver to friend's house or to friend's workplace or to own workplace. throw away ALL packaging, POST all receipts home. walk thru customs with it in your handbaggage, wrapped up in something boring and convenient for the frequent traveller. ie, not newspapers or bubblewrap, but teatowels or t-shirts. if they call you on it, claim youve had it for 3 months and you have to lug the b*****d around for work. look unthrilled.
nb: if flying thru germany, ensure you have either a charged battery or sufficient spare time for them to pull you luggage apart plus plug your charger in: as part of their safety tests, not only will you be hoover-sniffed for TNT/semtex, you'll also be required to demonstrate that it's a real laptop by starting it up.
--
for future reference:
Singapore is your best bet as a UK resident: you get the best of:
US prices
UK powersupplies and identical wall-plugs
US & UK commercial attitude
US PLUS ASIAN product options-- there are many machines which are only produced/sold-into asia. eg my favourite radio the aiwa cd-ld70-- full pushbutton fm convenience in a formfactor approx. 1.5 AAA batteries. not seen by outside SG except for ONCE in the amsterdam duty free shop 2 years ago. And now busted and do you think I can get the manufacturers in the UK to admit such a product exists? Unavailable in the UK despite the jaw-dropped reaction I get from every person who sees it. insert corporate braindeath about here
ps Sorry, forgot to say why: the reason for the customs faff is they'll stick you an extra 17.5% as you walk in the door IF it's "new", which sharply reduces your discount. The remainder of the discount is due to the UK's stalwart protection of monopoly/oligopoly premia, the reason for e.g. Renault historically earning 50% of its profits out of the UK despite making only 10-15% of its sales there by unit.
> D) Giant software companies hate open source (and yet, most of there developers probably use tons of open source software)
Minor(?) chill point:
most giant software companies can't organise their way out of a paper bag. (one exception. hint: succeeded rather better than most) And their motivations are nowhere near as commercially driven as you assume (everyone outside the yankee senior corporate environment assumes). Inside these monsters it's like being inside a cyclone-- the damage is all being done a long long way away from you, and apparently has no connection with what you are yourself doing. The goys and birls on the front line of devel are quite aware of OSS & use it happily. But they are no the ones making the decisions, and the ones making the decisoins have trouble taking seriously anything which states as an objective: zero profit.
Oh glorious. I haven't seen this sort of mindless flamebaiting for years.
I should let it lie, this and the other "expert" commenter are clearly flamebaiting like men possessed. But, this IS something that other people could read and be misled by. And it's something that CAN help people's quality-of-life.
So
Tell yer what, child. Do a spot of research, do a spot of reading... hell, live dangerously and try a spot of experimentation.
Then come back and read again what I've transcribed. Not fantasised- transcribed.
And no, sorry child, with that attitude, I don't feel like doing your work for you. Get off your lazy self-righteous arse and do something yourself for once.
Here's a hint. First-year biochem don't cut it. And things are a little more complex than one or two chemical paths.
I think Daneurysm (great eddress btw) is being kind to the human race here. In my experience, most humans' morals, ethics, and what you had regarded as their character, goes out the window when money becomes an issue, either in the sense of stress/need to pay, or in the sense of opportunity. I've lost what was my best friend to opportunity, I've been shafted by people seeking to skive out from their contractual obligations in a wide variety of circumstances.
My advice: if you think there's ANY possibility of the business ever needing rigorous professionalism, make an upfront EXPLICIT (written) agreement that the professional relationship can not endanger the personal one, and that as originator of the professional environment, ANY nonperfection in your eyes requires shouting, which you can't do to a girlfriend, so that the THIRD time you get stressed by her behaviour, it's time to hire a third party. Is that the way it needs to be? No. Is taking such an extreme possibleposition a good idea in such a sensitive environment with such potentially serious repercussions for the rest of your life: emotionally, professionally, financially? To my tiny mind : absolutely.
Your post (and outraged indignation:) confused me unti I realised we were talking about 2 completely different topics.
You are referring to people being able to pick up a phone and talk to someone via PSTN. And you are absolutely right. Both PSTN and VoIP (or CDMA or GSM or blahblah) are usable by any user; the underlying transport technology is utterly irrelevant to them and usually unknown by them: it is "transparent" technology in the old now-near-forgotten UI terms.
But that's not this discussion's topic.
The parent slashdot topic was focussed on (Lack of) Security, not the end-user interface -- the ability to step behind the curtain, as it were, and access someone else's phone call. So my post wasn't referring to Joe Public trying to sort his evening's pizza, but rather Fred Blackhat trying to listen in on the call ("Ah HA! Pepperoni... we have him now...").
The key thing I was trying to point up was that a MAJOR difference in the practical security of VoIP vs PSTN is not technical, but cultural/sociological: the motivation of the people with VoIP-cracking skills is much less likely to be confined to professional work than those with PSTN/POTS/CDMA/GSM skills.
To put it another way, the difference between a gun and a murder is motive.
The average trained telecoms engineer or even technician will have trained in a formal environment for several years to gain these skills, and will overwhelmingly tend to be using them in a normal professional environment, and as such will tend to have a normal social skillset and social life. Few telecoms technicians believe they will gain professional cred by cracking a network -- most skilled ones recognise that any engineer can do it, it's not hard for them (remember the bored "so what?" response to the gosh-wow announcement by that Israeli uni crew that they'd "cracked" GSM?).
In the IP world though, you've got the script kiddie syndrome. Find a crack for the sake of peer props, then propagate that crack. Fred Blackhat no longer needs 4 years training and expensive kit, he can just hang around on some IRC channels and wait for the current crack.
And yes, this risk only applies to the portions of the traffic that go by public networks. But it's still there and Joe Public can't know which calls are all-private and which travel on public networks.
And don't underestimate your exposure. I once got a direct email in London from an unknown student quoting stuff from a private email to some friends in the Baltics. I traced it back and then started wandering round some networks and worked out a pool hall where me and these friends had killed some time surfing while waiting for a table one night, had had network access provided by an extension of the uni network, one machine from the CS dept had briefly served double duty and now acted as a gateway between the uni and the pool hall (among many others). To cut a long story short, due to a brief period of technical shortcut followed by unexpectedly explosive growth in a commercial extension of the university's underused top-quality infrastructure, the uni's CS students can monitor & intercept a great deal of "commercial" traffic in that region. OK, they're still at script kiddy mentality of showing off. But in future?
In assessing your own practical risk, you have to take a position on how many silent timebombs you believe are sitting around your own country, waiting for a good reason to be used.
And you might like to hesitate a moment and reflect that your own IP traffic is increasingly likely to be routed via a low-cost high-tech country sometimes, according to the whims of the market... Remember where DarkAvenger came from?
You complain about fatigue from coding(?) for lengthy periods. There are 2 things that jump out at me from this:
Eye fatigue
Brain fatigue
1. Eye Fatigue: assuming you've done sensible things like vary the screen contrast and whitepoint to match your surroundings, the most common problem is slow screen refresh. And different people eyes "refresh" at different rates. A good quick test: when you're at the movies and watching a panning shot move across scenery, do your eyes swim in almost-pain from the inability to focus? You have fast-refreshing eyes. Set your screen to refresh to a minimum of 85Hz, 100 or 120 if it can. The difference can be felt immediately in a reduced level of tension around the eyes and neck.
2. Brain Fatigue: if you're coding creatively, such as doing new work, you are stressing your brain. The brain chews a surprising amount of energy and also particular nutrients, especially fats (essential fatty acids & oils). Fish oils (superior to flax/linseed substitutes) will tend to improve clarity of thinking (and also reduce dyslexia and antisocial behaviour, interestingly). But to improve mental stamina, take L-Glutamine combined with L-Tyrosine and L-Phenylalinine. These are the primary amino acids used by the brain when thinking, and supplementing your intake will sharply lift your mental stamina and reduce your stress/fatigue levels associated with mental work.
Chromium is key to the body's ability to regulate blood sugar, and is disappearing from the normal diet due to modern intensive farming techniques. A supplement of chromium will tend to stabilise your blood sugar variations, and over time tends to reduce the symptoms of diabetes. Try 200mg/day of chromium picolinate to start, vary the dose up or down depending on how well you respond to it. It IS a metal though, not a water-soluble vitamin, so don't take silly doses -- you don't need that much.
Incidentally, it will also have the side effect of reducing fat and increasing lean muscle mass...
PSTN communications are not easily physically available to most non-electronically-savvy people.
VoIP is (relatively) easily available to any computer-- it uses standard protocols and is intended to travel via networks which are physically publically available during at least some portions of a phone call's life. The access issues are those of any network crack. Exploits can be expected to be passed around thru the saddo script-kiddy-krackers as soon as discovered.
And as regards encryption -- no encryption can withstand brute force. If you are tracking someone's calls, you can simply copy them all to your own disks, then bruteforce open them in your own time. It might take a few days per call, but hey, that's good enough for most purposes.
Depends on the food being cooked and how stupidly you cook it. Heat breaks down vitamins, true; but it also breaks down the compounds and chemical bonds which lock the vitamins and minerals away from easy digestion. It's a bit of a race condition as regards to where you catch the trade-off of increased digestibility versus less left to digest. And it varies by food too, for example potatoes tend to just keep on increasing in digestible vitamin content the longer you cook them, but the higher their glycaemic index grows too... Humans' digestion systems most closely matches that of scavengers, and you'll note that a great many delicacies and "ideal" cooking or food preparation techniques essentially involve food rotting, commencing a breakdown of chemical bonds. Examples: blue cheese, meat hung for a week, old wine. Heat proxies this process.
Having said that: culturally, most people seem to boil the bum out of everything, so compared to that, raw food is a vast improvement.
Excellent analogy: we are all living in the global village. The thing is, in the old days, you had the option of leaving the village and joining another one. With one big homogenous global village, you're kinda outta options if this one starts to suck. Where can you go?
Ellen Batzel says
the case changed her life.
"This was a small, North Carolina mountain town -- I talked to the (district attorney) and he said 'Get a dog, get a gun, get a security system or better yet get out of town.' I sold my house and moved. I've been hurt in my professional reputation and in my private life.
"I know what free speech is, and I support it, but this is about invasion of privacy and my civil liberty. Every time I meet someone now, I have to say, 'Hi, I'm not Himmler's granddaughter."
Slashdot Mirror
i have experience in similar math-driven environments so can offer relevant thoughts.
a math-centric or faff-minimising prototyping environment is crucial whilst constructing the math models which you'll later be putting into Production. you want to absolutely minimise the Drag of the tool on the thought process. you can use MatLab or Excel or a piece of paper.
then take the result as being the Specification (Logical) which will feed into your development. your Production-ready code's particular Physical architecture will be influenced by that nasty thing called reality: performance, time/functionality tradeoffs, clients' hardware, legal requirements, that sort of thing.
you can use C++ if you want but i would advise against it unless you have strong historical/legacy lockins. for Maths work, Python's "NumPy" library actually runs faster than the standard C++ libraries (plus it can near-transparently use C/C++ libraries), and you avoid 99% of the time-wasting faff that C++ forces on the coders. so you develop several orders of magnitude faster. a lovely lovely language which slots straight into your mathematical environment.
e.g.: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882
Hmm. Looking at the formula's definition, that would imply "The Brittas Empire" would be the most successful sitcom on earth.
Maybe not.
(incidentally, "proves" in "the exception that proves the rule" is used in the old sense of "tests" -- not in the modern sense of "demonstrates the truth of")
america has very weak protection against most anti-competitive behaviour. this is because the courts/bodies have very few powers beyond breaking up the company.
a man whose only weapon is a nuclear bomb is not much good in a knife fight.
Or, he may have intended an ironic dig at Americans who type 'baited breath.'
>I think that one of the most interesting parts of this new iMac is the fact that it has air holes in the top of it so that the hot air can rise out. Now why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
:) It's not a new concept, but yeah, not one very often used.
Essentially, it's a tradeoff between the heat benefits when switched on and the dust problems when switched off.
Historical Note:
Silent convection-driven cooling was one of the design goals of the very first macs: they had no fans at all.
When fans finally became necessary, for a while you could buy a "Mac Hat" which was like a turbine tail/funnel you put on top of a mac with the fan unplugged: this passively created the extra airflow required.
The growth in chip heat has pretty much killed the fanless idea (the mid90s performas drew a MAXIMUM of 5 watts... not the chip, the whole machine), but the Apple Engineers seem to keep it in mind. The Cube, for example, blew air up a central column.
see subject...
of course you can jump into orbit, and out of orbit. you seem to be assuming you can run faster than you can jump. in low-gravity, running is very difficult, jumping is easy. and in low-gravity, escape velocity is very low.
quake always blitzed marathon from the perspective of 3D & realism & so on. but quake was as boring as hell unless you played other humans marathon sucked you in PHENOMENALLY well-designed as a GAME people playing marathon would get physically nervous as they snuck into new areas, shout out loud when they were surprise-attacked by a critter, flee when they heard the critters gathering for attack. awesome game. i fired it up recently on X, of all things, and despite the now-crappy graphics, got badly sucked into it. had to delete it after an hour for the good of my life... :)
LifeBalance is an outliner with top-down schedule-influenced prioritisation. Awesomely well designed. Elegant in every sense of the word. All interface designers should study this app. I LOATHE to-do apps as they are more time-consuming than time-enabling. LifeBalance I have used daily since I downloaded it about 4 years ago. It's utterly different. check out http://www.llamagraphics.com/ , in particular the walk-through.
nb: if flying thru germany, ensure you have either a charged battery or sufficient spare time for them to pull you luggage apart plus plug your charger in: as part of their safety tests, not only will you be hoover-sniffed for TNT/semtex, you'll also be required to demonstrate that it's a real laptop by starting it up.
--
for future reference:
Singapore is your best bet as a UK resident: you get the best of:
ps Sorry, forgot to say why: the reason for the customs faff is they'll stick you an extra 17.5% as you walk in the door IF it's "new", which sharply reduces your discount. The remainder of the discount is due to the UK's stalwart protection of monopoly/oligopoly premia, the reason for e.g. Renault historically earning 50% of its profits out of the UK despite making only 10-15% of its sales there by unit.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
> D) Giant software companies hate open source (and yet, most of there developers probably use tons of open source software)
Minor(?) chill point:
most giant software companies can't organise their way out of a paper bag. (one exception. hint: succeeded rather better than most) And their motivations are nowhere near as commercially driven as you assume (everyone outside the yankee senior corporate environment assumes). Inside these monsters it's like being inside a cyclone-- the damage is all being done a long long way away from you, and apparently has no connection with what you are yourself doing. The goys and birls on the front line of devel are quite aware of OSS & use it happily. But they are no the ones making the decisions, and the ones making the decisoins have trouble taking seriously anything which states as an objective: zero profit.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
No one appreciates common sense. Please stop it. You're making us feel anxious.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Can I suggest a small but significant wording tweak to one point?
>"Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
Open source means giants helping you onto their shoulders.
--
Sal
Writings: http://saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: http://go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Oh glorious. I haven't seen this sort of mindless flamebaiting for years.
I should let it lie, this and the other "expert" commenter are clearly flamebaiting like men possessed. But, this IS something that other people could read and be misled by. And it's something that CAN help people's quality-of-life.
So
Tell yer what, child. Do a spot of research, do a spot of reading... hell, live dangerously and try a spot of experimentation.
Then come back and read again what I've transcribed. Not fantasised- transcribed.
And no, sorry child, with that attitude, I don't feel like doing your work for you. Get off your lazy self-righteous arse and do something yourself for once.
Here's a hint. First-year biochem don't cut it. And things are a little more complex than one or two chemical paths.
I think Daneurysm (great eddress btw) is being kind to the human race here. In my experience, most humans' morals, ethics, and what you had regarded as their character, goes out the window when money becomes an issue, either in the sense of stress/need to pay, or in the sense of opportunity. I've lost what was my best friend to opportunity, I've been shafted by people seeking to skive out from their contractual obligations in a wide variety of circumstances.
My advice: if you think there's ANY possibility of the business ever needing rigorous professionalism, make an upfront EXPLICIT (written) agreement that the professional relationship can not endanger the personal one, and that as originator of the professional environment, ANY nonperfection in your eyes requires shouting, which you can't do to a girlfriend, so that the THIRD time you get stressed by her behaviour, it's time to hire a third party. Is that the way it needs to be? No. Is taking such an extreme possibleposition a good idea in such a sensitive environment with such potentially serious repercussions for the rest of your life: emotionally, professionally, financially? To my tiny mind : absolutely.
but hey, YMMV. and i'm way too cynical.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Hmm, institutionalised corruption was a further wrinkle I didn't think of. Check out the last few paras of this thread for a complementary look at other hidden international exposures.
Your post (and outraged indignation :) confused me unti I realised we were talking about 2 completely different topics.
You are referring to people being able to pick up a phone and talk to someone via PSTN. And you are absolutely right. Both PSTN and VoIP (or CDMA or GSM or blahblah) are usable by any user; the underlying transport technology is utterly irrelevant to them and usually unknown by them: it is "transparent" technology in the old now-near-forgotten UI terms.
But that's not this discussion's topic.
The parent slashdot topic was focussed on (Lack of) Security, not the end-user interface -- the ability to step behind the curtain, as it were, and access someone else's phone call. So my post wasn't referring to Joe Public trying to sort his evening's pizza, but rather Fred Blackhat trying to listen in on the call ("Ah HA! Pepperoni... we have him now...").
The key thing I was trying to point up was that a MAJOR difference in the practical security of VoIP vs PSTN is not technical, but cultural/sociological: the motivation of the people with VoIP-cracking skills is much less likely to be confined to professional work than those with PSTN/POTS/CDMA/GSM skills.
To put it another way, the difference between a gun and a murder is motive.
The average trained telecoms engineer or even technician will have trained in a formal environment for several years to gain these skills, and will overwhelmingly tend to be using them in a normal professional environment, and as such will tend to have a normal social skillset and social life. Few telecoms technicians believe they will gain professional cred by cracking a network -- most skilled ones recognise that any engineer can do it, it's not hard for them (remember the bored "so what?" response to the gosh-wow announcement by that Israeli uni crew that they'd "cracked" GSM?).
In the IP world though, you've got the script kiddie syndrome. Find a crack for the sake of peer props, then propagate that crack. Fred Blackhat no longer needs 4 years training and expensive kit, he can just hang around on some IRC channels and wait for the current crack.
And yes, this risk only applies to the portions of the traffic that go by public networks. But it's still there and Joe Public can't know which calls are all-private and which travel on public networks. And don't underestimate your exposure. I once got a direct email in London from an unknown student quoting stuff from a private email to some friends in the Baltics. I traced it back and then started wandering round some networks and worked out a pool hall where me and these friends had killed some time surfing while waiting for a table one night, had had network access provided by an extension of the uni network, one machine from the CS dept had briefly served double duty and now acted as a gateway between the uni and the pool hall (among many others). To cut a long story short, due to a brief period of technical shortcut followed by unexpectedly explosive growth in a commercial extension of the university's underused top-quality infrastructure, the uni's CS students can monitor & intercept a great deal of "commercial" traffic in that region. OK, they're still at script kiddy mentality of showing off. But in future?
In assessing your own practical risk, you have to take a position on how many silent timebombs you believe are sitting around your own country, waiting for a good reason to be used.
And you might like to hesitate a moment and reflect that your own IP traffic is increasingly likely to be routed via a low-cost high-tech country sometimes, according to the whims of the market... Remember where DarkAvenger came from?
cheers, Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
1. Eye Fatigue: assuming you've done sensible things like vary the screen contrast and whitepoint to match your surroundings, the most common problem is slow screen refresh. And different people eyes "refresh" at different rates. A good quick test: when you're at the movies and watching a panning shot move across scenery, do your eyes swim in almost-pain from the inability to focus? You have fast-refreshing eyes. Set your screen to refresh to a minimum of 85Hz, 100 or 120 if it can. The difference can be felt immediately in a reduced level of tension around the eyes and neck.
2. Brain Fatigue: if you're coding creatively, such as doing new work, you are stressing your brain. The brain chews a surprising amount of energy and also particular nutrients, especially fats (essential fatty acids & oils). Fish oils (superior to flax/linseed substitutes) will tend to improve clarity of thinking (and also reduce dyslexia and antisocial behaviour, interestingly). But to improve mental stamina, take L-Glutamine combined with L-Tyrosine and L-Phenylalinine. These are the primary amino acids used by the brain when thinking, and supplementing your intake will sharply lift your mental stamina and reduce your stress/fatigue levels associated with mental work.
cheers, Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Chromium is key to the body's ability to regulate blood sugar, and is disappearing from the normal diet due to modern intensive farming techniques. A supplement of chromium will tend to stabilise your blood sugar variations, and over time tends to reduce the symptoms of diabetes. Try 200mg/day of chromium picolinate to start, vary the dose up or down depending on how well you respond to it. It IS a metal though, not a water-soluble vitamin, so don't take silly doses -- you don't need that much.
Incidentally, it will also have the side effect of reducing fat and increasing lean muscle mass...
cheers Sal
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
If this is not a troll, the poster doesn't have a clue what he's talking about
PSTN communications are not easily physically available to most non-electronically-savvy people.
VoIP is (relatively) easily available to any computer-- it uses standard protocols and is intended to travel via networks which are physically publically available during at least some portions of a phone call's life. The access issues are those of any network crack. Exploits can be expected to be passed around thru the saddo script-kiddy-krackers as soon as discovered.
And as regards encryption -- no encryption can withstand brute force. If you are tracking someone's calls, you can simply copy them all to your own disks, then bruteforce open them in your own time. It might take a few days per call, but hey, that's good enough for most purposes.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
Depends on the food being cooked and how stupidly you cook it. Heat breaks down vitamins, true; but it also breaks down the compounds and chemical bonds which lock the vitamins and minerals away from easy digestion. It's a bit of a race condition as regards to where you catch the trade-off of increased digestibility versus less left to digest. And it varies by food too, for example potatoes tend to just keep on increasing in digestible vitamin content the longer you cook them, but the higher their glycaemic index grows too...
Humans' digestion systems most closely matches that of scavengers, and you'll note that a great many delicacies and "ideal" cooking or food preparation techniques essentially involve food rotting, commencing a breakdown of chemical bonds. Examples: blue cheese, meat hung for a week, old wine. Heat proxies this process.
Having said that: culturally, most people seem to boil the bum out of everything, so compared to that, raw food is a vast improvement.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
This restricts you pretty much to lichens, leaf mold, and deep-sea jellyfish.
Just the way nature INTENDED us to eat.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com
For example: In cyberspace, nobody cares if you scream.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com