If you're already running a server to do MythTV, printing, file serving, or whatever, just run the appropriate firewalling on it. I'd recommend OpenBSD if you don't need to Linux instead, since it will be exposed to the net.
For most of the problems that you'd want to solve with a quantum computer, the problem is in NP or maybe even P, so if the QC can guess the correct answer, you can verify that it's correct. For instance, for factoring large numbers that are a product of two primes, conventional computers can't guess the factors in usefully short times, but if somebody guesses or steals an answer, you can easily check whether it's correct or not. You don't need to do a best-of-N to figure out what's probably the answer.
On the other hand, your probability arguments assume that the probability of success is independent and identically distributed, randomly giving you either the correct answer or a bogus answer. There's no good reason to assume that, since quantum computers work by Magic - it may be that a given set of inputs will always produce the same output, so running it multiple times doesn't gain you anything.
There are other problems with playing old games on newer computers - depending on how they handle timing, you'll find that the Space Invaders zoom down and kick your ass in ways that they just didn't at the original speeds.
Maybe virtualization can give you a way to slow them down?
It was twenty-or-so years ago today.... So back in the late 1980s, I was using Gosling's NeWS on Sun Workstations. It could fit on a Sun3/50 with enough RAM, though it was happier on the SparcStations that came out in ~1989 and following. It was a Postscript-based windowing system - What You See Really Is What You Get. It later evolved into Java, which you may have heard of:-) Everything Just Worked (except when it didn't, in which case it crashed and died in ugly ways, but most of the time it worked, and the debugger was really cool.) For example, if you wanted to print something on a laser printer, you got the same fonts, rendered at the correct resolution, no jaggies required. The psterm terminal application we used instead of xterm didn't do anything special to iconize; you just shrank it to use a 1-point font, which is 1 pixel on a typical Sun workstation screen of its day, and anything happening in the window continued to work live, so you could see things scrolling by.
My supervisor was in his early 60s and kept switching eyeglasses to talk to people or look at his computer, so we just cranked his font size to 24 points and he could read everything.
I could do this on Sparcstation 1s using NeWS windowing. (You could even do that on Sun-3s if you had 8MB of RAM.) It was a Postscript-based windowing system, and What You Saw was really What You Got.
Now that I'm over 50, I'm starting to want bigger screens because of presbyopia, as opposed to merely because I ought to be able to get more pixels on my work machine than I had back on a Sun-3 back in 1987 (Finally fixed that this year:-) For the most part, because my vision issues are still mild, I fix the pixel size issues with glasses, because I'm running Windows on my main work machine and can't just tell it "make everything bigger", like we did with NeWS Postscript-based displays.
There are exceptions; timing-related software or analog inputs may be dealing with inexact bits, but basically everything you're doing with software is precise. Real-world building materials aren't. I once helped a crew of retired construction workers build a church, and not only did they use a lot less effort than us young guys (because they could hit something once, in just the right place, instead of waling away at it like we did), but they also had a lot of insights like "this board's a bit green, so as it dries it'll twist a bit _that_ way, so we should put it in this way up and nail it there so it stays in compression when it does that instead of going into tension.
You've lost track of the Bush Administration's propaganda about the UN, because you're only remembering the most recent versions. In the early Bush years, he wanted everybody in the world to support his campaign for invading Afghanistan, and he had the backing of the UN to allow him to do it. It was only later on when the UN wasn't being helpful enough in generating support for whatever he was doing that he switched over to bashing them. (Admittedly, it's been long enough that I've also lost track of when that was - it was probably when he was forming the Coalition Of The Willing, aka Bush League Of Nations, that he used to attack Iraq, since there was no real legitimate way to get the UN to approve the invasion of Iraq, in spite of him bullying Colin Powell into telling them that the Iraqis had Weapons of Mass Destruction.)
With all due respect to Esther Dyson, ICANN's been a total mess from Day 1, both technically and policy-wise, so I hate to have to say this, but No, the UN would be even worse than ICANN.
The previous Internet Governance Forums have made it clear that there are a mixture of objectives
Controlling what can and can't be said on the Internet
Internationalizing DNS
Bridging the Digital Divide so poor countries can get affordable computers and internet access.
Internationalizing DNS is a fine thing to do; too bad ICANN and Verisign have chosen that appalling Punycode approach, which requires anybody who wants to use international names to write ugly hackish paradigm-breaking code to do it, instead of just using UTF-8 and biting the bullet on the upper/lower case problem. On the other hand, that code is pretty short, and IE, Mozilla, and a couple of other significant programs have done it.
Bridging the Digital Divide is a fine thing to do - capitalism is rapidly improving the computer costs, mobile phones with texting are enough to make a good start, One Laptop Per Child is a bit more expensive than it should have been. In most poor countries, the best way to deliver cost-effective Internet access is to get rid of the government telecom monopolies, which isn't an especially popular viewpoint at an inter-governmental forum such as the IGF, but the mobile phone business has often leapfrogged the wired infrastructure anyway, and there's a lot of undersea cable being built around Africa waiting for the monopolies and ex-quasi-monopoly telcos to get out of the way so it can be connected.
But if the only people who can talk about controlling what can and can't be said on the internet are the people who approve of controlling it, and you can't name them or talk against that, because the First Rule of the Internet Global Fight Club is that you can't talk about what IGF is for, then any meeting is a farce, and it ought to be stopped right away.
and since they were in the US, they were also firearms enthusiasts. I'd advise against recommending killing Down's Syndrome babies around them; they might have other opinions about how to improve the gene pool...
Also, most people with Down's Syndrome babies have them when the mother is older, and they're much better able to take care of them than people who had their kids at 20. If your concern is about the gene pool rather than the individual kids, remember that they're less likely to have kids of their own.
Yeah, people who approve of eugenics tend to talk about designer babies; you'll see echoes of it in Heinlein and other early science fiction novels. But back when there was an active Eugenics movement, it was mostly about keeping the genetically undesirable from reproducing.
The main problem is that it lets you consume lots of alcohol without realizing that you're that drunk, because the caffeine makes you awake and bouncy, and the lack of flavor in the vodka also makes you notice it less. If you'd been drinking that much vodka straight up, you'd have noticed the effects earlier and slowed down, or at least been more aware that you shouldn't be doing things that seem like a perfectly fine idea with all that caffeine. And then the ethanol catches up with you.
Irish coffee doesn't have quite the same effect, because it's hot enough you drink it slowly, plus the social environment you drink it in is different. And it has good-tasting ingredients, as opposed to Red Bull which is just nasty:-) Rum & Coke is an intermediate case - you're getting a lot more liquid for the amount of ethanol and caffeine, so your body can process it more slowly and you won't get as much of the dehydration problems causing that hangover the next day.
That doesn't seem to be a medical risk with marijuana - there are no known cases of death from overdose, and it tends to discourage vomiting (unlike some of the psychedelic mushrooms.) On the other hand, even though marijuana's not fatal, it can lead to Stupidity, which can be fatal.
But yeah, you definitely should have a babysitter if you're consuming dubious substances. (Quarter of an ounce? Dude, what were you thinking?)
I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area; if I wanted to legally buy marijuana this week I could look in the paper for a doctor who'll recommend marijuana to help my back pain / migraines / stress / paranoia / whatever, and then go buy good quality marijuana at a "clinic". Jon Stewart (no relation) once said the whole medical-marijuana process seemed silly, if he needed it he could go buy it in the park like everybody else in New York does:-) Or there's probably a jam-band concert coming to your area next summer, if you're not in a hurry.
On the other hand, if I wanted a non-hippie drug like meth, I don't actually know where to look; rednecks don't hang out in drum circles, the nearby motorcycle shops are for yuppies, and walking into a strange biker bar asking if anybody's dealing meth is probably a Bad Idea. Maybe some of the hippie drug dealers in the park would know somebody who knows somebody.
Morphine's available in the US for similar applications, and for most applications it's as good as or better than heroin.
Vicodin (hydrocodone plus acetaminophen/paracetamol ) is widely prescribed for unsupervised use, for people who need something a bit stronger than codeine (which is also mixed with acetaminophen here) - the FDA and DEA allow it because the acetaminophen will rot your liver and kidneys if you take abuse-level doses, so they don't mind if your dentist prescribes you a bottle of 20 to take until your root-canal pain wears off. Oxycodone is somewhat stronger than hydrocodone.
Those drugs can be prescribed with only moderate levels of bureaucracy here - but if doctors want to prescribe anything stronger, or prescribe opiates that aren't mixed with other drugs, outside of a hospital environment, there's a much heavier level of bureaucratic supervision and in many cases outright harassment. That's starting to be a problem, as the medical practices are finding that acetaminophen overuse is a more serious problem than they'd expected, but they can't prescribe the safer versions because of the regulators' perception of abuse potential.
You're blaming the wrong Paul. The Kaminsky bug works because DNS usually uses UDP and only has a 16-bit query ID field, so it's easy to overwhelm at current network speeds (it was a bit tougher when the ARPAnet backbone was 56kbps...) and because you can birthday-attack the stuff if you're clever.
I've only waded as far back as RFC883 today, so it's possible that somebody other than Paul Mockapetris and presumably Jon Postel was responsible for picking the query id field size, but I doubt it was Paul Vixie. If you want to blame him for how long it took to put query port randomization into BIND, I won't stand in your way, but even that's only a stopgap.
I don't know about his ISP, but there are ISPs out there that not only hijack NXDOMAIN queries, but also transparently hijack *all* DNS queries. DNSSEC may help, and anti-Kaminsky-spoofing may help, but it's basically evil.
They're not redirecting you to a web page - they're redirecting you to a different IP address, which has a web server on it. What if you weren't running http? Besides dig, there's also https (are they only serving http?), and ssh, and email (less common on www.x.x, admittedly), but they're still fundamentally breaking it.
It's not unreasonable to expect that my machine might have a web browser on it - but if that's not the application I used, they need to know not to break it, and they *can't* know that, because they don't know what application asked DNS to send the DNS query. Furthermore, the browsers I'm most likely to be using already know how to redirect queries to my favorite search engine, so they're also breaking that application.
There's one case where it's usually ok for them to break DNS, which is where you're trying to query a DNS name for a known Evil Website, typically a phisher or malware site. There are some people who really want to check out what's being served from evil.impostor.paypa11.com, but those people are expected to know what they're doing, and 99.999% of the queries to those sites are due to phishing or other evils.
Slashdot Mirror
See section (f), above, and you can have some cake!
If you're already running a server to do MythTV, printing, file serving, or whatever, just run the appropriate firewalling on it. I'd recommend OpenBSD if you don't need to Linux instead, since it will be exposed to the net.
Any wireless router that can handle 802.11n had better be able to do 100 Mbps with NAT enabled or it'll be laughed off the market.
For most of the problems that you'd want to solve with a quantum computer, the problem is in NP or maybe even P, so if the QC can guess the correct answer, you can verify that it's correct. For instance, for factoring large numbers that are a product of two primes, conventional computers can't guess the factors in usefully short times, but if somebody guesses or steals an answer, you can easily check whether it's correct or not. You don't need to do a best-of-N to figure out what's probably the answer.
On the other hand, your probability arguments assume that the probability of success is independent and identically distributed, randomly giving you either the correct answer or a bogus answer. There's no good reason to assume that, since quantum computers work by Magic - it may be that a given set of inputs will always produce the same output, so running it multiple times doesn't gain you anything.
There are other problems with playing old games on newer computers - depending on how they handle timing, you'll find that the
Space Invaders zoom down and kick your ass
in ways that they just didn't at the original speeds.
Maybe virtualization can give you a way to slow them down?
Meanwhile, Nethack works just fine...
Hey, there are people out there who'd be happy to just have you take the clunky thing.
It was twenty-or-so years ago today.... So back in the late 1980s, I was using Gosling's NeWS on Sun Workstations. It could fit on a Sun3/50 with enough RAM, though it was happier on the SparcStations that came out in ~1989 and following. It was a Postscript-based windowing system - What You See Really Is What You Get. :-) Everything Just Worked (except when it didn't, in which case it crashed and died in ugly ways, but most of the time it worked, and the debugger was really cool.) For example, if you wanted to print something on a laser printer, you got the same fonts, rendered at the correct resolution, no jaggies required. The psterm terminal application we used instead of xterm didn't do anything special to iconize; you just shrank it to use a 1-point font, which is 1 pixel on a typical Sun workstation screen of its day, and anything happening in the window continued to work live, so you could see things scrolling by.
It later evolved into Java, which you may have heard of
My supervisor was in his early 60s and kept switching eyeglasses to talk to people or look at his computer, so we just cranked his font size to 24 points and he could read everything.
I could do this on Sparcstation 1s using NeWS windowing. (You could even do that on Sun-3s if you had 8MB of RAM.) It was a Postscript-based windowing system, and What You Saw was really What You Got.
Now that I'm over 50, I'm starting to want bigger screens because of presbyopia, as opposed to merely because I ought to be able to get more pixels on my work machine than I had back on a Sun-3 back in 1987 (Finally fixed that this year :-) For the most part, because my vision issues are still mild, I fix the pixel size issues with glasses, because I'm running Windows on my main work machine and can't just tell it "make everything bigger", like we did with NeWS Postscript-based displays.
There are exceptions; timing-related software or analog inputs may be dealing with inexact bits, but basically everything you're doing with software is precise. Real-world building materials aren't. I once helped a crew of retired construction workers build a church, and not only did they use a lot less effort than us young guys (because they could hit something once, in just the right place, instead of waling away at it like we did), but they also had a lot of insights like "this board's a bit green, so as it dries it'll twist a bit _that_ way, so we should put it in this way up and nail it there so it stays in compression when it does that instead of going into tension.
You've lost track of the Bush Administration's propaganda about the UN, because you're only remembering the most recent versions. In the early Bush years, he wanted everybody in the world to support his campaign for invading Afghanistan, and he had the backing of the UN to allow him to do it. It was only later on when the UN wasn't being helpful enough in generating support for whatever he was doing that he switched over to bashing them. (Admittedly, it's been long enough that I've also lost track of when that was - it was probably when he was forming the Coalition Of The Willing, aka Bush League Of Nations, that he used to attack Iraq, since there was no real legitimate way to get the UN to approve the invasion of Iraq, in spite of him bullying Colin Powell into telling them that the Iraqis had Weapons of Mass Destruction.)
With all due respect to Esther Dyson, ICANN's been a total mess from Day 1, both technically and policy-wise, so I hate to have to say this, but No, the UN would be even worse than ICANN.
Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations was the utopian dream. The UN was much less that way.
The previous Internet Governance Forums have made it clear that there are a mixture of objectives
Internationalizing DNS is a fine thing to do; too bad ICANN and Verisign have chosen that appalling Punycode approach, which requires anybody who wants to use international names to write ugly hackish paradigm-breaking code to do it, instead of just using UTF-8 and biting the bullet on the upper/lower case problem. On the other hand, that code is pretty short, and IE, Mozilla, and a couple of other significant programs have done it.
Bridging the Digital Divide is a fine thing to do - capitalism is rapidly improving the computer costs, mobile phones with texting are enough to make a good start, One Laptop Per Child is a bit more expensive than it should have been. In most poor countries, the best way to deliver cost-effective Internet access is to get rid of the government telecom monopolies, which isn't an especially popular viewpoint at an inter-governmental forum such as the IGF, but the mobile phone business has often leapfrogged the wired infrastructure anyway, and there's a lot of undersea cable being built around Africa waiting for the monopolies and ex-quasi-monopoly telcos to get out of the way so it can be connected.
But if the only people who can talk about controlling what can and can't be said on the internet are the people who approve of controlling it, and you can't name them or talk against that, because the First Rule of the Internet Global Fight Club is that you can't talk about what IGF is for, then any meeting is a farce, and it ought to be stopped right away.
and since they were in the US, they were also firearms enthusiasts. I'd advise against recommending killing Down's Syndrome babies around them; they might have other opinions about how to improve the gene pool...
Also, most people with Down's Syndrome babies have them when the mother is older, and they're much better able to take care of them than people who had their kids at 20. If your concern is about the gene pool rather than the individual kids, remember that they're less likely to have kids of their own.
Yeah, people who approve of eugenics tend to talk about designer babies; you'll see echoes of it in Heinlein and other early science fiction novels. But back when there was an active Eugenics movement, it was mostly about keeping the genetically undesirable from reproducing.
Glad to know all those movies with Warp Drive and Hyperspace Wars and shrinking people and such belong in the Fantasy section of the bookstore now...
The main problem is that it lets you consume lots of alcohol without realizing that you're that drunk, because the caffeine makes you awake and bouncy, and the lack of flavor in the vodka also makes you notice it less. If you'd been drinking that much vodka straight up, you'd have noticed the effects earlier and slowed down, or at least been more aware that you shouldn't be doing things that seem like a perfectly fine idea with all that caffeine. And then the ethanol catches up with you.
Irish coffee doesn't have quite the same effect, because it's hot enough you drink it slowly, plus the social environment you drink it in is different. And it has good-tasting ingredients, as opposed to Red Bull which is just nasty :-) Rum & Coke is an intermediate case - you're getting a lot more liquid for the amount of ethanol and caffeine, so your body can process it more slowly and you won't get as much of the dehydration problems causing that hangover the next day.
That doesn't seem to be a medical risk with marijuana - there are no known cases of death from overdose, and it tends to discourage vomiting (unlike some of the psychedelic mushrooms.) On the other hand, even though marijuana's not fatal, it can lead to Stupidity, which can be fatal.
But yeah, you definitely should have a babysitter if you're consuming dubious substances. (Quarter of an ounce? Dude, what were you thinking?)
I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area; if I wanted to legally buy marijuana this week I could look in the paper for a doctor who'll recommend marijuana to help my back pain / migraines / stress / paranoia / whatever, and then go buy good quality marijuana at a "clinic". :-) Or there's probably a jam-band concert coming to your area next summer, if you're not in a hurry.
Jon Stewart (no relation) once said the whole medical-marijuana process seemed silly, if he needed it he could go buy it in the park like everybody else in New York does
On the other hand, if I wanted a non-hippie drug like meth, I don't actually know where to look; rednecks don't hang out in drum circles, the nearby motorcycle shops are for yuppies, and walking into a strange biker bar asking if anybody's dealing meth is probably a Bad Idea. Maybe some of the hippie drug dealers in the park would know somebody who knows somebody.
Morphine's available in the US for similar applications, and for most applications it's as good as or better than heroin.
Vicodin (hydrocodone plus acetaminophen/paracetamol ) is widely prescribed for unsupervised use, for people who need something a bit stronger than codeine (which is also mixed with acetaminophen here) - the FDA and DEA allow it because the acetaminophen will rot your liver and kidneys if you take abuse-level doses, so they don't mind if your dentist prescribes you a bottle of 20 to take until your root-canal pain wears off. Oxycodone is somewhat stronger than hydrocodone.
Those drugs can be prescribed with only moderate levels of bureaucracy here - but if doctors want to prescribe anything stronger, or prescribe opiates that aren't mixed with other drugs, outside of a hospital environment, there's a much heavier level of bureaucratic supervision and in many cases outright harassment. That's starting to be a problem, as the medical practices are finding that acetaminophen overuse is a more serious problem than they'd expected, but they can't prescribe the safer versions because of the regulators' perception of abuse potential.
You're blaming the wrong Paul. The Kaminsky bug works because DNS usually uses UDP and only has a 16-bit query ID field, so it's easy to overwhelm at current network speeds (it was a bit tougher when the ARPAnet backbone was 56kbps...) and because you can birthday-attack the stuff if you're clever.
I've only waded as far back as RFC883 today, so it's possible that somebody other than Paul Mockapetris and presumably Jon Postel was responsible for picking the query id field size, but I doubt it was Paul Vixie. If you want to blame him for how long it took to put query port randomization into BIND, I won't stand in your way, but even that's only a stopgap.
I don't know about his ISP, but there are ISPs out there that not only hijack NXDOMAIN queries, but also transparently hijack *all* DNS queries. DNSSEC may help, and anti-Kaminsky-spoofing may help, but it's basically evil.
I'm not saying there aren't lots of reasons to be upset with just about any phone company, but which one are you upset at?
They're not redirecting you to a web page - they're redirecting you to a different IP address, which has a web server on it. What if you weren't running http? Besides dig, there's also https (are they only serving http?), and ssh, and email (less common on www.x.x, admittedly), but they're still fundamentally breaking it.
It's not unreasonable to expect that my machine might have a web browser on it - but if that's not the application I used, they need to know not to break it, and they *can't* know that, because they don't know what application asked DNS to send the DNS query. Furthermore, the browsers I'm most likely to be using already know how to redirect queries to my favorite search engine, so they're also breaking that application.
There's one case where it's usually ok for them to break DNS, which is where you're trying to query a DNS name for a known Evil Website, typically a phisher or malware site. There are some people who really want to check out what's being served from evil.impostor.paypa11.com, but those people are expected to know what they're doing, and 99.999% of the queries to those sites are due to phishing or other evils.