Sure, it's possible that identity theft could happen, and if you want to file a $54M lawsuit to get their attention, that's an obvious thing to bring up. But in practice it's unlikely, while any data on the machine that she didn't back up is lost.
The most likely thing that happened to the machine is that somebody mislabeled it or mistyped some database record tracking it, so it'll sit around their warehouse not getting repaired for a couple of years until the once-expensive laptop is worth $25 on eBay, or maybe it'll get noticed earlier than that but they still won't figure out how to return it to her. Another reasonably likely possibility is that it got broken during handling and somebody didn't want to admit it. And yeah, it's possible that an employee stole it.
But if it was actually stolen, while some thieves may be skilled enough to abuse the information, it's too easy to get caught that way; better to either steal the information off the machines you're not stealing, or to wipe the information off the disk on hardware you do steal so that it doesn't get traced back to the owner.
Incompetence ok, Lying Bad, Backups Priceless
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The $54 Million Laptop
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't fault the store for losing her laptop; it's incompetent and they should pay for it, but it happens on occasion, as do things like laptops falling off the workbench and smashing. You expect that to happen to every x% of the customers, and try to keep x small.
The local store lying about how they know where it is and they'll get it back to her Real Soon, on the other hand, and not taking responsibility for compensating her for losing it, is much closer to malice than incompetence, and they should get spanked for it. The traditional legal spanking is "triple damages".
On the other hand, she really _should_ have had backups of her data - not only do stores occasionally lose computers, but so do shipping companies, and computers break, disks crash, controllers scribble, etc., and external USB drives are cheap. The obvious first question from the store when she brought it in, after generally finding out what's wrong, should have been "Do you have backups? Let's burn you some DVDs now!"
He's writing about the *Experience*, not physics
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Outer Space has a Smell
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· Score: 2, Interesting
RTFA - it's really short, and was written in 2003, so you should have had plenty of time...
Of course vacuum doesn't have a smell, and it's much more likely that the smell is from the way space suits react to being in vacuum than gasses wafting up from earth getting stuck on them. Or it could be from some of those funky molds that grow on the space station. But that's not really relevant, because he's not writing about physics, he's writing about the experience of being in a space-ship, and smell is one of those things that tie in to emotions and memory.
My typical memory-burning web surfing session is to go to Google News or especially to Fark.com, open up about 100 tabs of potentially interesting news stories, and then go read them one at a time, closing each one after I've read it. It's one thing to have the browser use lots of memory while I've got all the tabs open - but when I've finished with them all, and just have the original page back, or even hit "Home" to get "about:blank", the browser typically *still* has over 100MB of RAM and is often burning 20-70% of CPU. That's a memory leak!. Firefox 2 isn't significantly better than later Firefox 1.x versions - I'm hoping 3 will be at least a bit better.
Do you know which settings to disable? Usually I don't mind if moving from one tab to the next is a bit slow - I've got lots of CPU, except when Mozilla tries to burn it all, and it's often slow anyway because the machine's busy paging/swapping heavily.
I used to share a lab with an ex-Navy guy. His basic description of how the different military branches "secure" a computer was like
The Army sends a bunch of guards armed with automatic weapons to make sure nobody steals the computer.
The Navy ties the machine down with netting so it won't bounce around during shipping, tightens the screws in the rack, coils the cables neatly and attaches them with cable ties.
The Air Force cuts a purchase order to buy another one.
Our lab was _much_ neater once Dave got there - plus he did a good job on router ACLs, installing OS patches, etc.:-)
You'd think the NSA would be more involved in this kind of thing, but usually when I hear about people getting funding for cyber warfare boondoggles as opposed to computer security, it's the Air Force.
Good luck getting geeks to move to Barksdale Louisiana - nearest major town is Shreveport, and it's about 3 hours from Dallas, 5-6 from New Orleans. They may be building a big shiny building, but if they want to hire geeks, they'd have a lot better luck locating this at Livermore Labs or Moffett Field or somewhere around Boston or NYC.
I'd much rather set the metadata to some passphrase of mine which I can choose for the occasion than be stuck with at most two sets of metadata for all my pictures. Or if I really wanted a biometric, a voiceprint would be more useful (because I could say something like "Washington DC, Nov 5, 2008" or whatever useful tagging I want.) Or even a thumbprint would be better than my eyeprint.
L Ron Ron was apparently taking lots and lots of pills during some years, but crack wasn't around until the 1980s, and he died in 1986. Some of his science fiction, such as Battlefield Earth, was written that late, but most of his work was much earlier. I don't know what he was taking, but amphetamines were popular and widely available in the 1950s, so paranoid sleep-addled drughead is potentially possible, and bad sci-fi is definitely correct.
Of course you're getting an unbalanced view by only talking to people who left and not talking to people who stayed. But the people who stayed aren't talking. Sure, they're saying that it's really helpful and gives them the weapons to win on the battlefield of life, and you can find out a lot of their entry-level beliefs by reading Dianetics (Buy it! Read it! Use it!), but they're basically not talking.
Now, there are other religions that are esoteric, but most of them don't pretend to also be scientific, and most of them don't have a ladder of charging you cold hard cash to get them. There are Buddhist teachings that the lamas will only teach you if you're a sincere Buddhist, and there are teachings that only make sense if you've spent a few years meditating and will otherwise distract you from the more important practices. There are Yoga positions that you really really shouldn't try unless you've been doing yoga for a long time, and any clueful teacher will tell you not to try them because you'll just tear your shoulder blade muscles. But the price isn't cash, it's practice. And there are mountains that guides won't take you to if you don't have the experience and physical strength to climb them safely - those guys *will* charge you money, but you've still got to have the skills, and they'll be happy to show you *pictures* of the mountains and recommend that you climb some smaller mountains first. Scientology doesn't want you to see the pictures of Xenu The Evil Space Alien and His DC9 Fleet until *after* your bank account's been tapped.
There are also other religions and similar types of groups that want cash up front. Transcendental Meditation wants whatever their current fee is to give you an initiation and your own personal secret mantra (which is picked from a simple list, not actually customized for you), plus you've got to offer fruit and flowers to their guru and his gods (not to the Maharishi, who just died this week, but to his teacher.) But they'll still tell you what it's about.
There are many religions and preachers that teach that you should give some fraction of your money to the church - some of them want it to help feed the poor, while others of them want it so the preacher can have a big house and a Learjet, and some of them teach about loving God and your neighbors while others mostly teach about Prosperity and how You can get it if you just Believe hard enough. Some of them are Christians, some of them are New Agers, some of them are Buddhists, and you'd think you could pretty much tell which kind are sincere, but a lot of people go in for the bogus ones anyway. (That's of course separate from whether the groups ask for some money to fix the church building's roof or pay the meeting-hall's rent or hire a full-time preacher at a not-very-high salary; if you're going to have an institution you're going to have institutional expenses.)
The price of Scientology auditing is a lot higher than the cost of office space and training volunteer quack psychiatrists to listen to you. And even if they keep some of their teachings secret until you've had the training you need to understand them, that doesn't mean they need to keep their organizational structure or finances hidden.
I'd recommend using SPF before the SURBLs, because you can do it during the SMTP interaction rather than after accepting the message, a point I'd forgotten to make above.
The other big difference between DKIM and SPF is that DKIM verifies the user name, while SPF only verifies the domain, so you can tell that mail really came from security@yahoo.com and not random-spammer@yahoo.com. For Paypal this doesn't make much difference; mail from just about anybody at Paypal is probably legit, while for Yahoo I suspect the big issue is really that if I complain about spam from random-spammer@yahoo.com they can use the DKIM to decide whether to cancel that user. EBay's an intermediate case - sometimes mail from their customers asking about my bids is from the real sellers, while mail from their customers or "eBay Security" when I'm not buying or selling anything is usually phishing.
I've got two main problems with mail from Paypal/EBay/etc. One is that sometimes they actually send me legitimate mail, so if I get mail that looks legit I may need to check that it's really from them. The other is that lots of spammers send me junk purporting to be from them that I don't want cluttering up my mailbox.
DKIM is a heavy cryptographic protocol for positive identification - it's occasionally worth checking, but I'd rather not have to use it on every phishing spam, and I'd rather not have to tell my mail system "If the mail purports to be from the DKIM sites, make sure there's a signature and also that it's valid" just to cut down on spam load.
SPF is much lighter - it doesn't give me a strong guarantee that the mail's legitimate, but for sites that use it (such as Paypal/EBay), it lets me discard a lot of the spam based on IP addresses. That doesn't stop everything - mail from Paypal-Security-Team.com or similar bogus domains can still get through, but at least it's a good start.
Vista's (or IE-on-Vista's?) approach to IPv6 is "Use IPv6 if you know the IPv6 address and are running IPv6, otherwise use IPv4 if you know the IPv4 address" - but unlike IPv4, where the whole Internet really is connected except for internal networks that use firewalls to reach the Internet, IPv6 isn't a whole Internet yet - it's a bunch of islands (or a series of tubes, or something.) So if anybody's DNS advertises an IPv6 address, and if you've got IPv6 enabled on your machine, then Vista will try to use it, even if you're only supporting autoconfigured IPv6 on your LAN connection and your ISP isn't providing you with connectivity.
That's not the same as saying that Facebook has (or hasn't) misconfigured their IPv6. You could argue that Vista's misconfigured its, or that IE-on-Vista's misconfigured its, and that the right choice should be "if you know an IPv6 address for the destination and are running IPv6, try an HTTP probe to the site, see if it opens, and try again with IPv4 if it fails." That's an annoying break-the-protocol-stack-layering approach - forcing the application layer to deal with routing issues that should otherwise be handled at Layer 3. But that's somewhat endemic to having multiple protocol stacks to pick from, and a more flexible operating system would just mean you had a choice of things to do wrong and tools to do them wrong with.
That's basically what this does, is lets you point users to your new shiny IPv6 tubes instead of the old IPv4 tubes.
But yes, IPv4 has already been saved by a variety of ingenious (or evil) tech solutions in advance of running out of addresses. We've got CIDR, and proxy firewalls, and Variable-Length Subnet Masking, and NAT, and Many Ugly NAT-Traversal Solutions, and HTTP1.1's virtual hosts (which let you have multiple web server domain names at a single IP address), and SMTP's virtual hosts. We've done that already.
We're now reaching the point that if you don't switch over to IPv6 soon, you're not going to be able to get a real IPv4 address, but instead you'll be stuck behind NAT for everything.
IPv6 has at least half a dozen different address-allocation modes, though I haven't kept track of which are popular for local use and which are deprecated. If you're going to use IPv6 internally, you can go pick one. Alternatively, find an ISP that supports IPv6, either directly or through tunneling, so you can reach the rest of the IPv6 world.
More importantly, the model that the IPv6 folks want you to follow is for end-users to get address space from their ISPs, who can handle addressing hierarchically, rather than rebuilding the IPv4 Class C Swamp, where everybody not only has an address block that belonged to them, but insists that every public router in the world needs to know how to reach them and people who have large address blocks split them up into multiple parts they advertise for traffic-engineering purposes. That's led to the BGP4 address space expanding rapidly, to the point that popular large Cisco switches that can route 244000 address blocks are running out of content-addressible memory. It's not a perfect model - there's still no good solution for companies that want to have multiple ISPs for redundancy - so you may need to get your own space if you're big enough. But for what most people are doing, it's fine.
I object because I used to work for a guy with a number tattooed on his arm.
Here in the US, people believe that we're free and the government works for us - we're not owned by some government. Britain's a bit different, having a tradition of feudalism (we has a revolution against ours, while they mostly outgrew theirs), but they still also believe in individual freedom as a fundamental value. We both know it doesn't really work that way any more, and don't like it, and that really annoys us. Our countries also both have a history of slavery, and we know how owners treat property, though we didn't use ID cards for slaves back then.
South African friends of mine also had ID cards, but they could travel freely around their country because they were obviously white, while blacks and coloreds had to show their passes prove that they were going somewhere the white people wanted them. If you need a pass to travel around your country, you're obviously not one of the white owners, and if you want other people to have passes to travel around, you're saying you *are* one of the white owners.
Organizations assign you numbers and ID cards because they want to keep track of you and make you ask their permission to do things, and because they don't trust you. I don't mind if my bank does that - they're keeping my money, and I don't want them to let other people take it. But when a government says I need to get their permission to go somewhere, that's morally unacceptable - freedom to travel is a fundamental human right - and they're able to enforce it because they've got a bunch of guns and can shoot anybody who doesn't obey. I don't mind if the government uses numbers as database indexes to keep track of appropriate things; I'm not the only person in my town with my name. But if they're keeping track of things that are none of their business, that's wrong. And ID cards mean that they can keep all those records together, which is dangerous and inappropriate.
I've been really surprised that Europeans are tolerant of ID cards, not only given the recent unpleasantness that had just happened when you Swedes got yours, but also given the history of the 1700s-1800s, with monarchies, czars, secret police, and that sort of abuse from traditional governments and their replacements.
They didn't say that because the government wanted to make sure nobody'd abuse the number (though there were enough people concerned about that and putting "not for identification" on it kept some of those people quieter.)
They said that simply because the Social Security Administration didn't want to go to all the work of producing an identity card, verifying that they only gave the card to the correct person, providing a mechanism to verify that a person holding a card was a correct person, etc. It was just a simple information card you could use to keep track of your number if you had trouble memorizing 9-digit numbers reliably.
Older US passports don't have the RFID chip; it's very new - the old ones have bar-codes which the passport control people can scan if they want to, and other people who take passports as ID (such as airline ticketing and TSA harassers) don't actually scan it. Usually laundering them will damage the paper parts of the passport but not the RFID; microwaving passports can burn the paper next to the chip.
I was in Hong Kong a while back, and the general advice from the tour guides was that you should only buy the silver $10 Rolexes from street vendors, not the gold ones, because the color rubs off the gold ones....
Nobody was around to write it down, so I guess it doesn't count as "history", but if that's how life evolved here it certainly *was* significant, and I'm not only glad it happened, but I wouldn't be here to say so if it hadn't, and neither would history.
On the other hand, if that's *not* how life evolved here, then it wasn't significant for history here, and the Ice Planet can have it if they want.
You can adjust those theories as needed if you think Panspermia was part of the process; it seems far less likely to me, but it's possible that some of the chemicals needed for life to evolve came from interstellar dust, or that some of Terrence McKenna's mushroom-spores-from-outer-space theories could be true (oh, wow, man!), but either of those cases could include some evolution in ice, whether that's Martian polar caps or moons of Europa or whatever.
The story you're referencing is about advances in Single-Level Cell NAND NAND flash memory, which is the more expensive longer-wear-cycle cousin of the Multi-Level Cell flash memory that's been taking over the USB Flash market. MLC is more dense, and the price/gig has dropped by about 75% since last summer. Unfortunately, MLC technology only supports about 10,000 write cycles per cell (vs. about 100,000 for SLC), so you need to use wear-leveling drivers to keep it from wearing out, but that's still good enough for most current applications.
Phase Change Memory (PCM)'s a different animal entirely - much faster, with much different physical and chemical design, and it's also had technology advances recently.
Scuba's difficult at those depths, and it's really only useful if you're trying to install a wiretap without being detected. If you want to get fancy, you can hang a video camera on your anchor chain. But otherwise, you can have your buddies back on land tell you when their pings stopped working on the appropriate cables or BGP gave them an update.
If you're the CIA/NSA/KGB/Mossad/HagbardCeline, you can use your fancy submarine to do the wiretap job. Or you might could just hire Bubba the Backhoe Driver's cousin Bubba the Fishing Boat Captain, or their second cousins Jean-Robe'rt Bubba' or Mustapha-ibn-Bubba to show you where the good tuna fishin' spots are, which is a lot cheaper.
The Republicans would be really happy to have Hillary as the candidate, and certainly don't mind helping along a low-cost easily-deniable smear campaign against Obama. They're not going to pay for expensive television advertising to promote it, or pay much to smear him in other ways before the nomination, but he's the candidate they're probably most frightened about, because he's talking about change, and because he's a relatively unknown quantity, while they've got years of practice smearing Hillary and now where lots of the skeletons in her closets are.
If she gets nominated, you can be sure that Whitewater gets mentioned a lot, and Vince Foster gets mentioned the way Obama's alleged Muslim status does now.
And besides, smearing the Muslim and the Mormon at the same time is Fair and Balanced.
More to the point, Romney's not going to be the Republican candidate, unless we get lucky and the Republicans decide to vote for somebody that either Hillary or O'Bama can beat.
California's going to vote Democrat, whether I like it or not, and since the Republican party was taken over by the Bush/Cheney/Rove wing a few years ago I can't say that that's a totally bad thing (though I'd prefer if the state government could be run by some vaguely fiscally responsible party without it influencing national politics.)
So it's ok to vote for the Libertarian or Green or Whatever Party in the fall election, because that way your vote indicates who you'd actually prefer to have running things, and the Democrats will get the state's electoral votes anyway.
The primary election's a bit different case - at least three of the parties have candidates that are significantly different from each other and it could be worth picking the best of them for your party.
I like Obama better than Clinton, even though he's a bit of a stuffed shirt, and I think he's got a better chance of beating McCain than she does, but I'm not going to re-register as "Democrat" to vote for him. If I'd known that I could re-register as "Decline to State" I might have considered that more seriously.
I was considering holding my nose and re-registering as Republican to vote for Ron Paul, and I supported him actively in 1988, but frankly he's pissed me off with his unConstitutional and unlibertarian position against immigrants, plus he did a fairly incompetent job in the New Hampshire debate. (I talked to him about the immigration issue a few years back, and his thinking is along the lines that the government owns the country and has a right as a private-property-owner to keep out trespassers.) He doesn't appear to have been paying much attention to real economics in the last decade or so; while there has been some inflation due to monetary policy, the real problems have been driven by fiscal policy and demographic changes and he doesn't get that.
From a strategic perspective, it was tempting to re-register Republican to vote for Romney, because either Obama or Hillary can solidly beat him, but McCain can probably beat Hillary and has a pretty good chance against Obama, and it's really important to get the Republicans out of power to reverse the damage they've done to America's civil liberties, foreign policy, reputation, courts, etc. Voting for the Huckster would be more fun - he's wrong about lots of things, but he's basically a decent guy, and Romney gives me the creeps - but he doesn't have a chance against McCain. There are reasons that the Republicans don't run an open primary here in California, and it's partly to prevent outsiders like all the Democrats from interfering with them like that.
I haven't been following the Greens candidates, so I don't know which of them are serious (presumably McKinney is) and which are random kooks or Draft-Nader-Again types.
The Libertarian Party picks our candidates by caucus at their national convention, so the primaries in states where we have them are really just a straw poll, but since I'm not going to be a national delegate, this is my chance to vote. I like Christine Smith, and will probably vote for her, and Steve Kubby and George Phillies are both good principled people. The leading fundraisers are Wayne Root (pro-war Republicanoid) and Michael Jingozian (New-Agey advertiser type - I don't know him and his web site was too fluffy to identify real positions the last time I looked;he might be just fine), and of course we've got a few old cranks and some nice guys who aren't serious contenders (even by Libertarian standards for "serious", which are pretty relaxed.)
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The most likely thing that happened to the machine is that somebody mislabeled it or mistyped some database record tracking it, so it'll sit around their warehouse not getting repaired for a couple of years until the once-expensive laptop is worth $25 on eBay, or maybe it'll get noticed earlier than that but they still won't figure out how to return it to her. Another reasonably likely possibility is that it got broken during handling and somebody didn't want to admit it. And yeah, it's possible that an employee stole it.
But if it was actually stolen, while some thieves may be skilled enough to abuse the information, it's too easy to get caught that way; better to either steal the information off the machines you're not stealing, or to wipe the information off the disk on hardware you do steal so that it doesn't get traced back to the owner.
The local store lying about how they know where it is and they'll get it back to her Real Soon, on the other hand, and not taking responsibility for compensating her for losing it, is much closer to malice than incompetence, and they should get spanked for it. The traditional legal spanking is "triple damages".
On the other hand, she really _should_ have had backups of her data - not only do stores occasionally lose computers, but so do shipping companies, and computers break, disks crash, controllers scribble, etc., and external USB drives are cheap. The obvious first question from the store when she brought it in, after generally finding out what's wrong, should have been "Do you have backups? Let's burn you some DVDs now!"
Of course vacuum doesn't have a smell, and it's much more likely that the smell is from the way space suits react to being in vacuum than gasses wafting up from earth getting stuck on them. Or it could be from some of those funky molds that grow on the space station. But that's not really relevant, because he's not writing about physics, he's writing about the experience of being in a space-ship, and smell is one of those things that tie in to emotions and memory.
Other astronauts have made similar comments.
Do you know which settings to disable? Usually I don't mind if moving from one tab to the next is a bit slow - I've got lots of CPU, except when Mozilla tries to burn it all, and it's often slow anyway because the machine's busy paging/swapping heavily.
- The Army sends a bunch of guards armed with automatic weapons to make sure nobody steals the computer.
- The Navy ties the machine down with netting so it won't bounce around during shipping, tightens the screws in the rack, coils the cables neatly and attaches them with cable ties.
- The Air Force cuts a purchase order to buy another one.
Our lab was _much_ neater once Dave got there - plus he did a good job on router ACLs, installing OS patches, etc.You'd think the NSA would be more involved in this kind of thing, but usually when I hear about people getting funding for cyber warfare boondoggles as opposed to computer security, it's the Air Force.
Good luck getting geeks to move to Barksdale Louisiana - nearest major town is Shreveport, and it's about 3 hours from Dallas, 5-6 from New Orleans. They may be building a big shiny building, but if they want to hire geeks, they'd have a lot better luck locating this at Livermore Labs or Moffett Field or somewhere around Boston or NYC.
And then there's that James Bond movie scene
L Ron Ron was apparently taking lots and lots of pills during some years, but crack wasn't around until the 1980s, and he died in 1986. Some of his science fiction, such as Battlefield Earth, was written that late, but most of his work was much earlier. I don't know what he was taking, but amphetamines were popular and widely available in the 1950s, so paranoid sleep-addled drughead is potentially possible, and bad sci-fi is definitely correct.
Now, there are other religions that are esoteric, but most of them don't pretend to also be scientific, and most of them don't have a ladder of charging you cold hard cash to get them. There are Buddhist teachings that the lamas will only teach you if you're a sincere Buddhist, and there are teachings that only make sense if you've spent a few years meditating and will otherwise distract you from the more important practices. There are Yoga positions that you really really shouldn't try unless you've been doing yoga for a long time, and any clueful teacher will tell you not to try them because you'll just tear your shoulder blade muscles. But the price isn't cash, it's practice. And there are mountains that guides won't take you to if you don't have the experience and physical strength to climb them safely - those guys *will* charge you money, but you've still got to have the skills, and they'll be happy to show you *pictures* of the mountains and recommend that you climb some smaller mountains first. Scientology doesn't want you to see the pictures of Xenu The Evil Space Alien and His DC9 Fleet until *after* your bank account's been tapped.
There are also other religions and similar types of groups that want cash up front. Transcendental Meditation wants whatever their current fee is to give you an initiation and your own personal secret mantra (which is picked from a simple list, not actually customized for you), plus you've got to offer fruit and flowers to their guru and his gods (not to the Maharishi, who just died this week, but to his teacher.) But they'll still tell you what it's about.
There are many religions and preachers that teach that you should give some fraction of your money to the church - some of them want it to help feed the poor, while others of them want it so the preacher can have a big house and a Learjet, and some of them teach about loving God and your neighbors while others mostly teach about Prosperity and how You can get it if you just Believe hard enough. Some of them are Christians, some of them are New Agers, some of them are Buddhists, and you'd think you could pretty much tell which kind are sincere, but a lot of people go in for the bogus ones anyway. (That's of course separate from whether the groups ask for some money to fix the church building's roof or pay the meeting-hall's rent or hire a full-time preacher at a not-very-high salary; if you're going to have an institution you're going to have institutional expenses.)
The price of Scientology auditing is a lot higher than the cost of office space and training volunteer quack psychiatrists to listen to you. And even if they keep some of their teachings secret until you've had the training you need to understand them, that doesn't mean they need to keep their organizational structure or finances hidden.
The other big difference between DKIM and SPF is that DKIM verifies the user name, while SPF only verifies the domain, so you can tell that mail really came from security@yahoo.com and not random-spammer@yahoo.com. For Paypal this doesn't make much difference; mail from just about anybody at Paypal is probably legit, while for Yahoo I suspect the big issue is really that if I complain about spam from random-spammer@yahoo.com they can use the DKIM to decide whether to cancel that user. EBay's an intermediate case - sometimes mail from their customers asking about my bids is from the real sellers, while mail from their customers or "eBay Security" when I'm not buying or selling anything is usually phishing.
DKIM is a heavy cryptographic protocol for positive identification - it's occasionally worth checking, but I'd rather not have to use it on every phishing spam, and I'd rather not have to tell my mail system "If the mail purports to be from the DKIM sites, make sure there's a signature and also that it's valid" just to cut down on spam load.
SPF is much lighter - it doesn't give me a strong guarantee that the mail's legitimate, but for sites that use it (such as Paypal/EBay), it lets me discard a lot of the spam based on IP addresses. That doesn't stop everything - mail from Paypal-Security-Team.com or similar bogus domains can still get through, but at least it's a good start.
That's not the same as saying that Facebook has (or hasn't) misconfigured their IPv6. You could argue that Vista's misconfigured its, or that IE-on-Vista's misconfigured its, and that the right choice should be "if you know an IPv6 address for the destination and are running IPv6, try an HTTP probe to the site, see if it opens, and try again with IPv4 if it fails." That's an annoying break-the-protocol-stack-layering approach - forcing the application layer to deal with routing issues that should otherwise be handled at Layer 3. But that's somewhat endemic to having multiple protocol stacks to pick from, and a more flexible operating system would just mean you had a choice of things to do wrong and tools to do them wrong with.
But yes, IPv4 has already been saved by a variety of ingenious (or evil) tech solutions in advance of running out of addresses. We've got CIDR, and proxy firewalls, and Variable-Length Subnet Masking, and NAT, and Many Ugly NAT-Traversal Solutions, and HTTP1.1's virtual hosts (which let you have multiple web server domain names at a single IP address), and SMTP's virtual hosts. We've done that already.
We're now reaching the point that if you don't switch over to IPv6 soon, you're not going to be able to get a real IPv4 address, but instead you'll be stuck behind NAT for everything.
More importantly, the model that the IPv6 folks want you to follow is for end-users to get address space from their ISPs, who can handle addressing hierarchically, rather than rebuilding the IPv4 Class C Swamp, where everybody not only has an address block that belonged to them, but insists that every public router in the world needs to know how to reach them and people who have large address blocks split them up into multiple parts they advertise for traffic-engineering purposes. That's led to the BGP4 address space expanding rapidly, to the point that popular large Cisco switches that can route 244000 address blocks are running out of content-addressible memory. It's not a perfect model - there's still no good solution for companies that want to have multiple ISPs for redundancy - so you may need to get your own space if you're big enough. But for what most people are doing, it's fine.
Here in the US, people believe that we're free and the government works for us - we're not owned by some government. Britain's a bit different, having a tradition of feudalism (we has a revolution against ours, while they mostly outgrew theirs), but they still also believe in individual freedom as a fundamental value. We both know it doesn't really work that way any more, and don't like it, and that really annoys us. Our countries also both have a history of slavery, and we know how owners treat property, though we didn't use ID cards for slaves back then.
South African friends of mine also had ID cards, but they could travel freely around their country because they were obviously white, while blacks and coloreds had to show their passes prove that they were going somewhere the white people wanted them. If you need a pass to travel around your country, you're obviously not one of the white owners, and if you want other people to have passes to travel around, you're saying you *are* one of the white owners.
Organizations assign you numbers and ID cards because they want to keep track of you and make you ask their permission to do things, and because they don't trust you. I don't mind if my bank does that - they're keeping my money, and I don't want them to let other people take it. But when a government says I need to get their permission to go somewhere, that's morally unacceptable - freedom to travel is a fundamental human right - and they're able to enforce it because they've got a bunch of guns and can shoot anybody who doesn't obey. I don't mind if the government uses numbers as database indexes to keep track of appropriate things; I'm not the only person in my town with my name. But if they're keeping track of things that are none of their business, that's wrong. And ID cards mean that they can keep all those records together, which is dangerous and inappropriate.
I've been really surprised that Europeans are tolerant of ID cards, not only given the recent unpleasantness that had just happened when you Swedes got yours, but also given the history of the 1700s-1800s, with monarchies, czars, secret police, and that sort of abuse from traditional governments and their replacements.
They said that simply because the Social Security Administration didn't want to go to all the work of producing an identity card, verifying that they only gave the card to the correct person, providing a mechanism to verify that a person holding a card was a correct person, etc. It was just a simple information card you could use to keep track of your number if you had trouble memorizing 9-digit numbers reliably.
Older US passports don't have the RFID chip; it's very new - the old ones have bar-codes which the passport control people can scan if they want to, and other people who take passports as ID (such as airline ticketing and TSA harassers) don't actually scan it. Usually laundering them will damage the paper parts of the passport but not the RFID; microwaving passports can burn the paper next to the chip.
Parent article is troll and/or flamebait.
I was in Hong Kong a while back, and the general advice from the tour guides was that you should only buy the silver $10 Rolexes from street vendors, not the gold ones, because the color rubs off the gold ones....
On the other hand, if that's *not* how life evolved here, then it wasn't significant for history here, and the Ice Planet can have it if they want.
You can adjust those theories as needed if you think Panspermia was part of the process; it seems far less likely to me, but it's possible that some of the chemicals needed for life to evolve came from interstellar dust, or that some of Terrence McKenna's mushroom-spores-from-outer-space theories could be true (oh, wow, man!), but either of those cases could include some evolution in ice, whether that's Martian polar caps or moons of Europa or whatever.
Phase Change Memory (PCM)'s a different animal entirely - much faster, with much different physical and chemical design, and it's also had technology advances recently.
If you're the CIA/NSA/KGB/Mossad/HagbardCeline, you can use your fancy submarine to do the wiretap job.
Or you might could just hire Bubba the Backhoe Driver's cousin Bubba the Fishing Boat Captain, or their second cousins Jean-Robe'rt Bubba' or Mustapha-ibn-Bubba to show you where the good tuna fishin' spots are, which is a lot cheaper.
If she gets nominated, you can be sure that Whitewater gets mentioned a lot, and Vince Foster gets mentioned the way Obama's alleged Muslim status does now.
And besides, smearing the Muslim and the Mormon at the same time is Fair and Balanced.
O'Bama's obviously an Irishman.
More to the point, Romney's not going to be the Republican candidate,
unless we get lucky and the Republicans decide to vote for somebody that either Hillary or O'Bama can beat.
So it's ok to vote for the Libertarian or Green or Whatever Party in the fall election, because that way your vote indicates who you'd actually prefer to have running things, and the Democrats will get the state's electoral votes anyway.
The primary election's a bit different case - at least three of the parties have candidates that are significantly different from each other and it could be worth picking the best of them for your party.