I make granola occasionally. I don't roll the oats myself, or pick the grapes and dry them into raisins, or scrape the honey out of beehives, etc., but combining them into granola's pretty straightforward.
The South seceded because they thought the North was going to take away their slaves (though the war is also called "The Slaveholders' Revolt", because it was the rich slave owners deciding to secede, without a clear majority of support from the rest of the population, and there were places like Eastern Tennessee that opposed the secession on a large scale.)
Lincoln invaded the South for reasons of nationalism. If he'd really been doing it because he cared about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would have happened in 1861, not in 1863 when the war was going badly and he needed to boost his ratings in the polls. America wasn't going to be able to complete its conquest of the West if it lost the South, or do any of the rest of that Manifest Destiny nonsense.
Another wrong side were the New York draft rioters, who didn't want to be drafted to fight in the war, especially when rich people could buy their way out of the draft. They weren't doing this because they were a bunch of hippies or Quakers - they were mostly immigrant laborers who didn't want to have to compete with free black people moving up to the big city after the North won the war.
There were probably other wrong sides as well, but over a million people got killed in that war, and there were other ways to have ended slavery.
Because the Patriot Act wasn't martial law at all, nor were the orders for all immigrants from Muslim countries to come in and talk to the authorities after 9/11, nor sending in the National Guard to shoot looters during Katrina instead of putting people on boats and busses to get them out of town.
And at least he had the decency to lie to Congress to get them to declare war on Iraq, instead of just announcing that he had the power to do so, like Obama did with Libya. On the other hand, if he wanted American citizens assassinated overseas, he just had his people do it quietly, instead of announcing that the White House lawyers had written up a legal justification for him to do it, which we're not allowed to see, the way Obama did.
The headline's not very clear - this is the new EAS, not the old EBS. EBS got tested nationally all the time - that's why radio stations would have the Tuesday morning squawking noise followed by "This is only a test", and TV stations would carry a test pattern and the same announcement. This one's probably a lot more complex and expensive, but can probably also do a better job of announcing local problems like floods as well as national-scale problems like Global Thermonuclear War.
We don't often get catastrophes that affect the whole US, but we frequently get ones that affect 1/4 of the country - hurricanes on the East Coast or the Gulf, floods on the Mississippi, power grid blackouts that take down the West Coast or the Northeast, or problems of that scale. Not only does the network need to be tested everywhere to make sure all the parts work (so it's much simpler for everybody to do it all at once), but it needs to be tested at full scale to make sure it doesn't choke at smaller scales (e.g. 10% of the country.)
But yeah, the first time I heard the EBS saying "This is not a test, repeat not a test", I nearly freaked out - I'd grown up in the Cold War, when the system was designed for the "kiss your ass goodbye" message, and it was the first time I'd heard them using it for normal emergencies like floods from the big rainstorm that was going on.
Yes, it's simple and obvious, and it took years of experimentation to get the simple and obvious parts to work well. The early Internet had congestion collapse problems that TCP needed to be retuned for, and figuring out how to get slow machines to send data fast (Van Jacobson's work) took a while, and Jim Getty's Bufferbloat work says we're not done yet.
Bram Cohen put a huge amount of incremental experimentation and testing into making Bittorrent work as well - things that are simple and obvious when you've got a dozen machines sharing files don't always scale up to a thousand machines sharing them, and things that work with a thousand machines don't always work with a million. And if you think that the Internet is mostly doing short transactions, you need to remember that at least as of a few years ago, Bittorrent was burning about a third of the bits on the internet, though Youtube/Hulu/etc. have probably displaced some of that with other big streaming data. (So yes, most of the transactions on the net are probably very short, but most of the bits aren't.)
There are two problems with using MAC addresses in IPv6 addresses making it easy to track - tracking you when you're in one place, and tracking you when you move around.
Tracking you in one place - in a typical IPv4 environment, there's a firewall that hides inside addresses behind NAT, so there's no obvious correlation between a public IP address and the actual machine behind it. Somebody may know that a connection came from a specific company or a specific Starbucks, but that doesn't identify the user, unless the firewall is managed by somebody who tracks that kind of thing. Of course, that's partly because NAT is breaking the end-to-end principle of the Internet in fundamentally evil ways, but it turns out that being evil wasn't all bad. And Microsoft and others have adopted IPv6 privacy mode, which lets your machine use different IPv6 addresses for every connection, which is kind of nice.
Tracking you in multiple locations - Computers aren't just for desktops any more - laptops etc. are portable. In a DHCP world, even if everybody used registered addresses instead of NAT, you can take a machine from home to work to Starbucks to a friend's house, and it'll get a different IP address at each location, with no correlations to show that you were at all those places, because the IPv4 address block belongs to the wired connection. With IPv6, each of those locations would have a different 64 network bits, but the 64 host bits are always your laptop's EUI-64 address, so somebody can track that it's you at all those place. On the other hand, IPv6 privacy mode helps that, and all of those cookies and flash-cookies and ever-cookies and browsers advertising your whole font collection mean that it was going to be pretty easy to track you anyway.
Maybe you don't remember the days before DHCP, back when you had to put IP addresses into equipment by hand, and TCP/IP hadn't entirely taken over the world. There were a couple of alternative protocols, such as Netware IPX and Banyan VINES and Appletalk, which let you plug equipment together and it would just work, because it would figure out what network-layer address to use based on the hardware address, and you didn't have to worry about whether two people had numbered their equipment 192.9.200.1 because they'd literally typed in the address in the manual, and if you wanted to renumber your network, you just renumbered a small number of boxes and everything else quickly figured out its new addresses by talking to the server/router/whatever. (There was also NetBEUI, if you were a Microsoft user, that had the property that you could plug it in and it wouldn't just work, because it was from Microsoft, but they weren't the only purveyor of bad proprietary networking software out there either.)
Of course, DHCP has given us that for 15 years or so, so it doesn't matter as much. And Microsoft's TCP/IP support gradually got good enough that most people stopped buying Netware, and it's probably been a decade since I've had to tell anybody to stop using IPX, Netware's had TCP/IP since 1995, and even Apple Localtalk was pretty much gone by the late 90s.
But it's still somewhat nice to be able to look at an IPv6 address and say "Oh, that MAC address belongs to a Cisco/Dell/Macintosh/etc., that's probably where the problem is.", the way you could with Netware. And it's too bad that the switchover from MAC to EUI-64 meant that any subnetting happens in the first 64 bits, not the second, so ISPs have to care about whether their customers are doing subnetting and how many bits they need for it, as opposed to the early-90s view where the ISP got 64 bits and the customer got 64 bits (which left 16 for subnet and 48 for MAC.)
A big problem for years was the price/performance of routers that were big enough to run large businesses or medium-large ISPs - they'd use hardware acceleration for IPv4, but didn't have anywhere near as good performance for IPv6, even if they had hardware support and weren't doing it all in software. And there was a big chicken-vs-egg problem of getting ISPs to spend more for fast IPv6 hardware when there wasn't enough IPv6 demand, while customers weren't pushing to go to IPv6 because few ISPs supported it (and content providers didn't feel the need to move when consumer ISPs weren't serving them eyeballs over IPv6, and consumer ISPs didn't move to IPv6 when there wasn't enough content.)
These days the big hardware has largely caught up - but consumer hardware for the home hasn't. That DSL router or cable modem runs on firmware, not remotely upgradeable hardware, and your $29 WiFi router doesn't know from IPv6, much less dual-stack, and your ISP doesn't want to deal with the customer support issues it'll take to get all their customers to upgrade. You'd think that at least all the 802.11n wireless gear would have done IPv6, so upgrading from g to n would also fix the problem, but nope - my Cisco Linksys stuff didn't, and I don't know if Netgear or DLink have caught up yet, much less random cheaper brands.
The other big problem is all of the management applications that it takes to run an ISP, web hosting service, or large business. There may not be quite as many 32-bit IP address fields stuck in random databases or printf statements as there were 2-digit dates before Y2K, but there are a lot. I work on managed network security services, and we need to deal with every router, firewall, IDS, and switch that we support to make sure that all of our databases and support systems and that perl script you wrote 5 years ago to automate monitoring the status of some widget all can work over IPv6. Vendor support is getting better, but I'm still running into products where you can connect to the management port over IPv6 if you need to, but the web GUI page where you put in the addresses of the trusted vs. untrusted sides only knows IPv4, or where some application lets you filter on arbitrary IPv4, ICMP, TCP, and UDP values (but not only doesn't do IPv6, but also forgot that ARP isn't IP either...)
Global Warming skepticism isn't just a grass-roots movement that's happening because global warming would be really scary if it were true or because its proponents don't like hippies. It's a well-funded campaign by businesses that would suffer financially from laws intended to stop global warming - oil companies, etc. - who are the Republican Party's corporate sponsors. They're also propagandists for Anti-Evolutionism, not because they care about Creationism, but because getting people not to believe in one kind of science makes it easier to get them not to believe in other kinds of science, and also because it's a way to get religious conservatives to believe that they should also be political conservatives. Anti-Evolutionism is the hook to get them in the door; stopping anti-global-warming laws is the payload.
I've got a Kindle, and I like it for reading, though unlike paperback books, I'm not going to read it it in the bathtub. It's light-weight, thin, arguably pocket-sized (depending on what shirt I'm wearing), ergonomics are really good for most things. For reading while travelling, it's stunningly nice.
But it's not big enough for web browsing; my 1280x1024 19" screen is just barely big enough for that. For a 7" screen to be useful, I'd need more pixels and stronger reading glasses, especially since I'd probably be wasting part of the screen space on a keypad (either physical or touchscreen.)
Yeah, it's been a decade or two since I've seen QNX too. It was a real-time OS with a message-passing microkernel that was only 4KB, which meant that it could be running on-chip in cache (assuming the cache didn't have better things to do, which it probably did, but 4-8KB was a typical cache size for a processor back then.)
SPEWS's main problem wasn't that they got DOS'd, though it didn't help them. Their main problem was that they had a reputation for providing low-quality results, blocking way too much legitimate email, and it was nearly impossible to contact them in case you were inappropriately listed. So if you were an email mailbox provider using them as a direct blocking service, you'd be getting huge numbers of false positives, and have to track down complaints from your users about lost mail. At best, they were useful as input to SpamAssassin. (I don't know if they're still operating the same way these days; I gather Michelle sold them or something, but haven't followed the details.)
Spamhaus's reputation over the years has been that they're really conservative, and almost never have false positive problems. That doesn't mean that they don't occasionally list ISPs who have some spammer customers and some non-spammer customers, but they're not in the Nuclear Overkill business the way SPEWS was.
Sure, in that case you would. But if you owned a bricks and mortar store, and the Better Business Bureau listed you as having a reputation for selling spoiled food or stolen goods, you wouldn't call the police on the BBB - you might sue them, or you might whine about how the BBB are a bunch of extortionists.
Calling the police is a more extreme reaction than sueing somebody. It's something you do if you think somebody needs to go to jail.
Once upon a time, your ISP was also usually your email provider. Hasn't been the case for a long time, though many people still find it convenient to use their ISP's mail for some purposes, but probably most people today either use a separate email provider for most of their mail, or use an ISP that outsources their email service to an email provider instead of running their own (e.g. mx.little-isp.net actually points to big-email-provider.net.)
So you either do or don't want to use an email provider that uses a specific RBL as part of their email filtering. Spamhaus has always had the reputation of providing high-quality conservative lists, as opposed to some RBLs that exclude all home IP connections (which are 99% zombie spammers and 1% home Linux users), or some lists that are extremely aggressive and non-responsive (e.g. SPEWS.)
My main email provider lets me choose a bunch of lists that can go into SpamAssassin weightings or just be used absolutely. For instance, I don't want any email from Nigeria or Korea, so those are on the hard-block list, but I do know people in South Africa and Japan, so those are only SpamAssassin weights.
I worked in other parts of Bell Labs in the 80s, and also saw him at Usenix conferences. Dennis was bright and did important work, but he was also a really nice guy, and didn't carry a Reality Distortion Field around with him.
While I never worked directly with Dennis, I met him a number of times during the 80s, between working at other parts of Bell Labs and going to Usenix conferences. He was a really nice guy, unlike a number of other important people in the field.
The standard treatment for stroke includes a clot-busting drug such as TPA if you can get it to the patient in the first few hours after the stroke. While this won't help her, they should keep a stockpile of it around for the next time somebody gets a stroke.
It's a bit more complicated than that - it helps some kinds of strokes and hurts others, so you need to consult a neurologist about it; I don't know if they'd also need to have CAT scan or equivalent medical hardware to help diagnosis.
Sure, they've been around a while, and we had various attempts at getting the pen-based computing market going since at least the early 90s. But they're typically tied up into an integrated vertical business model of applications, and never get the economies of scale it takes to be a mass-market product, and typically cost significantly more than a notebook computer. That's ok if you're Fedex making your drivers more efficient, but it's still really a niche market.
On the other hand, taking an iPad or competitor and adding a "fill out the forms" app? Easy.
Kindle-like devices are market-transforming for the eBook market, but from the standpoint of the computer market, they're basically a niche player. 10" tablets are big enough to replace many uses of a laptop or desktop computer and handle the equivalent of a full sheet of paper, so they're not just supporting niche applications like Angry Birds or phone-sized mini-browsers, they're enough to do full-sized web browsing. Maybe a 7" tablet can steal part of that market at half the price, but I'm skeptical.
I did get sent out for a left-handed smoke shifter once as a Boy Scout; it was obvious that that was a fake errand, so the way to respond to it was to come up with some credible object to bring back; I think we ended up bending up some sheet metal in a left-hand curve.
Unfortunately, the version of disk encryption that my corporate IT department uses on my work laptop means that the hibernation system doesn't work. I can still suspend the laptop (which on a Dell means that it sleeps for maybe an hour, then decides that it's gotten too hot keeping the memory awake inside my laptop bag, so it wakes up the OS and turns on the fan, burning the rest of the battery by trying to cool itself inside the bag.) It's Windows XP, and I think the disk encryption software is from Checkpoint. Does anybody know if there are laptop bags that have enough mesh for ventilation while still providing good padding?
Other than for electricity-related reasons, the main times my laptop gets rebooted are Microsoft Windows Patch Tuesdays, or sometimes when other critical application updates come out that insist on rebooting. On the other hand, my virtual machines get rebooted a good bit more often - that's sort of the point:-)
Of course there are other kinds of "better", coward. GSM's better because you can use it in more places, and have more choice of carriers, and have more choice of phones that support it, so you can find one that does a better job of what you want, and in many cases you can get it cheaper because of competition and economies of scale. Those are all different issues from whether the radio usage is technically better. And you may notice that Verizon, the main CDMA carrier, is switching to LTE for 4G, so apparently they think joining the GSM world is better for them too.
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I make granola occasionally. I don't roll the oats myself, or pick the grapes and dry them into raisins, or scrape the honey out of beehives, etc., but combining them into granola's pretty straightforward.
The South seceded because they thought the North was going to take away their slaves (though the war is also called "The Slaveholders' Revolt", because it was the rich slave owners deciding to secede, without a clear majority of support from the rest of the population, and there were places like Eastern Tennessee that opposed the secession on a large scale.)
Lincoln invaded the South for reasons of nationalism. If he'd really been doing it because he cared about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation would have happened in 1861, not in 1863 when the war was going badly and he needed to boost his ratings in the polls. America wasn't going to be able to complete its conquest of the West if it lost the South, or do any of the rest of that Manifest Destiny nonsense.
Another wrong side were the New York draft rioters, who didn't want to be drafted to fight in the war, especially when rich people could buy their way out of the draft. They weren't doing this because they were a bunch of hippies or Quakers - they were mostly immigrant laborers who didn't want to have to compete with free black people moving up to the big city after the North won the war.
There were probably other wrong sides as well, but over a million people got killed in that war, and there were other ways to have ended slavery.
Because the Patriot Act wasn't martial law at all, nor were the orders for all immigrants from Muslim countries to come in and talk to the authorities after 9/11, nor sending in the National Guard to shoot looters during Katrina instead of putting people on boats and busses to get them out of town.
And at least he had the decency to lie to Congress to get them to declare war on Iraq, instead of just announcing that he had the power to do so, like Obama did with Libya. On the other hand, if he wanted American citizens assassinated overseas, he just had his people do it quietly, instead of announcing that the White House lawyers had written up a legal justification for him to do it, which we're not allowed to see, the way Obama did.
The headline's not very clear - this is the new EAS, not the old EBS. EBS got tested nationally all the time - that's why radio stations would have the Tuesday morning squawking noise followed by "This is only a test", and TV stations would carry a test pattern and the same announcement. This one's probably a lot more complex and expensive, but can probably also do a better job of announcing local problems like floods as well as national-scale problems like Global Thermonuclear War.
We don't often get catastrophes that affect the whole US, but we frequently get ones that affect 1/4 of the country - hurricanes on the East Coast or the Gulf, floods on the Mississippi, power grid blackouts that take down the West Coast or the Northeast, or problems of that scale. Not only does the network need to be tested everywhere to make sure all the parts work (so it's much simpler for everybody to do it all at once), but it needs to be tested at full scale to make sure it doesn't choke at smaller scales (e.g. 10% of the country.)
But yeah, the first time I heard the EBS saying "This is not a test, repeat not a test", I nearly freaked out - I'd grown up in the Cold War, when the system was designed for the "kiss your ass goodbye" message, and it was the first time I'd heard them using it for normal emergencies like floods from the big rainstorm that was going on.
Yes, it's simple and obvious, and it took years of experimentation to get the simple and obvious parts to work well. The early Internet had congestion collapse problems that TCP needed to be retuned for, and figuring out how to get slow machines to send data fast (Van Jacobson's work) took a while, and Jim Getty's Bufferbloat work says we're not done yet.
Bram Cohen put a huge amount of incremental experimentation and testing into making Bittorrent work as well - things that are simple and obvious when you've got a dozen machines sharing files don't always scale up to a thousand machines sharing them, and things that work with a thousand machines don't always work with a million. And if you think that the Internet is mostly doing short transactions, you need to remember that at least as of a few years ago, Bittorrent was burning about a third of the bits on the internet, though Youtube/Hulu/etc. have probably displaced some of that with other big streaming data. (So yes, most of the transactions on the net are probably very short, but most of the bits aren't.)
There are two problems with using MAC addresses in IPv6 addresses making it easy to track - tracking you when you're in one place, and tracking you when you move around.
Tracking you in one place - in a typical IPv4 environment, there's a firewall that hides inside addresses behind NAT, so there's no obvious correlation between a public IP address and the actual machine behind it. Somebody may know that a connection came from a specific company or a specific Starbucks, but that doesn't identify the user, unless the firewall is managed by somebody who tracks that kind of thing. Of course, that's partly because NAT is breaking the end-to-end principle of the Internet in fundamentally evil ways, but it turns out that being evil wasn't all bad. And Microsoft and others have adopted IPv6 privacy mode, which lets your machine use different IPv6 addresses for every connection, which is kind of nice.
Tracking you in multiple locations - Computers aren't just for desktops any more - laptops etc. are portable. In a DHCP world, even if everybody used registered addresses instead of NAT, you can take a machine from home to work to Starbucks to a friend's house, and it'll get a different IP address at each location, with no correlations to show that you were at all those places, because the IPv4 address block belongs to the wired connection. With IPv6, each of those locations would have a different 64 network bits, but the 64 host bits are always your laptop's EUI-64 address, so somebody can track that it's you at all those place. On the other hand, IPv6 privacy mode helps that, and all of those cookies and flash-cookies and ever-cookies and browsers advertising your whole font collection mean that it was going to be pretty easy to track you anyway.
Maybe you don't remember the days before DHCP, back when you had to put IP addresses into equipment by hand, and TCP/IP hadn't entirely taken over the world. There were a couple of alternative protocols, such as Netware IPX and Banyan VINES and Appletalk, which let you plug equipment together and it would just work, because it would figure out what network-layer address to use based on the hardware address, and you didn't have to worry about whether two people had numbered their equipment 192.9.200.1 because they'd literally typed in the address in the manual, and if you wanted to renumber your network, you just renumbered a small number of boxes and everything else quickly figured out its new addresses by talking to the server/router/whatever. (There was also NetBEUI, if you were a Microsoft user, that had the property that you could plug it in and it wouldn't just work, because it was from Microsoft, but they weren't the only purveyor of bad proprietary networking software out there either.)
Of course, DHCP has given us that for 15 years or so, so it doesn't matter as much. And Microsoft's TCP/IP support gradually got good enough that most people stopped buying Netware, and it's probably been a decade since I've had to tell anybody to stop using IPX, Netware's had TCP/IP since 1995, and even Apple Localtalk was pretty much gone by the late 90s.
But it's still somewhat nice to be able to look at an IPv6 address and say "Oh, that MAC address belongs to a Cisco/Dell/Macintosh/etc., that's probably where the problem is.", the way you could with Netware. And it's too bad that the switchover from MAC to EUI-64 meant that any subnetting happens in the first 64 bits, not the second, so ISPs have to care about whether their customers are doing subnetting and how many bits they need for it, as opposed to the early-90s view where the ISP got 64 bits and the customer got 64 bits (which left 16 for subnet and 48 for MAC.)
A big problem for years was the price/performance of routers that were big enough to run large businesses or medium-large ISPs - they'd use hardware acceleration for IPv4, but didn't have anywhere near as good performance for IPv6, even if they had hardware support and weren't doing it all in software. And there was a big chicken-vs-egg problem of getting ISPs to spend more for fast IPv6 hardware when there wasn't enough IPv6 demand, while customers weren't pushing to go to IPv6 because few ISPs supported it (and content providers didn't feel the need to move when consumer ISPs weren't serving them eyeballs over IPv6, and consumer ISPs didn't move to IPv6 when there wasn't enough content.)
These days the big hardware has largely caught up - but consumer hardware for the home hasn't. That DSL router or cable modem runs on firmware, not remotely upgradeable hardware, and your $29 WiFi router doesn't know from IPv6, much less dual-stack, and your ISP doesn't want to deal with the customer support issues it'll take to get all their customers to upgrade. You'd think that at least all the 802.11n wireless gear would have done IPv6, so upgrading from g to n would also fix the problem, but nope - my Cisco Linksys stuff didn't, and I don't know if Netgear or DLink have caught up yet, much less random cheaper brands.
The other big problem is all of the management applications that it takes to run an ISP, web hosting service, or large business. There may not be quite as many 32-bit IP address fields stuck in random databases or printf statements as there were 2-digit dates before Y2K, but there are a lot. I work on managed network security services, and we need to deal with every router, firewall, IDS, and switch that we support to make sure that all of our databases and support systems and that perl script you wrote 5 years ago to automate monitoring the status of some widget all can work over IPv6. Vendor support is getting better, but I'm still running into products where you can connect to the management port over IPv6 if you need to, but the web GUI page where you put in the addresses of the trusted vs. untrusted sides only knows IPv4, or where some application lets you filter on arbitrary IPv4, ICMP, TCP, and UDP values (but not only doesn't do IPv6, but also forgot that ARP isn't IP either...)
Global Warming skepticism isn't just a grass-roots movement that's happening because global warming would be really scary if it were true or because its proponents don't like hippies. It's a well-funded campaign by businesses that would suffer financially from laws intended to stop global warming - oil companies, etc. - who are the Republican Party's corporate sponsors. They're also propagandists for Anti-Evolutionism, not because they care about Creationism, but because getting people not to believe in one kind of science makes it easier to get them not to believe in other kinds of science, and also because it's a way to get religious conservatives to believe that they should also be political conservatives. Anti-Evolutionism is the hook to get them in the door; stopping anti-global-warming laws is the payload.
I've got a Kindle, and I like it for reading, though unlike paperback books, I'm not going to read it it in the bathtub. It's light-weight, thin, arguably pocket-sized (depending on what shirt I'm wearing), ergonomics are really good for most things. For reading while travelling, it's stunningly nice.
But it's not big enough for web browsing; my 1280x1024 19" screen is just barely big enough for that. For a 7" screen to be useful, I'd need more pixels and stronger reading glasses, especially since I'd probably be wasting part of the screen space on a keypad (either physical or touchscreen.)
[] Do you feel lucky, punk?
Yeah, it's been a decade or two since I've seen QNX too. It was a real-time OS with a message-passing microkernel that was only 4KB, which meant that it could be running on-chip in cache (assuming the cache didn't have better things to do, which it probably did, but 4-8KB was a typical cache size for a processor back then.)
SPEWS's main problem wasn't that they got DOS'd, though it didn't help them. Their main problem was that they had a reputation for providing low-quality results, blocking way too much legitimate email, and it was nearly impossible to contact them in case you were inappropriately listed. So if you were an email mailbox provider using them as a direct blocking service, you'd be getting huge numbers of false positives, and have to track down complaints from your users about lost mail. At best, they were useful as input to SpamAssassin. (I don't know if they're still operating the same way these days; I gather Michelle sold them or something, but haven't followed the details.)
Spamhaus's reputation over the years has been that they're really conservative, and almost never have false positive problems. That doesn't mean that they don't occasionally list ISPs who have some spammer customers and some non-spammer customers, but they're not in the Nuclear Overkill business the way SPEWS was.
Spamhaus is implementing the agenda of a whole lot of third parties - it's their customers, who don't like receiving spam.
Sure, in that case you would. But if you owned a bricks and mortar store, and the Better Business Bureau listed you as having a reputation for selling spoiled food or stolen goods, you wouldn't call the police on the BBB - you might sue them, or you might whine about how the BBB are a bunch of extortionists.
Calling the police is a more extreme reaction than sueing somebody. It's something you do if you think somebody needs to go to jail.
Once upon a time, your ISP was also usually your email provider. Hasn't been the case for a long time, though many people still find it convenient to use their ISP's mail for some purposes, but probably most people today either use a separate email provider for most of their mail, or use an ISP that outsources their email service to an email provider instead of running their own (e.g. mx.little-isp.net actually points to big-email-provider.net.)
So you either do or don't want to use an email provider that uses a specific RBL as part of their email filtering. Spamhaus has always had the reputation of providing high-quality conservative lists, as opposed to some RBLs that exclude all home IP connections (which are 99% zombie spammers and 1% home Linux users), or some lists that are extremely aggressive and non-responsive (e.g. SPEWS.)
My main email provider lets me choose a bunch of lists that can go into SpamAssassin weightings or just be used absolutely. For instance, I don't want any email from Nigeria or Korea, so those are on the hard-block list, but I do know people in South Africa and Japan, so those are only SpamAssassin weights.
I worked in other parts of Bell Labs in the 80s, and also saw him at Usenix conferences. Dennis was bright and did important work, but he was also a really nice guy, and didn't carry a Reality Distortion Field around with him.
While I never worked directly with Dennis, I met him a number of times during the 80s, between working at other parts of Bell Labs and going to Usenix conferences. He was a really nice guy, unlike a number of other important people in the field.
The standard treatment for stroke includes a clot-busting drug such as TPA if you can get it to the patient in the first few hours after the stroke. While this won't help her, they should keep a stockpile of it around for the next time somebody gets a stroke.
It's a bit more complicated than that - it helps some kinds of strokes and hurts others, so you need to consult a neurologist about it; I don't know if they'd also need to have CAT scan or equivalent medical hardware to help diagnosis.
Sure, they've been around a while, and we had various attempts at getting the pen-based computing market going since at least the early 90s. But they're typically tied up into an integrated vertical business model of applications, and never get the economies of scale it takes to be a mass-market product, and typically cost significantly more than a notebook computer. That's ok if you're Fedex making your drivers more efficient, but it's still really a niche market.
On the other hand, taking an iPad or competitor and adding a "fill out the forms" app? Easy.
Kindle-like devices are market-transforming for the eBook market, but from the standpoint of the computer market, they're basically a niche player. 10" tablets are big enough to replace many uses of a laptop or desktop computer and handle the equivalent of a full sheet of paper, so they're not just supporting niche applications like Angry Birds or phone-sized mini-browsers, they're enough to do full-sized web browsing. Maybe a 7" tablet can steal part of that market at half the price, but I'm skeptical.
Snipe are real; snipe hunts are fake.
I did get sent out for a left-handed smoke shifter once as a Boy Scout; it was obvious that that was a fake errand, so the way to respond to it was to come up with some credible object to bring back; I think we ended up bending up some sheet metal in a left-hand curve.
Unfortunately, the version of disk encryption that my corporate IT department uses on my work laptop means that the hibernation system doesn't work. I can still suspend the laptop (which on a Dell means that it sleeps for maybe an hour, then decides that it's gotten too hot keeping the memory awake inside my laptop bag, so it wakes up the OS and turns on the fan, burning the rest of the battery by trying to cool itself inside the bag.) It's Windows XP, and I think the disk encryption software is from Checkpoint. Does anybody know if there are laptop bags that have enough mesh for ventilation while still providing good padding?
Other than for electricity-related reasons, the main times my laptop gets rebooted are Microsoft Windows Patch Tuesdays, or sometimes when other critical application updates come out that insist on rebooting. On the other hand, my virtual machines get rebooted a good bit more often - that's sort of the point :-)
Of course there are other kinds of "better", coward. GSM's better because you can use it in more places, and have more choice of carriers, and have more choice of phones that support it, so you can find one that does a better job of what you want, and in many cases you can get it cheaper because of competition and economies of scale. Those are all different issues from whether the radio usage is technically better. And you may notice that Verizon, the main CDMA carrier, is switching to LTE for 4G, so apparently they think joining the GSM world is better for them too.