Funny that you didn't mention why you wanted the jack in the bathroom, or why your S.O. was so irritated. Compromise will involve examining reasons.
Put machines at work or something if your place is really tiny, after all you've got ADSL. I use the garage & the attic for most of my machines. Wireless is good for cable tidying too.
I avoided putting a jack in the bedroom because I figured we need somewhere to get away from the machines, but now my Wife wants me to wire that room too.
My wife's not a geek, but we don't have much friction over computers. More over my four cars or my motorcycles, but still not so much. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek to count or something, but we seem to work it out.
Maybe my Wife's just incredibly tolerant. Obviously, since she married me.
I'm afraid that I've read & encountered a lot of bizarre cranks because I find them interesting, and a lot more of them are engineers than scientists. Doctors are also a more credulous group than you would expect.
I think it may be because these are very bright educated people, but who may not have some fairly important intellectual tools, and don't know what they're missing. Consequently you have doctors & engineers who fall for chain letters, or cold fusion, or data compression in excess of a hundred percent.
It's also easy to find engineers & doctors arguing for perpetual motion, squaring the circle, or trisecting an angle with a compass & straightedge.
Venture capitalists, on the other hand, don't have to be as bright or educated as engineers or doctors, and we probably shouldn't talk about software "engineers" here, either. (Hey, I don't have any degree at all.)
A great book for learning about auto repair in general. He tells you what to do, but best of all, explains why. He even convey considerable personality.
I wish I had a copy now. I'd read it all over again. Who knows though, maybe it's not as good as I remember. I'll look it up next time I'm in a bookstore.
I posted about it below, but I guess I took too long to write that post. I'm just not quick enough on the keyboard, except on the days when I post something that's so cranky that I'm embarassed.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir (can be found or ordered at a local bookstore)
It's a repair manual so well written that I read it more than once, even before I had a VW. It taught me a lot about auto repair, and reinforced what I learned in High School auto shop.
He's funny. He has nice line drawings.
He also editorialized. He refused to explain how to fix an automatic choke because he felt that the choke was bad for the car. The choke allows you to drive the car before it's warm. His suggestion was to roll a cigarette while waiting for the car to warm up, rather than cause excessive wear by putting a load on a cold engine. The edition I read was definitely an artifact of the 1970s.
Unfortunately, most manuals cannot be written in such a literate fashion. He had the luxury of explaining auto maintenance. These are concrete, well-understood, and intuitive concepts. The example vehicle is the air-cooled VW, technology is well over fifty years old, and consequently simple.
I usually need manuals (for instance) to document a poorly designed or arbitrary interface to a product whose mechanism of action I may not ever fully understand, and will (if I am lucky) never use again. Sometimes I need manuals to provide detailed specifications for an implementation of a process that I already understand well. Neither of these is much of an opportunity for an author.
There are still plenty of opportunities for well written manuals, but since most vendors seem to regard mere accuracy as a luxury, I never expect them to be literature.
Yes, it can be a pain in the ass for support staff, unless people can specify where they are well. As a rule, no-one bothers.
I got messages from people whose email and voicemail was inaccessible (if they were too busy to check promptly I didn't feel too badly) but didn't tell me where they sat. If they knew anything, they gave useless locations because no-one in the offices knew North from South "I'm in the old BobaFett project space." Thanks. If I'd been on project BobaFett, I'd have an idea of where to look for you.
I got messages like "My printer isn't working and this document has to go out in ten minutes!" I'm on my way, but what *building* are you in? What floor?
The Sun version doesn't involve users lugging laptops around, but having a functional workstation everywhere. Once you have your laptop toting users unplugging workstations to connect, plugging the monitors into their laptops, and disconnecting the phones to plug in their headsets, it all goes to hell.
I wish the case was made that these exclusive rights were extended specifically to authors.
Certainly works for hire can complicate the issue, but these are nonetheless authored by human beings, even if many human beings. Thus, anything that is beyond the human lifespan seems to be ruled out pretty clearly. Interesting that the original period 28+28=56 is most of a normal adult lifespan, and not more.
The book seems to already be out of stock everywhere I look. The Stacey's clerk I spoke with suggested it was some sort of "Cabbage Patch" thing, implying manipulation of supply to feed demand.
She also pointed out that for someone with the physics & math background it should be enjoyable. Gee, I never treated people who bought _Brief History of Time_ like that. Besides, I have learned a lot by reading over my head.
This is exciting to me because of a pet idea of mine:
The concept of Planck distance and Planck time (it is possible that there is a minimum meaningful distance or unit of space, and a minimum meaningful unit of time)implies a granular universe that would be best modeled by cellular automata. I'm headed out to purchase this at Stacey's _now_.
My good ISPs were all bought by bad ones
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
I don't think there are any good ones left.
I cancelled my slip.net account, but apparently slip.net refused to let me go. They cut off my service for non-payment, but continued to bill me. They insisted that they couldn't cancel my account unless it was paid in full, meanwhile billing me, but rendering no service. Now I have a huge FirstWorld bill on my credit report, but I refuse to pay for service that was never rendered.
Then there was when Earthlink cancelled my DSL for me. That's what PacBell told me, anyway. This was interesting, because I had SBC DSL, and never had any dealings with EarthLink, who became PacBell's ISP sometime after I had signed up. After a few months, and many hours of customer service hell, I got my DSL back, but they never missed a billing period. I'd dispute it, but I know that I would be punished for interacting with them, and probably by losing my DSL again.
solaris article in Sysadmin
on
Learning IPv6?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There was an article in Sysadmin magazine recently.
Getting on the 6bone Quickly With Solaris8 http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1441/sa m0111d/
I ordered a TINI from www.ibutton.com. This is a little java webserver on a simm. It came in a four foot long box.
The best suggestion I heard was that this was to discourage theft. If they'd shipped this 68 pin simm in an appropriate package, (the inner package was a reasonable size, maybe 1/2" x 2" x 3") it would have fit in a shirt pocket, and maybe tiny packages from semiconductor factories tend to disappear.
This makes some sense. A few years before, a six inch cube of a box containing tens of thousands of dollars worth of memory failed to be delivered somehow. I heard about it because the FBI was asking at a number of businesses on the delivery route.
Not silkscreening, but what about this hack?
on
Silkscreening CD-Rs?
·
· Score: 0
It's not silkscreening, but what about trying to do some sort of heat transfer from a printed transparency? If you can do T-shirts, CDs shouldn't be too awful. I just think screening will be a lot of work for a small run.
tn5250 is available for Windows, and free. Does it really have to be a 3270? You should be able to use a 5250 instead of a 3270 without your users noticing too much. AS400s will talk to a 5250 just as easily as a 3270, and I don't think the keyboard layout is even different. Try it out. http://tn5250.sourceforge.net/
For those who haven't had the pleasure, 3270 and 5250 terminals are field based devices, not character based devices. You can't just use a VT100 and send different escape sequences.
I used linux boxes to provide inexpensive 5250s to our users, but that was before tn5250 was ported to Windows.
Your Windows users could run a PC x-server connected to a linux box running the x3270 emulator, but that sounds irritating.
I don't miss the green screens, but the AS400 itself was a rock. I never saw unscheduled downtime, but that's not unusual. I was only there for a few years.
I'm happy to have been corrected about Bill's generosity. I was wrong.
The rich do many things besides "capitalize on those beneath them" and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. There are many good and generous rich people. There are many who make great contributions to our society.
Or we could talk about corporations with the rights of individuals but without the responsibilities. Shall we talk about what SLAPPs do to law? How about money = speech?
The rich have the most assets, so of course they pay the most taxes. This is, as you said, irrelevant to a discussion of philanthropy.
I'm glad that he has intimated truly fabulous generosity. I even believe it likely he will carry through on that intimation.
I'd like to see him encourage his company to behave in a lawful and responsible fashion, as I suggested before. I realize that is a lot to ask.
Regarding your judgement of my example of a ten percent tithe: While I have no love of religon or churches, I'd rather see people regularly make a contribution that they feel is meaningful. Besides, revving up a large fortune based on ten percent of anything (other than a larger fortune) is unlikely. That ten percent will not be the distinguishing factor in most cases. I do think a lifetime of philanthropy differs significantly from a later gift, but I am glad to know that he is so generous, and in the end, the money comes out comparably.
And to the other (totally different) person who after correcting my error, asked if I still wanted a dick-size competition: No thank you, and thinking this is about penises says more about you than you would like.
Many religious individuals tithe a _gross_ ten percent of their income. Is Bill giving away ten percent of his income? Oh, you "mean more philanthropic than any other" among people who have made money their religion.
Sure, among the rich, he's generous.
I have heard that if you look at the statistics of financial donations, on average those in lower income brackets give more as a percentage of income than do those with higher incomes. (Can anyone help me source the stats for this? I admit I don't have a good citation.)
I'm less impressed than I might be with BillG and Microsoft, especially considering the social consequences of running an extortion racket against public schools.
It's easy to get a camel through the eye of a needle, if you puree it first.
Wars are no more random than Stock Prices. The premise of the book _A Random Walk Down Wall Street_ is that mathematical models are in the long run no better than random stock picking. That doesn't mean that stock prices are random accidents.
The causes are to manifold and complex to yield to any simple mathematical model. No surprise, because we're talking about human behavior.
By the way, the author of the paper makes your point:
"This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical "laws" are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence."
Take a bubble level, and slide it back & forth. The bubble moves in the direction of accelleration.
I noticed this before I encountered the ballon problem, and realized that the liquid was moving in the expected direction, and so pushing the bubble to the opposite end.
Not the most beautiful, but easy enough to perform at home that I look forward to showing it to my children.
I was thinking this morning of expanding this very thought into an essay. This is the only argument against corporate pillaging of our rights that might sway conservatives.
Legislating a business model must harm the market, just as other laws that regulate the market do.
Patents and copyrights exist to encourage innovation, not legislate profits. FCC licensing keeps me off the airwaves to protect them as a public resource, not to ensure that Disney makes money.
No wonder IT has a bad name. It's not us simple BOFHs, it's those pesky management types. This is not surprising, because recently I've carpooled with two different people who were studying IT management, but not IT. As far as I could tell, there was no technical curriculum. They were more naive and technically ignorant than a newly minted MCSE, but training to be my boss.
Maybe they were being conned, but I somehow suspect they'll find jobs. Watch Out!
And after you've generated a few links to the same object with your pseudorandom salt, it becomes pretty easy to figure out the real URL, especially considering how reliable the structure of a URL is. You can delay the decoding of the url by using a larger salt, but you're still only delaying it.
Hearing loss with age primarily due to noise
on
Human Ears Make Noise
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Most hearing loss in old age is caused by the death of the hair cells, which are not regenerated."
Hearing loss with aging is unnatural. Hearing loss in the elderly is not common in primitive societies. We assume it is a normal part of aging because we are exposed to so much noise, but in fact it is not. In many non-industrial societies, older people hear quite well.
Hearing loss is caused by death of the hair cells, but that death in turn is caused by overdriving them with excess energy, that is, loud high-amplitude sounds.
70 decibels is a normal conversation, 80 decibels is damaging over time, and city noise is commonly louder than 80 dB. You probably listen to your music louder than that, too. Concerts? Wear earplugs, or you'll probably have demonstrably worse hearing afterwards. Any sound that makes your ears ring is probably damaging.
Ontopic: The idea that the ears are active, and produce sound is not at all new, although the demonstration that those sounds are externally audible is surprising. The very statement that doctors are listening to those sounds to check the health of infant hearing, tells you that this isn't brand new research.
How long will it be before the real (certifiable) paranoids start claiming that it's nanobugs making their lives hell instead of radio waves?
Will the dust mask replace the tinfoil hat as a symbol of paranoia?
I think it will be interesting to see how quickly this disseminates into the insane. Florid schizophrenic (hallucinating) paranoiacs weren't talking about being manipulated by radio waves a hundred years ago.
Since schizophrenia often begins in adolescence, there are probably some like this already. On the other hand nanotech doesn't have the near universal recognition that radio does.
No, I'm not on the government payroll trying to discredit anyone. This respirator is for my allergies.
Kid's have been nailing rollerskate wheels onto boards for... probably as long as there have been rollerskates. My father talked about doing this when he was a kid in the thirties. I don't think he had any illusion that it was original, even at the time.
On the other hand, making the jump from counting to calculating with tubes is beautiful, even if he was one of several men who invented the computer at different times and places.
"Uhhh.. well, I did my Master's Thesis on Library... forgotten more about books than you, or anyone in this entire company put together will EVER know) "
I'm glad you've got a bright well educated friend.
I've got ten years of experience in bookstores, and there's no shortage of bright people with graduate degrees working there. In fact, working in a bookstore is where I met my brilliant wife.
I met smarter, better educated, more original thinkers in the book business than I have since then in my professional life.
But guess what: Having a graduate degree in English doesn't make you a comptetent bookseller. There are other skills required.
Believe it or not, the person interviewing your friend could even have been a disenchanted lawyer, published author, or have just finished graduate school and realized she wanted to decompress & figure out what to do now that the love had been beaten out of her chosen career. She might have been all of these at once.
Your friend is competing with a lot of bright people who love books.
Yeah, you could learn, but your description doesn't fit someone who is willing to learn.
I hope you misrepresented your friend, for his sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny that you didn't mention why you wanted the jack in the bathroom, or why your S.O. was so irritated. Compromise will involve examining reasons.
Put machines at work or something if your place is really tiny, after all you've got ADSL. I use the garage & the attic for most of my machines. Wireless is good for cable tidying too.
I avoided putting a jack in the bedroom because I figured we need somewhere to get away from the machines, but now my Wife wants me to wire that room too.
My wife's not a geek, but we don't have much friction over computers. More over my four cars or my motorcycles, but still not so much. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek to count or something, but we seem to work it out.
Maybe my Wife's just incredibly tolerant. Obviously, since she married me.
I'm afraid that I've read & encountered a lot of bizarre cranks because I find them interesting, and a lot more of them are engineers than scientists. Doctors are also a more credulous group than you would expect.
I think it may be because these are very bright educated people, but who may not have some fairly important intellectual tools, and don't know what they're missing. Consequently you have doctors & engineers who fall for chain letters, or cold fusion, or data compression in excess of a hundred percent.
It's also easy to find engineers & doctors arguing for perpetual motion, squaring the circle, or trisecting an angle with a compass & straightedge.
Venture capitalists, on the other hand, don't have to be as bright or educated as engineers or doctors, and we probably shouldn't talk about software "engineers" here, either. (Hey, I don't have any degree at all.)
A great book for learning about auto repair in general. He tells you what to do, but best of all, explains why. He even convey considerable personality.
I wish I had a copy now. I'd read it all over again. Who knows though, maybe it's not as good as I remember. I'll look it up next time I'm in a bookstore.
I posted about it below, but I guess I took too long to write that post. I'm just not quick enough on the keyboard, except on the days when I post something that's so cranky that I'm embarassed.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the Compleat Idiot by John Muir (can be found or ordered at a local bookstore)
It's a repair manual so well written that I read it more than once, even before I had a VW. It taught me a lot about auto repair, and reinforced what I learned in High School auto shop.
He's funny. He has nice line drawings.
He also editorialized. He refused to explain how to fix an automatic choke because he felt that the choke was bad for the car. The choke allows you to drive the car before it's warm. His suggestion was to roll a cigarette while waiting for the car to warm up, rather than cause excessive wear by putting a load on a cold engine. The edition I read was definitely an artifact of the 1970s.
Unfortunately, most manuals cannot be written in such a literate fashion. He had the luxury of explaining auto maintenance. These are concrete, well-understood, and intuitive concepts. The example vehicle is the air-cooled VW, technology is well over fifty years old, and consequently simple.
I usually need manuals (for instance) to document a poorly designed or arbitrary interface to a product whose mechanism of action I may not ever fully understand, and will (if I am lucky) never use again. Sometimes I need manuals to provide detailed specifications for an implementation of a process that I already understand well. Neither of these is much of an opportunity for an author.
There are still plenty of opportunities for well written manuals, but since most vendors seem to regard mere accuracy as a luxury, I never expect them to be literature.
Yes, it can be a pain in the ass for support staff, unless people can specify where they are well. As a rule, no-one bothers.
I got messages from people whose email and voicemail was inaccessible (if they were too busy to check promptly I didn't feel too badly) but didn't tell me where they sat. If they knew anything, they gave useless locations because no-one in the offices knew North from South "I'm in the old BobaFett project space." Thanks. If I'd been on project BobaFett, I'd have an idea of where to look for you.
I got messages like "My printer isn't working and this document has to go out in ten minutes!" I'm on my way, but what *building* are you in? What floor?
The Sun version doesn't involve users lugging laptops around, but having a functional workstation everywhere. Once you have your laptop toting users unplugging workstations to connect, plugging the monitors into their laptops, and disconnecting the phones to plug in their headsets, it all goes to hell.
I wish the case was made that these exclusive rights were extended specifically to authors.
Certainly works for hire can complicate the issue, but these are nonetheless authored by human beings, even if many human beings. Thus, anything that is beyond the human lifespan seems to be ruled out pretty clearly. Interesting that the original period 28+28=56 is most of a normal adult lifespan, and not more.
Google caches sites that don't cache themselves, but Google doesn't cache itself.
Shouldn't Google cache itself?
I am Russell.
The book seems to already be out of stock everywhere I look. The Stacey's clerk I spoke with suggested it was some sort of "Cabbage Patch" thing, implying manipulation of supply to feed demand.
She also pointed out that for someone with the physics & math background it should be enjoyable. Gee, I never treated people who bought _Brief History of Time_ like that. Besides, I have learned a lot by reading over my head.
This is exciting to me because of a pet idea of mine:
The concept of Planck distance and Planck time (it is possible that there is a minimum meaningful distance or unit of space, and a minimum meaningful unit of time)implies a granular universe that would be best modeled by cellular automata. I'm headed out to purchase this at Stacey's _now_.
I don't think there are any good ones left.
I cancelled my slip.net account, but apparently slip.net refused to let me go. They cut off my service for non-payment, but continued to bill me. They insisted that they couldn't cancel my account unless it was paid in full, meanwhile billing me, but rendering no service. Now I have a huge FirstWorld bill on my credit report, but I refuse to pay for service that was never rendered.
Then there was when Earthlink cancelled my DSL for me. That's what PacBell told me, anyway. This was interesting, because I had SBC DSL, and never had any dealings with EarthLink, who became PacBell's ISP sometime after I had signed up. After a few months, and many hours of customer service hell, I got my DSL back, but they never missed a billing period. I'd dispute it, but I know that I would be punished for interacting with them, and probably by losing my DSL again.
There was an article in Sysadmin magazine recently.
a m0111d/
Getting on the 6bone Quickly With Solaris8
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1441/s
I ordered a TINI from www.ibutton.com. This is a little java webserver on a simm. It came in a four foot long box.
The best suggestion I heard was that this was to discourage theft. If they'd shipped this 68 pin simm in an appropriate package, (the inner package was a reasonable size, maybe 1/2" x 2" x 3") it would have fit in a shirt pocket, and maybe tiny packages from semiconductor factories tend to disappear.
This makes some sense. A few years before, a six inch cube of a box containing tens of thousands of dollars worth of memory failed to be delivered somehow. I heard about it because the FBI was asking at a number of businesses on the delivery route.
It's not silkscreening, but what about trying to do some sort of heat transfer from a printed transparency? If you can do T-shirts, CDs shouldn't be too awful. I just think screening will be a lot of work for a small run.
tn5250 is available for Windows, and free. Does it really have to be a 3270? You should be able to use a 5250 instead of a 3270 without your users noticing too much. AS400s will talk to a 5250 just as easily as a 3270, and I don't think the keyboard layout is even different. Try it out.
http://tn5250.sourceforge.net/
For those who haven't had the pleasure, 3270 and 5250 terminals are field based devices, not character based devices. You can't just use a VT100 and send different escape sequences.
I used linux boxes to provide inexpensive 5250s to our users, but that was before tn5250 was ported to Windows.
Your Windows users could run a PC x-server connected to a linux box running the x3270 emulator, but that sounds irritating.
I don't miss the green screens, but the AS400 itself was a rock. I never saw unscheduled downtime, but that's not unusual. I was only there for a few years.
I'm happy to have been corrected about Bill's generosity. I was wrong.
The rich do many things besides "capitalize on those beneath them" and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. There are many good and generous rich people. There are many who make great contributions to our society.
Or we could talk about corporations with the rights of individuals but without the responsibilities. Shall we talk about what SLAPPs do to law? How about money = speech?
The rich have the most assets, so of course they pay the most taxes. This is, as you said, irrelevant to a discussion of philanthropy.
I'm glad that he has intimated truly fabulous generosity. I even believe it likely he will carry through on that intimation.
I'd like to see him encourage his company to behave in a lawful and responsible fashion, as I suggested before. I realize that is a lot to ask.
Regarding your judgement of my example of a ten percent tithe: While I have no love of religon or churches, I'd rather see people regularly make a contribution that they feel is meaningful. Besides, revving up a large fortune based on ten percent of anything (other than a larger fortune) is unlikely. That ten percent will not be the distinguishing factor in most cases. I do think a lifetime of philanthropy differs significantly from a later gift, but I am glad to know that he is so generous, and in the end, the money comes out comparably.
And to the other (totally different) person who after correcting my error, asked if I still wanted a dick-size competition: No thank you, and thinking this is about penises says more about you than you would like.
Many religious individuals tithe a _gross_ ten percent of their income. Is Bill giving away ten percent of his income? Oh, you "mean more philanthropic than any other" among people who have made money their religion.
Sure, among the rich, he's generous.
I have heard that if you look at the statistics of financial donations, on average those in lower income brackets give more as a percentage of income than do those with higher incomes. (Can anyone help me source the stats for this? I admit I don't have a good citation.)
I'm less impressed than I might be with BillG and Microsoft, especially considering the social consequences of running an extortion racket against public schools.
It's easy to get a camel through the eye of a needle, if you puree it first.
Wars are no more random than Stock Prices. The premise of the book _A Random Walk Down Wall Street_ is that mathematical models are in the long run no better than random stock picking. That doesn't mean that stock prices are random accidents.
The causes are to manifold and complex to yield to any simple mathematical model. No surprise, because we're talking about human behavior.
By the way, the author of the paper makes your point:
"This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical "laws" are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence."
Take a bubble level, and slide it back & forth. The bubble moves in the direction of accelleration.
I noticed this before I encountered the ballon problem, and realized that the liquid was moving in the expected direction, and so pushing the bubble to the opposite end.
Not the most beautiful, but easy enough to perform at home that I look forward to showing it to my children.
I was thinking this morning of expanding this very thought into an essay. This is the only argument against corporate pillaging of our rights that might sway conservatives.
Legislating a business model must harm the market, just as other laws that regulate the market do.
Patents and copyrights exist to encourage innovation, not legislate profits. FCC licensing keeps me off the airwaves to protect them as a public resource, not to ensure that Disney makes money.
No wonder IT has a bad name. It's not us simple BOFHs, it's those pesky management types. This is not surprising, because recently I've carpooled with two different people who were studying IT management, but not IT. As far as I could tell, there was no technical curriculum. They were more naive and technically ignorant than a newly minted MCSE, but training to be my boss.
Maybe they were being conned, but I somehow suspect they'll find jobs. Watch Out!
And after you've generated a few links to the same object with your pseudorandom salt, it becomes pretty easy to figure out the real URL, especially considering how reliable the structure of a URL is.
You can delay the decoding of the url by using a larger salt, but you're still only delaying it.
"Most hearing loss in old age is caused by the death of the hair cells, which are not regenerated."
Hearing loss with aging is unnatural. Hearing loss in the elderly is not common in primitive societies. We assume it is a normal part of aging because we are exposed to so much noise, but in fact it is not. In many non-industrial societies, older people hear quite well.
Hearing loss is caused by death of the hair cells, but that death in turn is caused by overdriving them with excess energy, that is, loud high-amplitude sounds.
70 decibels is a normal conversation, 80 decibels is damaging over time, and city noise is commonly louder than 80 dB. You probably listen to your music louder than that, too. Concerts? Wear earplugs, or you'll probably have demonstrably worse hearing afterwards. Any sound that makes your ears ring is probably damaging.
Ontopic: The idea that the ears are active, and produce sound is not at all new, although the demonstration that those sounds are externally audible is surprising. The very statement that doctors are listening to those sounds to check the health of infant hearing, tells you that this isn't brand new research.
How long will it be before the real (certifiable) paranoids start claiming that it's nanobugs making their lives hell instead of radio waves?
Will the dust mask replace the tinfoil hat as a symbol of paranoia?
I think it will be interesting to see how quickly this disseminates into the insane. Florid schizophrenic (hallucinating) paranoiacs weren't talking about being manipulated by radio waves a hundred years ago.
Since schizophrenia often begins in adolescence, there are probably some like this already. On the other hand nanotech doesn't have the near universal recognition that radio does.
No, I'm not on the government payroll trying to discredit anyone. This respirator is for my allergies.
Kid's have been nailing rollerskate wheels onto boards for... probably as long as there have been rollerskates. My father talked about doing this when he was a kid in the thirties. I don't think he had any illusion that it was original, even at the time.
On the other hand, making the jump from counting to calculating with tubes is beautiful, even if he was one of several men who invented the computer at different times and places.
"Uhhh.. well, I did my Master's Thesis on Library ...
forgotten more about books than you, or anyone in this entire company put together will EVER know) "
I'm glad you've got a bright well educated friend.
I've got ten years of experience in bookstores, and there's no shortage of bright people with graduate degrees working there. In fact, working in a bookstore is where I met my brilliant wife.
I met smarter, better educated, more original thinkers in the book business than I have since then in my professional life.
But guess what: Having a graduate degree in English doesn't make you a comptetent bookseller. There are other skills required.
Believe it or not, the person interviewing your friend could even have been a disenchanted lawyer, published author, or have just finished graduate school and realized she wanted to decompress & figure out what to do now that the love had been beaten out of her chosen career. She might have been all of these at once.
Your friend is competing with a lot of bright people who love books.
Yeah, you could learn, but your description doesn't fit someone who is willing to learn.
I hope you misrepresented your friend, for his sake.