Why bother? Just use the Internet. Banks run transaction traffic through the internet, of course heavily encrypted, with proper integrity protection and certificates. It's entirely possible to do this securely, the global economy already depends on this capability.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel, the power companies should just be using proper compartmentalization techniques to dig some trenches between the internet and their systems.
Isn't traffic usually higher during business days than during the weekends? If so, during a pandemic I'd expect lower traffic, not higher. Especially since people, you know, being sick don't really feel like browsing...
Huh. Now to me, this is a clear sign that they hired a new web guy who happens to have experience with and a preference for Drupal. I don't think there's a necessarily a political statement here.
The top of the government and especially the president are HR people first and foremost. They don't do much personally, but act through the agents they select, rely on their judgement and trust them to condense issues of importance for them. Sure, they also get to make some decisions, but they decide based on the information fed to them and the decisions are broad, policy decisions in most cases.
The point is, they didn't make a policy decision that "zomg, F/OSS ftw!", but they hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the web guy and the web guy seems competent enough to pick a F/OSS solution.
IPV4 exhastion has been predicted as '2 years' for about 5 years. The 'exhaustion counters' are not going down. Someone needs to plot a graph of the days left to see if there's a general trend downwards or whether it's static - to my eyes it looks fairly static, but there should be a slow decay in the number of addresses theoretically.
Actually, your opinion is just uninformed. It is true that IPv4 exhaustion estimates varied over time, but never in the pattern you suggest. Here is Geoff Huston's excellent IPv4 Address Report and if you actually bother to read through it carefully, it is very informative and will answer most of your questions.
There is also an overview on the predictions the IPv4 Address Report has been making since 2003, you can read it here.
2. Even if that were changed and massive efforts would set up a trading system it wouldn't achieve much. Out of the pre-RIR assignments of 48/8, the legacy blocks reclaimable are less than 16/8 unused blocks. and I'm for example pretty sure the US DoD wouldn't want to give up their 8/8 either.
Pretty much all these what if scenarios you're talking about have already been considered and if they would work we wouldn't talk about IPv4 exhaustion in the next 2 years.
Ruby exceeds Perl in web development, a la Rails (or Merb). It comes with many "hackers' libraries" built in, such as Expect, Erb, and Net::. Ruby Gems has Rubyforge, Raa, and GitHub as sources, which are functionally similar to CPAN. However, Gems is cleaner, without all manner of compilation and portability issues (and less code rot).
Perl is king of the hill in web development. RoR brought us a clearly defined concept that doesn't work in practice (implementation). Perl has Catalyst that scales with increased requirements and complexity very well. It runs some very high traffic websites in the world.
Github is not a replacement for CPAN. Github allows you to get a code repository, with you know, git. I use it every day, but CPAN is so much more. It's a network of archives that you can use to install software from using any complete Perl 5 installation.
About cross-platform compatibility and portability, Perl runs on around a hundred platforms by last count. Ruby is "cleaner" if you take it to mean that it doesn't work on nearly as many platforms and as such it has no "issues" originating from those platforms.
Ruby's lambdas, open classes (monkey patching,) and method_missing() make Perl hackery look anemic and juvenile, by comparison. If you need a different way to program, try building a DSL in Ruby, which is similar in functionality to Lisp's macros, just without S Expressions.
You might have a point with Perl 5, since it's pretty old. However, Perl 6 is way WAY ahead of Ruby, in part because the features that Ruby borrowed from Perl 5 and cleaned up, got borrowed from Ruby into Perl 6 and improved upon again:)
50 MB is not the Perl interpreter size, but about 5MB for perl, 45 for loaded modules and the variables that come with them. You need to load a lof of moduels to get to 50MB. I'm not sure why are you worried about that 50MB though, most of it should be COW across the 20-40 child processes, or does that only work with FCGI like that?
Perl probably has the best testing culture out there from the major programming languages, including Java on the list. Between TAP, Perl 5 core's large test suite and a myriad of test related modules it has automated testing well covered.
Did you know for example that when you upload something to CPAN, it gets automatically smoked on dozens of platforms and hundreds of different boxes, test reports sent to the author and assistance provided to diagnose platform specific problems if needed?
Manual testing is for the problems not caught by the huge array of automated tests.
I've read it years ago that the USA is losing billions per year in tourism after the 9/11 border restrictions.
The Olympics became a disgustingly commercial event for the past few decades and corporations are going to put pressure towards a location where prospective visitors aren't put off by over the top security measures...
The next time someone asks what's the harm in the security theatre, point them towards the loss of tourism. I have to say I'm one of those people who deeply resent the invasive fingerprint taking entrance to the USA. It's a shame that stupid border procedures prevent me from visiting an otherwise beautiful country...
What do you mean shady? Patents are something that shouldn't exist in the first place! There is nothing shady about ignoring them, especially if it's legal in the country of residence.
People should realise that invention is not A to B, but it is a feedback loop! If you make it hard to go from B to C, it's pointless!
Gravitational waves are a consequence of general relativity, so IF gravitational waves don't exist then GR is at least partly wrong. That's a bit stronger than believing in Santa Claus I'd think.
Health insurance companies do not look at preexisting conditions as a risk: they look at them as an excuse. They have people explicitly hired for the purpose to dig into people's medical history and find a mostly insignificant "medical condition" to invalidate the insurance and avoid paying insurance payout for an unrelated problem. This has been documented even at the congressional hearing level.
I do not think that even real preexisting conditions are a case of billing. They are a case of hightened risk. Also, if you're approaching this from the cost point of view, insurance is a model of stochastic events, where you deal with averages. Insurance companies should not have it both ways: if they require insane amounts of insurance fees for high risk personnel, they should also offer significantly lower fees for low risk people. They don't want to do that for some reason and it is unethical.
The problem with insurance in the USA atm is that it's inherently socialist - it distributes costs across a large number of people to pay for the needs of the fewer number of people who get sick. People should own up to this fact and make sure the system works properly or do away with insurance entirely in the name of the free market. Then you can do as you wish and pay for whatever you need. Of course people live in a society and that means actions or lack of action of others affect you. The people who can't afford or can't be bothered to get insurance will end up costing a lot more on average in emergency room visits and by infecting others and spreading disease. Preventative medicine is VERY important.
Detecting or not detecting gravitational waves validates* or invalidates part of Einstein's theory of general relativity. That's a pretty big deal. It means that we have found the first flaw in a theory whitstanding constant attacks on it since 1915 if we would not find gravitational waves.
*take "validates" in this context to mean that there is no experiment or information in disagreement with the theory, therefor going by science's falsification requirement, science considers the theory to be currently valid.
A human landing on mars gives us pretty pictures and a bunch of cozy, warm feelings.
Understanding fundamental physics (and mathematics) gave us the computer age along with keeping Moore's "law" working for the past 40 years. What did physics ever give to you? Pretty much every major engineering invention since 1950 depends on it in some way or other.
What do you mean finding absolutely nothing? They just ruled out the higher end of the spectrum for gravitational waves. They learned a lot in building very precisely calibrated instruments to do the gravitational wave detection. They continue to lower the detection threshold.
I sure as hell hope that Obama and the congress/senate outlaws denying insurance based on preexisting conditions. It seems like such an obvious abuse of the uneven patient - insurer relationship and an area sorely in need of regulation.
These are orthogonal questions. You'd still have to do this even if someone rolls out their own lines.
Why bother? Just use the Internet. Banks run transaction traffic through the internet, of course heavily encrypted, with proper integrity protection and certificates. It's entirely possible to do this securely, the global economy already depends on this capability.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel, the power companies should just be using proper compartmentalization techniques to dig some trenches between the internet and their systems.
Oh I disagree. I want the fastest processor I can get...with a 1W thermal envelope.
Isn't traffic usually higher during business days than during the weekends? If so, during a pandemic I'd expect lower traffic, not higher. Especially since people, you know, being sick don't really feel like browsing...
The top of the government and especially the president are HR people first and foremost. They don't do much personally, but act through the agents they select, rely on their judgement and trust them to condense issues of importance for them. Sure, they also get to make some decisions, but they decide based on the information fed to them and the decisions are broad, policy decisions in most cases.
The point is, they didn't make a policy decision that "zomg, F/OSS ftw!", but they hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the web guy and the web guy seems competent enough to pick a F/OSS solution.
If they are competitive, that's welcome news...
This is what the analysts are doing.
Information doesn't come out. But information != entropy. Black holes are the ultimate rand() it seems.
Actually, your opinion is just uninformed. It is true that IPv4 exhaustion estimates varied over time, but never in the pattern you suggest. Here is Geoff Huston's excellent IPv4 Address Report and if you actually bother to read through it carefully, it is very informative and will answer most of your questions.
There is also an overview on the predictions the IPv4 Address Report has been making since 2003, you can read it here.
1. IP addresses cannot be bought or sold.
/8, the legacy blocks reclaimable are less than 16 /8 unused blocks. and I'm for example pretty sure the US DoD wouldn't want to give up their 8 /8 either.
2. Even if that were changed and massive efforts would set up a trading system it wouldn't achieve much. Out of the pre-RIR assignments of 48
Pretty much all these what if scenarios you're talking about have already been considered and if they would work we wouldn't talk about IPv4 exhaustion in the next 2 years.
Perl is king of the hill in web development. RoR brought us a clearly defined concept that doesn't work in practice (implementation). Perl has Catalyst that scales with increased requirements and complexity very well. It runs some very high traffic websites in the world.
Github is not a replacement for CPAN. Github allows you to get a code repository, with you know, git. I use it every day, but CPAN is so much more. It's a network of archives that you can use to install software from using any complete Perl 5 installation.
About cross-platform compatibility and portability, Perl runs on around a hundred platforms by last count. Ruby is "cleaner" if you take it to mean that it doesn't work on nearly as many platforms and as such it has no "issues" originating from those platforms.
You might have a point with Perl 5, since it's pretty old. However, Perl 6 is way WAY ahead of Ruby, in part because the features that Ruby borrowed from Perl 5 and cleaned up, got borrowed from Ruby into Perl 6 and improved upon again :)
Just don't write any perfume reviews please...
50 MB is not the Perl interpreter size, but about 5MB for perl, 45 for loaded modules and the variables that come with them. You need to load a lof of moduels to get to 50MB. I'm not sure why are you worried about that 50MB though, most of it should be COW across the 20-40 child processes, or does that only work with FCGI like that?
Reverse string is .flip in P6.
Perl probably has the best testing culture out there from the major programming languages, including Java on the list. Between TAP, Perl 5 core's large test suite and a myriad of test related modules it has automated testing well covered.
Did you know for example that when you upload something to CPAN, it gets automatically smoked on dozens of platforms and hundreds of different boxes, test reports sent to the author and assistance provided to diagnose platform specific problems if needed?
Manual testing is for the problems not caught by the huge array of automated tests.
And the appearence of security is not security.
I've read it years ago that the USA is losing billions per year in tourism after the 9/11 border restrictions.
The Olympics became a disgustingly commercial event for the past few decades and corporations are going to put pressure towards a location where prospective visitors aren't put off by over the top security measures...
The next time someone asks what's the harm in the security theatre, point them towards the loss of tourism. I have to say I'm one of those people who deeply resent the invasive fingerprint taking entrance to the USA. It's a shame that stupid border procedures prevent me from visiting an otherwise beautiful country...
What do you mean shady? Patents are something that shouldn't exist in the first place! There is nothing shady about ignoring them, especially if it's legal in the country of residence.
People should realise that invention is not A to B, but it is a feedback loop! If you make it hard to go from B to C, it's pointless!
You CAN'T blame Nancy Reagan for this too! She tried!
Gravitational waves are a consequence of general relativity, so IF gravitational waves don't exist then GR is at least partly wrong. That's a bit stronger than believing in Santa Claus I'd think.
Health insurance companies do not look at preexisting conditions as a risk: they look at them as an excuse. They have people explicitly hired for the purpose to dig into people's medical history and find a mostly insignificant "medical condition" to invalidate the insurance and avoid paying insurance payout for an unrelated problem. This has been documented even at the congressional hearing level.
I do not think that even real preexisting conditions are a case of billing. They are a case of hightened risk. Also, if you're approaching this from the cost point of view, insurance is a model of stochastic events, where you deal with averages. Insurance companies should not have it both ways: if they require insane amounts of insurance fees for high risk personnel, they should also offer significantly lower fees for low risk people. They don't want to do that for some reason and it is unethical.
The problem with insurance in the USA atm is that it's inherently socialist - it distributes costs across a large number of people to pay for the needs of the fewer number of people who get sick. People should own up to this fact and make sure the system works properly or do away with insurance entirely in the name of the free market. Then you can do as you wish and pay for whatever you need. Of course people live in a society and that means actions or lack of action of others affect you. The people who can't afford or can't be bothered to get insurance will end up costing a lot more on average in emergency room visits and by infecting others and spreading disease. Preventative medicine is VERY important.
Detecting or not detecting gravitational waves validates* or invalidates part of Einstein's theory of general relativity. That's a pretty big deal. It means that we have found the first flaw in a theory whitstanding constant attacks on it since 1915 if we would not find gravitational waves.
*take "validates" in this context to mean that there is no experiment or information in disagreement with the theory, therefor going by science's falsification requirement, science considers the theory to be currently valid.
A human landing on mars gives us pretty pictures and a bunch of cozy, warm feelings.
Understanding fundamental physics (and mathematics) gave us the computer age along with keeping Moore's "law" working for the past 40 years. What did physics ever give to you? Pretty much every major engineering invention since 1950 depends on it in some way or other.
What do you mean finding absolutely nothing? They just ruled out the higher end of the spectrum for gravitational waves. They learned a lot in building very precisely calibrated instruments to do the gravitational wave detection. They continue to lower the detection threshold.
I sure as hell hope that Obama and the congress/senate outlaws denying insurance based on preexisting conditions. It seems like such an obvious abuse of the uneven patient - insurer relationship and an area sorely in need of regulation.