Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I'm the other way around. There are plenty of packrats around who want to be sure what they have is still there in the event of a company going down or no Internet (remember, no Internet = no Cloud). Tape storage is out of reach for the consumer, so a way to economically store a lot of data (speed is not an issue, and pairing up helps guard against a catastrophic failure) is a boon in my book.
But you have to assume that most people are uninformed because, frankly, they have better things to do. Perhaps that was why the Founding Fathers originally required voters to be landowners: on the assumption that people with actual skin in the game would pay attention to the government.
Employers MUST collect the SSN because SS taxes are levied and withheld against the employee's wages and needs to be processed accordingly.
Banks generally need you SSN if they need to get a credit report. If any account you have pays interest or dividends, that's taxable income. If you hold a mortgage, the interest you pay on it is tax-deductible and a frequent reason to itemize deductions (Schedule A). If taxes are involved (the latter two), the bank MUST know your SSN.
PS. If you have an SSN, yes it is your TIN. But aliens can have a TIN but not an SSN.
But the credit agencies are BIG companies, SO powerful they can push the legislators (and with them, the LAWS) as they please, and there's little the citizens can do about it since they have enough to influence the stupid. And as the comedian says, you can't fix stupid. Makes you wonder if this whole government by the people is overrated.
"2. Have you ever seen the web before Javascript and Flash? Everything worked much faster, despite of Browsers that choked on some GIFs and dialup connections."
Not things like eBay because of the round-trip issues. That bus left long ago. Plus it was pretty, well, boring.
No, because that means computers can't do what we want anymore. How do we get new programs if we can't download them? They're potentially unworthy sources (because even if they SAY they're trustworthy, can we BELIEVE them?)
And websites became interactive and Turing-complete to meet consumer demand. Not to mention ANY protocol, not just WWW, can be similarly vulnerable to the right confluence of events. If you don't want to be attacked from the Internet, your only guaranteed option is to unplug, just as the only way to keep a computer from being hacked is to unplug it.
"Of course a local ad-hoc force could not effectively defeat a modern military. A measure of local control is retained in the National Guard. I do wonder if military hardware should be in the hands of amateurs."
Don't be so sure. Look at Vietnam and the slogs that were Afghanistan and Iraq. There's something to be said about home field advantage in war.
Except when it comes to suicides, the US is strictly middle of the pack, and its per-capita suicide rate is pretty average. You want bad suicide rates? Go to Japan and especially South Korea: both countries, you should note, with strict gun policies. The three main methods of suicide in Japan? Throwing oneself in front of a vehicle, self-defenestration, and self-poisoning/overdosing. No guns involved. Indeed, given there are still plenty of non-gun suicides in America, it's hard to say that taking away guns will take away suicides (which account for plenty of the gun deaths in America). Guns to them are just low-hanging fruit. As Japan demonstrates, though, there are plenty of other ways.
Escalation violence can still be quite deadly without guns. Take them away and you still have knives, improvised clubs, and of course the old "ram their head against the wall/floor with your bare damn hands." And why aren't the brains engaged? Probably because most of the time both belligerents are drunk (which lowers inhibitions).
As for Charles Vacca, a similar thing could happen in a chemistry lab, a trade shop, or many other places where dangerous things are taught to youngsters. It was an accident. Crap happens.
PS. 30,000 pa in a country of 300+ million is, per capita, not as big as it looks. Furthermore, your reference of "people determined to kill people" is inaccurate because the #1 reason for gun deaths happens to BE people determined to kill people. Most gun deaths in America are attributed to criminal activity: specifically, criminal activity against other criminals (IOW, gang-on-gang violence, drug wars, and other violence BETWEEN criminal organizations).
I had originally thought Bath Township had 89 deaths (more than this), not 43. In any event, the point was that if someone wants to kill you, they'll find a way. For example, in response to lower gun violence in places like Europe (due to fewer guns), the usual answer is to look for violence by other means such as knives as well as to account for criminal-on-criminal (particularly gang-on-gang) violence (which accounts for a lot). Bath Township was committed by a farmer (meaning at the time it was legal for him to possess TNT, which he used in the massacre, as excavation charges), while IINM one of the three Oklahoma City perpetrators owned a farm (meaning he had justification for owning ammonium nitrate fertilizer--note, it had been denatured, but they found a way to REnature it).
Before anyone mentions gun control, let me remind everyone about two worse massacres perpetrated by natural-born Americans: Bath Township and Oklahoma City. Note that NEITHER involved guns and indeed are likely to have been impossible to prevent due to their circumstances. I'm not going to comment on the Las Vegas incident until further information is given.
Well, enterprise happens to be most likely place to find IPv4-ONLY equipment: acquired before IPv6 was a thing yet too indispensable and/or too expensive to replace. You can't roll out IPv6 selectively because the old stuff will lose touch with complicated bodges, becoming a case of "If it ain't broke..." best not to rock the boat internally and address external IPV6 needs via specialized structures: dedicated subnets, gateways, proxies, etc.
I meant to say entire COUNTRIES. Plus you can't tell if it's YOUR country that would be affected or not since the servers could be upstream of you. Sounds fun to say, "let 'em suffer" until you discover YOU'RE suffering...AND can't change ISPs because ALL of them were affected at the same time.
"Are there more layers of DNS ( like managers) . some group of "master servers"?"
Yes. DNS is hierarchical in nature with varying levels. The "master servers" are the 13 root servers at the top of the hierarchy. It's THEIR keys that are being changed, and each layer down needs to copy or everything below them can go dark.
I will admit, after reading the details, that was a bit gruesome, and after giving it some thought, this is the kind of event that really can't escape Murphy's Law. I mean, Scrapheap Challenge and its US counterpart Junkyard Wars had seen many a catapult built (with a noted fondness for counterweight trebuchets), and even the MythBusters have done a few, but it's also easy to see how any of them could go wrong as well (some did go wrong, even). It's a difficult line to draw; where does it move from the builder's fault for not making it safe enough to being the spectator's fault for standing too close to the blasted thing?
Because they normally take AA or AAA batteries. End result: they don't last long, and if you need charging in an emergency, you probably need it for a LONG emergency. You'd probably need something that uses like a 6V lantern battery or 4 D batteries, but all I've seen in that end are bodge jobs.
There's that big bug-a-boo about flexible capacity: that also means surge capacity, that rarely gets used but when it DOES get used, it gets USED! Like when the big game lets out, everyone gets out at once and needs a ride at once. Now you're caught in a vice. Having enough cars to handle this surge means a lot of idle rides most of the time, whereas anything less will mean people wait and gripe as a result. Lose-lose.
But how would the generator operate? Turbojets are designed for thin-air operation. Also, they're often used (via bleed-air extraction) to pressurize the cabin. Seems to me you end up trading two to four smaller turbine engines for one big one (because how else will you run the generator in thin-air conditions), making it a case of excessive complexity.
You forgot the Joke Alert icon.
You're basically going the roundabout route to the generator attached to the motor it's supposed to power: the classic Overunity Device.
Quick primer: any wind force used to power a windmill doesn't come out the other side. Breeze goes in, calm comes out. A ram air turbine adds drag because of the previous (similarly how it's harder to operate a crank charger when the phone's plugged into it than when it's not), which is why they're normally small and only used to charge essentials when necessary.
"Namely the fact that an electric aircraft performs a lot better then than the megajoules in its battery would indicate by direct comparison with a fuel engine."
By how much? Perhaps you can show us some actual numbers. Also for the reduction in drag using smaller pods for the electric motors versus turbofans.
"Oh and a ground based CCGT is about twice as efficient as the same turbine in the aircraft."
Also a lot bigger since you're basically using TWO powerplants. Given your physical restraints, size matters, and is there anything more efficient than a turbojet for its size and operational conditions?
"Order points are already reducing the staff requirement for many places. Online has made a massive shift from customer service to warehouse worker. The internet has replaced skilled knowledge. It would be harder to replace low wage labour if they stay that way. But with people pushing for unrealistic minimum wages and such the worker is pricing themselves out of the market."
They seem unrealistic until you figure in the Cost of Living. If you have to work two or three jobs without a day off and STILL can't pay the bills even for a Spartan living, the system is stretching to the breaking point.
And as I recall, the EO was due to it being moot due to things like A-GPS and other commercially-available means to correct out the wobble. Basically, if someone wanted REALLY accurate information, they could do it whether SA was there or not, so remove it and let the higher accuracy be put to use commercially. Most drift these days is due to physics (atmospheric interference and so on), not sabotage.
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