I would counter that you could not possibly even begin to make the case that the situation with health insurance was in response to the general absence of regulation. That's just completely dishonest and stupid. HMOs, employer provision, lack of competition, and almost every other significant feature of health insurance today -- other than the basics: that it exists, that it covers medical expenses -- was directly driven by federal and state regulation, well before ObamaCare came along.

There is simply no doubt whatsoever that if these regulations did not exist, we would have much more competition, much more portability, and therefore, much lower prices for health insurance. No economist would disagree with this.

Gosh, why not? I can see someone looking at their MBA saying, "It works perfectly, has a great OS, awesome battery life, and does everything I could ask for and does it fast. I need to dump this for a barely functional device with an actively antagonistic OS sold by a company unable to secure a wet paper bag or make software that works acceptably. All this for far less battery life and far more money. I wish I had 2 MBAs to trade in!",

Back to the real world....

Did I mention that the day after the S3's release I was at a press event on a bus full of journalists. Anand has his S3 and in less than 24 hours it broke. The entire bus full of tech journos all concluded it was better that way.

That said, some people do like it. Microsoft traded in an absolute monopoly lock on the desktop to cater to 10% of their base. Clever that MS management, clever.

                                -Charlie

This is important work, which compliments terrestial geomagnetic measurements and space based observations.

The earth's magnetic field results from a planetary dynamo. Magnetic field lines get frozen into the electrically conductive fluid core. Then, differential motions in the fluid causes the magnetic field to get twisted up -- it's no longer is the simple dipole (like those bar magnets that you played with as a kid). Instead, the earth's magnetic field develops high order moments (sorta like bumps and dips). These shapes evolve as the conductive core moves. Eventually, the magnetic field gets so tangled up, that it unravels. At that time, the earth's field reverses. These magnetic field reversals show up in the geologic record ... every 10,000 to 100,000 years, there's a flipover.

Measurements like the ESA Swarm satellite give us a handle on the evoloution of the Earth's magnetic field, as well as showing how that field interacts with the magnetic and particle environment of the solar wind.

(disclaimer - most of what I just posted is from a terrific graduate class that I took at the Lunar & Planetary Labs way back in 1979, and when I worked with Charles Sonett, who studied the solar wind. Likely, much of this is way out of date!)

Impeachment does not require the Senate, only conviction does. I also don't think impeachment proceedings would actually start, just that the threat of them starting would cause Obama to throw the IRS officials under the bus to prevent them from starting.

Evidence of the act of document destruction should be harder to cover up than the documents themselves. Now it's x7! Obama is going to have no choice now but to throw all seven under the bus to avoid impeachement. Usually I am a pessimist, but I'm predicting actual jail time for at least one of the seven.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

RTOS is not required for real-time, and in fact can hinder it by introducing interrupt latency.

5-2000 KHz -- we called it "supersonic", less than "ultrasound". On the other hand, in a job long ago c. 2000 dealing with satellite signals (GHz), we used a heterodyne so that we could then do real-time digital processsing with FPGAs (no powerful GPUs back then).

There's another technology that reduces the need for analog engineers: GPU. Three years ago, I demonstrated real-time band-pass filtering on incoming digitized sensor input that previously required a custom $20k signal conditioning unit. Except in the GPU rolloffs could be steeper, and cutoffs could be adjusted through the GUI instead of calling up one of the retired original designers to compute new resistor & cap values.

Thanx!

I saw a short section of the German version of that Nova show ... apparently I speak fluent German in the that version!

Mit den besten Wünschen,
-Cliff

And my thanks back to you, oh Anonymous Coward: The 15 cents in royalties from your purchase of m'book is now helping my kids attend college. Uh, it'll last about 1.3 minutes.

You say that you're managing firewalls - all sorts of possibilities! I had the honor of working with Van Jacobson at LBL when he first researched TCP/IP traffic jams and compression. I was amazed at how much could be done by looking at traffic and thinking about the interaction of traffic, buffers, routers, and network congestion. Wonderful stuff - what looks like a boring problem may be an opportunity for research.

With that in mind, here's my encouragement to you: Go and sharpen your tcpdump & wireshark tools. Figure out what's really happening to those packets. Who knows what you'll uncover?

(blush). Thanks!

Now it's your turn: Go forth and make our networked community friendlier, stronger, more trustworthy, and more useful.

Best wishes,
-Cliff

PS: Of course, you raise a fascinating, self-referential question. How can you tell if this posting is from the real Cliff Stoll? I know it's me - and it's easy to prove in person, but difficult online. For the best proof, well, stop by for coffee. Way more fun than posting online.

It's been a quarter century since I chased down those hackers. Hard to think back that far: 2400 baud modems were rarities, BSD Unix was uncommon, and almost nobody had a pocket pager. As an astronomy postdoc (not a grad student), I ran a few Unix boxes at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. When the accounting system crashed, my reaction was curiosity: How come this isn't working? It's an attitude you get from physics -- when you don't understand something, it's a chance to do research. And oh, where it led...

Today, of course, everything's changed: Almost nobody has a pocket pager, 2400 baud modems are a rarity, and Berkeley Unix is, uh, uncommon. What started out as a weirdness hiding in our etc/passwd file has become a multi-billion dollar business. So many stories to tell ...

I've since tiptoed away from computer security; I now make Klein bottles and work alongside some amazing programmers at Newfield Wireless in Berkeley. Much fun debugging code and occasionally uncorking stories from when Unix was young.

Warm cheers to m'slashdot friends,
-Cliff

He himself retired from the redacted state police after 12 years, some spent undercover. He said that for the most part the idealists who want to save the world get washed out by the corruption by 5 years and anyone who's stayed longer than that is getting more out of it than their salary.