Gandi.net. French open source geeks. They've been in the registrar business for about as long as you've been on Slashdot. Many consider it an advantage for their registrar to be outside US jurisdiction. Their terms of use and conduct in the face of legal challenges have received thumbs-up from privacy activists and lawyers.

PairNIC, operated by Pair Networks. From their web site: "Launched in January 1996 and profitable since its second month of operation...". I have hosted with them for many years and their reliability is unbeatable. If you are a US-based business you can't escape US jurisdiction anyway and probably won't mind paying a couple of dollars more.

Executions have never really worked as a deterrent, and they don't in the US today. The most thorough research where pairs of counties all over the US were compared, a slight (non significant) brutalising effect were all that could be shown. (I.e. the death penalty tends if anything to lead to worse crime, not less.)

But sure, those were where executions weren't public. In the bad old days in England when pick-pockets were hanged for their crimes, who were busy working the audience of the hangings? Pick-pockets...

For those of us for which deterrence works, prison and social condemnation has already maxed out our unwillingness to commit crime. For the rest, the chair is as abstract, and useless a deterrent, a punishment as a long prison sentence.

What? Are you going to force anaesthesiologists to perform executions? How? By threatening them with the death penalty if they don't do it?

Nope. If you consistenly could find your car at the top of the hill for no extra effort, that would be great. And should be included in the efficiency (why not?).

It's not as if a heat pump has to put the heat back into the ground/air/water after you're done heating your house, like you would have to with the car if you ever drove it down the hill, so not a good car analogy, but points for trying.

> TFA talks about the filament temperature: 60C. This is no problem.

It's "no problem" because someone has done the work to solve it. A filament has a very small surface area to dissipate heat. Air is a very poor heat conductor. Glass too. Without the helium fill gas and a sufficiently large bulb envelope area the filament equilibrium temperature for the same electric power would be much higher and greatly reduce the efficiency and lifetime of the bulb.

> Holding helium for years is easy. Sealed glass is traditional in bulb manufacturing and is sufficiently helium tight.

Again, it's easy once someone has solved it. If it were not for the legacy of incandescent bulb production techniques and facilities making this a solved problem
I am pretty sure this idea would have been dropped in favor of other LED packaging methods based on plastic and aluminum.

I find it interesting that there are sound engineering reasons behind this shape, not just the retro look. The filament shape solves the 360 degree light distribution of most LED lamps but raises the issue of how to cool it effectively when not in contact with a heat sink. Helium has a much higher heat conductivity than air and moves the heat effectively to the envelope. Holding the helium for years without leaking is difficult requires something more gas tight than plastic. Forunately, there are many factories for glass bulbs that would otherwise be closed due to the decline in incandescent lamp sales. The technology for the glass envelope and sealed leads is a result of many years decades of development and probably would not have been worth the investment just for this purpose but these factories are already there with trained personnel and fully depreciated equipment.

Who said that the taxpayers funded the network? It was funded by those that chose to connect. If not enough people connect, then no fibre for the area. In my case it was the local district heating company that also lay fibre when they dug up the streets anyway. Cheap and effective.

But, sure, we have (had) people who aren't "interested" in high-speed (aka "only speed") access. Like I'm sure was the case with electrification and city water and sewage treatment. They've mostly come crawling back with their tail between their legs when/if they get the chance to get connected. So I have no fundamental problem with taxpayers footing some of the bill. Much like I don't have a problem when I have to pay for railways I don't personally use, roads I don't travel on, schools I (no longer) send my kids to, etc. etc.

One reason we Swedes manage to stay competitive is undoubtedly our infrastructure, which internet connectivity is a recent part of.

Fun fact: The buildout of fibre connectivity is faster in rural areas, where many communities band together in co-ops to get fibre as it's seen as one way to get young people to stay, instead of moving to the city. So they're fighting hard not only for schools, and groceries these days, but mostly for fibre.

Isn't the general idea that light has all the properties of each?

Some of the properties are mutually exclusive. For example, a wave requires a medium of transmission (such as water) but a particle doesn't (boats exist independently of water).

File extensions were originally something that humans put on files to tell each other what they were. Around 1974, for example, I might have a file called "phlist.txt" on an PDP-11 and my cow-orkers would know that was a phone list in raw ASCII format. The OS did not care, labels were for humans. If you wanted to tell the OS to execute a program, you typed "run filename" and if it wasn't an executable you'd get an error message.

Then unix and friends came along, and put an "executable bit" in the metadata for each file, so that you didn't have to type "run" any more. If you typed the name of a file, and it had the executable bit set, the system treated that as if you'd run it. Saved some ink on the teletype, don't you know.

Well, 8-bit micro computers running CP/M and DOS came along, and they sort of half-assed the concept. They still didn't have very much metadata on files, but the extensions .exe and... hmmm... something else I forget right now... were designated as "special". If you typed a word that the system did not recognize, it would look for a file with that name followed by .exe, and try to execute it.

But then Apple came along and built resource forks into their file system metadata, so they were able to associate information about what applications and/or utilities were used to create a file, and give some recommendations on what should be done if a user simply clicked the file. A really significant advance for filesystems, at least in theory.

Now, Microsoft wanted to make people believe that their OS and file system were as capable as the early Apple Macintoshes (pre-OSX) so they faked up a sort of back-alley version of the resource fork using file extensions. They were already checking for that .exe extension anyway, so most of the infrastructure to do this was already in place, they just jammed some hacks in to generalize the mechanism for all file extensions. And then they hid the extensions, so that to a clueless end-user it looked exactly like an Apple mac - you clicked on a file named "phone list" and the phone list application opened up.

This hare-brained scheme doesn't really work like Apple's, of course, because instead of including extra information about the file in the file metadata, instead they have built a separate list of file "types", designated by extension, and actions to associate with those types. In terms of the required slashdot car analogy, this is the difference between having the name of your state or country blazoned on your license plate, or having a giant book where you can look up the number of a car's license and see what state the car was registered in. Obviously the latter is inefficient and scales poorly as well as being fundamentally less capable and having no consistency across individual machines. Using the Apple method, if someone gives me a file with a resource fork, I get the resource metadata with the file. Using the Microsoft method, somebody gives me a file and maybe - if I'm lucky, and have the same applications installed - I will have the same resources associated with the file extension that the person giving me the file had on their machine.

But people who grew up after all this was invented can rarely see how stupid this all is, and always has been. It's like the idiocy of having the label of the volume MFD being the same as the subfolder separator character - nearly all of you young folks think that actually makes sense, in the same way that people brought up in the Westboro Baptist Church think raving bigotry makes sense. You've been conditioned to accept it.

This is only one of several giant steps backwards in computer technology. We used to have automatic file versioning but now programmers are so thoroughly conditioned they don't even seem capable of understanding why that was so awesome.

Now get off my damn lawn, you whippersnappers!

If these materials that act as surfactants for liquid methane at cryogenic temperatures occur naturally on Titan the obvious evidence for their presence would be foam. The next probe to follow Huygens should be an autonomous boat to study the shores.

That's how we do it in most of "socialist" Sweden. I.e. I have an "open city network" fibre to my house. ISPs are free to sell service on that fibre/network (for a small access fee that pays for the network infrastructure, now less than 10% of my montly fee). So I have a choice of eight different ISPs and pay about $40/month for 100/100Mbps + IP telephony (no subscription fee, but charged calls). I also get cable TV over the same fibre from a different company but that's extra, about $25 for the channels I get.

That's how you'd actually want it organised to enable a free market.

The only thing that made you cry? Try this:

Voices From The Hellmout