Another good fantasy series would be the Xanth books by Piers Anthony. I remember reading them when I was really young and really enjoyed the puns and plays on words that he incorporated into the titles & throughout the books.

One other series that comes to mind is one I remember stumbling across in my elementary school library. It was "Midnight at the Well of Souls" by Jack Chalker. It's more sci-fi but it has a mix of fantasy included.

I find that claim highly suspect. Just because a car can self-drive doesn't mean the highways wouldn't be congested. In fact I'd argue that the exact opposite is true.

I live outside of Boston where we had to deal with the Big Dig for roughly a full decade. For those of you unfamiliar with it, this was essentially a project to replace the central elevated highway through the city with a larger underground tunnel (along with other new highway improvements). Before the start of the Big Dig the highway through Boston was designed to handle an estimated 90,000 cars per day, but that capacity was exceeded just one year after the highway had been built in 1960, and traffic jams were commonplace.

Since the completion of the Big Dig there have been studies that suggest the increased capacity of the highway hasn't resulted in less traffic. Instead, more people are now driving (and driving by themselves instead of carpooling) because they see the highways as better able to handle the capacity. If anything the traffic jams are bigger and extending further out from the city.

Driverless cars are likely to invite more people to hop into cars (and likely be alone rather than carpooling), so there will likely be many more cars on the road thanks to this technology. How does having a much larger number of cars, even when some or even most of them are automated, reduce or eliminate traffic/congestion if a road is only designed to handle so many cars per hour/day?

ISA was created in 1981. China is just ensuring that everything from the past 30 years happens again...

Again, in what way was this a sting? There was no deception involved, at least none that was mentioned in the article. The headline says it was a sting, but nowhere in the article is there any mention of any sort of deception. In fact the article really says nothing at all about how they identified the C&C hosts that were seized. Typically researchers locate C&C servers by analyzing the network traffic to/from a compromised server. How does network analysis equate to deception?

The slang term 'sting' means a swindle or fraud. This article doesn't mention any of that - just that Microsoft again seized C&C servers for the botnet. They likely determined which servers were providing C&C for the botnet by good old fashioned detective work, not some elaborate con perpetrated against the operators of the botnet.

You pack up your carry-on bag and show up at the airport. As you go through the security line you have to unpack everything. All liquids and gels have to be placed on one conveyer belt. Electronic devices are placed on another. Your belt, shoes, hat, jacket, are placed on another. Whatever remains is placed on yet another. If you accidentally put something on the wrong conveyer then you and all your belongings are dragged off to a private room by 3 goons who go through everything with a fine toothed comb, taking so long that you'll undoubtedly miss your flight. Each of those conveyers goes through an assortment of various gizmos that poke, prod, scan, irradiate, zap, spray, and shake all of your possessions.

If you sort all your belongings properly then you then proceed to one kiosk where you have your retinas and/or fingerprints scanned. Depending on the outcome of that (and probably the whim of a nearby screener) you're shunted to another line where your clothes are swabbed down and tested for lord-knows-what sorts of chemicals. Then it's off to another line to proceed through a nude-o-scope so the screeners can gawk at you. And since the nude-o-scope doesn't actually do what it's purported to do then you're also subjected to a full pat-down. After the final pat down you're interrogated by yet another agent who demands to know where you're traveling, who you're traveling with, why you think you should be allowed on board an airplane, etc.

After about 30 minutes of "processing" you're allowed to retrieve roughly 85% of your belongings (half of which are damaged or completely destroyed from the "screening" process) from a huge bin where all those conveyers dump everything into one huge pile.

Oh yeah, and if you're not smiling sincerely throughout the entire process then you're also subjected to a full body cavity search and then ejected from the airport no matter what the outcome of the search.

I was in the US Coast Guard for about 10 years through most of the 90's. They used regular VHF marine radio for most communications, but they had an encrypted local area radio that they could switch to if necessary. The quality wasn't as good as VHF, but you were pretty much guaranteed that every boater in 10 miles wasn't listening in if you were discussing something sensitive like looking for a body in the water, etc. If we wanted to notify people to be on the look out for a missing boat we'd broadcast on VHF. If we didn't want hundreds of random people to know that we're investigating a drunk boat operator or assisting somebody who had a heart attack or other medical issue we'd "go secure".

As time progressed we also started using cell phones more and more since the cell phone coverage for a couple miles from the coast is pretty decent these days in most populated areas and the quality is typically very good. Why shouldn't police departments be afforded the same level of security in their communications? Yes I know cell phones aren't perfect and could be intercepted by somebody intent on doing so, but at least you don't have to worry about hundreds/thousands of people eavesdropping by simply flipping on a radio.

Once again we see a proposed law that will only impact law abiding people (and be a major invasion of their privacy to boot).

If I was intent on covering my tracks I could take so many routes:

- Download Tor and use it to privatize all my browsing
- Search for open SOCKS proxies, etc. to exploit
- Rent a VPS out of state and set up a proxy on it

and any one of hundreds of other approaches to take...

The only problem with your argument is that Red Hat has a huge base of paying customers, and money talks.

I manage a small research cluster at a university. It's running Red Hat linux on over 100 nodes. The university has a site license for Red Hat so licensing for the cluster isn't an issue. The decision to go with Red Hat had to do mainly with what distros are directly supported by commercial products like Matlab, Mathematica, Abaqus, Maple, Comsol, Ansys, etc. All these vendors sell lots of software & services to universities, research labs, etc. and they all support Red Hat linux.

I've personally dealt with support departments when trying to run commercial software on non-RH distros, and in some cases they pretty much tell you you're on your own if you're not using RH or one of the other top two or three distros. Most commercial vendors will only state that they support RedHat, SUSE, and maybe Ubuntu and/or Debian.

If/when Red Hat comes out with a new way of doing things then customers like us will start pushing on the vendors to support those new ways. After all, we're tied into using Red Hat, and we need their products to run on it. So the commercial software vendors will start supporting the Red Hat way of doing things to appease their customers. And once the commercial vendors start supporting it then it will slowly but surely make its way into other distributions as well so that these apps can run on distros that other people want to use.

Basically impossible to jam because of the very powerful land based transmitters

Any signal can be jammed, and LORAN has its own weaknesses. A simple jamming or disruption of the signal from a master station would effectively disable LORAN across a huge geographic area. And given that they're ground based, it would be trivial to drive a truck into an antenna tower, blow it up with a small amount of explosives, etc.

If you're going to use rsync then I'd recommend using rsnapshot, which is essentially a perl script that makes rsync even more powerful. It's basically a poor-mans version of Apple's Time Machine software. It'll keep hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots in such a way that disk usage is optimized, and the number & timing of snapshots can be fully configured.

I still have a Heathkit multimeter that I built in the late 80's. Still works like a charm. I think I also have an LED clock sitting in a box in a closet somewhere.
I built a lot of their kits as a kid, from shortwave radios to speakerphones. My dad was a ham radio operator and he got me hooked on them. I'd love to see them make a comeback in this arena.

Was there any thought whatsoever in terms of security when they developed this format? A document that can embed other objects sounds like an excellent method for distributing malware, etc.

and pretty soon you'll have Planet of the Bees instead of Planet of the Apes...

What kind of logging are they going to expect to come from all the VPS's out there? I have two VPS's, each of which I use for two different domains I own. I also manage a third VPS for a non-profit group. Unless the ISP starts to log every single bit of data that comes into and out of my VPS this law is going to be absolutely useless to dealing with traffic that goes through a VPS.

There's no way in hell I'm going to forward the syslogs, mail logs, etc. of my linux hosts to an ISP for them to archive for an arbitrary amount of time. I'll simply pay a little bit more to use a VPS provided by a foreign provider that's outside of the reach of US laws.

And even if they did somehow manage to force VPS users to forward logs to the ISP for storage, how would they know that what I'm sending them is everything? I'm a pretty decent professional linux systems administrator. It wouldn't be all that hard to filter out some stuff and only send the ISP's log server what I want them to see.

Once again we see an excellent of an example of a proposed law that only makes things more difficult for the innocent and ignorant, and will have little effect on those who have the knowledge and desire to avoid it.