And people said that Applied Eschatology was a stupid major.

Dialing 1 for long distance is actually something that goes farther than the country code. Until about twenty years ago calls within an area code did not require you to dial the area code, but you did have to dial a 1 for long distance.

Heck, up until 25 years ago I didn't have to dial the full exchange.

My town had 2 exchanges, numbers were either 729-xxxx or 725-xxxx.

If you were dialing in town, you only had to dial 5 digits (9-xxxx or 5-xxxx)
If you were dialing the next town over, then you needed the full exchange (e.g. 867-xxxx).
If you were dialing a local number in another area code, you needed the area code (212-867-xxxx).
And if you were dialing a long-distance number then you needed a 1 plus the area code (1-213-867-xxxx).

All rotary phones in Sweden have the 0 before the 1, making the 0 quickest to dial. 0 gives one click.

Interesting.

In the US, city area codes were assigned based on the relative importance/population of the cities in order to make them fastest to dial for the most people. They can't start with 1- (that's for long distance calls) or end with -11 (x11 are reserved for special use--911 for emergencies and 411 for information being the most commonly known) and the middle digit is always "1" or "0". Within those rules, you got the biggest cities with the quickest codes to dial:

212--New York (fastest to dial goes to largest city)
213--Los Angeles
312--Chicago
214--Dallas
313--Detroit
etc

Some of the higher/slower numbers were unused, but there's a lot that were allocated (0 is the slowest to dial here):

907--Alaska (the whole state)
808--Hawaii
906--Central Michigan
etc.

It's not a hard and fast rule--some higher codes were split off as lower-coded regions became too big and so are in very populated areas, or came along more recently when the rule wasn't really applicable (touch-tone era). But it's kind of interesting.

You're right ... every lecture should be delivered in the most droll monotone available. We need to get a hundred Ben Stein clones up in our colleges and universities.

I think you have that backwards. Gamification is an attempt to make lectures and learning more droll*, an adjective that the post you were responding too seemed against. And monotones are rarely droll, though Ben Stein's is a notable exception. Having someone as smart and funny as he is up there teaching seems like a pretty good approach.

* Droll: having a humorous, whimsical, or odd quality .

That's great IF you can use a password that long. My bank limits passwords to 14 characters

14 characters is still enough for 90 bits of entropy (assuming you're limited to ASCII). If you choose it truly randomly, that's 2^90 possible passwords; this thing can try 77 million passphrases per second. Call that 2^27; so it'll take 2^90/2^27 seconds to hack you, which is 2^63 seconds.

Which is roughly 275 billion years.

The trick is choosing and remembering the random password.

Exactly. This article title is intentionally misleading--strong 14-character passwords are not being devoured in minutes, weak passwords are. The problem, as always, is that people (for good reason) don't choose and remember strong passwords, not that strong passwords are insufficient.

A key phrase from the summary is "That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force and wordlist (or dictionary) attacks"--it's completely nonsensical even without knowing what "that" is. A dictionary attack is a way of limiting the amount of the key space that you need to search by assuming that passwords are distributed non-uniformly throughout the keyspace, and that you know how they're distributed. "The most secure passwords" are by definition uniformly distributed, and hence immune to dictionary/word list attacks.

Are you saying that in America you can get a criminal record for littering?

It's up to the state, but certainly you can in some states (maybe all states, I don't know). Certainly it's on your record in California and Texas, to name a couple big states at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Not every crime is put on your record; the so-called "infractions", which are less severe than misdemeanors or felonies, are sometimes omitted. Not always, though--speeding tickets are often (lower-than-misdemeanor) infractions, but they're certainly tracked for at least a few years in most areas.

If you take it out when it hits 155 F, the internal temperature can then get up to 165 before it starts cooling down. Now granted, it is unlikely to get much over 160, but it's probably going to taste better and should still be perfectly safe.

You get a lot more carryover heat gain than you'd expect.

Alton Brown's show this year he's revised in a couple of ways:
1. No breast-plate foil any more
2. Pull the bird out when the breast reaches 151F.

He did that with a 12 lb bird--the breast was 151F when he pulled it out, and after 1/2 hour of rest the carryover had raised the breast temp to 164F.

An in other areas of the U.S. they have moved enforcement from criminal to civil. Here in RI you can have up to an ounce, you can't smoke in public, and they actually license growers. It's all very quiet of course but it exists.

If you are caught in public it's like a $100 fine on the civil side, not criminal.

I hate the term "decriminalization" and wish it would go away, because it leads to confusion like this.

In RI and MA, the penalty for marijuana possession is now only a fine (no jail time or arrest). But it's still a criminal fine, not a civil fine. Criminal fines are punitive; civil fines are purely restitution for actual damages done to the government. If you dump toxic waste in a national park, you might be assessed a civil fine to pay for the costs of cleanup (on top of any possible criminal penalties for trespass, endangering people's health, etc). If you litter or speed, you can be assessed a criminal fine. Even though in common parlance people use "criminal" to mean misdemeanors and felonies, strictly speaking infractions like littering and speeding are still (very minor) crimes, and it's because of that misuse that the misleading term "decriminalization" came into play.

In general, a good way to differentiate "civil" cases (torts) vs. "criminal" cases (crimes) is to look at who the non-defendant is in the case: If you fail to fulfill the terms of a contract, or file for divorce, or are sued for child support, then the other party will hire a private attorney and sue you in civil court. If you assault someone, rape someone, commit DUI, etc, then the state's attorney (not some attorney hired by the victim) will show up and take you to a criminal court. There are many levels of criminal courts, ranging from traffic courts up to the US Supreme Court, alongside the civil court system.

The case of a "civil fine" is more complicated, but it's essentially the case where the government is showing up not to protect the general public or a third party, but to recover damage to government property. It's similar to a true civil case in that the wronged party is representing themselves in court, but in practice that's tough to distinguish because the wronged party is the government.

Yeah, the leading question is a little annoying--it should be "does anything keep you from using Linux, and if so what?" My answer would be the same as yours--I've been running Linux exclusively for 18 years now. For others, there are still applications--games or otherwise--or usability issues, driver support, or whatever that have stopped them from adopting Linux.

It's the same as the annoying "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?" questions--the closest thing we'll ever see to a "year of the Linux desktop" was around 2000 or 2001, when you started seeing Dell and others selling Linux machines, could actually use a graphical "click here" widget to set up networking instead of needing to manually enter your gateway and network addresses by hand, didn't need to manually enter your monitor's timings as XF86 modelines, etc.

That's a far cry from saying that it was usable on the desktop by everyone, but it's basically the closest thing to a bright line we're ever liable to see, and is the point where it crossed over from "power users can use a Linux desktop if true gurus install it for them" to "regular users can use it if power users install it". From there on out, it's incremental support for apps here and there, UI improvements, driver support, etc--but there will probably never be another year of the Linux desktop as big as what we already saw 10+ years ago, it'll be slow adoption in fits and starts here and there as people's particular needs are met. The biggest global hurdles are long since passed, and we're into an (equally important, but harder to solve at one whack) forest of individual issues holding things back for people.

You're better off running your own CA and distributing that CA's public key to your internal apps. Then you can ignore outside CAs but still avoid MITM attacks.

Canada is party to both agreements. The US is party to the London Convention. Russ George is an American, his company is American, and they were working for the Haida (a Canadian Aboriginal group) so they are in legal trouble if the Canadian Courts find either applies

More accurately, they _might_ be in trouble if Canadian Courts find that either applies. It'll then depend on the ongoing mess of sovereignty issues with the Council of the Haida Nations--the Haida never signed any treaties with the Canadian government, so they have a much greater claim to sovereignty than many of the First Nations and may have a legal argument that they are not signatory to those treaties (despite Canada being a signatory).

The hardest thing mixed in there was the a.out->ELF migration, for which I rebuilt everything on the system by hand sort of like a primitive LFS. It was worth doing once--you learn a fair bit in the process--but made it so I have little interest in LFS or similar distros going forward.

To be fair, the NSA don't seem to have caused problems with the S-Boxes and differential analysis doesn't seem to have worked too well

In fact, the NSA's changes to the S-boxes made DES stronger against differential cryptanalysis; it appears that they and IBM knew about diff crypto back in the 1970s and designed an algorithm to resist it even though the technique wouldn't be widely known for another 15-20 years.

Diffential crypto only "doesn't seem to have worked out so well" because it's known and algorithms are designed to withstand it--prior to the public knowledge of diff crypto, algorithms like SAFER, IDEA, FEAL, etc fell to or were partially attacked by differential crypto. Somewhat amusingly, it appears an extended version (impossible differential cryptanalysis) wasn't known by the NSA, as their SKIPJACK algorithm was pretty well gutted following its development by Lars Knudsen and Biyam/Biryukov/Shamir.

It's the key length stuff where the NSA seems to have held things back, and at least that was public at the time.

and where would mount, say, an off-the-shelf lavalier

Why not come full circle? Before it was coöpted to mean a type of microphone, lavalier originally meant a pendant that hangs from a necklace.