Whenever I replace a part, I have to record the serial number of the old part, the serial number of the new part, and the name of the customer. I return the old part to the warehouse, and don't get paid for the service call until it arrives. Clearly, Verizon Wireless wasn't this careful; perhaps now they are.

Younger Slashdot readers cannot imagine what the discovery of exoplanets means to those of us who have been reading science fiction since the 1950s. We dreamed of traveling to the moon, and we managed that thanks to a martyred President. With that milestone accomplished, we looked forward to the planets and the stars.

Somehow, we lost the will to explore space. The Space Shuttle, which should have preceded the exploration of the Moon, was funded only after many compromises, and the program is now ended. The Russians still have their 1960s-era space capability, and the Chinese are moving forward, but the exploration of the Solar System is being done by robots.

We thought we would have to travel to the stars to see if they had planets, but the astronomers have managed to see them from a distance. It now appears certain that most stars have planets, and it is only a matter of time before we start detecting the habitable ones. There is no longer any chance that we can ignore the challenge of interstellar travel. It may be a century or two before the probes are launched, but launched they will be. The dreams of the science fiction fans of the 1950s are being realized.

Not everyone in the 1970s would have laughed at the notion that it would take a long time from the first explorers to a permanent base. Some of us remembered that it took 50 years from the first explorers reaching the south pole to the establishment of the permanent base there.

I still believe it is possible that there will be a base on the moon by 2019, but I am not so sure that Americans will participate in it.

I also like Science News. I've been a subscriber to the magazine for many years. Their web site is actually http://www.sciencenews.org/, and you can subscribe to the magazine from https://sciencenewssubscriberservice.com/promo_pages/gen_order/OrderForm.php.

Saying that New Hampshire has no sales taxes is an over-simplification. New Hampshire taxes prepared food, such as that sold by restaurants. Compared to other states, New Hampshire taxes very few sales.

It is also an over-simplification to say that New Hampshire has no income tax—the state taxes interest, dividends, and business profits. It would be more accurate to say that New Hampshire does not tax wages.

I do not know what percentage of property taxes collected are from summer properties, but I am sure it varies by town. A few years ago I surveyed the mailing addresses for property tax bills in one New Hampshire town. I don't remember the exact figures, and I didn't correct for property values, but a large fraction of the zip codes were for that same town.

Amen, brother! There are probably fewer than 100 people left in the world who know how to program the DEC PDP-1 in assembler language. The fact that I am one of them gains me nothing in the job market.

So the lesson, then, is to confirm that the intended recipient is at the other end of an e-mail address you've been given if you intend to send any sensitive information. I suppose the easiest way to confirm is to send an inquiry e-mail and ask for a response. If you don't get one, or if the response says "no, I'm not him", then discard the e-mail address.

My name isn't all that common, but even so this has happened to me. I first learned about a "john Sauter" in southern California who is some kind of medical doctor when he traveled to a conference and I got notices from his hotel. I told them that they had the wrong e-mail address, and thought no more about it. However, I kept getting other messages obviously intended for him. When there was a reply address available I would politely tell the sender that I am a computer programmer in New Hampshire, not a medical professional in southern California.

It got a little scary, though, when he sold his practice, and a lawyer sent me the legal paperwork. I don't know what kind of trouble you can get into by receiving legal papers intended for someone else—it would be easy to run afoul of the insider trading rules in the case of a public company, or HIPPA rules for medical information.

Better yet, come to New Hampshire. We don't tax sales of the things that Amazon sells. Your employees will also benefit: we don't tax wages either. Don't buy any property, though: there is a high property tax to make up for the lack of taxes on wages and most sales.

"Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system."

The qualification "outside our solar system" is unnecessary. There are only two transiting planets inside our solar system: Mercury and Venus.

The phone company's 100-year reputation isn't always a reliable predictor: I recently had an excellent experience with the local phone company. My Comcast download speed, advertised as “up to” 12 million bits per second, was actually between 6 and 7. I had been waiting for DSL to be available for years, and when it finally was, I invited Fairpoint, the local telco, to install it on 30 days approval.

They sent me a DSL modem, which I hooked up, and then waited for the service to be switched on. To my surprise, they dispatched a technician. I walked him around the property, showing him where the wires were buried, and he then followed the pair of wires that connected me to the neighborhood fibre termination point, making sure I had a straight run. When he was done I had an excellent signal to noise ratio, and was able to actually get the advertised 15 million bits per second of download speed.

The technician told me that mine was the first 15 million bits per second installation he had done, so that might be why he went the extra mile (literally—the neighborhood fibre termination point is a mile away) to make sure I got good service. Nevertheless, it shows that when you get down to the level of individuals, the reputation of the organization doesn't tell you much.

Care to tell those of us looking for work what company you work for?

And thank you from me, also. If you aren't a physics teacher, you should be.

OK, let's, as a community, add an (E). Everyone create a file on your laptop, in your home directory, named random.bin, as follows:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=random.bin bs=4096 count=10000

The actual value of the count isn't important, as long as it is large enough to create lots of random bits. If lots of people do this, we have “(E) Random bytes because Slashdot told me to”, providing plausible deniability for anyone who needs to use that file to encrypt something important.

Would you be kind enough to provide Slashdot readers with a pointer to your master's thesis? I would like to experiment with this.