Danger Will Robinson!

Do yourself a favor; avoid the hostile Latvians at Mikrotik and use UBNT's Edge Router! [And hey, I've got nothing against Latvians - a colleague is Latvian and the nicest guy ever. Dunno, perhaps it's something in the water, but wow Normis is out there - as are most of the other 'Tik guys.]

Seriously! The feature set of EdgeRouters is pretty full and there's nothing I can't do on ER that I could [and used] on 'Tik.

Plus you get a real Linux underbelly - if you can't do it in the CLI, you can probably find a way to do it in Debian.

-Greg

++1

Seriously. I've used Mikrotik (hostile latvians [check], and buggy firmware [super check] - really the rant list is too long to enumerate here!) and am moving lots of stuff to UBNT.

The edge-router line is frankly totally incredible.
And speaking of VPN - they have an OpenVPN that actually supports the full spec, rather than the totally neutered one 'Tik does.
Real IPSec firewall interfaces! [L2TP where IPSec can get bypassed? Another 'Tik exclusive!]

(Do I sound kind of bitter about 'Tik? :) Yeah, I've got quite a number of people on 'Tik stuff, but given their hostility [it's legendary] and crap firmware [firmware russian roulette anyone!?] and a host of other issues - I'll be glad to have all my clients off onto Ubiquiti's stuff. )

Learning curve is steep, but no more than equivalent products - for example 'Tik, Cisco etc. It's a Vyatta based platform. UBNT's forum is incredible, as are UBNT staff themselves.

Virtually any UBNT product I'd not hesitate to buy. It's *incredible* value.

---
As for a router on a PC or some other idea...
It's way less power than a franken-PC.
Solid-state disks. [less mechanical failure possibilities]
Massive packet throughput. [1M pps for the $100 ER Lite, 2Mpps for the 8 port versions!] Based on Debian. Rocks.
Damn cheap!
Quiet!
And best of all. Really pretty easy, quick.

Basic stuff won't require a lot of work/time. If you want more, pretty much the sky's the limit. But more fancy stuff will take more time.
But basic functionality - probably a couple of hours start to finish.

Good luck!

-Greg

Nope. A patent is a license to sue. Small players rarely have the resources to do so. A very small number take the risk, fewer still manage it successfully. Pointing to one or two cases where small players were successful is not an argument. You have to look at all patents held by small players, find out how many get violated and what fraction of those use the courts or plausible threat of legal action to defend themselves.

I don't have the numbers, but from an insiders perspective (I am a small patent holder and have worked for a number of small players with patents) I can tell you that the average small player is very unlikely take court action, and that the average large player is unlikely to be much bothered by a threat of patent litigation from a small player, because they know they can simply exhaust the small player's resources.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as "the next generation" when it has been studied since well before my now-adult children were born.

Skepticism with respect to hydrogen exists in part because some of us have heard this tune before. Storage of hydrogen in metal sponges is nothing new, and they have some very nice theoretical properties, including reasonable volumetric energy density, which is a big problem for hydrogen.

Getting up to 1/5 the volumetric density of fossil fuels--which is the likely upper limit--would make hydrogen cars more than competitive with electric vehicles. But so far no one has managed that, despite continuous work on the problem.

For some reason TFA doesn't say anything about the long history of storing hydrogen in metal sponges, or make clear what makes this one different, although one can guess that as a liquid there are likely metal particles in suspension and that gives a huge surface area advantage.

It's almost as if the articles were written by junior staff members with no actual knowledge of hydrogen storage technology, but since we live in a "knowledge based economy" where STEM skills are in incredibly high demand there is no way reputable news organizations like the BBC would do anything like that, right?

In particular, Reno/Nevada offered this because it was beneficial to the state over the long term. Other states were also competing for this long term heavy industry by offering similar deals. The factory would have gone to another state if they had not offered this deal and then they would not be the national leader in battery manufacturing + all of it's cottage industries. The building the road part is genuinely a good idea as it adds value to their industrial park and is a good long term investment.

A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero.

No. Don't mistake "users" for "customers". They do not mean the same thing, and you conflate the two at great risk to your productivity, your profitability, and your sanity.

The fact that random people can read my blog in no way makes them "customers". The fact that Google makes money on their websites while I make nothing and use mine as a soapbox has no relevance - I ignore email from German users too (mostly because I can't read them). Come and get me, polizei!

It would've gone on long enough for something to happen.

For what to happen, exactly?

"We the People" count as fucking sheep, more concerned with Kardashians than the Constitution. What exactly do you think more awareness of the problem would have gotten us?

The general public now knows about the NSA's spying programs, just like they learned about Bush (senior)'s CIA running the global drug trade to arm the Taliban 30 years ago, just like they learned about J. Edgar's FBI's CoIntelPro 30 years before that, just like they put Joe Kennedy in charge of the SEC 30 years before that. And yet... Do you see Keith Alexander's head on a pike in a conspicuous public place? Do you see the entire agency disbanded for breach of public trust, and everyone who ever worked there rendered unemployable due to the taint on their resumes?

No. No, you don't. Because we deserve the government we have. We exist as a nation run by bread and circuses, and we like it.


/ Dear $Deity - You can send that asteroid any time now... Perhaps the intelligent dragonfly empire 100 million years from now will do better than the domesticated apes did.

The judges in these kind of cases are appointed by the executive, the same branch of government they are supposed to keep in check.

Remember, kids - Nothing says "legitimate democratic government" like extortionate secret courts!

Un-fucking believable. Well, no, entirely too believable. On the bright side, federal judges get appointed for life, so we have a very straightforward recall procedure.


/ 28 USC section 375, of course - What did you think I meant?

In fairness to the writer of the simply hideous article, which is an amazing compendium of misleading nonsense, irrelevancy and outright falsehood, the research team seem to be speaking in a private language. Even their "popular summary" is difficult for a physicist who has done some work in quantum fundamentals to understand.

It appears they have created a fairly standard state in which microwave photons are strongly interacting with each other via a superconductor. Their is for some reason they do not explain and seem to take for granted, a phase transition in the system's behaviour as the number of photons drops.

This may (or may not) be related to the "phase/photon-number uncertainty principle", which is analogous to the usual position/momentum uncertainty principle: you can know the precise classical phase of a many-photon beam or you can know the number of photons in it, but not both at the same time. As the total number of photons goes down the uncertainty in the the number of photons goes down, increasing the uncertainty in the phase (that's one fairly hand-waving way to think about it, at least.)

After the phase transition the system is in some weird quantum state that they liken to Schrodinger's cat, but since Schrodinger's cat is in a perfectly ordinary quantum superposition that knowledge adds exactly nothing to our understanding of what the state actually is. Presumably they are referring to some particular state that is currently well-known within quantum information theory, but by presenting the idea to a lay audience without elaboration they simply add to the overall sense of confusion and, uh, incoherence.

Which hasn't (yet) happened in this case, as the current situation was expected and predicted back in the '80's. There was a long article in The Atlantic Monthly in maybe '83 or '84 on precisely the perverse incentives that asset forfeiture laws created for law enforcement.

The reason why things have got so bad is not because no one expected them, but because no one was able to control them given the internal incentives (as others here have pointed out, judges' salaries can be paid in part by seizures, which further corrupts the process.)

I believe the primary rules for "not looking like a drug dealer" are:

1) be white
2) be middle-class
3) be middle-age
4) be male
5) be conventional in dress, behaviour and language

And really, if you aren't a white, middle-class, middle-age, conventional male, do you really have anyone but yourself to blame?

Two answers:

1) We aren't.

2) We need to be reminded now and then just how corrupt and borken the republic to our south actually is, as we tend to forget it and have trouble believing it.

Canadians, for all of our manifest imperfections, live in a relatively lawful country and take for granted that people in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand do as well. Despite being bombarded by news stories out of the US and UK in the past ten or fifteen years about how lawless things are getting there with their out-of-control security states we simply have trouble processing the practical implications.

Although... I renewed my passport recently and realized I haven't actually traveled to the US in over five years, whereas in the previous five years I had worked, lived and vacationed in the US. So we do kind of appreciate what a dangerous, arbitrary and lawless place the US has become, we just react by avoiding it rather than thinking much about it.

I figure the best strategy is to have a gun and a well-prepared neighbor. However, I'm too lazy even for that level of preparation.

Bad idea - Any "well prepared" neighbor probably has more guns, and more familiarity with using them, than you do. And while it only takes one lucky shot to take him out by surprise, you can pretty much bet your life (literally) that the Missus and little Timmy also know the right end of the barrel from the wrong.

(Not trying to sound like a "tough guy" here - I don't count as any sort of crackpot survivalist, just a rural geek; but I do know a few, and would do my best to avoid them in a doomsday scenario - Made of meat, dontchaknow?)

"Solved" isn't a term properly used in the sciences, and your quite legitimate confusion here is a nice example of why.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference. It does not produce certainty, but rather knowledge. Unfortunately, because science is still a very young discipline (only three hundred years old) we have yet to really update our language to accommodate it, so we still talk in terms of "solution" and "proof" and the like, as if we were philosophers seeking after some chimeral goal like "certainty" or the ability to turn base metals into gold.

The questions scientists are interested in here are:

1) "Which is more plausible given the evidence we have: that we are computing something wrong in our Big Bang nucleo-synthesis calculations using existing physics; that our measurements of lithium abundance are wrong; that there is new physics that affects lithium production in the Big Bang; that our chemical evolution calculations are wrong for some reason; or that something else entirely is going on that we are missing?"

and:

2) "What new evidence might we gather to clarify the situation given we currently don't have a stand-out idea that is sufficiently more plausible than the rest that no one can be bothered to do further investigations?"

Science is a human discipline, and as such is never "settled" except insofar as no on can be arsed to look at some question more deeply because the plausibility of the currently-best answer is so high (for example, while I think it very likely the Earth is heating up, I support further research like better satellite measurements of albedo: http://www.washington.edu/alum...)

With regard to lithium, we have a pretty good handle on Big Bang production assuming there is no new physics, but lithium has a number of characteristics that make it more strongly subject to the forces of what cosmologists call "chemical evolution"--the way the chemical composition of the universe changes through time due to stellar and other processes. The Korn et al work points to one particular way primoridal lithium could be hidden away. In the '90's there was similar work being done to show that various other processes could actually break lithium nuclei up over the course of the history of the universe.

Then there is also the problem that the whole "missing lithium" thing could be a result of a local anomaly in lithium abundance: after all, we have only sampled a small part of the universe. The work this /. post is about focuses on extending the reach of measurements to other galaxies, which is a start, although one could also imagine large-scale enrichment processes in the early universe that put us in a lithium-poor bubble, so no-doubt "additional work is required" to reach a sufficiently strong consensus that the missing lithium has been explained well enough to be not worth bothering with any more.

You'd never do it to strike a deal with the prosecutor to get a lesser sentence because the evidence they have on you is incontrovertible?

Entering a guilty plea differs from offering an unsolicited apology. Sure, I might pragmatically enter a guilty plea, but the idea of any sort of sincere apology after engaging in a decade long campaign of harassment? It just doesn't even make sense.

I don't know if Canada has a version of the "insanity" defense, and I know that very rarely works in the US, but I'd have to say that no sane person would waste that much time systematically trashing their former coworkers over a stupid job. That dude snapped - I'd call his coworkers lucky he didn't literally hunt them down one by one and torture them to death in his basement.