LOL ... you rock, that's cool ... a *very* localized, man made eclipse from an orbital body would be freakin' *awesome*.

Hmmm ... Conversely, turn it around ... death ray! :-P

Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.

Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).

However, it's not like gethostbyname() is a rare call. I suspect that well over 99% of net-aware applications are still using it. This affects just about everything that's talking over the internet.

True, but gethostbyname() is ancient and if the program wants to support IPv6, you can't use gethostbyname(). So I think the number of programs actually vulnerable is far lower. Remember, gethostbyname() only works with AF_INET - while getaddrinfo() works with AF_INET, AF_INET6 and any other protocol that uses sockets (since it returns

struct sockaddr*

making life really easy).

So a lot of older code is vulnerable, newer code less so. it's been around about 15 years or so.

ROFL.

What a strawman. Which hypothetical investment banker will take Uber and what happened to his limousine and private driver?

The affected call is gethostbyname() and friends, which have been deprecated by the more protocol-transparent getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() set of APIs. If you use IPv6, getaddrinfo() is the only way (gethostbyname() and friends are AF_INET (IPv4) functions only), but they're protocol transparent ways to do DNS lookups (they can return AF_INET, AF_INET6 and any other valid address supported by the system and DNS).

Deep down, if you look closely, they mention that code using getaddrinfo() is not vulnerable to the bug.

Shortly after learning about getaddrinfo() I stuck to using it - far easier to use than gethostbyname() and less messy in the end. The only complication is having to call freeaddrinfo() when you're done.

Because other people will pay for your desire.

Economists are big fans of auctions and say that's the most fair method to distribute resources. Economists, however, are not known for taking social, cultural or human values into account in their simple models.

So yes, I would. Man, it really isn't so difficult. Get some history lessons on when and why the taxi business became regulated.

Or maybe refund the money they've been given to maintain it, or the subsidies to expand it.

Sorry, but the telecom companies have been handed huge piles of cash to maintain this stuff ... that they've sat on it and failed to invest in all of their infrastructure is their damned problem.

They weren't given that money to only invest in the most profitable stuff ... they were given it to invest in the entire system so that it was there for everybody.

Greedy, shortsighted corporations don't need to charge more to pay for that stuff ... they need to use the money they've been given/have been charging for what it was for in the first place.

Mostly I think they've been lining executive pockets, and bribing politicians so they can keep doing the same crap.

No, most of that is porn ... true fact, 71% of all global storage is dedicated to porn, and the rest is almost entirely cat videos. ;-)

OK hotshot, how sure are you that the medium those *wonderful* answers are stored on hasn't deteriorated, resulting in us looking back on bad advice?!

Assume it will, or that it already has. Which, has more or less been in all those answers which came before.

Buy 4 HDs ... back everything to all four, keep two at home, and keep backing up to them, put the other two in another physical location. Periodically rotate one of them.

If you have at least two backups of very recent vintage, and two of an slightly older vintage ... you're constantly making new backups.

Over time, assume even the ones you're still using.

In other words: Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.

Which is precisely what the GP said.

Don't assume you've made a static backup which will suffer from neither bitrot nor obsolescence. Plan accordingly.

This is literally a decades old strategy. The more important the data, the more discrete copies you keep, and the more regularly you do it.

Funny, and I want to have three open browsers so I can sandbox various activities from one another.

Who said you had to support it? Are you the support guy for the entire interweb or something?

Nobody is forcing you to use it or support it.

Firefox users who likewise prefer a browser with more rather than fewer features (but otherwise want to stick with Firefox) might also consider SeaMonkey, which bundles not just a browser but email, newsgroup client and feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools.

LOL ... 1997 called, they want their browser back.

More seriously, where does Opera/this Vivaldi thing fall on the privacy end of the spectrum? Is it ad supported? Is it full of crapware?

If it isn't secure or trustworthy, WTF is the point? The last I saw anything from Opera was an Opera mini ... and it seemed to be quite the opposite of a privacy oriented browser, precisely because it seemed full of ads.

I want the "advertisers and sponsors go to hell" browser, do we have that?

External HDs are cheap these days.

Set up a robocopy script to backup to an external. drive Periodically backup to a second external HD.

Periodically cycle the external HDs into your safe-deposit box at the bank.

Accept that every few years your external HDs get cycled out due to age.

Don't try to make some permanent archival solution which will rely on technology in the future working ... keep them active and in the air. Two local copies, and possibly as many as two remote copies.

I think your specific medium over the long term is less meaningful when you can buy a 3TB external HD for under $100 .. especially if archiving those files actually is valuable for you.

Nowadays, it seems like redundant, offline backups for stuff you deem important enough is fairly easy to do.

The advantage of a robocopy is it will only copy what's changed, so your static data doesn't add too much.

Economics isn't an ideology.

Bullshit, it sure isn't objective science, it's models, based on dubious assumptions which aren't reflective of anything other than the beliefs of the person who made them, and then using mathematics of dubious quality to "prove" what your ideology tells you.

Are you retarded or just ignorant?

Are you an asshole or a douchebag?

I'm saying that when people say "if you cut taxes it will stimulate the economy", that is a purely ideological position, not grounded in objective fact. And economics serves no purpose if it isn't down to implementing policy, which is inherently idological.

And again, it is like you are saying physics cannot be a science because there is many unproven theories that coexists.

No, I'm saying physics still boils down to actual objective reality, and in no fucking way shape or form does economics do that, and never has.

Frankly, you are an idiot.

Frankly, you're an asshole who thinks too highly of his own opinion.

So far you've failed to offer anything intelligent, just the cowardly ad hominem attacks of a worthless moron with nothing new to add.

So, I'll tell you what, here's a piece by someone who has a fucking Nobel prize in "economic science".
One problem with economics is that it is necessarily focused on policy, rather than discovery of fundamentals. Nobody really cares much about economic data except as a guide to policy: economic phenomena do not have the same intrinsic fascination for us as the internal resonances of the atom or the functioning of the vesicles and other organelles of a living cell. We judge economics by what it can produce. As such, economics is rather more like engineering than physics, more practical than spiritual.

There is no Nobel prize for engineering, though there should be. True, the chemistry prize this year looks a bit like an engineering prize, because it was given to three researchers - Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel - "for the development of multiscale models of complex chemical systems" that underlie the computer programs that make nuclear magnetic resonance hardware work. But the Nobel Foundation is forced to look at much more such practical, applied material when it considers the economics prize.

The problem is that once we focus on economic policy, much that is not science comes into play. Politics becomes involved, and political posturing is amply rewarded by public attention. The Nobel prize is designed to reward those who do not play tricks for attention, and who, in their sincere pursuit of the truth, might otherwise be slighted.

Why is it called a prize in "economic sciences", rather than just "economics"? The other prizes are not awarded in the "chemical sciences" or the "physical sciences."

Fields of endeavour that use "science" in their titles tend to be those that get masses of people emotionally involved and in which crackpots seem to have some purchase on public opinion. These fields have "science" in their names to distinguish them from their disreputable cousins.

So, seriously, fuck off and grow up.

Economics is descriptive how what complex systems involving humans do. But is is NOT measuring some innate natural properties of how that actually works.

As soon as economics goes from measuring and describing, and steps into applying policy .... it utterly ceases to be a science.

It's best if people all move at more or less the same speed. It keeps them better spaced. People driving much slower than that can cause as many difficulties as people driving much faster.

We recognize the dangers of driving too fast, and most people try to keep it to near the speed limit, at least as long as the limit is set properly. Some are set very badly, and that's hazardous. You get a mix of people traveling at a safe but illegal speed with people obeying the law.

Fortunately, I've found that most speed limits aren't too badly off. I'm sure there are jurisdictions where they're deliberately mis-setting them as revenue generators, but I don't encounter many of them. (I can name one not too far from my house, where a four-lane divided road with minimal access has a 30 MPH speed limit... and a speed camera on a big downhill leg. That's going to get people killed, because everybody who knows about the speed limit jams on their brakes and goes 25. And the road is a major arterial, or it could be, if they didn't deliberately limit the flow rate so badly. The road is, of course, a nightmare at rush hour and a speed-trap revenue source the rest of the time.)