It always puzzles me why folks imagine saying a given piece of tech is old is axiomatically equivalent to saying it's been mightily improved upon since then.

Has the pencil been improved on yet? How about the wheel? Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s? Do we still use propellors to make boats move? Et cetera.

I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea. After all, the biggest advances since the 70s have mostly been in stuff like electronics or avionics, and besides the fact that this doesn't do squat for things like thermal protection and reliability of very high energy rocket systems under very heavy load (the two weaknesses that killed Columbia and Challenger, respectively) the best of these advances in electronics have in many cases been retrofitted into the Shuttle anyway.

Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.

You overlook the possibility that the net energy of the universe is zero. Some theories of physics suggest just that, because the energy due to gravity exactly cancels the energy present as mass and other forms of energy.

If the net energy of the universe is zero, then of course there is nothing to have been created -- nor is there anything that needs to persist forever.

The only difficulty with this attitude is that it's only going to work for the Russian and Dance Departments. If you try it in Physics or Chemistry or Engineering, where a generic professor can be responsible for $1 to $2 million a year in no strings attached research overhead that goes straight into the university's hungry coffers, you will be quickly educated in the different levels of deference applied to cost centers (like IT) and profit centers (like research departments).

I might add that it's possible a place as prestigious in these fields as Cornell might be able to get away with it, because they think, not unreasonably, that for any professor pissed enough to start looking at moving they can find 10 eager replacements, but few universities further down the academic pecking order will be able to do the same.

I think it's worth noting that this is kind of exactly the reason there was a surge of folks, as I recall, getting their ticket in the mid-80s, when 2m repeaters really took off. Quite a lot of guys used the thing as more or less a cell phone, or really car phone, since HTs were still pretty bulky. Not only to set up meetings and stuff with other hams, but also to put a call through the patch to say he'd be home late or what else was he supposed to get at the store?

I think there's room for people who at least start off thinking they'd like a "cell phone" that works even when the power and phones lines are all out from a hurricane. After all, they're doing no harm, they're paying their dues to keep the bands ours, and -- who knows? -- it's entirely possible at some point they might drift into something more technical. This is to even leave out the possibility they might get involved in some RACES or ARES work and put their skills to use for the community.

I don't think the guy should be discouraged for social reasons. Sure, he should know about the technical limitations, but otherwise, go for it and welcome.

You're quite right. I've got an FT-817, and I take it camping. I've got a slingshot and some twine, plus 120 feet of thin wire hooked up to make an inverted-L antenna. A year or so ago I was camping up moderate-high in the Sierra Nevada, in a valley where cell-phone or 2m/440 reception would be out of the question. I used my slingshot to hoist the high end of the antenna up about 35 feet and made contact with a guy in Texas on my 2.5 watts, no problem. I was working him CW, but I'm sure he would have heard me on SSB, too.

You can also buy a little solar panel for the FT-817, amusingly enough. But it's probably a better idea just to pack along some extra AAs.

For my money if you really want to guarantee emergency communication, I would get one of those tiny QRP rigs that Elecraft sells, with built-in paddles, then pack along a slingshot, twine, and a few hundred feet of wire to make a 40m inverted-L. That gives you solid regional day and night coverage at a cost of less than a pound or so. Of course, in this case you do need to learn code, but it's not like that's actually hard.

Sorry, but actual experience and history shows that you have it exactly backwards. It's people in really awful situations that tend to think long and hard about the morality of what they do -- who do the most to help each other out, do the least to exploit and brutalize each other.

The concept of dispensing with morality and taking a Look Out For Number One attitude is the luxury -- because you can only take that attitude if your life is so sheltered that you don't realize how much you really do depend on others. If you're the kind of person who assumes that just because you have a lot of pieces of green paper in your pocket, you can do anything you want, and you don't need another soul, then yes you could have this kind of amoral every man for himself attitude.

But when civilization breaks down, and you realize that all the money and social status in the world won't get you a drink of water from the rainbarrel your dirt-poor neighbor happens to have, well, then you start to realize rather well how interdependent people are. And when you start to realize that the only thing you have to gain trusted access to group resources is your word, your honor, your reliability -- well, then, you gain a new appreciation for the very practical value of social ethics.

Oh come now. Think of it as natural selection, weeding out the less competent network security policies and practitioners. Those that remain will be stronger, faster, and smell better between showers.

If Google can fend off the People's Army, then your Gmail account is probably pretty proof against plain old identity thief hackers from Chicago. So this is good news!

You've got to love the innumeracy of the reporter on this article:

by Wednesday, the contamination had jumped to 17,000 parts per liter.

Ah yes, parts per liter. One of those quaint old-fashioned units of concentration, I guess, like horsepower per cubit. I wish someone could remind me how we convert to a more familiar unit like grams per liter, moles per liter, parts per million.

Unless people whose brain fails to rewire itself get killed off before they can reproduce, then, no, evolution isn't going to change a damn thing.

You're falling prey to the Lamarck mistake, thinking that characteristics acquired during life are somehow passed on to offspring. They're not. The only way evolution proceeds is by the differential reproductive success of different genetic patterns.

In other words, if you make the usual assertions, you're safe in predicting that humanity will evolve to be puzzled and uninterested in /., since the usual belief is that being interested in /. implies reproductive nonsuccess.

...and have to deal with public schools. You will absolutely grind your teeth in rage that you have no choice about paying the princely salaries of those motherfuckers, and I use the word advisedly. I would rather deal with the cable company and the DMV on the same day I had a root canal than deal with a public school district.

It's different because what Amazon blocked, if his post is the full story, is purchases IN THE FUTURE of NEW content for his Kindle. How is that some evil taking back of things he thought he'd already paid for? It's not. He can still read all the books and content he's already purchased -- he just can't read anything new.

If you want to make a comparison to Home Depot, it's as if you bought a lawn mower, then returned it fifty times for this or that warranty repair, and they got pissed off at you, thought you were a whiner and a parasite, and banned you from buying accessories for the mower from their store.

Now, to make the analogy complete, we have to imagine that the mower is made by Home Depot, and you *can't* buy accessories elsewhere, so your mower will be a lot less useful in the future than you thought it would be. The action by Home Depot hurts more.

But I'm not seeing how any of your imagined property rights on your mower have been violated. You can still do what you damn well please with the mower. HD isn't restrictign your use of what you already own in any way at all. They're just declining to sell you additional parts that would make your mower still more useful, and I don't see what's wrong with that. Requiring them to make business transactions with you forever just because they did so once is obnoxious. Imagine if it worked the other way around -- if the law said that, once you bought a mower from Home Depot, YOU were required to buy all your future accessories from them. Suck much? But that's the forced-marriage deal you want to force on Home Depot. It fails the Golden Rule test.

I don't doubt that this guy is unhappy because he counted on being able to buy content from Amazon in the future for his Kindle. But...well, maybe he should have thought about that before returning SEVERAL $1000 pieces of big electronics. I mean, if doing business deals with him ends up costing Amazon money on the whole, instead of earning them money, what the hell did he expect? Why would they want to continue doing business with him? In essence, he's a "defective" customer, not working as they thought, and they're "returning" him. If, as he says, it's Amazon's fault, because they keep sending him defective merchandise, well, then he ought to be just as happy as Amazon that they're severing their business relationship.

So, just out of curiousity, what government policies and rules are you nominating as those which keep the price artificially high?

Or are you just saying the taxpayers should subsidize your online habit?

Global optimization! Sounds great!

Now, when you find the alien species, supremely smart and ultra powerful, who can find that global optimization and impose it on all those individuals (like every living human being) who would prefer his own local optimization (or more precisely is convinced that his "local" optimization is actually -- ha ha! such a coincidence! -- the global optimum) you let me know, and I'll sign up to have the compliance chip installed in my brain, too.