What's the deal? I'd think I was crazy except my parents still have a landline, and when someone calls them the name for that number pops right up. Just like it has for almost 20 years.

Why is this broken on cellphones, anyway?

Came here to say this. Also note how far the US is ahead of the rest of the world. It's a rare scenario where the US is a world leader in something Internet. 14.5% of all Google's US connections are v6, and it's higher on the weekends. Only Belgium does better. The major US ISPs have actually been pretty good about v6 and at least TWC/Comcast offer it to all their customers, and all their provided routers do it automatically. All the other major ISPs I know about are at least testing deployment. As people swap out their routers that number will only rise.

The lag as you observed is corporate networks since each one is different. (Also note around Christmas there is a huge jump, and the spread is getting wider.) But even there, eventually you won't be able to buy a device that doesn't automatically do v6 (or at least as automatically as it does v4).

v6 is coming, folks. People can naysay it all they want but the facts don't support it.

I used to think like you, but the fact of the matter is that most animals simply don't get cavities. Seriously! I mean, their teeth are very capable of getting cavities, but haven't you wondered why humans have teeth that "go bad" without regular maintenance? Have you ever known a dog to floss? The idea that all calories are equal is a tempting one, especially to engineer-types like myself, but it doesn't seem to be true.

Eating simple sugars is quite rare in the animal world, and presumably primitive humans. We like them so much because they are simple, high-density sources of energy compared to extracting a few calories from some nuts and greens. An early human would get as much as they could - which wasn't very much at all. But we are not set up to mostly run on them to the extent that we try today, and I think the evidence on that is increasingly clear. It's not necessarily simply a question of physical fitness, though it's true that that will probably mitigate many of the downsides like weight gain. The input matters, and calories and nutrients are not necessarily fungible - it doesn't go without saying that getting all your calories and nutrients via soda and multivitamins (and I guess fiber pills) is equivalent to e.g. a balanced diet of vegetables and protein even if the caloric and vitamin content is exactly the same. This of course ignores the fact that it is far, far easier to blow through your calorie budget with high-density foodstuffs.

It is a hard problem to solve. The basic problem is that our favorite foods bear no relation to foods that we should be eating, which was fine when the only foods there were to eat (mostly) *were* the foods we should be eating - or vice versa, the foods that are good for us are the ones that we evolved to eat. But we have an artificial abundance of the foods we really like, but didn't used to be able to get in common practice.

And for the record, I eat like a pig, am overweight, etc (though I'm working on it now that I have time). I do not practice the "paleo" fad diet and think most of its claims are bogus. But even though we don't know much about what "primitive" people actually ate, we do know that simple sugars are rare in nature unless artificially grown. Humans are clearly quite adaptable when it comes to diet... but perhaps not infinitely adaptable. We already know that trans fats are shockingly bad, for instance. Perhaps this applies to simple sugar as well - both are found in nature, although much much more rarely than we have been using them. If for no reason other than calories, most people would be better off eating no sugar at all - which would make it much harder to have stupendously high calorie diets.

You assume that people value their time and the money equally. But this is trivially false. Some people really want to make every last penny they can, and others just want to make enough to comfortably support them and their family, with plenty left over for hobbies and savings. If there is a sufficient supply of the latter type, go nuts - but if there isn't, and you won't negotiate with the former group, you will lose them assuming others will go higher, which they will due to the lack of talent. How do you know which type is which? Easy - they'll tell you by trying to negotiate. You don't pay them more because you value their negotiation skill, you pay them more because that's what you have to pay to get that person. You might as well ask why car dealers should reward good negotiators with cheaper prices.

I didn't negotiate when I got my job, since I fall in the latter group and was happy with the offer. Sure I'd like more money if it landed in my lap, but honestly it'd only serve to fill my savings a bit faster and I think my compensation is fair. Other things are more important to me. If I wanted to fight tooth and nail for every cent than I'd do that at hiring time and relentlessly seek other jobs afterwards, jumping ship at the first sign of a higher offer.

This is a stupid idea. Since people don't value money the same way, they will have to pick a number that will be too high for some and too low for others. They will lose the "too low" folks, and they will overpay the "too high" folks who were willing to work for less. Neither is good business.

I am frankly offended by the idea that I need protecting (and then offended again when I'm the 'oppressor' despite facing the same 'problem'). Apparently unlike modern-day feminists, I believe that women are smart enough that they can decide for themselves whether a particular job offer is worth their labor.

I work on Public DNS, and we have that printed out and put up on our wall. Made our day when that came out :)

Short answer: no. But if you're on the ground they probably don't need to, strictly speaking.

Much better to be in the plane and refuse to land. Don't be like this guy and cooperate. Though if he didn't land, apparently Sgt. Yosemite Sam was going to start firing his handgun at the glider 3000 feet in the air (and hoping the bullets went... where, exactly, when they missed?) so take that with a grain of salt.

There are two powers that can compel a plane to land: 1) the FAA and 2) a military intercept (which itself only works because they'll just shoot you down if you don't obey). Well they're really the same because if you don't comply with #1 they'll just use #2. Local, state, or even federal law enforcement cannot compel an aircraft to land - the FAA has sole authority for the country's airspace.

Now if you're on the ground, of course, they can put their hands on you regardless of whether they're technically allowed to. If the drone pilot was licensed appropriately then you'd have a serious case on your hands, but there's like 20 of those in the country at the moment so odds are this will be nabbing people violating the regs to begin with and the FAA will probably not bother to get involved.

I'm not saying everything should be for me, but what more is there to say about DST, even in relation to IT issues? It's just the same stuff we've been talking about - on Slashdot and elsewhere - forever. Yes, it makes things inconvenient, and yes some people don't like it and want to get rid of it. We'll have the people railing against it while slightly fewer say "actually I kind of like it", and some guys in the corner will say "we should just use GMT for everything" and it'll all happen again - right on schedule! - in ~8 months. There's nothing even different (like a new study) this year, just "remember this is happening again and how it makes you mad? let's all complain in the comments!". All the linked things are from 2014 or earlier. Might as well have an article about how some people still don't like Windows 8, or that taxes are due on April 15.

It just feels like a Two Minute's Hate at this point, and I object to that on principle.

I don't generally complain about articles on Slashdot, but this is ridiculous. It reminds me of that Simpsons episode with the newspaper having the front-page headline "Christmas Occurs". I like reading about some not-strictly-tech stuff on Slashdot, but can we please not have articles to remind us of something that's marked on the calendar?

Didn't Gears go away because its features got folded into HTML5? Seems like a much better solution than an optional proprietary plugin.

I don't think it's fair to compare Snowden to this genius. Leaving Assange aside (yeah, I'm lazy and he's slightly harder to defend), Snowden alerted the world to serious problems with our various intelligence groups who were doing something quite widely considered to be unethical at best, and probably illegal. And if you're going to say that it wasn't up to him to make that decision, and others (the ones in charge) didn't think it was unethical so he should've just followed his orders, I'm pretty sure we decided as a planet to hang people despite that logic before.

You can prove them wrong but it's like playing chess with a pigeon - you think you're winning, and then the pigeon shits on the board and flies off. Point being that reasoning with these people is a waste of everyone's time because their concerns are not based on reason, so reason can't defuse them. More likely that they'll see you as some sort of government operative, the existence of which PROVES that they're right!

That said - why is this guy crazy, you ask? Well first of all:

Well clearly it's not his way either - it's not like we're all talking about that time we might have had a global positioning system until this guy ruined it, is it? The GPS literally reached "initial operating capacity" (continuous worldwide coverage) on schedule about a year later. I never even heard of this guy until now.

More broadly, sure the GPS is a military invention and is run by the military (though overseen by a committee, and other GNSS are run by different militaries with no particular love for the US). But it didn't take long for it to be opened up to civilians - only one satellite had been launched! By now even Selective Availability has been turned off, and can not be turned on (the new satellites can't do it). Yes, the SA thing was after this guy's rampage, but he's sticking with his story, so I'll count it.

GPS is one of the greatest peacetime things that military technology has ever done (in a long line of technical advances fueled by the military). Think about it - the average person now has at least two devices that know where they are in absolute terms on the Earth's surface, to within a few feet. This has never happened before! People had maps, which are a big enough breakthrough on their own, but are comparatively inaccurate, need to be kept up-to-date, and require some skill to use - and you have to know basically where you are relative to identifiable landmarks in order to use them. Planes can fly routings more precisely, or even directly to the destination, saving fuel and freeing up congested airways. And instrument approaches are now possible to virtually any point on earth - no expensive phased-array radio antenna on the ground to maintain, just define a few points in a database and publish a chart. And all that thousands of years of naval navigation technology (like the sextant, or the clock)? - unnecessary, except perhaps as a backup. Cars with turn-by-turn directions, virtually eliminating the big road atlas or fold-out maps everyone had to have and mess with while driving (and far more accurate that your aunt's "turn right by the, well there used to be a farm there but now it's just a field" directions). Track logs of running and biking sessions to evaluate speed, performance, and trends. Nanosecond-scale timekeeping, allowing for previously-impossible management of the power grid and other distributed systems. Slightly in the future, self-driving cars - and more we haven't even imagined yet. By comparison the military's usage is unsophisticated and unthreatening - it's just a lighter-weight replacement for systems they already had like LORAN and allows bombs to be placed somewhat more accurately and easily than e.g. a laser sight.

Point being, he's arguing (still!) for the destruction of something that would be a far, far greater loss to peaceful civilians around the world than it would be for the military. With all the countries that know how to shoot down satellites nowadays (why did they develop that? hmm), does he think the militaries don't have a contingency that they're more than capable of using?

So, no, this guy doesn't have a point. Protesting the GPS is like protesting computers because they could break German codes or develop artillery tables, protesting the internet because it was designed to enable military communication in the event of a nuclear war, or protesting duct tape because it sealed ammo cases. Yeah military bad rah rah... but come on.

Glad he's apparently (basically) alright. I fly small planes and they're incredibly awesome, and very liberating and fun, but... yeah, they have only one engine and if it quits you have a problem ("it's a fan to keep the pilot cool - turn it off and watch him sweat!"). Every pilot is constantly keeping an eye out for landing sites, and unlike non-pilots we love heights because it means gliding distance to make it to one. Takeoff is obviously the worst time to lose an engine, and in some ways the most likely - you're really demanding 100% of the performance of the engine, propeller, etc, at a low airspeed (=less cooling) and you're doing it for the first time since you got in the plane. You might think you can make it back to the airport - but that's such a bad idea it's called "the impossible turn" since you'll waste some of your precious lift making the turn. This is why we check our engines thoroughly - regularly with maintenance, and in particular with a "run-up" to high power immediately before takeoff to check the gauges and systems at that high throttle position. But stuff still goes wrong every once in a while, and then you have to do what you can. A bunch of pilot coworkers are in the area and one swung by to check it out. He said that the (wood) prop was intact, which suggests that it wasn't even turning ("windmilling") at impact time, and that he did a bang-up job landing that thing with no engine - golf courses aren't great compared to say an empty field, but if those are in short supply they do quite well. A golf course near my airport is my contingency plan as well - let's hope I never need it.

And lest anybody think otherwise, Harrison Ford is quite an experienced airplane and helicopter pilot, with thousands of hours. He even did his own flying in a movie where he played a pilot (apparently this gave the insurance company a heart attack and he had to fight them on it). So he probably handled it better than most pilots would.

Or Google Contributor?

Sigh. I saw the movie and it was a well-executed film, but it was essentially about a made-up person. I agree with your summary of the fictional character, but not the man. Turing was certainly eccentric, but he had friends, was liked by his colleagues, and had a good sense of humor. As terrible as his chemical castration was, it certainly didn't ruin his mind - he did some interesting work on mathematical biology inspired by those very changes. And he died more than a year after the end of his "treatment". And it was recast as an "us-vs-them" story, which simply isn't true - thousands of people were working on breaking Enigma and made steady progress throughout the war, with the support of the entire chain of command (in particular the Commander Denniston).

He's such an interesting person with a fascinating story - it's a real damn shame they basically invented a character to give his name.