Unless you were using vi Berkley, your vi had a :x

This matters because :wq! parses as "write, then forced quit", not "force write, quit". x! does the correct thing on failures.

I had a situation that appeared that a hacker had taken control of a VOIP system and ran up a full E1 worth of calls to Africa 24x7 for a weekend resulting in a $1.4 million dollar phone bill. The initial evidence showed that Sierra Leone was involved with toll sharing fraud but I looked deeper. I called a few of their embassies and found out they couldn't call home if they tried and the London embassy had some who had the job of trying to calling home all day. It turns out that someone else was playing the scam and taking the money. Sierra Leone was given millions every month for the scam but then it was taken way with fines leaving them with problems. Everyone I talked to was hesitant to talk to me until I explained that I didn't think they were the scammers. I ended up talking to Alpha (what a cool name) who was the head of their phone company and he provided just the extra details. I had a friend from The old school US telco get some of the guys who used to work in the dark room listen to the calls and they said the wobble in the busy wasn't right for modern automatic gear so calls there would be considered connected even if most people heard a busy signal. The end result was a US phone company shipped them a nice bit of kit to terminate some of their calls in a deterministic way.

Years ago I had a counter scripts for the common scam script. Does anyone have a site with some that fit the current scams?

The stones I saw in the Great Pyramids that looked like they came from the same area, were in the same orientation and I expect rolling them would leave about half of them upside down from their neighbours.

I think most archeologist have incorrectly lumped Engineers in with Scribes.

I think the great Pyramids were built on their North and West sides and I think the different chambers were in the center at different stages of construction. If also solves the problems that you don't know how long you have to build a pyramid if it needs to be that shape for your ritual and there needs to be a chamber in the middle and bigger is better.

Herodotus said they used wood devices to lift the stones. I've seen pressure points from logs under the edges of the casing stones on the Red Pyramid but the internal and casing stones were done differently than the core stones. Wood has been rare in that area for very long so anything that wasn't needed anymore was firewood.

The boat they found buried has deep cuts on the deck as if someone had loaded up many several ton stone blocks on its deck. The sizes of the stones seems to decrease at height and I'm not sure how the 2.5 ton average came from and while it is everywhere, I question it. I don't think the casing stones were ever finished because if they were, there would be plenty of buildings in Cairo that had angled cuts in their stone work and I don't think any have been found.

I still don't think they later ones were ever intended for burial but just part of the process resurrection so if they Pharaoh didn't walk out, he wasn't God they were looking for and they tried again with the next one

The other key aspect that I wonder about is the fact that the Coptic religion managed to spread through out Egypt with minimal major political problems or wars which means the new religion was so close to the old one that it didn't matter or is was so radically different it blind sided an entire population.

This is exactly right. I was playing with the last lot of RHEL7 betas - the biggest issue I had was that ethernet adapters would randomly fail to start - and systemd would not give any details as to why. Each time I had to log in over a serial console, stop networking, disable the profile, enable the profile again, and start networking. This would work perfectly - until a random time when rebooting later on (and not every reboot) where networking wouldn't come up again.

This is not what admins need - randomly failing network connections. This is also a problem that was fixed decades ago - until systemd causes it again.

Lets ignore the problems with new aims to recreate consoles etc in systemd / userland and ignore / disable the kernel ones. Because that's a great idea *cough*

Radio astronomers are look at pulsars a different way than a Galaxy Position System needs to.

The pulsar interference issues came up shortly after the industry found out that Trimble was making use of the short bit at the end of the message to figure out when a frame started on the military signal which gave them much better accuracy. The pulsar noise messes up the way that was found so it had to be filtered out and those filters helped clean up other noise issues. That was over 15 years ago and I haven't worked on this in over a decade.

I agree you need a large antenna if you want to see some of the finer detail of pulsars radio transmissions since they tend to have something in the range of 400 to 450 db signal loss. For a GPS system, you don't need that fine of detail, you just have to be able to compare the time between two pulsars which is a much simpler problem.

Most major GPS chip sets now actively filter pulsar noise. The thing about pulsars is they are better clocks than what is being launched and they transmit on all frequencies. The ephemeris calculations are much harder but it has be used to 2 meter accuracy and it isn't even limited to working just around earth. I wonder why they spent so much money to duplicate two existing systems that weren't even state of the art when they started. Maybe it was because you can't license pulsar transmissions.

I've been telling people that going to those odd top level domains are like calling 1-900 numbers, you will get a large bill from your ISP so just don't ever use them.

Microware OS9 running on a radio shack color computer in 1984 had module white listing. It used CRC but it was a step in the right direction. Too bad it took Microsoft decades to catch up.

So the next lot of phishing will come from: róót@gmail.com / Àdministrator@gmail.com or BìllGàtes@gmail.com etc?

Great.

Python 2 or Python 3? They're not portable between the two versions. Who knows what Python 4 will bring.

You need about 700 meters of depth with the current off the shelf parts to make a RO well in the ocean. I think there is some technology that might let it work at 250 or so meters. You still have to pump the water up from that depth unless you can play games with building a saline density pump. Then there is the problem of changing a filter at depth.

Pedestrians are getting killed far more often at crossings at much higher rate than anytime in the past 60 or so years. The numbers they are seeing may not be related to what they think are seeing.

If Australia, Canada, Japan and South Korea got together, they could get the F-15 Silent Eagle built to the appropriate specs. It can be more stealthy than the F-35, it would be cheaper, faster, it is a proven air frame and it would meet the internal defense roles as well as the role of supporting allies. The F-15 Silent Eagle (or F15 Advanced as that might be its current name) is an more modern F-15E Strike Eagle air frame with modifications taken from the failed F-23 prototypes.

Seeding the random source using a private key looks like the same concept as using your encrypted root passwords to seed the TCP sequence numbers. This is not a new concept.