As a long-time geek, I carry lots of pens in my shirt pocket. I decided to turn them into business cards.

I had a bunch of nice-looking personalized pens made, with my e-mail address inscribed on them. If someone asks me for my e-mail address, I hand them a pen. I then have to explain that the pen is not to write down my e-mail address, but it has my e-mail address alreay on it, and they can keep the pen. I have handed out more than 100 pens in the last couple of years. People tend to keep them longer than paper business cards because they have utility: you can write with them.

My e-mail address includes my name, and if you search the Web for my e-mail address you get my web site (hosted by the workstation under my desk at home) and my résumé, which includes a picture of me, my telephone number, and my mailing address. That's better than a business card.

It's not quite that bad. You need a test version of your system anyway, so you can make changes without risking bringing down the production system. You hack NTP for the test system as a whole and observe what breaks. You fix problems and re-test, just as you do for any modification, until the test sytem functions correctly. You then copy those changes to the production system.

When a new version of an external component changes, you verify that it works using your test system. You would do this even if you were not worried about leap seconds. However, now that you have the hacked version of NTP available, you also test for leap seconds handling. If you find a new leap seconds problem you work around ir and/or report it to your vendor, just as you do with any new bug that you find.

Yes, it will probably be cheaper to take a couple of minutes of outage every few years. However, you now have an advantage over your competition that can be exploited by your marketing department. If a customer is seriously interested in maximizing his up time, he will have a "leap seconds" box to check off on his RFP. If you are the only one who can check it off, you can charge higher rates.

By hacking NTP to introduce frequent leap seconds, he can discover how each source handles leap seconds, and develop workarounds for each source he cannot fix. For example, if a particular source sits at 23:59:59 for two seconds, he might recognize that and write a filter or post-processor to convert the second second to 23:59:60 in messages received from that source.

If you are concerned about your SLA, fix your software so it handles leap seconds correctly. You can test your fixes by hacking NTP to insert a positive or negative leap second at the end of every minute. When you get it working, you will have a competitive advantage over everyone who has to shut down.

Whenever I replace a part, I have to record the serial number of the old part, the serial number of the new part, and the name of the customer. I return the old part to the warehouse, and don't get paid for the service call until it arrives. Clearly, Verizon Wireless wasn't this careful; perhaps now they are.

Younger Slashdot readers cannot imagine what the discovery of exoplanets means to those of us who have been reading science fiction since the 1950s. We dreamed of traveling to the moon, and we managed that thanks to a martyred President. With that milestone accomplished, we looked forward to the planets and the stars.

Somehow, we lost the will to explore space. The Space Shuttle, which should have preceded the exploration of the Moon, was funded only after many compromises, and the program is now ended. The Russians still have their 1960s-era space capability, and the Chinese are moving forward, but the exploration of the Solar System is being done by robots.

We thought we would have to travel to the stars to see if they had planets, but the astronomers have managed to see them from a distance. It now appears certain that most stars have planets, and it is only a matter of time before we start detecting the habitable ones. There is no longer any chance that we can ignore the challenge of interstellar travel. It may be a century or two before the probes are launched, but launched they will be. The dreams of the science fiction fans of the 1950s are being realized.

Not everyone in the 1970s would have laughed at the notion that it would take a long time from the first explorers to a permanent base. Some of us remembered that it took 50 years from the first explorers reaching the south pole to the establishment of the permanent base there.

I still believe it is possible that there will be a base on the moon by 2019, but I am not so sure that Americans will participate in it.

I also like Science News. I've been a subscriber to the magazine for many years. Their web site is actually http://www.sciencenews.org/, and you can subscribe to the magazine from https://sciencenewssubscriberservice.com/promo_pages/gen_order/OrderForm.php.

Saying that New Hampshire has no sales taxes is an over-simplification. New Hampshire taxes prepared food, such as that sold by restaurants. Compared to other states, New Hampshire taxes very few sales.

It is also an over-simplification to say that New Hampshire has no income tax—the state taxes interest, dividends, and business profits. It would be more accurate to say that New Hampshire does not tax wages.

I do not know what percentage of property taxes collected are from summer properties, but I am sure it varies by town. A few years ago I surveyed the mailing addresses for property tax bills in one New Hampshire town. I don't remember the exact figures, and I didn't correct for property values, but a large fraction of the zip codes were for that same town.

Amen, brother! There are probably fewer than 100 people left in the world who know how to program the DEC PDP-1 in assembler language. The fact that I am one of them gains me nothing in the job market.