To help reduce DNS spoofing and other shenanigans, DNS records can be digitally signed. For example, Slashdot.org could be signed by the folks who run the dot-org registry, whose keys are in turn signed by the root zone operators. It all chains up to a single root key that is widely trusted by DNS servers.

For security reasons, the root periodically replaces their signing key. Since the entire internet relies on this and consequences of misuse of that key are very high, they have a formal ceremony with people in different roles to make sure everything is done exactly as planned, nobody makes any extra keys for nefarious purposes, at least two people consent to any given action, everything is documented recorded and lifestreamed, etc.

However the safe holding a piece of cryptographic hardware couldn't be opened. This delayed the ceremony and threw the plan off track. Since the people in various roles had flown in from all over the world, they had to decide if they should simply delay the ceremony a few days to fix the safe (which would need to be documented, overseen, etc. to ensure security) and carry on, or if they should use their backup systems in Virginia (which would entail short-notice travel).

One of Beidou's major design "features" is that it shares a frequency, 1575.42 MHz, with GPS' L1 civilian band. This is the same as Galileo. This works well for improving device compatibility and lowering cost for receivers (easy to build filters that can receive both but minimize interference), while also making it impossible for anyone to jam Beidou without jamming GPS. Jamming GPS would also end up jamming Beidou.

Yes, there are other bands they transmit on that are open for public use, but they're not nearly as widely used as the 1575.42 MHz frequency (this may be different for shipboard and safety-of-life systems).

Interfering with navigation systems is (or at least should be) globally frowned upon, doubly so when used for peaceful civilian purposes in busy ports, airports, etc. where loss of life or serious damage would be likely. Having higher-power, harder-to-spoof backup systems like eLORAN would also be beneficial.

I've used Gandi.net for the last 20 years and have been quite happy. They support all the usual stuff like DNSSEC and offer their own DNS hosting if you want to use it, or you can do what I do and use them merely as a registrar and use Cloudflare for DNS.

Cloudflare also offers a registrar service with zero markup over the registry cost.

85% of the power delivered to my house is zero-carbon-emission, with 58% of it being categorized as "renewable" (wind, solar, and small hydro). 27% is from large hydro. 15% is "unspecified", likely purchased on the open market to cover spikes in demand.

The local power company will be offering 100% carbon-free power later this year for an extra cent-per-kilowatt hour. I intend to switch to that, as well as adding a grid-tied solar system to the roof of my house (at the very least, it'd lower my bill and make using air conditioning much less expensive).

So, while there's likely still some carbon emission due to constructing the various generating stations, and in the 15% of "unspecified" sources of power, the electricity I use to power my Chevy Bolt is dramatically cleaner than burning gasoline, and any emissions take place relatively far from where I live, drive, and work. More effective emissions controls can be installed on a stationary power plant far more easily than on size-and-weight-constrained mobile vehicles. Charging at night, during off-peak times, can be considerably cheaper and help balance power consumption, thus increasing the efficiency of the whole system.

Electric vehicles have a dramatic advantage over gas-powered vehicles, in that the sources of electric power can be incrementally changed and improved over time without needing to change anything on the consumer's end. For example, coal power plants could be gradually shut down and replaced with natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. Thus, the energy used to power people's home, work, and vehicles would become incrementally cleaner. That's not really feasible with gas or diesel vehicles, since any replacement fuel would need to be compatible with existing engines, widely available, etc. So far, that's not really happened.

Fair enough. Of course, the well-to-wheel costs for gasoline is non-trivial either. In California, for example, coal only makes up a fraction of the total power supply, at least from PG&E, so the electricity is relatively clean.

True, but renewable stuff is generally closer to CO2-neutral than gasoline production and use: crops will still get harvested, sewage and landfills will still get used, wood products and paper will still get manufactured, etc., so using the waste streams from those things as fuel for power generation makes a lot of sense. Additionally, power plants can be built or refitted with pollution controls that wouldn't be effective on millions of small, mobile engines and, as I mentioned before, electrons are fungible and it's possible to incrementally improve the cleanliness of the power generated for the grid without having to make wholesale changes on the consumer side once EVs are more widely used.

To me, that latter part is the key advantage of EVs: even in areas that generate power from relatively polluting sources now, the deployment of EVs will centralize emissions at large power plants with better pollution controls and that are typically relatively far from populated areas rather than right at in areas where people live. Over time, those polluting sources can be upgraded or replaced and all EVs on the road would immediately benefit.

Sure, but E85 sucks for reasons that "drinkypoo" mentions in this thread. I like the idea of biodiesel that's drop-in compatible with existing engines, but that doesn't seem to have panned out as expected, plus it does little for the particulate emissions from diesel engines. Liquid fuels have many advantages for cars (e.g. fast fill-ups, high energy density, etc.), and gasoline has the advantage of essentially-universal availability in terms of gas stations being available in every little town across the country, but that also means there's a lot of inertia to switching to other fuels that becomes problematic.

As battery tech improves and the grid becomes cleaner in more areas, EVs look to be more and more practical for more and more users. That has a big appeal to me.

The math's pretty easy: according to http://www.coaleducation.org/lessons/twe/ctele.htm, it takes about one pound of coal to generate one kilowatt hour of electricity. The long range battery has a capacity of 75kWh, so that'd be about 75 pounds of coal. Assuming a gas vehicle gets 50mpg, the gasoline needed to travel 310 miles weighs 39 pounds, a far cry from your 2000 pounds claim. Either way, a centrally-located power plant would be able to more readily control its emissions than a smaller, mobile gasoline engine.

Depending on your power mix, that's a worst-case scenario. In California, which you mention, PG&E generates ~70% of its power from renewable and greenhouse gas-free sources, like nuclear, hydro, and unspecified "renewable" sources. 17% is from natural gas, which is very much cleaner than gasoline or coal, and "unspecified" other sources. Sounds much less polluting than gasoline.

EVs have the advantage that the source of the power feeding the grid can be changed without requiring all users to switch to something else: switching all gasoline cars to something that's compatible with their engines and fuel systems but is less polluting and damaging to the environment would be quite difficult. Replacing aging coal power plants with cleaner-burning natural gas plants dramatically reduces emissions while still pushing the same electrons through wires. Adding nuclear, wind, solar, etc. can further improve the cleanliness of electricity supply without any change from consumers.

This. I used to have a 125cc scooter back in my college days. Very handy and efficient, to be sure, but it was also lacking in emissions controls. I think it had a very basic catalytic converter in the exhaust system, but nothing near as advanced as a standard car, and so the emissions were considerably greater.

My Honda generator which I use in emergencies is similar: it has no emissions control whatsoever, though it's exempted from even California's strict emissions-control regime because it's a very small, portable engine and is not intended for continuous use.

In the next few months I may be moving to California for work (if I get the job I've applied to, fingers crossed!) and am seriously looking at electric vehicles. They work well with my commute and my wife would have a standard gas-powered hybrid for longer-range trips that may be impractical for the EV (though my hope is charging infrastructure will improve in the next few years). The electric company there provides a power mix that's about 70% renewable or greenhouse-gas-free in terms of how it's generated: 12% large hydro, 24% nuclear, and 33% "renewable" (without additional details). The rest is a mix of natural gas (17%, and which is far cleaner-burning than gasoline), and "unspecified" (14%). That's not bad. In addition, as the power sources to the grid get cleaner, EVs automatically get cleaner.

Only downside: California electricity is considerably more expensive than in the rest of the country (though still cheaper than gasoline on a per-mile basis) unless I get a special time-of-use plan with cheap night-time charging rates. We'll see. I may end up being able to charge at work for free.

Agreed. I liked Fallout 3 a lot (1 and 2 are great as well, but aren't FPS). Fallout New Vegas was nice, but got really repetitive after a while. I played it all the way through, but it didn't really have the replay value I wanted.

I started playing Fallout 4, and it looks promising, but the "fuel" mechanics for the power armor is a bit annoying (though not deal-breaking). Alas, finishing my PhD got in the way, so I haven't had a chance to play it. Elite: Dangerous, a space sim, has my current attention but I'll likely rotate to another game soonish.

I concur. Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 are a lot of fun, though I prefer 1 and 2 over 3 most days. I really enjoy the character development and the environments, though I admit some of the levels on ME1 are a bit "cookie-cutter" (you find yourself storming the same planetary bases over and over), but otherwise the games are a ton of fun. I keep going back to them every year or so.

ME: Andromeda is, so far, less enjoyable than the earlier ones.

The original Deus Ex and its modern sequels are great fun, as are the Half Life series.

Borderlands and its sequels are a hell of a lot of fun, and a lot more casual.

Under what jurisdiction would they seize the domain names? Sci-Hub operates under many domains, including those in .ac (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a group of islands in the South Atlantic), .bz (Belize, a Central American country), .cc (the Cocos/Keeling Islands in the Pacific), among others. Of those, .ac has a connection to the UK due to the islands being a UK territory, and .cc's operations are run by VeriSign, a US company.

The site itself is hosted in Russia, who is unlikely to care about US or EU takedown requests.

It's also available over Tor, so good luck.

Seizing the names isn't really feasible.

In my field (physics and meteorite research), peer reviewers work for free. They're not paid by the journal, though I'd argue that they should be paid at least a reasonable fee for their time and expertise.

And yes, the publication process must be paid for, and that's quite reasonable. Still, the journals charge far more for subscriptions than the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, distribution, and a modest profit.

Personally, I prefer to publish in the journal maintained by the scholarly society relevant to my field rather than the other major journal in the field that's published by Elsevier, even though the latter has a slightly higher impact factor. The society journal is essentially the journal-of-record for the field and their publication costs are quite minimal. They contract with an outside publisher (one of the big publishers, but who's remarkably non-gangster-like in their operations) to actually handle the printing, distribution, and online access, but otherwise maintain control of the content and policies, and strongly push for open access.

Yeah, it's very strange. I contacted a few of the people sending out CVs, and they seem legitimate if a bit naive. From what I can gather, most tend to be either Indian or Pakistani, are in the UAE on a short-term visa, and are looking for employment. Most tend to be engineering-types, while some have been for administrative office staff. There seems to be no specific type of employment that they're looking for: they're not all, for example, civil engineers, electrical engineers, etc. -- the applicants have a wide variety of skills and aren't looking for a specific project.

They either send their CVs directly to me from their own mail accounts or, more commonly, there appears to be some mailing list host to which they submit their message and CV and it sends it out to a bunch of (presumed) employers. The host inserts some footers (e.g. "To unsubscribe, click here...) but it changes every week or two, while keeping the same style, suggesting the same sending organization is just rotating through things in a shady way. Very weird. The ones who send me their CVs directly can't provide any specific details as to where they collected my address.

While I don't have a LinkedIn profile, I'm not particularly careful about where I publicly post my email address (see this post, for example), so I get a fair bit of spam and rely on my spam filters to do their thing (which they do). Still, I thought this was a bit odd as it wasn't the typical pharma spammers, Nigerian scammers, etc., but seemingly-ordinary people (and sometimes a shady mailing list provider).

I have [firstname]@[myslashdotusername].com. My domain name is now 18 years old and, outside of certain administrative addresses like postmaster@, abuse@, etc. (all of which forward to my address), mine is the only email address that has ever existed on the domain.

Even so, I occasionally get seemingly-legitimate people entering my address for things like an appointment at an Apple Store to get their iDevice repaired and for other purposes. Fortunately not as much as the original poster, but it does happen on occasion. I usually end up canceling the appointments and whatnot just so they stop. Very odd, as they have very different names than I.

Also annoying: somehow my email address has gotten around as someone in Dubai who is a position to offer employment, so I get tons of unsolicited CVs and cookie-cutter job applications from people living in Dubai. When asked, they say they received my email address at a job fair, trade show, etc. I've not yet had the pleasure of visiting the UAE, so I have no idea how my email has gotten around in those circles. Somehow it's also been picked up by those offering real estate and other services in the UAE, so I get a bunch of spam relating to that. Very odd.

I also have [myslashdotusername]@ and [myslashdotusername1]@gmail.com, and have had them since Gmail first started (both were invite accounts). I mostly got them to reserve the name and, later, for other Google services like YouTube and Google Voice. I occasionally get some guy in Australia, oddly enough, who has [myslashdotusername01]@gmail.com, but either he or the people he correspond with omit the digit 0 and I get his mail. I contacted him through other means (one of the emails "he" received included his phone number) and he is more careful now, but there's occasional screw-ups. Since I don't use the email address for email, I have an auto-responder set saying "If you're trying to reach [guy] in Australia, you have the wrong address."

And yet, my u-Blox NEO-M8T module can receive GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals simultaneously, compute a fix, and provide a timing signal +/- 50ns, and still draws less than 67 mA as an absolute maximum. GPS ASICs use surprisingly little power.

Assuming the iPhone battery is 2000 mAh and isn't using other power (a poor assumption, but we'll go with it), the battery has enough energy to power such a GPS receiver for over a day.

Let's say someone uses their iPhone enough to drain the battery in 12 hours. That's an average current of 166 mA. With the GPS enabled and using 67 mA, that's a total of 233 mA: a 40% increase in the amount of power used, and would drain the battery in 8.6 hours.

I have no idea what GPS is used in the iPhone, and assume it's built into the CPU...but it really shouldn't use more power than the M8T. The fact that it does -- as do those in most (all?) Android phones -- surprises me.

Depends on the USB-to-Serial converter. My PL2303-based ones get new COM port numbers whenever I switch physical USB ports, as do my CH340s, but my FTDI and CP2102 based adapters have per-device unique serial numbers, so the system can recognize it's the same device even when you switch USB ports. Very handy.

Some versions of the PL2303 will let you define a unique serial number (by default the option is to not have a unique serial number).