At $DAYJOB, the IT department supports the long-term-support versions, currently at 17.0.5. It crashes a lot, and often gets into a runaway burn-the-whole-CPU trap (I've got an 8-CPU-core PC, so it shows up as 12-13% CPU utilization, so the rest of my machine's ok even though the browser stalls.)
The main add-ons I'm running are NoScript, Ad-Block-Plus, and Ghostery.

It does seem to recover much better from crashes than 10.x long-term-support did, but it's still annoying.

Lynx is a stripped-down browser, without enough artificial intelligence capability to have "feelings". EMACS, on the other hand? Sure, it's just meta-x-cokebottle and RMS's your uncle.

Back in the old days, when Netflix worked by mailing physical DVDs, their bandwidth was about 1/3 of the total bandwidth of the Internet. They had a much higher latency (~48 hours), but a huge amount of parallelism and 4GB packet sizes.

It's possible that that figure was only on Internet2, which has mostly academic users. Or is Netflix using BitTorrent for their downloads?

Thanks for the explanation; many of us here only know the Star Trek definition of red shirt :-)

It's not like law enforcement and the prison business aren't also in drastic need of reform; there's no excuse for the US to have more people in jail than the Soviet Union did. But all the world's militaries are making their own countries worse for their own people, making them worse for their enemies, forcing their neighbors to beef up their militaries, and the US and Russia are still threatening to blow up the world with nuclear weapons. Militaries are an excuse for governments to have power over their own people, and to give lucrative contracts to their politically connected friends, and defense contractors are happy to contribute to whatever politicians will give them the most business, regardless of how bad they are on other topics.

There are a few countries out there without armies. Costa Rica got rid of theirs back in the 1800s, not because they're any more peace-loving than everybody else, but because their president realized that the primary functions of a Latin American military were to steal land from the Indians (already done!) and to overthrow the civilian president (which he didn't want to happen to him.) Most of the others are countries in civil war, where there's no single official army.

Thanks! I didn't have anything funny to say, and the previous sig was post-election snarkiness which had gotten dated, so I figured I'd do something useful with the space :_)

When my mother was growing up, the ice man delivered ice for the icebox; they didn't get mechanical refrigeration at home until after the war (and that was in a medium-large city.) If you drank milk, it didn't keep very long, and most people didn't have cars, so delivery made sense.

When I was growing up, milk companies still delivered in the suburbs, and some bakeries delivered, as well as a few more specialized products like potato chips. Most Americans didn't have two cars, and they tended to do large grocery shopping runs on Saturday. My mom learned to drive around 1960 so she could haul us to pre-school, and my dad carpooled to work; they probably got a second car in the late 60s, and they switched over to supermarket milk around 1970, and supermarkets were starting to have enough shelf space by the late 70s to carry more variety of products like potato chips than corner stores could.

If I had had kids, they would have grown up around the time of the internet boom. Webvan and Kozmo briefly delivered a wide variety of convenience foods (and weed :-) and while I never used them, my mother-in-law was elderly and less mobile and found them really useful; they improved her nutritional choices just as AOL improved her ability to socialize (and she'd quit smoking, so she no longer had to go to the store a couple times a week to get cigarettes.)

Good bread can last just fine if you treat it well (and don't eat it all, of course.) Refrigeration keeps it from going moldy, plastic bags keep it from drying out in the fridge. And here in the San Francisco Bay Area (or up in Seattle), there's lots of choices of good bread, even if you don't like sourdough. (Maybe soft spongey breads don't last as long without preservatives, but I don't eat those.)

Also lottery tickets and tobacco. In much of the US, mom&pop corner stores have been replaced by 7-11 or similar chains, but the functions are still similar. Ethnic neighborhoods are more likely to have mom&pop stores with a bit more specialized food varieties, but they're still selling the high-profit-margin goods that keep them in business.

• - I started with wetware, then books.
• - The IBM 403 and 026 keypunch didn't really have operating systems.
• -RSTS/11 and some similar DEC OS's.
• - Some HP thing.
• - Several IBM 360 and 370 OSs, including VM/CMS.
• - Some HP programmable calculator OSs.
• - IBM System/34 (first paid computing job.)
• - PLATO
• - Unix (finally!) V6 and V7 in 1978.
• - A couple of things that ran APL.
• - Some more IBM/370 OSs.
• - Some more Unix flavors, including System III and 4.1BSD and something on an Amdahl.
• - VMS
• - DOS (might have been before VMS?)
• - MacOS 6.x, 7.x
• - More Unix flavors, including HP/UX, SunOS, several 4.x and System V versions, more BSDs, VENIX, POSIX, a few other vendor-specific ones, BLIT.

Eventually the 1990s rolled around and things like Linux, OS/2, Solaris, and Windows showed up, but it was a while before any of them became useful.

As far as actually porting software goes, my first software ports were between DEC and HP versions of BASIC, and between V6 (well, Mashey) and V7 shells, and I had some C code that I wrote on V7 that would still work today except it's either on 9-track tape or Sun cartridge tape, neither of which I have any way to read. My SIMSCRIPT code is lost to the mists of time (though I did port some of it from batch to TSO.) A lot of the software I wrote was for various application environments that aren't around any more, so there's no longer data to feed it.

The classic Unix password salt was 12 bits, and that was good enough to help protect a good 8-character password on a PDP-11 or VAX or even a Sun-3, back in the days when everybody could still read the password file. It did stop you from building a rainbow table that covered all 56 bits of password space, and even today there are very few (if any) organizations that can store that big a rainbow table.

But rainbow tables don't need to store the whole password space to be useful. A rainbow table of 1000 overly common passwords are enough to catch a non-trivial fraction of real-world passwords, and a table for 64K passwords with a 12-bit salt will still fit on a cheap thumb drive, though if you want to handle a million still-too-easy passwords, you'll probably want to use rotating disks. If you're trying to break root's password, hopefully root has more sense than to use a wimpy password. If you're trying to crack some user's email account to send spam from, or a blog account to drop comment spam, and don't care whose, there's probably somebody using weak passwords.

So if you're building a password system, and you're going to bother adding salt, please use at least 64 bits of it, or preferably 128 bits. Make the attacker do at least some per-victim work, even if the user's not going to bother.

Doubling internet speed only gets you an economic advantage if it lets you do new stuff, or do old stuff better.

• - Modems were transformative, and let people connect with the outside world, send email, use BBSs, read Usenet, read the early mostly-text web, access Wikipedia, get access to market prices for farmers and merchants, send greeting cards to their mom over AOL, and change the world.
• - 384 kbps really was transformatively better than modems, mostly because it was always-on and because it let web pages have more still-picture content, so businesses and individuals could do commerce on the web, but it was enough to run corporate-quality video-conferencing, and codecs have gotten better since then (and even before that, you could run ham-radio-quality talking heads video over modems), and it was enough to do stock-market day-trading back when people thought that was a good idea.
• - 1.5 Mbps was enough to let you watch cat videos on YouTube, which has been transformative, and lets you download Linux updates and pirated movies fast enough that they don't have to run overnight.
• - 1.5 Mbps with a static IP address lets you actually distribute content from home instead of from a hosting provider like YouTube/Flickr. Oh, you don't have a static IP address, do you?
• - 3 Mbps lets you watch higher-resolution cat videos, but if you don't have a static IP address, you're still just a media consumer. Yes, it's slightly better television, but it's still just consumer TV.

Yes, Old People In South Korea have 100 Mbps internet at home. What are they doing with it besides online gaming that they couldn't do at 1 Mbps?