Not that local then? My 6th grade teacher told the class if the emergency sirens every went off for real he'd go outside and face the air base because he didn't want to survive that blast. He probably wouldn't have either way, we were pretty much right on ground zero of any potential nuking. No one was going to fucking duck and cover in that classroom.

If you're into that sort of thing you can find some nifty footage of the old atomic blasts back in the day on youtube. They're pretty impressive. People used to spectate for that shit. They'd have reporters out for a test detonation. I wonder how many of those people died of cancer. Though everyone smoked back then so maybe it wasn't even the worst environmental risk factor they were being exposed to...

Of course, being afraid of nukes is so thirty-years-ago. Not really in vogue anymore. Too bad really, being afraid of some guy in a cave in Derkaderkastan really doesn't have the same... Zazz.

Or ramen. That was a big problem back when I was going through college. Scurvy was making a comeback because college students were trying to live on ramen alone. If all you're eating is ramen, you need a pop tart every so often for vitamin C!*
* Statement not evaluated by the FDA

Nah man, I've always kind of hated Firefox. From day one it would randomly just consume all the RAM on my 486/66 Linux box. Pretty much any time there's been a better option available, I've used it. I'm just using a tool that seems to work better for me. I don't really see a problem with that at all.

A firefox upgrade that required me to reboot my system was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I'd been growing increasingly annoyed with the browser and its developers as time went on. I stopped using it at home about a year ago in favor of Chrome. Firefox had introduced a change that broke the archaic application stack I'd been maintaining at the time. I found someone else on one of their forums who was having the same problem I was, and he received a only-slightly-more-politely worded "fuck off" from the developers. So I started looking around again. Of course, I was already pissed off about the way they'd gone out of their way to break the C standard library IP address resolution on OSX. The only reason I was keeping Firefox around after that was no one else at the time had a usable noscript add-on. As soon as someone wrote one in Chrome, I was off like a shot. Chrome also seems to be more consistent across all the operating systems I use it on, but that's just a bonus.

I'm sure that will make him feel better.

About not getting caught.

Oh sure. And I have nothing to hide either. And neither does Joe Average User, assuming he lives in a country that doesn't consider his goat porn habit illegal. But even if the various three letter agencies weren't listening at all, your internet provider (and google) has no incentive to make it easier for you to encrypt your packets or your E-mail. If they do, they can't inject their ads into your data stream. There was a project for opportunistic encryption for ipv4 a while back, that didn't go anywhere. IIRC opportunistic encryption for ipv6 was killed by the standards board.

Basically the upshot of all that is if you're worried about this sort of thing, use tor and stop being hysterical about it. If you're not, suck it up and stop being hysterical about it.

I mean really 2/3rds of the planet is covered in the stuff. You don't think you're going to run out of water. And then you do. Gasoline felt the same way in the 70's. Funnily enough, even though we haven't reached that point with water yet, a lot of people will pay more per gallon for it than for gasoline today, for bottled water that the grocery store filled from its taps.

Joe Average User, who doesn't know anything about the internet, assumes that we, the guys who built the Internet, made sure that all his communications would be secure from eavesdropping by... whoever. He also assumes that his posts are anonymous and won't come back to bite him in the ass when he's looking for a job. Neither one of these assumptions is at all true. The problem is that back when we were building it we really didn't think that many people would be using it and everyone who was using it at the time knew everyone else. Most of us stopped working on it after three or four years of endless September and the corporations who took it over really didn't have any incentive to secure it at that point.

Way I see it, we have two options, neither of which will work. We can fix this shit ourselves and wrest control of our communications back from the corporations. Except there are several projects (like Tor) which attempt to do this and those are ignored by most of the people who say that being monitored by everyone bugs them. We could also petition the corporations and governments who are behaving badly and demand that they behave better. Then we could hold our breaths and see what happens.

Which leads us to the third option, which is suck it up and live with it. Seems like most people are picking that one.

I hear tell that after he got in office the CIA briefed him on their assassination program and he was appalled. IIRC he signed an executive order pretty much on the spot saying we don't kill bitches. That was the last I heard of us killing bitches until President "Rain Death From Above" Obama got into office. I don't think even W killed any bitches (He just imprisoned them without any method of judicial review and shocked their testicles from time to time.) (And yes technically he DID kill a LOT of bitches, but he AFAIK he mostly did so "legally".) Glad to have our age-old tradition of killing bitches back with the Big O, but we still have a lot of catching up to do with the Russians, who have it honed to a fine, polonium-tipped art.

I'm guessing someone's going to sue them for their efforts. As we've seen time and again, no good deed goes unpunished.

Thermodynamics is OK with it as long as you don't get more energy out of it than you put into it. Anywhere you have a thermocline you can derive work from the differential... until the two two sides equalize in temperature. If you pump a lot of energy into one side, it gets hotter and you can get more work out of it. The other side will get hotter as a result. Eventually it will stop working again. You'll also get decreasing amounts of power out of it as the two sides equalize.

If you're considering trying to harvest energy from a car's exhaust heat this way, it would generally be more efficient to just not make all that hot exhaust in the first place by using electric motors instead or something.

Knowing how these things usually go, I'm guessing this technology won't end up being cost effective. That's the impediment for most of these fringe power generation ideas. Yeah, you can get a little work out of it, but the system costs so much to install that you're better off just sticking with what you have.

Oh lord don't get me started on that. That was the single most crippling flaw in the operating system! And they COULD have fixed it! Someone posted a problem related to that on my queue one time, and I went out of my way to locate a quad processor machine running a multi-processor version of OS/2. The multi-processor version still had the problem mind you, but it had an input queue per processor. I was able to demonstrate that the system would continue working even with one (or up to three) input queues not being processed. All they really had to do was instantiate multiple input queues and one misbehaving app couldn't bring the entire system down! *sigh* Fuckers...

This made OS/2 ironically better at multitasking windows and DOS applications than it was at OS/2 applications. Windows apps couldn't lock the input queue and could be run in separate instances of Windows so that if one crashed, you wouldn't bring the others down. If you opened a command prompt you could do multi-taskey things like format a disk and print something at the same time. The trick was you had to use the command line format and not the pretty GUI one.

Ah IBM. Always reaching for awesome and always falling just a little bit short. The problem with them was they viewed the PC line as toys. You didn't use a PC to multitask. You used it as a dumb terminal to a mainframe. If you wanted to multitask, you dropped 5 digits on an AIX machine. Shitty CDE gui and all. I discovered Linux shortly before they announced they were killing OS/2, and Linux was really what I wanted anyway -- UNIX on my PC without having to pay SCO several thousand dollars for the OS (Which was something like $1200) TCP/IP (Which IIRC they wanted another grand for) and a goddamn C compiler.

Ahh the good ol days...

And there was never any verbal abuse. We were all good and we all trusted one another to know our parts of the code. Pretty much the only time I ever saw a voice raised was when one of our guys got pretty well fucked over by a developer who was assigned part-time to the team. He'd worked a few months on a piece of code and claimed it was finished, and we'd just discovered that it wasn't really even actually started.

I've worked projects since then where I'd wished I could verbally abuse co-workers. There's a general theme there. All those people who I wanted to abuse sucked. I think the moral of this story is, if you don't want to be verbally abused, try sucking less. :-P

No kidding. I was working the OS/2 support line at the time. Rumors at the time had it that Microsoft introduced that version entirely to force IBM to play catch-up with their Windows support. I seem to recall they started their biweekly releases of DirectX drivers shortly after that, as well.