Comment Re:Dog breeding is not evolution (Score 1) 387
There are a variety of hypothesized ways to generate entirely new species, but they have not been observed directly.
There are a variety of hypothesized ways to generate entirely new species, but they have not been observed directly.
Over the years I've owned modem/routers by Netgear, Linksys, Cisco, Swann, TP-Link, Thomson, Corega, Origo, D-Link, probably some others too. I've used them with different ISP in different countries, various physical locations, in the presence and absence of other local networks, with stock or custom firmware (DD-WRT, Tomato and OpenWRT) and I've come to one conclusion: they're all crap.
For the most part they work ok when new, but I have never had a router that stayed working for more than a couple of years. Usually the first symptom is wifi dropouts, then dropping ADSL, then router crashes. Eventually they just stop responding at all. It's not interference since getting a new router always fixes it all (for a bit anyway). I really don't understand how they would 'wear out' (being solid state); perhaps poor thermal design? I'm not a demanding user - they need to connect my ADSL to my ethernet and wifi quickly and reliably and provide NAT, DHCP, basic firewalling, operation as a DHCP relay or bridged access point if it's not a modem; I can happily do without media servers, port triggers, QoS, static routes, print serving etc - if it can't provide my most basic requirement of simply maintaining a connection, all that's just excess junk.
I've had the worst record with Netgear; their stuff just likes to die. I've not tried Apple, Buffalo or Draytek. Most of the open firmware is generally better than stock, but instability and risk of 'bricking' is stupidly high, and we wouldn't need them if stock firmware was decent in the first place.
It all seems a bit like my experience with Terry Pratchett books - I have a bad experience with one, so I look for suggestions, get recommended something, try that, and and am disappointed yet again. I'm certain there must be a market for wifi kit that isn't crap; it seems to be up for grabs.
This on-amp argument is quite pathetic; European cars with way higher efficiency cope just fine on motorways with fewer lanes and higher speed limits (e.g. 83mph in France), i.e. where on-ramp aceleration is far more critical.
Ford's EcoBoost engine is pretty impressive. They have a 3-cyl, 1.0 litre version pushing out 177BHP at sane revs in the works. The V6 version is used in the F150 too.
It could be that there is a correlation between poor riding practices and not wearing a helmet, given that not wearing a helmet is a poor practice!
They do give stats on helmet usage in non-fatal accidents: it's 13%. What you're saying about paying attention is true - accident prevention is by far the most effective measure - but the numbers make it clear that if you are going to have a crash, wearing a helmet improves your chances of surviving it by a factor of about 33, and you'd be hard pushed to find a factor that big by other means.
Where I usually ride I'd say helmet usage is in the high 90%s: It's very rare to see anyone without, and I don't know anyone that doesn't.
Cycling in London, I got used to using buses to my advantage - they're particularly useful as shields when pulling out onto roundabouts.
For a straightforward do-everything mail server (runs in an OpenBSD VM), take a look at mailserv. I'd really recommend weaning everyone off POP3 - it's just horrible. IMAP is great, and there's very little that doesn't support it now.
I've never found a contacts & calendaring solution with multi-user 2-way sync that really works - it always seems to run into trouble in one way or another. Any recommendations?
I've had real reliability problems with Google Apps, and their backup options are really quite bad: you can't seem to back up in a native format, only via conversions which are lossy, and as an admin, you can't back up user accounts - you need to log in to each one and back them up separately.
I did see this recently (asterisk/FreePBX running on a Raspberry Pi), it's got to be worth trying at the cost!
Helmets are certified to a minimum of 300g, and the reason for that figure is that it's been established (apparently) that it's roughly what you can take without sustaining significant injury. The helmet is thus a force measuring device of sorts - if it breaks it suggest that the impact exceeded 300g. If it breaks AND you did not sustain injury, it means that either the helmet was not up to standard (and the crash wasn't as bad as you thought), or that it provided sufficient critical protection while exceeding its failure threshold (i.e. it was a good helmet and saved your bacon). Random sample testing should reduce the incidence of the former (I don't know if that's common), and the latter is sustained by the fact that you're not dead - knowing precisely how much you're not dead by is not interesting and provides no rational basis for not wearing a helmet.
It's not that simple of course - some crashes will be unaccountably harsh (landing on a small stone on top of a hard surface wil send accelerations and force concentrations rocketing), others surprisingly mild.
I always wear one - I crashed into a pile of rocks at 40mph on the kamikaze downhill in Mammoth and had to dig 2" rock slivers out of my helmet (ok, and my arms, legs, neck and back too!) afterwards, but walked away mostly intact. A friend not wearing a helmet was killed with no external injuries from an 8mph fall onto flat pavement after being knocked off by a car.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley