journalctl -S 2026-02-01 | grep DPT="23\ " | wc -l
5315

Note that we don't have anything listening on port 23 and thus these are SYN packets being blocked by our firewall.

The numbers have been larger in prior months. We often get attacks of >1,000 connection attempts from a single source IP. These attacks have died off in recent weeks.

I don't understand what drives the location of these facilities in places where the infrastructure (electricity, water) does not support them.

Either build them in the southwest desert where they could have miles of 'green' solar panels and just turn the center off at night, or put them in areas with lots of hydro power. Putting them in rural America is a very bad idea and most of the locals don't want them there. The greedy politicians give the data centers tax breaks and concessions that amount to big money in their own pockets. The 24x7 noise from on-site generators, cooling towers and the like, higher electricity rates and excessive water consumption are not benefits to anyone.

This AI 'boom' will soon die anyway with either improved algorithms or the realization that most of AI is garbage in -> garbage out.

I think you did it in the correct order. By paying off your house, your deferred some earnings because of the spread between your 3.5% mortgage rate and the yield of your investments. However, you now have a much lower monthly fixed monthly expense and that should be giving you considerable peace of mind.

The spread between 3.5% and I-series bonds is pretty low and won't really allow you to meet your needs for money in retirement. If you invest in stock market index funds and have a long term (0+) year horizon, you should be able to get 7% after tax yield.

The trick to wealth is to always spend less than your income and make sure that you have no debt that incurs interest charges. Do this any you will accumulate a lot of money for later in life.

I am not sure I agree with your analysis. For one thing, with more DRAM, there is a lot more (data, programs) resident and thus more things that could be corrupted. It seems that the probability of some bit being corrupted by a random bit flip would scale linearly with the amount of DRAM. You may be correct with respect to a single transaction's data because it is the same size without regard to the amount of DRAM.

Now, it may be that there is more unused memory as total DRAM capacity increases, but it seems unlikely that this would be significant.

I personally run a single workstation with 5-10 development VMs running containing toolchains for various project I am working on. In addition Yocto builds are run a few times a day or more. the 128GB DRAM memory is often more than 90% consumed with active working sets. Unfortunately, I could not obtain a system with ECC DRAM and the clock speeds I needed, so I have to hope that bit flips are minimal.

WARNING: Firefox will erase all user customization, bookmarks, save passwords and all other data if you upgrade from a release that the so-called develpment team deem 'too old'. The upgrade process provides no warning that all of your data will be destroyed. The Firefox Devs simply don't care about users' data and provide no help to recover the data. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Given their cavalier attitide, I would suggest never upgrading and instead find another browser.

I think you are missing the point that others are trying to make.

You seem to believe that the homeless population mirrors the non-homeless population with respect to caring for others' property, such as housing. This seems likely to be incorrect, as the percentage of mentally ill and/or drug addicted is much higher among the 'problem' homeless, perhaps as much as 95% of all 'problem' homeless.

I say 'problem' homeless, because there is a group of people who are technically 'homeless' that really are working regularly and cause very few problems for others. The reasons for their 'homeless' status is likely to be purely or mostly economic and will get resolved once they recover their financial situation. These people should absolutely be given assistance to stabilize their situation (but not free long term housing).

One the other hand, the 'problem' homeless appear to be ruinously expensive to try and help without involuntary confinement and medical/psych treatment. Call it jail, or call it an asylum, it boils down to getting 'rid' of them by forcing them to be confined indefinitely. I don't like the loss of due process this demands, but we can spend some money on making sure they are really crazy and/or drug addicted and not suffering from some other issue, like a brain tumor.

I had a look at the study. The reported cases of elevated levels were for situations where there were no range hoods that were externally vented. In many of those cases, they were cooking with all windows closed. So, the results are hardly surprising. Cooking with any heat source emits fine particles from food as it cooks and smells that most people would want vented.

In addition, the cost of electricity in California is so high, being more than $0.85/kWh, more than 6x the cost of natural gas on a per BTU basis.

Finally, many of the electric cooking methods have significant hysteresis, require special cooking implements (induction) and/or have much lower output than high quality gas burners. My 15,000 BTU/hr burners would require at least 4.396kWh, which none of the electric ranges I have seen come close to on a single burner.

Please tell us the dates of the 'black starts' you are referring to.

I can't recall any grid needing a 'black start' in the US since 2003, when large parts of the eastern US and Canada (55 million people) lost power due to a cascading failure that took nearly four hours to wind down. Even there, 'black starts' were likely not needed for many areas.

Does anyone believe this statement, other than the headline seeking author?

Look at other, widespread outages caused by cascade outages, such as (From Wikipedia)
"On August 14–28, the Northeast blackout of 2003, a wide-area power failure in the northeastern US and central Canada, affected over 55 million people, 14 days fully restored."
"2007: From December 8 to 12, a series of ice events cut power to over one million homes and businesses across the Great Plains of the United States, including large portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska."

The point is that generation plants and switching systems are well prepared to deal with faults that cause excessive current being drawn through those facilities. In fact, one of the primary areas of concern for grid operators, besides phase/frequency variations, is over-current. Thus, this type of protection would prevent any of the 'catastrophic' damage' imagined by the author.

The events I cited are proof that it is possible to 'cold-start' a system after a widespread outage and not have it take months, even accounting for repairs to transmission or generation facilities. The simple fact that the grid is nearly completely restored is further proof that the autor is engaging in sensationalism.

"Blackouts for months" does make a good headlines, but is simply a fantasy. Maybe Hollywood should make a sequel to the "Towering Inferno" based on this idea.

There are also financial incentives to hospitals to classify deaths as 'Covid-19', even if it was not primarily responsible for the death. It is my understanding that the federal government will reimburse the hospitals for more than they would receive from insurance companies if the death is classified 'Covid-19'.

Note that I am *not* saying there is no increase in the death rate due to Covid-19, but that some deaths are being mis-attributed. This is proven by looking at the death rates in prior years and comparing that number to the 2020 deaths - reportered Covid-19 deaths. You will see a significant *decrease* in total deaths not attributed to Covid-19, which makes no sense.

I have to agree that it was much better having the WW2 early "computers" located at Bletchley. Not sure what kind of politics required the split, but not having those machines there does not diminish the Bletchley experience for me. I have also been there once after the change and visited both.

TNMOC is nice and does have some unique items. It is too bad that some have bitter feelings towards Bletchley or TNMOC. Both are assets to the UK.

I am not sure what your bias against Bletchley Park, but I have been to both. I found both interesting, but Bletchley is "where it actually happened". TNMOC is just a collection of "interesting" stuff.

There is a lot to be said for visiting the physical places where important events occurred. Then, when you read histories or biographies of those who work there, you can relate to the details. On the other hand, TNMOC is like so many other museums, a collection of interesting items with a tiny bit of context as to each item. It can be interesting to look at various items of technology and perhaps even touch a few, but that is, in my opinion, a much more shallow experience than visiting Bletchley, or the Trinity site, or the Arizona memorial.

Just because you like one type of museum, does not make others bad.

As to the cuts at Bletchley, I guess those of us who appreciate its place in history will need to consider what we should do to continue its funding.

I keep hearing that a mask reduces the probability of asymptomatic transmission to others, but I have yet to see any study that provides objective evidence of this. In fact, the evidence I have seen suggests that while it is theoretically possible for a person with no symptoms to infect another person, it is quite unlikely. One reason for this may be that there is a low quantity of virus particles exhaled without coughing or sneezing or that virus particles are not commonly present in the lungs until later in the disease process when the infection is apparent.

I also wonder about the number or virus particles required to infect an otherwise healthy person. Of course there will be a range. If only a few particles will spread Covid-Sar2, then there are a lot of people who have been infected and recovered without noticable symptoms. If it take a large quantity of virus particles to infect someone, then a lot of these precautions are less urgent, beacuse it would be hard to ingest a large quantity of virus particles without very close contact. Note that I am only talking about interactions with people that have no symptoms.

Now, there may be people that are much more susceptible to this infection. They should isolate themselves to avoid burdening others with otherwise unnecessary masking, etc. People who are sick must stay at home and everyone should wash their hands frequently and avoid touching one's face.

The Sheriff in Orange County and multiple city police forces have said they would not enforce the prior order by Nichole Quick, OC Heath, who recently resigned in disgrace. There is no reason to believe that Newsom's ambiguous order will be enforced either.

In general, it seems that there is little widespread support for constantly wearing masks in public. On the other hand, there are places where wearing a mask is helpful. The big problem is that masks provide the wearer little to no protection, but offer some limited protection of others and thus it may not always be a top priority. People that have symptoms of a cold or flu should probably just stay home, as has always been the case, but people without symptoms probably pose little risk.

It would be helpful if someone could post a pointer to a few studies that show definitively that actual rate of propagation on Covid-Sars2 from asymptomatic individuals occurs and at what rate.

  As has been said elsewhere, infection probability scales (linearly?) with the quantity of viral particles that a person inhales. Virus on one's skin does not matter much. So, it would seem that unless a person coughed or sneezed in your face while you were inhaling, the chance of infection should be very low. An infected person who has no symptoms should be minimally infectious. But, I have seen nothing to support or refute this line of thinking which would allow a more objective discussion of the risks and mitigations.

For me, wearing a mask is a choice and the foolish Gavin has no impact on me deciding when or where to wear one. Washing ones hands and not touching you face is one thing we should all be doing to avoid getting sick from many infectious agents, including Covid-Sars2.

Unfortunately, You are not correct, at least in the two cases I am aware of (before I disabled Amber Alerts and all other alerts on my phones and all my relatives' phones).

One, in San Diego about two years ago was issued by a detective who was so ineffective at his job he had not idea what to do, so he issued an alert at 1:30 in the morning for a child that had been missing two days.

The second, issued by a woman Captain in the LAPD, who was then promoted to Assistant Chief, gave no identifiable details when the alert went out at 2:30 am to most of southern California, to over 5 million phones. In that case the CHP, who operates the system, told this LAPD officer that the Alert requested would likely be ineffective becuase there was almost no content that could be used to ID the car or person who had the child. Something like "Brown Honda" was the extent of the information. However, the LAPD went ahead anyway. I spoke to the LAPD Captain the next day and she admitted "not knowing what to do next" so the alert was her only idea.

In both of these cases, the father or uncle was known to have the child and in both cases the child was back home without incident within a few days.

The Amber Alert system is broken because there are no objective standards for its use, the person who "cries wolf" is not held responsible for their actions which demonstrably hurt persons that have no ability to assist in the search and the system itself is technologically primitive which makes the information shown largely irrelevant.

I urge everyone to turn off these alerts until the system is fixed and those who misuse the system are made liable for their actions.