kloch

I don't know (or care) about how he got that ASN but ARIN does occasionally recycle returned 3 or 4 digit ASN's, including very recently:

  20220607|arin|US|asn|888|1|assigned|66e25d155d3f3d57ff208733b59f8cc8
  20220607|arin|US|asn|889|1|assigned|5b048aafff56a02f895e68ac5188853b
  20220607|arin|US|asn|890|1|assigned|708d3f11915973323c76a5f95fa2d775
  20220607|arin|US|asn|891|1|assigned|ab9bfca0becd32b7fe44c7ea0ba1aac3
  20220607|arin|US|asn|892|1|assigned|0b9118a23862aab1647fd26939f7b219
  20220607|arin|US|asn|893|1|assigned|57d59e6dfd1cd07523724f9cf5fc572b
  20220607|arin|US|asn|894|1|assigned|0a932835b90a81bffeb1539b4bc93040

The first time ARIN did this with a lot of 4-digit ASN's was 2009 and was how Netflix was able to get AS2906.

There is also a market for reselling ASN's that aren't needed anymore: https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)

No, the strong force does not have any effects at galactic scales. It is effectively neutralized at sub-atomic scales.

About 12 years ago I had several (big ISP) routers that were punting all ESP packets to the routing engine for forwarding, instead of the normal path of using ASIC's on the line cards. This was noticed because I had some customers with a lot of IPSEC traffic and there is very little capacity to forward packets using the CPU on the routing engine, so packets were being dropped.

When I opened a case with the hardware vendor and described the problem they immediately and tersely asked for a shipping address and how many cards I wanted to replace. They didn't even check for support contracts, which was unheard of especially for an expensive part like this.

These routers were purchased on the grey market so I always assumed there was some kind of (botched?) tampering with the hardware and the vendor was at least aware of it.

Here's a good article about this type of PRNG, with other sample seeds:

https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/does-it-beat-the-minimal-st...

I don't think the pick needs to be deliberately random (forsaking any responsibility for the outcome).

You could try to pick the best option quickly based on immediately available/easily discernible information with the acknowledgement that you could be wrong, but it likely won't matter if you are.

While most of the examples in the article fall under "don't waste time on decisions that don't matter", one of them certainly does not: which university to attend. That is where you will live and work for the next 4-5 years. Given two equal status choices I would put a lot of research into the decision. Mainly to try to uncover anything I would strongly dislike - and have to live with - about either choice.

That would make sense since this was a news crew from DC and that was one of the closest malls for them to visit.

The Proper People recently did a video in Landmark Mall just days before it was demolished, including a walk through the old Sears which was in very bad shape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L106fYg9H5M

On the open market they are currently $45-$55 USD per IP depending on block size.

Source: https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

So a /16 (like a cloud provider would be buying) is $3.5M USD right now.

Currently, it means they will continue to let some small part of the securities the Fed hold on their balance sheet mature without immediately re-investing the proceeds.

Outright sales of these securities are another option that they seem reluctant to do at this point.

Either way this has the effect of reducing the amount of money in the system (the opposite of QE where they created money out of thin air to buy the securities in the first place).

Oh that's definitely on their mind:

https://stevenmcollins.com/auto-license-plaste-to-have-rfidt...

https://www.nbc12.com/story/20500107/virginia-lawmakers-want...

It's ok to praise/reward companies for doing the Right Thing, even if they try to make the most of it with PR.

Especially with Sun where the vast majority of color frame buffers were 8-bit throughout the 1990's

Exception: Sun's printed documentation was beautiful

> drive up to a 20,000 something pound vehicle

Specifically in the US the limit is 26,000 lbs GVWR without a CDL. That is the gross vehicle rating cannot be over 26,000 lbs, even if it actually weighs less when driven.

I've always assumed that exceeding the GVWR is illegal but searches show conflicting results.

> That’s why engineering exists in the first place. With an unlimited budget, my 2-year-old could design a bridge that carries monster trucks over the English channel for a million years.

I'd like to see the math on this one. A million years is a lot of weather (including tropical storms that sometimes reach England), wars, meteors, earthquakes, climate variation, but especially a million years of weather.

I suppose if you truly had an unlimited budget you could build it thousands of feet tall out of gold plated titanium mined from the moon.

Virtually all turbofan engine blades exceed the speed of sound at high N1% even when moving slow (like during takeoff). This is part of what generates the distinct "buzzsaw" sound at or near max thrust when seated forward of the engines. The pitch/tone of the buzzsaw sound depends on the number of fan blades and rpm of the main fan (and likely stator design).

In this video of an Iran Air 747SP the buzzsaw effect is particularly isolated/exaggerated due to the camera/mic placement, the use of 1970's design (louder) JT9D engines, and the shorter length of the 747SP. https://youtu.be/3lhHwKK-6ms

On a 737 the pitch is higher due to the smaller diameter fan (higher max RPM), while a 777 has the lowest buzzsaw pitch due to having the largest fan diameter.

The most recent jet engines (like on the 747-8) have highly suppressed this sound with contoured fan blades.

How ironic the error message I get when visiting the link:

"Error establishing a database connection"

"UHF" connectors are very unfortunately named. They shouldn't be used for anything above 30 MHz (HF), but are often used on VHF (~150MHz) radios even though they have poor performance already at those frequencies:

https://www.hamradio.me/connectors/uhf-connector-test-result...

> The stunning result is all the UHF connectors in the test have worse performance than all the other connectors. One immediate conclusion concerning ‘UHF’ connectors is they will function at these higher frequencies, but one must decide if using the PL259 or SO239 is worth it in an age where its deficiencies have been made moot by ALL connector designs since WWII.

N connectors work excellent all the way up to ~1GHz and also have decent power ratings. Above that SMA/SMC is popular for low power applications, and waveguides for high power.

TNC connectors were popular in the 1980's for analog cell phones and 800MHz public safety radios.

I actually agree with you there. I was just trying to imagine a scenario where it made sense from Sagan's perspective.

> One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase "butt-head."

But one does seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrases "crackpot" or "crank", which are not very far from "butt-head"

So while I think the ruling was correct in that the average person would not take the insult seriously, I can see why Sagan might have taken it seriously.

> C is sort of a dead

C is like a table saw without a blade guard. Simple yet precise, powerful, flexible, and will cut your fingers off if you aren’t careful.

But it’s often exactly the kind of dangerous saw we need sometimes.

There’s no point in trying to improve it - there are plenty of other, safer saws for that.

This article must have been written by someone who has never experienced it.

Getting a number you like (especially if it's 4-digit) vs random pick by the RIR.

According to their previous sales page, 5-digit ASN's have been selling fairly fast at ~$2,000 level even though as you point out you can get one for just the RIR registration fee (ARIN at least will give you a 6-digit by defualt but 5-digit if you ask when applying).

Exactly, the first thing I thought of is was the (modern) IETF involved with this

There is a market for AS numbers too (filter by ASN)

https://auctions.ipv4.global/

It depends on the dynamic range you are working with and they type of operation. Dynamic range is critical with addition and subtraction but usually not important with multiplication and division (where only maximum exponent ranges are of concern).

For example, 1.0 + 1.616e-35 = 1.0 (exact) with double precision as the dynamic range is far too high to encode the sum within the ~16 decimal digits available. The second term just gets rounded out.

1.0 / 1.616e-35 however can be successfully encoded and you will not lose much precision, at most a rounding error in the last digit.

So, to answer your question double precision is usually sufficient even at Planck scale as long as you are not also adding/subtracting terms at much larger scales (like the 1 meter example above)

Repeated summation can compound rounding errors and reduce the effective precision of floating point encoded numbers.

Doubles have ~16 decimal digits of precision but adding a billion doubles together sequentially (simple summation) could with worst case data reduce your effective precision to only ~7 digits. Random data would tend to have a sqrt(n) effect which would leave you with ~11 digits.

Several algorithms have been devised to reduce or even eliminate this effect. Kahan summation for example typically results in the precision loss of a single addition, effectively eliminating the compound errors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahan_summation_algorithm

In the mid 1990's someone in my office put pop tarts in the microwave and mis-typed the time by an extra digit or something and walked back to his desk.

The entire 7 story building was evacuated and the fire department called because of the smoke. There was so much smoke everyone thought the building itself was on fire.

> a highly fixed supply (synthesizing it is prohibitively expensive)

This is what gives Bitcoin much of its value as well.

> Gold is conceptually very similar to bitcoin, except gold can't be forked or copied

This touches on another thing that makes Bitcoin valuable - consensus. Enough people agree to use it that it becomes the defacto standard.

Bitcoin (and Ether to a lesser extent) are the “rough consensus and running code” of decentralized algorithmic money

The two points are related. It was much easier to synthesize Bitcoin when fewer people were using it, and it’s market value was less.

This auto-scaling of difficulty with interest/value was added as a security mechanism but actually plays a key monetary role as well.

Does anyone else remember a joke/malware DOS program that circulated on BBS's in the very early 1990's that promised 98% compression of any file?

It just shortened the size in the FAT table (or similar gimmick that would result in data loss as you wrote new data to the disk)...

In this case the tension is not between SEC and Wall Street but between the SEC (which regulates stocks and bonds) and the CFTC (which regulates commodities and derivatives).

Most people in Wall Street and the crypto community want clearer regulations so they know what the rules are for specific coins/tokens and transactions. What we have now is a very slow Government trying to catch up with technology coupled with infighting between different regulators defending their own turf.

Fortunately there was a bill introduced in the US Senate (referenced in the article) that would clear up much of this, along with various taxation issues.