packet_nerd

Somewhat related, but not the same thing; I'm curious when Firefox will finally get proper line breaking support for Burmese and related languages?

Burmese doesn't have spaces between words, just between phrases and sentences. Breaking lines between sentences results in really ugly jagged paragraphs. (I've ended up inserting Unicode zero width spaces between each syllable to get line breaking to work consistently in projects I've worked on.)

Checking just now on Windows 10, Firefox and Edge aren't doing it correctly but Chrome and IE are. Even Windows Notepad is getting it right.

> In many US states you can assume that people you walk past may well have a handgun under his jacket or in her purse.

I think that's kind of a stretch. Where I live I think most people have a gun or two at home, and I do too, but I've never personally met someone who carries them around on the street. (For one thing, I've tried those conceal carry holsters, and found them extremely uncomfortable.)

The only time my guns are out is for hunting, or going to the range with friends.

It's a shame we're still using passwords, even more so that they are sent to the server. FIDO UAF or U2F is the way this should be done.

This makes me smile a little. My civilization includes all human kind; we're all stuck on this rock together, after all. Think about the vastness of the universe and the billions of civilizations that must be out there! It makes me think that our petty squabbles, divisions, and tribes are just so much of a tempest in a teapot.

> light bounces off the walls of the fibre optics cable

This is true of multimode fibre, but not single mode. Long haul communications cables are single mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-mode_optical_fiber

Light is slower in glass than in air.

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/speedoflight/index....

The fire could just as easily have been started by anyone. Heck, I'm pretty sure you can find similar lapses in maintenance at pretty much any company in California or the country. Any one of them could have caused the fire. Or it could just as easily started from something totally different.

I just feel like the punishment should fit the crime (failing to maintain equipment) and should be fair (apply to all companies who fail to maintain their equipment). Turning them into a scapegoat just because we're out for blood doesn't sit right with me.

Arson implies mal-intent and is a totally different thing. Not understanding the connection?

When the conditions are right its extremely easy for a wildfire to start. Lightning strikes, a glass bottle in the sun, a camp fire, there's so many different ways it could get started. Does it really matter that it happened to be PG&E's equipment in this case? If not them, it would have happened anyway from another cause. It seems unfair to hold them liable, or at least, the extremely hostile tone in these comments seems a bit overboard.

In my early teens my family moved to rural northern Idaho and my dad decided one day to burn some of the brush on our land to clean it up. Well, being from a much more suburban setting we didn't know that that's a real no-no that time of year. The fire got out of control and started burning into the trees and my mom, brothers, and I frantically fought it with hoes and buckets of water while dad tried to plow over it with the bulldozer (we didn't have a phone and this was an hour drive from a fire department). Anyway, we finally got it put out before it got into the national forest bordering our property on the east. Very very scary.

A week later there was a lightning strike fire in the national forest which ended up burning several hundred acres.

The federation requires a publicly accessible server to work. I got a cheap domain name, pointed it to my public IP (with DDNS), and port-forwarded to my server. Works fine for me.

I didn't say it always will, just that it has so far.

Crypto 101: never let anyone have your private key. No-one who religiously followed that rule has ever had their crypto stolen.

Coins go missing from exchanges, which break the basic private key rule. People use exchanges for convenience because as clever as cryptocurrency is, it has no answer to the exchange problem.

You can call me a fan, I at least think they are cool and clever, and I like the idea. If a magic coin comes along and is the one true coin that elegantly solves all current problems, I'd think that was great. I don't currently hold any amount of crypto with any hope of getting rich off it.. so it wouldn't really matter to me.

From a division of labor perspective, it seems like it'd be better to tax the corporation, and not the individual employees.

I spent most of today working on my taxes, and will need to do the same tomorrow to get it all done. Not sure how many hours the average person spends, but I imagine I'm typical. Multiply that time by every single employee, and that's a huge amount of time! A specialist in the company's tax department can probably accomplish the same amount of work as many people like me.

(Yes, I know they already hire tax specialists, and I know I have to do my taxes after hours, so it's "free" from the company's perspective, but at the level of society as a whole, it seems like it'd be more efficient to tax the money just once).

If the claim is that the majority of humans speak a language which includes huh? as a feature, then sure. But that doesn't seem very interesting scientifically...

By calling it a universal word, I guess I thought they were referring to the concept of linguistic universals [1], which are interesting since they might suggest something about the deeper way in which our brains work. To make a claim about linguistic universals like that I really think they should study more than 10 (31) languages.

According to this page [2], 44% of people speak an Indo-European language, and 96% speak a member of one of the top 10 language families. The remaining 4% includes 84 language families. I imagine there's a ton of variety there, and for understanding human language and cognition they all probably have just as much value as the larger language families.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal

[2] https://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_families_statis...

They only studied 10 languages. That doesn't seem like enough to call it "universal".

What about those African languages made up of all clicking sounds?

No.

John Bogle [1] claims that the long term annualized return from the stock market has averaged about 6.8%. The lowest 50 year period was 5.8%, and highest was 7.9%. As far as 10 year periods, the lowest was 2.3%, and highest was 11.5%.

But, these percentages are after adjusting for inflation, maybe before inflation would be closer to your "7-13%".

[1] Common sense on mutual funds, p16

In what sense is an adblocker freeloading?

They voluntarily delivered content to my device, in my home. What I do with it after that is my business and no one else's.

It's not freeloading in any sense if I serve my breakfast cereal from mason jars instead of the box. It's not if I tear out pages I don't want to see from a book or if I dump the ad leaflet from the newspaper or credit card offers in the trash. It's not freeloading if I mute the radio during political attack ads. Why should it be any different on my computer screen?

My grandma got an iPad, and was using the calculator app to do her finances. I had a chuckle when I saw she had suck a sticky note over the ad. :-) Do you really see that as freeloading?

Its my house, my stuff, I can do with it exactly as I please, and there is absolutely no sense in which those companies have a "right" to my attention or in which I have some moral obligation to give it. To suggest otherwise sounds like a plot from a science fiction movie. I think Black Mirror had an episode like that.

Also evaluate which data really needs to be saved in the first place.

> inches upward

I wish it inched upward... So much software now-days is bloated crap.

> But the second unit had failed in the identical manner a few milliseconds before. And why not? It was running the same software.

That got me to thinking, could 3 different teams have separately built and programmed 3 different units (separate software and hardware), and then had a voting type system so that, if say 2 units are saying "keep going straight" and the third is saying "turn left", then it knows to keep going straight? Is something like this ever done in systems that require extremely high reliability?

> We need to teach our children to observe the world accurately and debunk pseudo-science.

I'm not a scientist and don't have the depth of insight in many fields that I feel I could always accurately debunk pseudo-science. Most people aren't experts, and most kids certainly aren't. I've spent my career getting the measly amount of domain expertise I do have, and that's only in a very narrow IT field.

Rather, we need to focus on learning to better evaluate authorities. Who's the most qualified source of information? Which of several competing theories have the most qualified proponents? What incentives might they have to color what they believe?

On the web its really hard to know who's who. Mostly we have nothing better than the tone and look of the site and domain name. That's really pretty weak if you think about it! I'd definitely be interested in a system of some kind (browser extension?) that added a little more information.

Guess I disagree. They are a mental burden that I didn't ask for and don't want. My life, my rules.

I find ads in general, and particularly audio ones, to be a super annoying cognitive burden. I have to interrupt my train of thought and consciously block the message they're trying to pipe into my brain.

I'm happy to pay for things if its low friction and reasonably priced, but will never accept being advertised to (in any form really, but especially audio and video ads).

An audio adblocker seems like a great thing, and I'm excited about this. If enough of us use it, hopefully we can force creators to abandon ads and find a model where they work for us, not the ad companies.

I wish there was a way to block billboards too. Back when google was making google glass, I thought it'd be possible to block out billboard advertisements someday.. to bad that didn't work. Or, just move to a state that bans them, I guess.

I left, in my early 20s, mostly as a way to expand my horizons and escape the suffocating conservative religious environment I grew up in.

I recently came back to get a career in IT going, but will be moving again soon.

Yeah, but the point is you wouldn't expect a competent network engineer to use the words "packet frames". And incompetence would seem to fit with the facts of the case, i.e. 911 was down for 2 days.

> terms are interchangeable

No, use frame when your talking about layer 2, packet when your talking about layer 3, and segment for layer 4. Datagram and protocol data unit (PDU) are general terms that can apply to any layer.

A switch forwards frames, while a router routes packets.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31446777/difference-betw...

Ip helper usually only shows up in the context of DHCP so its easy to forget it forwards a lot more than just DHCP broadcasts.

Your thinking of the firewall that's built into most consumer routers. The exact technicalities of NAT (PAT actually) are not super well defined, and many implementations will not track the destination address.

Hook grandma up with a $30 chinese firewall box, and disable UPNP? Plug modem into WAN, computer into LAN, turn it on, done.

True, it will be called a "router" in consumer speak, but all consumer IPv6 routers should actually be firewalls.

> nothing behind this style NAT can receive unsolicited traffic

This isn't really 100% true though. Since IPv4 NAT was never standardized, many many variations exist in the wild and some can be exploited to send unsolicited traffic inside the network defeating the implicit "firewall" aspect of NAT.

NAT translates IPs. Firewalls allow or block traffic based on a policy. In some configurations (static NAT, port forwarding, etc. etc.), there's no firewall aspect to NAT at all. In others (PAT, what this discussion is mostly about), there's often an implicit firewall, but different implementations have widely variable behavior, and it basically should not be depended on as a firewall.

If you want to deny inbound unsolicited traffic, then you need a firewall.