Re: It could be a Dyson sphere

Yes - a Dyson Sphere made out of cork & balsa wood! Will wonders never cease??? ;-)

Title

" There is a more pressing technical issue at hand: the fact that the current internet protocol (IPv4) will run out of addresses, oh, say in four years or so. "

Bollicks.

10 years ago, we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses in 3-4 years. If we were so hard up for standard IP addresses, how can the spammers get hold of, and subsequently abandon, so many of 'em that the good guys can't keep up???

We need to go back to the "good old days" - Prove you need a Class C, and spank the owner of said Class C if it gets misused... stop handing them out like candy and take care (read: responsibility) of the ones you have.

IPv4 gives *almost* one IP address per human on the planet. If you break that down to one IP address per family, we're good to go until world war 7. Explain to me why we need more IPv6 addresses (by almost double) than the number of square meters of land mass of the earth? So spam can keep up with Moore's Law?

Postini?

Yet another reason not to use gmail... and I thought the "when you delete your email... we don't" reason was enough!

Amateurs?

""" He's the worst type of person to be in such a dangerous situation: an amatuer.[sic] """

Remember: Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.

Just another damn yank chiming in, but if there were more guys like this (unarmed but willing to rush armed people) then maybe on our side of the pond, just maybe 9/11 wouldn't have happened.

IMHO, and all that jazz... but I still think the guy's a hero (maybe not the smartest on the block, but nonetheless...) and should be applauded for his efforts.

Laptop LAN Interface troubleshooting...

Quoting: "but weren't sure if that was RHEL or the ThinkPad's problem. It was some sort of DHCP issue; the install machine hadn't been plugged into the LAN when it booted. A reboot with the net connected solved this, though perhaps one could just bounce the interfaces."

=-=-=-=

Quite often the default for laptops is if there's no active physical connection on the LAN port on boot, the interface is disabled as a power-saving feature... my Fujitsu Lifebook is that way. In that instance, a full reboot would be necessary to bring up the Ethernet interface.

Speaking of crap -- you don't know Shinola either, eh?

Quote: "As for subsidising MS (and please, stop using the "M$" thing and start communicating like a grown up) no one is putting a gun to your head and making you but [sic] it; you don't have a right to anything they produce and as far as I see they can charge any amount of money they want to it. You don't have to buy it, after all."

When I purchased my Fujitsu Lifebook P2120, not only was I *forced* to purchase MicroFlaccid (is that better than M$?) Windows XP Pro with it, I was told that my hardware warranty was void if I removed it! M$ tells OEMs that if they give end users a choice of OS, they'll revoke *all* the OEM's Winders licenses. How is that not "forcing" people to purchase Winders?

Yes, the laptop runs Linux (that's my job) and yes, I'm glad I had the foresight to ghost the hard drive before I installed it, because I did have a warranty issue with the LCD, and I had to restore the original partitions on the drive before I sent it in for repair.

Go, Howard Stern, Go!

Quote: "I say protest your girlfriend or your wife's TV habits, or force her to watch old Star Trek reruns, with samplings from Magnum P.I. Miami Vice and the A-Team."

Makes me damn glad my wife prefers Stargate SG-1! And no, I'm not gonna bugger with you Brits, because even tho you may have started things like AI & Big Brother, you also gave us Dr. Who & Benny Hill! Thankfully, I grew up watching the latter as I live on the Canadian border, and could pick up the CBC broadcasts of BH.

Roger

P.S. IMHO, Brits *don't* have any reason to complain about base/basketball... you have cricket, after all. When most people who know how it's played can't explain how (or in some cases why) it's played... ;-)

Been There, Done That

Quote: "I wonder if there would be a market for a bottled beer with a picture of an ugly woman. So you can tell when you've had enough."

We Americans did that *long* ago - The beer: Olde Frothingslosh, the pale stale ale with the foam on the bottom! The picture on the can features the fictional "Fatima Yechburgh":

http://cordic-and-co.com/ofc/ofcc004.jpg

I don't think the ploy worked, though. How's that saying go? "Beer: Helping ugly women have sex since 1869" or somesuch? Methinks it goes back _much_ farther than that, and I'd wager it's just as helpful for the ladies when presented with the dregs of man-dom. Hell, I'm married, that must be proof! I doubt a picture on a can will stem the tide. ;-)

Roger

It wasn't always this way...

Back when I was asked to build a help-desk system in VBA for Access (versions 2.0 and later 7), the F1 key was my friend - heck, you could learn everything you needed (at least I did), with cut-n-paste examples that actually made some sense, just from F1 & a simple search. Never bought a book -- never needed to. Starting with Access 97, things went downhill... and fast... and never recovered.

It sucks that over a decade ago, MicroSoft actually knew how to "do it right" and b0rked it up so bad in the name of "progress." Sheesh.

Laterz,

Roger "Merch" Merchberger