I had signed up for a webinar for this morning.

When I tried to connect, it wouldn't let me. It said that you either had to use Chrome or Edge. On the computer I was on, I only had Firefox and Opera installed.

So no webinar.

Kissinger was instrumental in starting the Vietnam War?

Where did you get that idea?

At the time of the start of the Vietnam War, Kissinger earning his doctorate. It is hard to imagine someone starting a war overseas while they are a grad student. That would be one hell of a powerful graduate student.

A more technological society would likely be impossible with few people. If there were only ten million people, we wouldn't have the infrastructure we would need to be able to progress much at all. More likely, it would knock us back a thousand years or more. Our automation would be minimal.

Like it or not, the people of today live better than kings did 500 years go.

A warmer Earth is a more productive Earth.

The real disaster would be a cooling Earth. When this interglacial period ends and we start to enter into another 100,000+ years of serious cold, with temperature drops well in excess of 10 F starvation is going to become real common. Death by starvation might easily be the number one cause of death at that time.

There will also likely be world wars over the dwindling resources of the Earth. They might even have the potential to replace death by starvation to become the leading cause of death.

I'll take warmer and love it.

My local church uses Zelle for donations. You can attend on-line through their Facebook page and then make your donation with Zelle.

That is literally the only time I have personally come across it being used, but then I don't get out very often.

I used to know a lawyer who war sunglasses at night. I'd laugh every time I saw him.

That was one of the least intelligent lawyers I ever met. When I knew him, he hadn't been able to pass the bar exam. I looked him up on the Internet about a year ago and it appears that he never did manage to pass it.

A few years ago, I sunburned the hell out of my eyes twice.

On one July afternoon, I was on the roof of our office building in the middle of the day and got a hell of a sunburn of the eyes. Then about three weeks later in August, I was on the roof of our city hall in the middle of the day and got another sunburn of the eyes, nearly as bad as the first. On both occasions, I was wearing a cap. It clearly provided no help.

The following July 3rd, I got a light sunburn outside in the middle of the day while wearing a cap. So on the 5th of July, I drove to a farm/ranch store in a nearby small city and bought a straw western hat for the summer. I also started wearing a beaver felt western hat that had been my father's in the fall, winter, and early spring. Also, unlike the current fashion for western hats, I flatten the brim out to provide better protection from the sun on the sides.

I haven't had any issues since.

Regarding buying advertised products, I grew up on a somewhat remote farm/ranch. Also, we didn't have that much spending money. When I was a kid, I would watch advertisements on tv and wonder what it was like to use this or that product or eat at this or that restaurant. But I never did have the chance since they were for places that were generally 100 miles away or more.

Over time, I just started tuning out the advertisements. They now have little or no effect on me.

For example, I never even saw a McDonald's until I went to college in the early 1970s. After a year or so, I did stop and eat at one and saw no reason to go back. Since that first time, I've eaten at McDonald's exactly twice. Similarly, I've eaten at Burger King once that I can remember and thought their food was really awful.

There is some brand awareness, but I generally don't choose on brand. For example, when I go to the store for toothpaste, I can't remember what brand I've been using, so I just get whatever is cheaper. There are no chain restaurants in my hometown (the one nearest the farm/ranch) and only two chain restaurants in the county. Neither of those are on my list of places to eat.

Not only am I not much of a consumer, but advertising does little to sway me.

If I need a product, I may or may not think back to advertisements for that product. What does not happen is for advertisements to drive my desire t buy a product. The only times that brand matters to me is if I have tried the brand and were happy with it or if that brand is the most most available out here on the prairie.

Our civilization was not possible until the Earth warmed up, warmer than today, roughly 10,000 years ago.

We are in an ice age right now. It is a inter-glacial warm period, but still an ice age. Whenever this period ends and it cools back down, that is when the true disaster will emerge as the carrying capacity will rapidly fall and mankind will be fighting what is left. Starvation will become extremely common.

The period known as the The Little Ice Age had major effects but nothing compared to what entering another period of glaciation will bring.

About 10,000 or so years ago, the Earth had warmed up enough for mankind to begin settling down in agricultural communities instead of consisting in small bands of subsistence hunters. Our distant ancestors were finally able to take some control over their lives instead of just moving from place to place looking for prey.

Coupled with this was the accidental development of the modern hexaploid wheat during the same rough time period. Before that, we only had diploid and tetraploid wheat. Some unknown farmer sowing his ancient crop of wheat accidentally included a related grass. By horizontal gene transfer, the genes from the related grass entered that tetraploid wheat and voila, it has 42 chromosomes instead of the previous 28 chromosomes. This new wheat quickly spread across Europe and Asia and eventually around the world. The tetraploid wheats are still important today for things like pasta, but the wheat that enabled civilization to flourish like never before was the hexaploid wheat that was successfully grown around the world.

Prior to our current interglacial warm period, sea levels were about 100 meters lower than now. Just a few thousand years ago, they were about two meters higher than today because of the warmer temperatures of that time.

If you want to see the probable end of our civilization, cool it back down. That can happen pretty quickly, too. There is some thought that when we entered the cool period known as The Younger Dryas, we dropped about 10 degrees Centigrade over a few years. The knowledge that this will almost certainly happen again along with the uncertain knowledge of when it will happen is what is truly scary.

For my e-mail, I have both RSA4096 and ED25519 PGP keys that are published on keys.openpgp.org. One thing that bothers me, though, is that for every '+' style alias, we need a different key. For example, 123456@example.com and 123456+ 3.14159265358979323846264338@example.com need different keys. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it were not for the fact that I use the '+' aliases extensively in order to make it easier to filter my e-mail into the proper folder on arrival. While few people send me encrypted e-mail, I generally have to have PGP keys for them in case they start using PGP to encrypt e-mail.

Same here. As for 4096 bit RSA vs 8192 bit or 16384 bit RSA, I don't think that there is much practical difference. Just avoid 2048 bit RSA and you should be fine.

If you are thinking about RSA 4096 bit or higher encryption, it is an error to compare the 4096 bits of RSA with 128 bit encryption. I think that the 4096 bit RSA is essentially 128 bit encryption. As I understand it, what the 4096 RSA does do for you is to make the determination of the private key from the public key far more difficult than a 2048 bit RSA key. So it is probably worthwhile to use 4096 RSA for that purpose. For my own use, I generally use the ED25519 (Elliptic Curve 25519) keys. The keys are much smaller but considered to be more secure cryptographically.

Novell's Chief Marketing officer stated:

Here's a message from Novell about the merger, from John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer: On November 22, 2010, Novell issued a press release announcing a definitive merger agreement under which Attachmate Corporation (“Attachmate”) would acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash (“Merger Agreement”). Novell will continue to own Novell’s UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate. Novell filed a Form 8-K/A with the SEC on November 22, 2010, with respect to the Merger Agreement.

That is, Novell will be a subsidiary of Attachmate and Novell will continue to own the copyrights.

In some early photo-radar locations, there was a loophole that nobody ever caught onto.

The citations gave an option of identifying the driver and address. If the address of the "identified driver" was foreign, the citation was immediately dismissed.

And one municipality had a maximum time during which the company handling the ticket had to issue the final ticket. If the owner of the vehicle waited until the last minute to identify the driver, there was not enough time to reissue the citation to the identified driver and so it was dismissed.

For a while, citations to anyone driving a rent-a-car were dismissed simply because the rental companies wouldn't respond to the citations. After much digging, a list of the correct addresses to send the citations for each major rental car company was made. After that, requests for identification of the drivers were promptly made by the rental car companies.

My solution to red light cameras is to drive 10-20 mph below the speed limit in any town that used red light cameras.

If those cities were really interested in safety, they could more easily do so, and at all light controlled intersections, by merely increasing the yellow light a second or two.

By the way, when New York City issued their RFP for red light cameras, the first city in the U.S. to do so, I was head of R&D for a radar company and wrote most of our proposal in response to their RFP. We were also working very hard back then to get the Washington DC contract. At the time, I thought that red light cameras would work well, but the actual results have convinced me otherwise.

While I was head of R&D at that company, we were also approached about developing a similar system for railroad crossings. Nothing ever came out of that, though.