Since you mention the radius of a circle: the persistent recurrence of 2pi all over the place makes me wonder if tau (C/r or 2pi) is truly more fundamental than pi. Perhaps that's too philosophical of an observation for this context, or perhaps it might simplify some of your expressions, or perhaps I'm simply barking up the wrong tree here, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts to share.

If you have an authentication server why do you need or even want block chain.

Seems like people are deafened by the clamor of buzzwords. Heard about the Certificate Transparency project? A certificate audit log is a Merkle tree that is appended to by adding a new root node of which the old root is a child, proving the history has not been tampered with. The end nodes of the Merkle tree are also digitally signed data structures. These two properties give the audit log the same data structure shape as a blockchain.

Furthermore if you want to distribute the authentication to many servers how do you control the authentication list if there's no proof of work. and if there's proof of work, then it gets expensive because that's why its called work

The entirety of the log is issued by a single entity, so each new root can simply be signed by the CA, and all the heavyweight Byzantine distributed consensus cruft such as proof of work that applications like Bitcoin use is completely irrelevant to this use case. Individual certificates can be verified by the embedded digital signature, issuance can be verified by consulting the (also signed) audit log.

Note that this doesn't mean I think Microsoft's project referenced in TFA is necessarily a good idea. I don't know enough about it even after reading TFA to pass judgement on it. That may itself be an artifact of excessive buzzword density.

DMA makes that approach a nonstarter unless you have a working and properly configured IOMMU between the controller and main memory. Even then, the most common use case is to give a virtual machine direct access to a device rather than to put an ordinary driver in user space.

I got into a situation last week doing a fresh install where the chipset's USB host support was built as a module but not included in initramfs. A startup problem (fumbled fstab) left it prompting for the root password without a working keyboard. Well, at least now the blasted driver's compiled in.

I see what you did there ;)

Doubletype is a symptom of an echo problem, not a duplex problem. Specifically, it happens when both local and remote echo are mistakenly enabled at the same time. Echo and duplex are often confused, possibly because they're characteristically set together: remote echo is clumsy, inefficient or both on a half-duplex channel, so local echo is usually used with it. It also has zilch to do with keyboards unless the setting switch happens to be on it.

Ah yes, fantasy... perhaps you'd enjoy a tale in which he has enough marbles to sort into Ravenclaw. The Magicians trilogy isn't half bad either.

Except the fourth party's fifth column is also up your six.

What of the "dust theory"? In a closed state machine, any given state's successor (chain of successor states, for that matter) does not become undefined simply because the simulation is no longer being run on an identifiable substrate. With no I/O, conceptually such a machine rests on a foundation of pure mathematics, though it would correspondingly have no way of interacting with its environment.

I'm highlighting a point on which the FSF, OSI and CFI are in agreement: the significance of the right to fork a project.

I'll try to buck the trend here by skipping the derision and offering constructive advice. ;-)

In this case, the closest match I can come up with off the top of my head is to apply the Microsoft Reference Source License to the source code.

This is not a Free/Libre or Open source license, because the constraints you are looking for are in direct conflict with the Open Source Definition, clauses 1 and 3; the Copyfree Standard Definition, clauses 1 and 3; and the Free Software Definition, freedoms 2 and 3.

Do you expect that if you were to permit redistribution of the core and modifications to it that others in the community would completely take over the project and continue its development without your business's involvement (a 'fork', in development jargon)? That would be the primary reason I can think of for such a restriction.

Perhaps, for that very reason, many chat support representatives I've encountered instead err on the side of obsequiousness. Many take it too far, almost as if they're trying to trigger irrational rage responses, and others ring hollow with Eliza-like echo statements ("My frob won't womble." "I'm sorry to hear your frob won't womble.") - it wouldn't surprise me one bit if there was a pacifying-echo hotkey on their end.

This form of asshattery is by no means limited to the "Internet of Things", or "Web 2.0", or "Social Media", or any other buzzword you might choose to throw out there. I'm not even certain it's restricted to Internet manifestations, though those are certainly the easiest and most prominent.

These discussions usually continue long after the horse is beaten to death - call it blunt metaphors trauma.

This uses POTS, not FDTS, so there are ethoxy groups instead of chlorine atoms bound to the silicon. Still flammable, but POTS is innocuous enough that it's used to coat pigment particles in cosmetics.

I suspect even FDTS gets a lot less nasty once a coating settles in. R1-Si-Cl + H-O-R2 -> R1-Si-O-R2 + HCl, the HCl escapes as a gas and the rest stays put, covalently bonded to the surface.

MITM positioning is a prerequisite, but that's not hard if you run a Wi-Fi hotspot. This is a bid-down attack, tampering with initial negotiation to limit the cipher suite and strength to something more breakable without raising alarms.

If you can additionally prevent the use of PFS cipher suites so the 512 bit key is used for pre-master secret encipherment, you need only break the static 512-bit key once to read all the traffic protected by it.