Bought the Cowboy Neal VR Goggles here and have seen the world differently ever since. Joined /. in 1998 or 1999 and it changed everything

"smtp fixup" is the worst PIX/ASA default configuration ever. So obvious what The Problem is once you see a bunch of asterisks censoring the SMTP conversation.

Yay UCSD and Roger Revelle! More charts of the Keeling Curve, which passed 400 three months ago. "1700 to Present" is my favorite.

I'm still totally amazed people can't look at a before and after of the summer ice in the Arctic or glaciers in Patagonia and Glacier National Park and make the leap that, "Okay, releasing carbon from long-dead dinosaurs in the form of petroleum and coal results in atmospheric carbon dioxide which warms and expands oceans and makes ice melt."

Okay, fine, here's a link to pictures of glaciers melting over the last century.

It's not amateur. The external connections (the wires, the SMA) may be sloppy but tossing together some breakout boards makes a prototype not a product. I mean, the GPS I made for the tracker in my car is amateur, but it's still a formal product on a PCB, not a bunch of wires sticking out of a breadboard.

Totally pleasant to hear from other people that have flown from KSMO. Anyway, it's my understanding without seeing video myself that he had altitude before the engine completely malfunctioned and he had u-turned to bring it back. I bet if he'd had another 100' he could've cleared the VOR and set it down on the runway, but witnesses report it basically clipped a tree and came right down.

(Unrelated, having worked underneath the flight paths for both MCAS Miramar in Sorrento Valley and KSMO on Rose Ave and as a resident of Venice who supports general aviation, one word: Surfridge.)

I was a year old when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At the time he worked at a hospital where they later named an auditorium in his honor; at his first diagnosis they gave him two to four weeks to live. After six months he removed his oxygen mask to die.

So here's my first suggestion: Don't record hours and hours and hours and hours of video. It'll be like the wedding movie no one watches, or the thousands of baby pictures no one looks at. Pick your favorite photos, have them printed into a hardcover book with iPhoto, and write down who is in them, what the event was, and why it's important to you.

My dad recorded about a twenty or thirty minute message to me on reel-to-reel tape. I sent it to a professional sound engineer to have it digitized a few years ago. I've probably listened to it three times in thirty-five years. I didn't understand it as a kid but it was amazing to hear his voice.

Every night until I was three years old I slept with a picture of my dad. At some point we accept and progress.

So, here I am as an adult and I have basically a couple items that were my father's: 1) The patch from his Air Force uniform with my surname. 2) In my bedroom, an 8x10 family picture with the three of us. 3) A shoebox with all the letters his mother sent him from the farm in the 1960s and 1970s. 4) That half-hour of him talking into a microphone, imagining his one-year-old as an adult and telling me to "find a beautiful girl and marry her."

No one cares about your material possessions when you're dead. Don't worry about sorting all your old possessions. Fill a small box with the most important items for your family and write down why they're important. And be realistic. I care immensely about the collar my dog had when she was a puppy; to anyone else it's a frayed blue ribbon for the trash can. My maternal uncles have spent a decade looking for my grandfather's original pilot's license from the 1930s with little concern for anything else he possessed; it's the records of achievements and milestones we cherish. I hope my college degree doesn't get tossed in the trash but expect every single one of my books will be quickly donated and destroyed, no matter how important that Oxford Dictionary or human anatomy textbook is to me.

So, all that aside: Your child has the advantage of knowing you today. So look back at your own life and the major events you cherish, and tell her about those. "The day I met your mother... so when you meet someone..." or "The day you were born was so important to me because... so when you have children..." Don't tell her about dating boys or finding a good job or reading books or traveling. Everyone figures that out on their own. Tell her about how important family is to you, and your connection to her future and her family as she experiences the wonder of life. Don't talk to her like a sixth-grader, you do that everyday already. Talk to her like she's 25 or 30 or your age. She'll understand your words when she needs to look back and understand.

Something positive can happen from the misfortune that has come upon your family. I understand life is precious because my father died when he was forty-two. So I've lived my life as if that's my expiration date: I've lived in New York City and Los Angeles. I've travelled to five continents. I've learned to sail. I've studied flight. I ride horses. I have a dog. I've spent well over a decade living at the beach because that's what I want. Every day is a gift and I live it like it's vacation. So many people have these simple plans: "When I retire, I'm going to the Grand Canyon and on a cruise around the Mediterranean." I learned from the death of my father to, well, it's a cliche, but seize the day. Do everything you want to do without fear because you might not ever get a chance. So consider your daughter might live a life greater than either one of you imagined only last year. Yes, it hurts you'll be apart. But I'd probably still be among cornfields without my tragedy propelling me forward.

And think about your wife too. So many people keep paying the bill on an old phone just so they can call it and hear the voicemail greeting for a dead relative. Your wife will soon be a single parent, terrified about working all day and paying the mortgage and mowing the lawn and lighting the furnace and snaking the sewer pipe and wondering what a soon-to-be high-school girl is doing between 3:30pm and 6pm while she's still at work. Never mind the immense loneliness resulting from the unexpected. Give her a thirty-second recording for those moments when she just wants to cry and laugh and run away all at the same time. Write her a letter that says, "Open in 2016." Just let her pick whether it's on January 1st or December 31st.

Finally, turn off your fucking computer and go take a nice trip together for a few days. We don't need a hundred hours of goddamned video, we need memories of love.

Amen. I just received a handful of FT323RLs in the mail today from Mouser. It costs 5x as much as a Chinese import, but this certainly isn't the first time FTDI has used driver updates to protect their technology, it's just the first time (that I know of) they've actively disabled chips. But if FT-Prog can fix them, great.

Anyway, there are cheaper alternatives, I'm growing fond of the WCH CH340/341 series for being a tenth of the price of an FT232. But it requires driver installation, whereas MacOS just works with FT232s.

I mean, I even address that in eBay listings for products built on CH340s ("this is $4 cheaper because you have to install drivers, and it's known to not be counterfeit") and in my products using the FT232RL ("It costs more, but you just want it to work, right?"). Like my USB GPS adapter.

Most people involved in a pre-textual motor vehicle stop and issued a warning for a trivial non-offense won't know to say the magic words that begin their legal defense: "Am I free to go? Why am I being detained?" and when the polite officer says, "Well, I'm sure you've got nothing to hide, let me search your vehicle, and no matter what I'll make sure you're on your way quickly," many quickly hope compliance is their best option in the short-term.

So they say, "Yeah, go ahead," instead of the alternative, "I do not consent to search and invoke all protections afforded me by the Constitution; while I am cooperating within those constraints, please advise me promptly when I am free to go."

You'll get searched anyway, whether it's your phone or your car. You might get arrested anyway. But having invoked your rights instead of freely waiving your rights gives the defendant ample opportunity to assert their innocence in court without having already accidentally proven their guilt without the benefit of counsel.

I expect most people, despite the Supreme Court ruling, will find their phones searched anyway; consider stop-and-frisk in New York City. Please set a passcode on your device, preferably alphanumeric instead of a simple PIN, and avoid interacting with law enforcement, they have better things to do than read a neckbeard hacker's text messages to his mom about picking up more Mountain Dew at the store.

(Nevermind Border Patrol checkpoints in the US or Customs/Immigration interviews...)

(IANAL.)

"Herd" animals have eyes on the side of their heads, because they're prey. "Pack" animals have eyes facing forward, because they're predators.

In one of the best military history classes I took as a budding young officer, we learned that the largest defence budget in the world belonged to Great Britain until the Suez Crisis of 1956. Once Ike shafted the 1) British and 2) French, they started on the road towards respectively 1) getting out of the role of "world's policeman" and 2) eyeballing the exits from NATO (actually done in 1966). The US defense budget soon eclipsed that of Great Britain. Of course, that gave the USA something to do with all the European gold that had made its way to Ft. Knox by 1945.

Most of Lenin's advisers were delusional enough to reject the initial German peace offer of early 1917 as they waited for all of Europe to descend into Bolshevik revolution. I strongly doubt President Calvin Coolidge and Vladimir Illych Lenin would have been toasting good relations with carbonated grape juice in the Prohibition White House of the early 1920's. The capitalist western powers loathed the Soviet Union from day one, but Franklin Roosevelt's Administration had so many sympathizers that one has to question the usual narrative of, "we wuz robbed at Yalta." I figure "Old Whiskers" calculation was that the democracies had no stomach for fighting another war so soon after Hitler's fall, so he dropped his Iron Curtain across Europe and then grinned. As for any worries that Russians might object to his aggressiveness triggering a war with Britain and the USA, such dissent could be liquidated handily.

Personally, I have enormous respect for the French military of the pike-and-shot era through World War I. The severe fissures in French society of the interwar period had an enormous impact on the resulting collapse at Sedan (again). Communist-sympathetic workers and unions deliberately dragged their feet on helping France arm for the looming war with Nazi Germany. Throw in a lot of gloom, dark memories of the huge casualty lists from World War I, and a lot of defeatism at the top.

The Dardanelles (Gallipolli) Campaign highlights a never-ending dynamic of naval warfare. The British-French fleet very nearly breached the Bosporus and could have potentially pushed Turkey out of the Central Powers using 15 inch naval rifles. Unfortunately, the loss of a few capital ships during the breaching operation caused the senior admiral to call off the attack when it was very close to success. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese admiral had the American troop transports dead to rights, but broke off as he feared the loss of capital ships as the American escort carrier task forces threw everything they had at his battleships. Just recently, the US Navy was criticized for withdrawing the usual two fleet carriers that operated in the Persian (Arabian) Gulf. The civilian/politician criticism would be that if we can't risk these capital ships when it matters most, then we shouldn't build them in the first place. Coaches don't leave their Heisman Trophy winners on the sidelines in big games (except for Pete Carroll with Reggie Bush, but I digress).

The German "Great General Staff" considered a huge number of plans, conducting "staff rides" for the ones that might be applicable to a future conflict. I read the summary of "1901" on Amazon's website and have to dismiss it out of hand for a complete lack of basis in reality. I am willing to bet the Great General Staff did not conduct a staff ride regarding this plan to tackle the USA. Note that Alfred Thayer Mahan published his treatise on sea power around 1900 and pointed out how critical naval bases were for projecting sea power. Admiral Tirpitz embraced Mahan's concept of the "fleet in being" during World War One and it succeeded in tying down a huge portion of the Royal Navy. In the "Age of Coal," Germany's fleet was coal-fueled and built only to dispute control of the North Sea and English Channel. The German warship ("panzerschiffe") designers' emphasis on armor and compartmentalization meant their ships did not have the range to conduct a campaign against the US East Coast. Their lack of overseas coaling stations would have crippled their ability to seriously threaten the USA. A cursory skim of Conroy's other alternate histories indicates a lack of appreciation for the financial and logistical realities of warfare. The old saw is still true, "Amateurs study tactics, generals study logistics." Note that American Joint Planning Board simply triggered "War Plan Rainbow 5" even as the bombs were falling on Pearl Harbor. It was one of many, many plans that had been drawn up before full American participation in WWII ensued. Maybe an alternate history called "War Plan Gold" would be interesting - it was the Joint Planning Board's plan for a war against the French Empire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

It's hard to imagine the United States joining the Central Powers, particularly when one "follows the money." Courtesy of the Royal Navy blockade, Britain and France were huge, vigorous markets for all manner of American goods throughout World War One. Like the British considering whether to enter the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, the overseas power found itself mostly shut out from a market by a blockade. However, the loss of one trading partner was more than compensated for by the gains from maintaining the other. I believe the USA faced a much higher financial price for joining the Central Powers than for either remaining neutral or entering on the side of the Entente Powers. Alternate history is certainly an interesting field to me. One of my favorite books is "The Difference Engine," in which Charles Babbage's "difference engine" was a huge success leading to the Industrial Revolution combined with the Information Revolution through the middle decades of the 19th Century.