Why Timber Towers Are on the Rise in France - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/10/why-timber-towers-are-on-the-rise-in-france/544098/ <comment><USER2> Something I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned yet are the acoustics of a wooden building. Wood is less dense when compared to concrete and (at least in older buildings) there are significant air gaps between ceiling and floorboards of the floor above it. As anyone who's lived in an SF Victorian will tell you even regular walking can be perceived as loud by the person below. Before I'd consider living in a wooden building, I'd have to be convinced that the noise isolation would be sufficient. I wonder if it's been accounted for properly in these new buildings.

<comment><USER3> As someone living in a modern wood building I can tell you that this is really not a problem anymore. Our floors are filled with anhydrite, they are solid.

Only when the kids upstairs are _really_ wild you can hear their steps.

<comment><USER4> As someone living in a wooden house, I can say it's still problem.

Even walking barefooted upstairs can be heard from downstairs. Floorboards creak and make noise.

Only places that don't make this noise are the bathroom and kitchen, which have tiled concrete floors.

<comment><USER5> Creaking floorboards can be solved by attaching the floors more securely. Just screw them down. Usually it is caused by wood moving against nails.

<comment><USER6> Correct. Most squeaky wood floors and stairways, etc., were just assembled poorly and you can actually fix them _in situ_ with finish screws. I recommend the #8 GRK finish screws @ 2.5 inch length.

Either find your biggest (heaviest) friend to stand on the spot before you insert the screw OR find a way to jam the floor down from the ceiling. You lock the floorboard in place, fully compressed, and then seal it in place with the screw(s).

For new wooden floors, I highly recommend a layer of cork between the floorboards and subfloor for a variety of reasons ... insulation, noise, squeak avoidance, etc. I would not build a wooden floor without that layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The production of cement, one of the main ingredients in concrete, generates an estimated 5 percent of the world's carbon emissions. Trees, in contrast, capture CO2, helping offset emissions produced by a typical building process."

If I am reading this correctly it's the trees and not timber, laminated or otherwise, which capture CO2. So what kind of advantage does timber offer in form of CO2 emission? Specially considering the tree is now gone and this article doesn't cover if there is re-plantation - something like sow a 5 plants of each tree used for timber.

<comment><USER8> Timber is carbon that a tree has pulled from the atmosphere.

As long as it stays in a building, it's not going back in the atmosphere.

Planting trees and turning them into timber is a form of carbon sequestration. As long as it doesn't burn or decay...

<comment><USER9> It's interesting, you could say that trees grow out of the air, not the ground.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, most of the mass of a tree comes from the air. Even the water was in the air not so long ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps it's difficult to convey but I redid a lot of the interior of my current (brick and mortar) home from the 1930's myself and it really made me appreciate wood as a building material. Strong, very easily made into the required shape, easy to attach to each other, easy to attach other things to... I always felt wood was "how we used to do it"... not anymore.

Guess this place is a good as any to express my found love for the material.

<comment><USER6> "Guess this place is a good as any to express my found love for the material."

I agree with you but I would point out that the buildings and their "wood" materials that the article discusses are really not anything like what you worked with.

The article speaks about wood and trees and "timbers" but these building materials are engineered panels and timbers that, while in many cases _actually stronger_ than their "real wood" counterparts, do not have the aesthetics you remember.

I would go so far as to suggest that they are moving not from concrete to wood construction, but from concrete to _glue_ construction.

<comment><USER11> Ah, good clarification, indeed I mostly used pinewood for inside and Azobe and Meranti for outside (though some composite for the parts we walk on). But The pleasure was mostly from being able to drills holes and put screws in with a light cordless drill and saw it in the right shape either by hand or a light jig saw. It's carry-able and still very strong. I guess this also applies to the used composite materials your describe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wood is a very cool material! But I would be nervous living in a tall building made out of it, because of its flammability. Maybe if all the wood buildings also have sprinkler systems, that would offset the risks.

Our building is a concrete building about fourteen stories tall. The information we received as part of the lease tells us that it's known as a non-flammable building, and supposedly the safest thing to do if there is a fire on another floor is to shelter in place. I doubt the same would be true in any wood building.

Oh, and apparently the article also speaks to this:

> It's also this heft that helps make CLT fire-resistant: the outside layers > char slowly, protecting the wood inside from burning.

(More on that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUGNoTP0Nlc1O-EWf3d1m3QQ&...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUGNoTP0Nlc1O-EWf3d1m3QQ&time_continue=36&v=hRIPQ_q2iyY))

<comment><USER13> After that terrible fire in England I would recommend getting a 150-meter climbing rope, a harness and an aluminum "figure-eight" and learn how to repel as a means of escape in case the smoke became far too overwhelming. But that's just me. I live in a house.

<comment><USER14> I had an invention that could help many people escape from a building:

Magnetic strips on the side of the building, and backpacks with metal.

You put on the backpack and shimmy down. Just in case, you also strap yourself onto the slide by its sides, so as not to disconnect from it and fall off.

This is better than a rope because it can hold many people simultaneously.

Do the magnets wear out over time though?

<comment><USER15> Magnets are probably way too expensive. Especially as you could get same functionality with regular fire ladder.

<comment><USER14> How would you shimmy down the ladder?

But yes I suppose technically you can have rollers in vertical struts and have them roll down inside the rails, carrying the person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So how much of earth do we need to cover with forest to have a sustainable production for our buildings at a level that it actually matters? One building works, sure enough. But is it scalable to a level that it actually helps? I have my doubts.

Bringing awareness is still a good thing of course. Which is how I tend to see most of these projects.

<comment><USER17> If I did all my math/googling right, one acre of managed forest can produce about thirty square meters of the 20-inch-thick panels mentioned in the article per year. (A typical wood weighing 0.4 tons per square meter and a managed forest producing about 6 tons per acre per year.)

I'll guess it takes around four of those acre-year units to build one person's worth of an apartment building. (Thirty square meters is on the small side for an apartment, and apartments need walls, but they're also not going to be entirely constructed of the thickest panels.)

My home city of Seattle is growing at about 20k people per year, which (if we try to fit them all in wooden highrises) works out to 80k acres, which is roughly the size of the city itself. I feel like that'd be entirely reasonable.

It's also worth noting that this sequesters a rather appreciable amount of carbon (trees are half carbon, so about 240 kilotons per year).

<comment><USER18> Also, if we're considering ecological foot print, structural use of wood is near-permanent sequestering (ie. carbon-negative) which is better than most other uses of wood such as burning for fuel which is "only" carbon-neutral.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here are a few renderings of the "Arboretum" project that was mentioned in the article- [http://www.laisneroussel.com/fr/projects/55](http://www.laisneroussel.com/fr/projects/55)

</comment><comment><USER20> "Timber Towers" work for up to about 10-story building (depending on architecture, building technique). It's similar to brick and mortar buildings, only with the introduction of cement and steel we got the first high rise skyscrapers (1890s-1930s). Also fire-safety (30+ min fire resistance) is a problem with wood based buildings, the photos shows that at least the elevator and staircase shaft is made out of steel reinforced concrete. That said wood based buildings have a warmer in-house climate and other positive aspects.

</comment><comment><USER21> There is something bothersome to me about using all that wood only to cover it up. Concrete is ugly and wood is beautiful, in my opinion. I hope they leave a lot of the wood visible.

<comment><USER22> As a person replacing a 130 year old sill plate, cover up structural wood. Termites and water can destroy it.

<comment><USER23> If it's covered, how can you tell when there's damage?

We recently had seismic plywood shear walls installed in our soft story garage, holding up our 2 stories of living space. A previous owner actually had shear walls installed in 1992, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. But the '92 retrofit used the wrong grade of plywood, and used screws instead of nails. Screws have poor shear strength. The panels were basically useless for seismic safety and had to be replaced.

The 90-year-old redwood studs looked surprisingly pristine. But one of the studs had some kind of termite or fungal damage. The entire stud, top to bottom, basically disintegrated in your hands; but everything else was in perfect shape, including the sills. There were no outward signs of this at all --neither on the stud itself, on adjacent studs, nor the top or bottom sill plates. It was bizarre. And it would have gone totally unnoticed and maybe even spread, completely undetected, had the old panels not been removed.

The shear walls weren't the only things improperly installed. The 1992 foundation bolts didn't use adequately sized washers, so with enough movement the bolt heads would have ripped through the sill plate. Again, this was hidden behind the wall panels.

I grew up in Florida trailer parks. To me anything covered is hiding something --cockroaches, termites, substandard construction. Were there no need for the shear walls, I'd much prefer to have exposed studs and a completely exposed sill plate, at least in the garage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Concrete buildings can last for centuries. There are few wood buildings that last that long.

I would think something like aerocrete would also provide superior insulation.

</comment><comment><USER25> How is cutting down trees better for climate change? Don't we need more trees?

<comment><USER26> Think of trees as co2 batteries. They take in co2 to create wood then release it back when they burn or decay.

If you plant a tree farm and use the wood to create buildings you are effectively doing carbon sequestration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What about the risk of fire, as they had in Chicago and London etc.

<comment><USER27> Assuming you're talking about Grenfell, that was an old concrete building. The fire was so deadly due to improperly specced and/or installed exterior cladding which had recently been added; nothing to do with wood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is the clue and fire resistance safe to breathe though?

</comment><comment><USER29> It's rather stupid to worry about global warming here, as concrete use in France is less than 1% of what it is in China anyway.

</comment><comment><USER30> This trend towards large multi-story timber apartment buildings is worrying. That used to be prohibited in many US jurisdictions. Now I see San Jose and Redwood City putting up lots of these things. "Luxury apartments" made of chipboard. The fire protection people aren't happy about this.[1]

There's a fad for "podium buildings". The first two floors are steel and concrete, and then there are a few floors of wood. These appear in areas where you're not allowed wood construction for commercial buildings. The bottom floors are commercial; the upper floors are residential.

[1] [https://community.nfpa.org/community/nfpa- today/blog/2017/03...](https://community.nfpa.org/community/nfpa- today/blog/2017/03/21/recent-fires-in-apartment-buildings-under-construction- highlight-the-importance-of-developing-a-fire-safety-program-and-designating- a-fire-prevention-manager-during-construction)

<comment><USER31> Modern wood is much more fire resistant than concrete or steel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-3oEb8KUiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-3oEb8KUiQ) \- it's an imaginary myth, that wood is dangerous.

<comment><USER32> Wood constructed buildings are fire resistant. The article he linked discusses fires in buildings under construction recently. All wood is flammable, but insulation goes a long way.</comment></comment></comment>


Guy Films Space Shuttle Launch from Passing Airliner - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5036953/guy-films-space-shuttle-launch-from-passing-airliner <comment><USER2> Why is this making the rounds again? And on HN? It hasn't even been a month since the first time...

[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1165-space-shuttle- launch...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1165-space-shuttle-launch-as- seen-from-a-plane-air-canada-flight)

[http://www.reddit.com/comments/6tnti/space_shuttle_launch_vi...](http://www.reddit.com/comments/6tnti/space_shuttle_launch_view_from_commercial_flight/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Watch this with the sound turned off, and without the expectation of actually seeing much, since the guy filming this is annoying to listen to, he can't keep the camera pointing at the shuttle, and because of that, his camera cannot stay in focus...

I would absolutely _love_ to see an official video from a military plane where they can keep the camera actually focused on the shuttle the entire way up...

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a Delta 2, not the shuttle.

Relevant "It's on the Internet so it must be true" discussion at: [http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/08/todays_video_sh_1....](http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/08/todays_video_sh_1.html)</comment>


Starboard asks Yahoo to sell core business instead of Alibaba stake - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/19/us-yahoo-spinoff-idUSKCN0T81SQ20151119#1SutuTK8RB6WpWU7.97 <comment><USER2> Why should any company listen to "shareholders"?

Shareholders don't think long-term.

Shareholders prefer the immediate cash out gratification.

Warren Buffett does not listen to shareholders for the same reason. They are not thinking about the business.

Unfortunately, too many CEOs think the same way -- immediate cash out, screw the long-term growth.

<comment><USER3> The most basic answer is that the "shareholders" are the owners of the business. Shareholders do think "long-term" in the sense that they believe their capital could achieve better returns in other areas and hence the desire to "cash out".

<comment><USER2> They are welcome to sell their shares anytime. Being a shareholder does not mean that a shareholder runs the business. A shareholder can sell their shares or vote for a different board. That is it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure why either Starboard or the reporter thinks this is newsworthy. After you read the background, at the very end of the article you come to this little nugget of obviousity that every reader was waiting for: "Many analysts attribute little or no value to the business ..." Yeah, exactly. Yahoo!'s operating entity is totally and utterly worthless. No one would buy it. It's not even clear that you could construct a transaction in which Yahoo!'s current shareholders pay someone to take it off their hands.

The sad fact is that for most Yahoo! shareholders, the best deal on offer is going to be giving the US government 35% of the value of those foreign holdings and then selling their stock in what's left for $0. Starboard is just wriggling on the hook and looking for ways to avoid booking the inevitable massive loss on this holding. The IRS knows this and their private letter ruling denial is just them playing hardball. It's not right or fair, but if the IRS were a business partner, it's exactly what you'd expect.

<comment><USER5> Reuters cites no sources for the "little or no value." It could be made up from whole cloth. "Some people say" isn't journalism.

Starboard's own analysts assign a value around $2 billion.

<comment><USER6> That value could just be in assets, like hardware and office space. The Yahoo! product offering is what's worth "little or no value". They have 0 products that are number 1 in any market. They have no vision, no big projects, no R&D, and the only time I hear about Yahoo is when someone is wondering why they're still around.

<comment><USER7> Yahoo! makes actual money. Step away from the meaningless stats and realize being a top 5 global website for the last decade take execution beyond most 'unicorn' startups.

<comment><USER6> Sure they make money, but so do chinese knock-offs. That's what Yahoo is, a cheap rip-off of better internet services. They do search, but google is better. They do email, but outlook and gmail is better. They do ads, but facebook and google are better. They do news, but there's no money in that given the ridiculous number of companies in the news space.

Seriously, go to yahoo.com and try and figure out what this company is about. It's just a portal with all sorts of links to other garbage. It's a remnant of 90s internet. Yahoo tried to revamp their mail solution a year ago and their users threw a huge fit because "it's different and I don't like change!". That's the only thing keeping them running; a contingent of luddite users.

If Yahoo's users leave, they're done. You can't say the same for Google, they're now expanding into automobiles. And Facebook is moving into video games. These are companies with vision and an outlook for the future. Where is that for Yahoo? It's not enough just to make money any more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox's Condoleezza Rice advocating for warrantless NSA surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.drop-dropbox.com/surveillance.html

<comment><USER2> I deleted my account about a week ago. Some things, like google (mail, drive etc) are harder to drop but with so many cloud storage applications out there this was an easy choice.

appointing someone who advocates(or at least once did) warantless surveillance is certainly less overt than more direct cooperation and there are other organizations more strongly implicated in NSA surveillance. I don't feel like my cancellation will make a lick of difference nor do I feel like my citizen vigilance quota is filled up for the year. However it's one small thing I can do in under a minute.

<comment><USER3> Tough to find another email eh? Excuses for Google all day. Man up, admit you have no principles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like the most straight forward argument, and far more germane to Rice's role at Dropbox as a continuation of her role as National Security Adviser. There she was expected to provide independent advice to the President. Now she's expected to provide independent advice to the CEO and Board. The worry is she either got rolled by more strident hawks in the Bush Administration or went along willingly because she believed the arguments. Neither explanation encourages much faith in her role as an independent director at a company with lots of my data.

</comment><comment><USER5> According to 'dang, the original "drop Dropbox" story was the most-flagged submission in the entire HN database, by a factor of 3. This story is a mere subsidiary of that one. It's worth flagging as well. There are better places to advocate against Dropbox (which is banned for other reasons at my company) than on HN.

<comment><USER6> It was the most flagged submission, by a factor of 3, out of the most recent million posts. That probably true of the whole dataset as well, but I didn't have time to scan everything.

The current story was killed by user flags. We didn't touch it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I dropped them a couple days ago. Said "Rice." in the reason why box.

<comment><USER8> Mine was "I don't do business with torturers and murderers."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To be fair, this was almost a decade ago. Has she mentioned what her stance on this is today?

<comment><USER4> The problem is her APNSA position was central to the use and expansion of illegal methods that are still with us today in various capacities that we still don't have a full accounting of. Without Snowden, we'd have far less information.

Maybe she'll help Dropbox navigate those challenges to help protect the privacy of their users (black hat to white hat), but I'm dubious. She had a historic opportunity and went in the extreme other direction.

<comment><USER10> If she actually carries out her role with a primary responsibility to Dropbox, as such roles and business practices are currently defined, then her primary concern will be _liability_.

And in terms of corporate _liability_ with respect to extant surveillance practices, a consistent line of argument and arm-twisting has been to proffer immunity in return for cooperation. ("Give us the data, and you won't be liable, criminally nor civilly.")

So... I don't see her new role at Dropbox as particularly encouraging with respect to the privacy of Dropbox users' data. Her concern, per the above, will be to ensure that if and when Dropbox provides surveillance access, the corporation cannot be prosecuted nor sued for doing so.

If you want some context for this argument, just refer back to all the stink about telecommunications companies' liability/immunity that erupted particularly into the public dialog around 2007 - 2008. Look also at the deals that have been proposed for what access ISP's should be required to provide and what they would get in return. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It'd be sad if another tech company board member got run out of town. But I'll say that if dropbox didn't expect this reaction, they're foolish. They hired Rice for her political ties, so I'm slightly less sympathetic if the public judges her for her political ties.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems a little crazy. Just because someone who has different political views than me is on the board of a company whose product I use, doesn't mean I must support their political views. By that logic, I can never use a product made by a company who has a board member who doesn't have the same views as me.

And to the point that her political views will somehow cloud security at Dropbox: they probably brought her on to advise on how to deal with security requests by the government.

In any case, the idea that adding Rice to the board will somehow make Dropbox excitedly comply with all governments surveillance is preposterous.

</comment><comment><USER13> Original title of this submission "Dropbox's Condoleezza Rice advocating for warrantless NSA surveillance" is more than a little dishonest.

The article is talking about statements she made on TV in 2005. That is bad enough, I don't understand why you feel the need to make it seem like she is going to the White House today in a Dropbox t-shirt advocating for NSA surveillance.

<comment><USER14> It's not so much the statements as the fact that she specifically helped get bills passed that enabled warrantless wiretapping. There was no concern for Constitutional law.

Personally, I don't think people change much. I doubt she thinks she did the wrong thing, and would not hesitate to do it again if she went back in time.

<comment><USER15> And in case she happens to be a sociopath, as so many politicians are, she wouldn't even fully grok what "wrong" means in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand this decision. Dropbox in February (2014) was finally allowed use back in China, so my understanding is they're going hard for that market of over a billion people.

I wouldn't be surprised if China blocked them again due to this appointment.

<comment><USER17> I would guess that someone from the administration that did the most to unleash the surveillance state on Americans would be highly compatible with the Chinese government's view on the role of state security in the communications infrastructure.

Dropbox probably recruited her for her conservatism in this area, and for the prestige of her previous position. If she causes problems it would be because her prestige was dinged by backlash in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm no fan of warrantless surveillance, but this is a bit too much sensationalist thinking for hacker news no? The NSAs ability to look at your dropbox files has not been affected one way or the other by this appointment I'm sure. If you catch my drift.

To me the bigger issue for Dropbox is that it's a feature not a platform, which explains why they're having so much trouble entering new markets.

added: [wow, some pretty aggressive downvoting going on there, must have touched a nerve.]

</comment><comment><USER19> I have 15 people on Dropbox for Business, so it's not so straightforward to migrate off, but it'll be done before our renewal deadline. Mostly because of this. The $2.5k/y was just an annoyance, but this is a matter of principles now.

We're currently evaluating BitTorrentSync and Owncloud. Any opinions about their relative merits for a 15-strong team that's half distributed, half local, and using this as a "shared drive" of sorts, are welcome!

</comment><comment><USER20> Somehow I think this would be more effective if it was hosted off of people's dropbox accounts. Use their bandwidth and resources to show disapproval.

</comment><comment><USER21> Goodbye Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER3> First, Eich was taken down by crusading morons and now this? I don't agree with Eich's former donation (see how stupid that sounds when actually stated?), and I'm not a fan of Ms. Rice (oh noes, he's not a fan...) but no thanks, I'm passing on your political hate train.

</comment><comment><USER22> Honestly, I'm getting numb to the political witch hunts.

</comment><comment><USER23> I already dropped Dropbox. It's a done deal. I moved everything over to Yandex.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like a lot of privileged white males having trouble with a strong black woman.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the straw man. I'll pass on it, but you can go ahead and beat the crap out of it.

Now let's talk about the _real_ concerns regarding privacy and the encroach of politicians in Silicon Valley.</comment></comment>


4.4 billion-year-old crystal is oldest confirmed piece of Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/24/world/oldest-earth-fragment/ <comment><USER2> I just search a bit about Jack Hills. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hills](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hills) The last modified was last December. The actual paper [http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo20...](http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2075.html) was received last July but published on Fed 23, 2014. So it took a while to confirm and accept by the reviewers using the new technique.

And Jack Hills seems to have caught a lot of attention as early as 2006. [http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Zircon/](http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Zircon/) and in this article, 4.4B crystal was mentioned. So the actual paper we are reading today is really about using the new technique to confirm the age of the crystal.

 _" Among the first important discoveries, says Watson, came out in 2001."_

Just think about an art from 10, 50, 100, 1000, 5000 and 10,000 years ago. Then think about this 4.4B years ago. It isn't mind-blown; it's scary to think about time. It takes millions of years for rocks to crush into each other and make a planet. What is it like to see things from 4.4B ago? Then think about the galaxy out there. People, the universe is an awesome and scary place.

Here is another article with an image explaining the idea of 4.4B with a personal phone interview from the primary investigator.

[http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/gem-found-on- austr...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/gem-found-on-australian- sheep-ranch-is-the-oldest-known-piece-of-earth-scientists- find-20140224-hvdkd.html)

<comment><USER3> The almost incomprehensible age of the Earth was famously summarized thus:

"The reſult, therefore, of our preſent enquiry is, that we find no veſtige of a beginning,–no proſpect of an end."

— _Theory of the Earth_ , James Hutton, 1788

<comment><USER4> On a ſide note, we ſhould bring back the long S.

<comment><USER3> Yea, and alſo þe þorn! More seriously; it's a text from 1788 – I'd think I was allowed to keep its spelling and not translate or transliterate when I'm actually _quoting_ it verbatim.

<comment><USER4> It's fine, I understood what you were up to. In earnest, though, I'd rather see thorn and eth come back than long S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dumb question, would finding this just be pot luck, or did they have an idea of what they were looking at before they decided to subject it to the battery of tests?

<comment><USER6> Zircons are industrially useful as the primary ore for zirconium metal. If you keep it reasonably cool, like under red hot, it makes a great nuclear fuel rod protective cladding, assuming you refine out the hafnium which does little good in a fuel rod. Its also good for high temp ceramics, although too expensive for your fireplace, probably. If you get the metal red hot and dip it in water it does a fair impersonation of sodium being dumped in water at room temp. Unfortunately, recently, an extremely large demonstration of this effect was performed in Japan with predictable outcome.

Anyway there's lots of profit involved, leading to lots of geological research, leading to interesting discoveries.

<comment><USER7> Actually, there's a lot of research on zircons because they're useful for other research.

There are cases ("heavy mineral sands") where zircon is used as an ore, but essentially none of the research on zircons has anything to do with this.

Zircons have a number of nice properties:

1) They contain trace amounts of uranium and (initially) no trace amounts of lead. This allows them to be dated through U/Pb dating, which is relatively precise and is still accurate over _very_ long timescales.

2) They can undergo heating to very high temperatures without allowing lead to escape from the crystal lattice, resulting in the date being "reset". This allows dating of the original zircon grain even after the rock hosting it has gone metamorphism.

3) They're very durable physically and chemically. For this reason, they show up in sedimentary rocks and preserve a record of what was being eroded to produce the sedimentary rocks in question. Even when the sedimentary rocks have been changed into metamorphic rocks, the zircons are often preserved.

4) They're not very rare. Zircon isn't "main" rock forming mineral, but it's a not-too-uncommon accessory mineral in many igneous rocks (mostly in felsic magmas). Because zircons are so durable, they show up in sedimentary and metamorphic rocks sourced from the original igneous rock.

All of these reasons is why you'll see a lot of dating of zircons. They're somewhat common, durable, easy to date, and yield accurate results.

This leads to a lot of uses that you might not think of at first.

For example, if you want to know where (geographically) a given sedimentary rock was sourced from (i.e. what was eroded to form it), the most accurate way is to use the "age spectra" of the zircons within it. You basically disaggregate the rock, sort out the zircons (they're very dense), and date every single grain of zircon (and sometimes many zones on every grain). You take the distribution of ages that you get and compare it to the know ages of large igneous bodies that were likely to be exposed and eroding at the time. By matching the distributions (i.e. mixing models, etc), you can get an estimate of where sediment was being sourced from.

This may sound esoteric, but it's very useful for things like oil exploration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't everything on the earth this old? The dirt in our backyard has been around for 4.4 billion years too. Or is it that this crystal hasn't been changed in that long?

<comment><USER9> It solidified from the melt 4.4 billion years ago and hasn't remelted since.

<comment><USER10> Or otherwise changed. Metamorphism doesn't involve melting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In reference to the comments on this article, it really is quite a sad day when creationism is reduced to the single "6500 years" theory by those who beg for people to have a more comprehensive approach to the subject (Read: those on the "side of science".)

It's somewhat of a double-standard critique.

Can we all agree that there are a massive number of views on this, and the range between the views is quite a bit closer to continuous than absolute?

For instance, there are those of us creationists who believe in the story of creation as somewhat allegorical, a cultural way of explaining a complex series of events that originated from an intelligent design, possibly including a singularity, evolution, and whatever else might be considered the "anti-creationist" view.

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't everything on Earth as old? It's all the same material that was there when the Earth formed, except for a few meteoroids that dropped on it later during its lifetime.

<comment><USER13> The same atoms, but in different combinations and configurations. What's newsworthy here is that this chunk of atoms has been in the same configuration for 4.4 billion years, and that the configuration can tell us something about the history of earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> According to BBS Earth Biography series, half of all the water in the world came from a comet colliding to earth some 4 billion years ago.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article does not seem to touch upon the possibility that the crystal was of extra-terrestrial origin.

<comment><USER16> At that time, I think the distinction is a little more fuzzy. The entire planet was of extraterrestrial origin.</comment></comment>


To Ban or Not to Ban? That Is the Free Speech Question - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-launches-online-tool-report-bias-facebook-twitter-2019-5 <comment><AUTHOR> As is often the case, the problem is centralized platforms.

They have to both ban or not ban, depending on the nation's or city's mores, the particular government or its feelings.

Last year there was a similar issue, with different actors:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-launches- online-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-launches-online-tool- report-bias-facebook-twitter-2019-5)

Both problems can be resolved if we had smaller networks with fewer participants, like HN or a local township.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is awesome!</comment>


Windows 8.1's user-hostile backup story - <AUTHOR> http://www.edandersen.com/2013/09/15/windows-8-1s-user-hostile-backup-story/ <comment><USER2> @drivebyacct

I have given 8 a shot. You know what I've decided? That Microsoft's ideas on UI design are about as good as their ideas on advertising (i.e. head- scratching at best and migrane inducing at worst)

I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired. Yes, I know this can be disabled. The fact that it's on, and the default, is the problem. (If you're wondering what the problem is, it's that there's no difference from a "swipe" gesture and just moving your mouse from left to right across the pad)

Same with the whole start screen business which has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. Suffice to say, its information density is low, its disruption to whatever you're doing is high.

And then there's this Microsoft account malarky that they shove down your throat at every other turn. I 'm already using an OS which more likely than not has backdoors for the TLAs, made by a company that admits they give new vulnerabilities to said TLAs before fixing them. I am sure as _HELL_ not going to make logging onto my system reliant on some random cloud service!

Whatever tangible benefits 8 has over 7 do not at this point tilt the cost/benefit ratio enough in that direction for me to shell out the roughly ~$1000 it would cost to up(down?)grade my 7 enterprise infrastructure.

*ed

I really wish you'd get a real account that isn't dead. It's impossible to respond to you.

<comment><USER3> > I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop > trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching > applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired.

Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture. That was probably added by Synaptic, or the OEM of your laptop, and you should disable the gesture and probably let the OEM know that including that gesture was insane.

The rest of your complaints are, well, I think they're overstated, but I can't argue with how using the OS "feels" to someone. If you think it feels poorly done, me telling you your feelings are wrong is not going to get us anywhere. But at least factually, you should know that some of your assertions might be rooted in what OEMs have done to add crap to Windows 8.

<comment><USER4> Tested this on vanilla Win8. Swiping from "beyond" the right edge of the trackpad to ~1cm left from the right edge opens the Charms menu (same thing as Win+C shortcut or doing the same gesture on the touchscreen). Similar results (app switching) happen when swiping from the left edge.

This is a built-in Win8 feature, not a custom driver feature. The gesture recognition is quite decent though, so I've never had these gestures activate accidentally.

<comment><USER3> It sounded like the author was referring to a (very real) feature of Synaptic trackpads that performs app switching via the trackpad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 8.1 also heavily pushes logging on with a Microsoft Account. 8.0 had a small print option to use a local account but that is gone now and you have to submit a bad email/password combo 3 times before it gives in and lets you setup a local account.

I'll stick to a local account per machine thanks very much. Would rather not have MS holding the keys on whether I can logon to my own machine or not, nor give them free big data for onselling to marketers.

<comment><USER6> Not true. Total FUD.

you click create account, then select local account at the bottom.

Enterprise edition also doesn't prompt for a Microsoft account.

<comment><USER7> I installed the RTM x64 Pro version in a VM a few days ago and it did not have an option for local account. I had to Google around to find out how to bypass it. After installation, when you create additional accounts, it does give you the option to use local.

<comment><USER8> Just disconnect internet during installation.

(and under most cases during installing an OS, the internet is not avaliable)

<comment><USER7> You're right that this is a good option for people who care, but most won't bother. Windows 8.1 will have most drivers for ethernet and wireless cards which means that the majority of people will be connecting to the Internet before creating a user account. This is a very good strategy for Microsoft to maximize the number of Windows installations connected to their online services. A marketing or sales person would spin this around and say that it's good for users because they'll get to experience Windows connected to the cloud without having to jump through any hoops after installation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The really sad part is that at least somebody at Microsoft once knew how backup was supposed to work. Windows Home Server backed up every Windows machine in your house over the network to the central server. It was a bare metal recovery type differential backup, the backups were aged rationally, and the machines were woken up in the middle of the night to perform the backup, but laptops would only do this if they were plugged into AC so you wouldn't wake up a laptop in a suitcase and drain the battery and burn up the machine because it had no cooling airspace. It was pretty damn perfect (OK, a couple of minor issues), one of the best products Microsoft has ever produced.

So of course they screwed up the next version so bad that all the OEMs dropped their products that were based on it and Microsoft killed the product.

<comment><USER10> I was burned on more than one occasion by the "RAID" disk volume getting corrupted. As much as I liked Windows Home Server, I was really hoping the next release would have improved their drive volume manager, rather than just killing off the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I truly don't understand what MS finds so hard about backup. What people want is so simple and obvious - a separate copy of all their files, preferably their whole system image, somewhere else. And yet every version of Windows seems to screw around with it. I remember Vista came out and I thought a great way to migrate would be to do a full system backup and then I could restore back the personal files I wanted onto Vista. Nope - the backup system totally changed, the utiltity to restore files didn't even ship with Vista! I was left to manually use an old XP computer to extract and copy files across from my backup image.

Then Win7 came and I started using the backup option there. But even with the full drive image I didn't quite trust it, so I also made intermittent backups using Macrium Reflect which creates a low level image of each partition. So then came the day when my wife chose the "recover my pc" from the boot menu and wiped everything. "No problem!" I thought, I will just Google how to restore a full system image to bare metal. Imagine my shock to discover that this is not a feature of Windows backup. Unless you make a "recovery disk" using a CD (this computer did not have a CD drive), you cannot reinstall a full system image!? So I installed from the Macrium partition image and it delightfully brought back our system in a matter of minutes.

I've never been able to work out if this consistent incompetence is by design (to keep the industry of alternative backup solutions alive and avoid accusations of monoply / antitrust) or if they have some strategic or tactical reason to make sure noboby on windows manages to back up their computers (hey, 20% of all users who corrupt their hard drive just buy a new computer!)

Whatever the reason, it is exacty this sort of thing that is driving regular consumers away from Windows and into the arms of Apple. I hope MS figures it out, because I am not fond of Apple either.

</comment><comment><USER12> Random question: What would be a good backup option for Windows? Even Windows 7's backup option was often unusable, failing backups with strange errors or taking two days to complete so I'm not too sad to see it gone completely. I'm just missing a useful alternative. File History is nice for accidentally lost files, but for restoring a working state of the machine there are probably better options.

<comment> david-keepvault I work for KeepVault Online Backup and we've heard similar feedback from customers regarding Windows built-in backup solution.

Our software provides both local and cloud-based backup. If you only need local backup to an external, you can sign up for a free KeepVault trial account and use the local backup forever. KeepVault Pro also provides versioning, so a file corruption or deletion isn't going to wipe your backups.

KeepVault backups are also fully encrypted end-to-end and incremental.

[http://www.keepvault.com](http://www.keepvault.com)

<comment><USER12> For a purely local backup (I rsync my NAS to a datacenter myself) KeepVault seems unnecessarily complicated, as I have to get an account and I cannot seem to make a local backup to a network share/drive (I only see local drives in the selection).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am staying on 7 as long as I can. I get the impression that 7 is the new XP.

<comment><USER14> Windows 7 will be the last good "desktop OS" from Microsoft. They're going to completely kill the desktop mode in future versions, slowly but surely. They will turn it into DOS, where the desktop is but a fading "app", and will bury it deep inside the Metro mode. I'm almost certain they will do this.

There are rumors that with Windows 10 and beyond they will also try to turn Windows's license model into a _subscription model_ , which will completely kill Windows for just about any "regular consumer", and will turn it into a mostly enterprise OS, because only the enterprise customers will (probably) agree to that kind of model.

Consumers already believe Windows is "free" with their laptop purchase, and that they don't have to pay anything else after that. A subscription model will be a huge turn off for consumers, not matter how little it costs (even $1 per month).

We can only hope that before Windows 7 gets too long in the tooth, Ubuntu or some other multi-OEM OS (Android? Chrome OS?) will become popular enough in the mainstream, and mature enough, to make it a viable alternative five years down the road (I think they will be).

<comment><USER15> Unlikely. Metro software is extremely thin on the ground, and there's no indication that this is changing in the near term. Microsoft has a long, long history of goofball widget UIs (Active Desktop, Sidebar Gadgets, Metro, various Shell plugin technologies, and to a lesser extent MMC and control panel applets). Each in turn has had its moment in the sun before being marginalized or removed outright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't believe that Microsoft would be so irresponsible for propagating the myth that file mirroring is the same as file backup! What an absolute recipe for disaster.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yea this blog is wrong because they just removed the backup GUI. You can do a backup and image using powershell commands just like past Windows versions.

<comment><USER18> The GUI for system image is back in the final RTM version [http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-use- system-...](http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-use-system-image- backup) (also confirmed by multiple friends already on RTM)

<comment><AUTHOR> This doesn't automatically do it on a schedule.

<comment><USER18> Can't really comment as I'm still on 8.0. For me it's enough that it's still there and can be scheduled as a PowerShell command (for files history I use Crashplan anyway) but I agree that if this is the case, it's pretty much hostile for consumer users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How do they get away with including SkyDrive in the OS without having companies like Dropbox up in arms? Maybe that's why they're calling it backup, since backup is arguably part of an operating system and has existed (albeit in other forms) on previous versions of Windows.

<comment><USER20> How do Apple get away with including iCloud in the OS without having companies like Dropbox up in arms? And they do call it "sync".

<comment><USER21> Bigger thing is how iOS has only one browser that can be default and how other browsers can never be as powerful as Apple's. how is apple getting away with it, despite MS being punished for just installing a browser in their OS. Yeah MS is more of a monopoly in desktops, but Apple monopolizes iOS if we see it that way.

<comment><USER22> Every company "monopolizes" their own products - the problem for consumers begins when there's only one de facto product in a particular market (e.g. - desktop or smartphone OS). iOS is certainly not in that position in smartphone OS and it can be argued that Windows is no longer as dominant as it was during the antitrust trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dropbox allows you to recover past versions of files; does SkyDrive allow you to do the same?

<comment><USER24> Yes, this post is very misleading. SkyDrive features both a recycle bin for deleted files and a version history option to restore from a previous copy.

<comment><USER25> The version history option is only available for Office files (.docx, .xlsx etc.), plus even if it applied to all files a local backup can still be useful. Forcefully disabling local file history for SkyDrive simply doesn't make any sense... there's no technical reason for it, and it neither benefits the user nor Microsoft or anybody else.

<comment><USER26> Yep, I just tested with a simple txt file and the changes were not versioned. New modifications were made permanently without ability to go back to a prior version of the text file. It does support versioning for office docs as you stated though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is idiotic: Cloud _synchronisation_ is not backup. If you think that, you are a wally, despite the vendor's promises.

This is a new feature they have added that allows sync between devices. It doesn't stop any of the old ways of doing stuff from working other than windows backup which was a piece of shit that didn't work properly anyway.

Sync is always notoriously problematic at the best of times so YMMV always with that approach.

Realistically, most people just drag stuff to a USB stick periodically and that's good enough for backup. That's how it really works.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, I think I said it several times that SkyDrive is _not_ a backup system, despite MS trying to claim it is.

<comment><USER6> If you read their terms and conditions they say it's not a backup system as well.

People really need to read the SLAs etc.

<comment><USER16> I think you might have missed the point of what the author was saying. Check out the screenshot he posted:

[http://www.edandersen.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/image.p...](http://www.edandersen.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/image.png)

Notice it says that your files are "automatically backed up to the cloud"?

<comment><USER6> Yes i saw that. It's true, but its not a substitute for a backup setvice. If it was, they wouldn't have the discontinuation of service and disclaimers in their T&C.

<comment><USER27> But you can understand how people could confuse "automatically backed up" and 'automatic backup', right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I neither use skydrive nor windows backup, but the article had good point, saying skydrive is not a backup option on their terms and conditions to avoid legal problems, but then saying it will backup your files in the user interface, which one do you think people will see most? I like a software when it clearly says its purpose and don't confuse its users

</comment><comment><USER29> You want to back up your personal files, not your OS. How can an OS make backup user hostile? Write your files to several external disks that you keep in different places, and maybe some online service, and that's it.

</comment><comment><USER30> So.... spend 5 bucks a month and get a real backup service?

I get that it's underhanded for Microsoft to call this backup when it's just sync.... but honestly, for 99% of people, that's better than the nothing they have now.

<comment><USER31> Seems like plain old upsale, a little similar to Apple's pricing for extra storage on iCloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't bother with backups on Windows or Mac since I made the wise decision to backup every computer, Mac or PC using Crashplan to NAS and cloud.

I would have once been mad with this Microsoft feature removal. However, I've come to realize than neither Microsoft's or Apple's backup solutions satisfactory for my needs. Time machine is arguably better... until it decides to stop working. Since I've been on CrahPlan, no problems on any computer. I've had one laptop that shorted since then and it was easy enough to recover my files.

</comment><comment><USER33> Really, most Windows apps are bad at backup, and it's not Microsoft's fault. Even Thunderbird is bad at it - what's wrong with a menu item called "backup" and "restore"?

Most apps fail because they store crucial data in various undocumented directories, plus the system registry. Even worse, some like to store critical data in hidden directories.

Backing up an app and its data, and restoring, on Windows should be as simple as a single xcopy command.

</comment><comment><USER34> Did anyone else find it disturbing how the dialog box telling you about SkyDrive tries to hide the fact that you don't actually need to use it by make the "Don't Use SkyDrive" button not a button but clickable text? The vast majority of users will not even see the clickable text, and of those who do, they'll think it's not clickable, ensuring that millions of people will sign up for the service, even if they don't want it.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm going hold off on Windows 8 for as long as I can. For now I'm sticking with OS X and time machine.

</comment><comment><USER36> For those who've missed it: [http://prism-break.org/](http://prism-break.org/) has a few alternative OSes.

Personally, I've been on Ubuntu for about 8 years. I have never regretted it. But the more time passes, the less I regret it, if you know what I mean.

<comment><USER6> Yes, download a new OS and Tor. That'll surely protect the network layer between X and Y!!!

<comment><USER37> Are you smoking again?</comment></comment></comment>


Another death on trail to 'Magic Bus' from Into The Wild won't stop adventurers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.5228700/why-another-death-on-trail-to-magic-bus-from-into-the-wild-won-t-stop-adventurers-1.5228705 <comment><USER2> As I remember it, Into the Wild was a pretty clear suggestion that blindly trying to turn to nature with no background, experience and knowledge was a really easy way to die... even if he managed it for a few months.

So this seems particularly dumb if thats the inspiration

<comment><USER3> People seem to interpret it a few different ways. The idea of "checking out of society" really appeals to some and he's heroic for doing it. Fight Club has a similar, almost cultish, following.

<comment><USER2> I mean, both ideas exist in the movie; the idea itself was naive idealism and the lack of preparation gets him killed.. but what little time he had there was great.

The lesson: its a good idea, but don't run in unprepared, and don't think nature is without danger

The apparent takenaway: it's a good idea

<comment><USER4> It takes a long time to die of starvation. That can't have been a pleasant 4 months by any stretch of the imagination.

<comment><USER2> As I remember the film, it was death by poison mushroom, risked due to starvation — I feel like it was a death depicted over maybe two weeks. I remember the overall stay being quite bearable.. until the winter hit, and everything went wrong; and death came swiftly and without mercy

But regardless the movie depicts it as a fairly slow, very painful, and a fairly pathetic death (alone, weak, with lots of regret and little to show for it), but still 90% of the movie was him running around in gorgeous nature shots and small towns.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I believe (at least in the movie) it came from eating a type of poisonous berry that he naively mistook for a very similar-looking nonpoisonous berry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe the best way to stop it would be to embrace it. Build a tourist site and hand out postcards saying "I made it to the magic bus".

Give helicopter tours to rich people and exploit the irony of wanting to explore the isolation and wilderness, yet do the same as everyone else.

<comment><USER7> > Give helicopter tours to rich people

No, don't. Providing the most polluting form of transport to somewhere isolated and tranquil for profit, to allow the rich and lazy to get there in a day trip is disgusting. But hey they are rich, let them ruin it for others who made an effort to get there. The rich are what we should all aspire to as the ultimate form of success and happiness, right?

I find the constant hustle to find an angle to monetise something quite sad. Especially when aimed solely at the rich to the detriment of everyone else.

Why does everything need to be exploited? Sanitised? Made safe. You undertake something dangerous, then death is a possibility that is understood. Just accept it.

<comment> blaser-waffle > I find the constant hustle to find an angle to monetise something quite sad.

You realize you're on Hacker News, right?

<comment><USER8> Monetization of something as a goal to be the next billion dollar unicorn vs monetization of something useful as a lifestyle product are different paths that cater to a majority of people who frequent HN. But constant hustle to find an angle is another part of it. In some cases people find the next thing organically, and then you have others constantly trying to slam the square peg in a round hole. It seems as though the latter is more often focused on acquiring wealth to be rich rather than having a passion for a tangible product/solution.

<comment><USER9> _often focused on acquiring wealth to be rich rather than having a passion for a tangible product /solution_

There's nothing wrong with it. On the surface, what if someone has a passion which is unprofitable? Becoming rich is the way, and motivation to be able to practice it. And going deeper: having 'a passion' doesn't necessary make anyone a better person vs someone who just wants to give his/her kids a better start, and spend the last part of life being able to pay medical bills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is actually factually incorrect. He didn't die of starvation, he died of poison. He ate some seeds that contained a neurotoxin or something like that.

<comment><USER11> McCandless starved to death. _Why_ he starved to death is not settled (and probably never will be), and a poison which prevented his body from metabolizing food is one suspected contributing factor: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Death)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ironic that people who respect an independent spirit and trailblazer (or so they see him) think the best way to do so is follow in his footsteps.

<comment><USER13> When McCandless began his journey he didn't know the bus was there. He just picked a random direction and started walking. If you're intentionally walking towards the bus, you're following his literal footsteps but you're not replicating the same conditions. If you wanted to really follow in his footsteps you should pick an equally random direction and start walking. Odds are you won't find a bus and no one will ever find your body.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Recently in Ontario the Amber Alert system for forcibly alerting phones got booted up. It got me thinking about the use of technology for non-optional alerts.

What if phones were loaded with some basic geometry layers, so when your phone's GPS detects you're outside the polygon, it forcibly alerts you: YOU ARE OUTSIDE THE RANGE FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES. 911 AND EMERGENCY RESCUE NOT GUARANTEED."

I got thinking about this also because of how emergency services are often perceived as being some universal guarantee, taken for granted in the modern world. I wonder if people don't really grok that they're completely outside of the safety net they grew up in.

<comment><USER15> I like how your proposed alert notification is in capitalized letters and post hoc. "DUE TO RECENT LEGISLATION RESTRICTIONS ON CELL TOWER PERMITS IN WILDLIFE AREAS, AT&T HAS DETECTED THAT YOU ARE NO LONGER WITHIN OUR PLATINUM CELL TOWER COVERAGE AREA. YOU ARE NOW IN THE IMPENDING DEATH NO EMERGENCY SERVICE ZONE, GOODBYE."

<comment><USER14> That's how our amber alerts are presented. Alongside a forced max volume klaxxon. It's quite the spectacle when a whole room of people's phones go off at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did the bus get there?

<comment><USER17> It was towed there.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stampede_Trail#Bus_142](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stampede_Trail#Bus_142)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ">> Have you been to the bus? >> I have not. I've only been as far as the river. I went to the river to see it for myself when I was reporting on this whole pilgrimage phenomenon a few years ago and I watched a group of hikers cross that were headed to the bus and three of them were swept downstream and one of them almost drowned."

A reporter who can't figure out why people keep going to the bus sure had an easy time justifying why they themself went.

</comment><comment><USER19> I consider the bus a sacred spot for everyone who wanted to escape the world and find themselves. That said, at this point, it truly is a place you go at your own peril, and if you die it's no one's fault but your own. Death is sad, but the dangers are well known by this point.

</comment><comment><USER20> RIP

But to any other would-be followers, imagine completing your "wilderness" pilgrimage, only to find a couple of other groups already camping there.

</comment><comment><USER21> Move the bus to a museum in an accessible place and charge admission. Let a private company get the contract so it won't cost taxpayers.

</comment><comment><USER22> I swore I read there was a bridge not far from where he crossed?

<comment> nappy-doo Not quite a bridge, it was a cable with a carriage. I believe the carriage was chained on his side, but I don't know if it was locked.

<comment><USER23> IIRC, the guy who gave him a ride to the start of the trail tried to give him a map that would have showed the cable not far from where he tried to ford on his way back, but was prevented by high water.

McCandless had some idiotic notion that the map would degrade the purity of his experience of nature, or something like that, so he refused.

How ridiculous that someone who was a fan of the book would die trying to ford the same river at the same place that stopped McCandless. Did they not read that part of the book where Krakauer decribed the cable, or did they just not remember it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't see too much of an issue to be fair, experience comes from taking risks and surviving crises, not from staying home. And you take risks because you know people will help you if something bad happens.

Of course 2 trends are against it: the tribals who believe they are more legit than others to do the trek for some reason (like the hunters or locals), and the economists who believe taxes should pay for the army, not for rescuing citizen who had an accident, and that normal citizens who want to do that should pay an army of guides and sherpas who will iron out any issue. I don't subscribe to any of it, tribalism is a license to be an asshole, and guides tend to be only nice to wealthy clients.

<comment><USER25> Its volunteer firefighters who are responding to the calls for rescue.

>It's primarily volunteer firefighters that execute these rescues. And there have been numerous rescues.

Getting yourself knowingly in that danger, relying on people having to rescue you if it doesnt pan out seems rather shitty to me.

<comment><USER24> that's what hunters, miners, people lighting their fireplace or people driving their cars do all the time there.</comment></comment></comment>


Namecheap to Donate $1 to EFF for Every Domain Transfer on December 29th - <AUTHOR> https://www.namecheap.com/moveyourdomainday.aspx <comment><USER3> Namecheap is _really_ taking advantage of Godaddy's misstep. I say good for them! Godaddy deserves whatever is coming at them right now.

<comment><USER4> I was literally thinking the exact same thing.

GoDaddy is an already shady company, hopefully they take a big hit from this and change the way they do things.

<comment><USER5> Think bigger: hopefully they declare bankruptcy and no longer have the resources to participate in policy decisions.

They should be considered a Corporation Non-Grata.

<comment><USER6> Don't get ahead of yourself buddy.

GoDaddy is the largest and most wellknown registrar out there.

From all accounts, they've lost less since this began than they gain -in a single day-.

This isn't affecting their bottom line much at all, it's just affecting their image with the techie/hacker crowd.

A vital crowd to have a good image with, but their business is literally built on taking advantage of NON-hackers -- let's be honest, how many people here have ACTUALLY bought anything but a domain from GoDaddy, and MAYBE some cheap/crappy hosting?

<comment><USER7> If you look at this specific moment in time on Tuesday, no it hasn't effected their bottom line _yet_ , but company perception is everything and GoDaddy's company perception has gone from "gray area that some hate and some don't care about" directly into _the RED_.

Are any HN'er going to forget this for their next startup? Or their next contract? Or when their buddy asks them to register a domain for them?

No, we are all going to remember that as long as we don't use GoDaddy we will be fine.

That is going to cost GoDaddy a lot in the years to come. I don't think bankruptcy is around the corner, but I think we'll hear about some down sizing in a couple of years.

FWIW, I am thrilled to see the karma fairy show up and pay GoDaddy in full for years of garbage.

<comment><USER5> "Always" and "never" are particularly strong marketing words when uttered by word of mouth. Non-technical people can easily remember never to use GoDaddy, much more than "use any of these X registrars depending on what you need."

<comment><USER8> Nonsense, non-technical people will be swayed by some initial special offer, as always. This will all be forgotten about by February.

GoDaddy will just price themselves to be attractive to the vast majority, i.e. cheapskates. The 'elite' will probably also pile in by rationalising that this must be costing GoDaddy money, so by registering a domain with them they are actually costing them money.

Never underestimate the twin forces of "getting a good deal" and geeky self- deception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been with Namecheap for most of my domains for a couple years now. One of the surprisingly awesome extras:

 _Dynamic DNS_

No more need for DynDNS or another third-party DNS service for this simple but useful feature! Once enabled for a domain, you can simply use an update client to regularly update the IP Namecheap servers point to.

See Namecheap's knowledgebase articles to enable and use it: [http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/category.aspx...](http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/category.aspx/11/dynamic- dns)

Update clients:

ddclient (unixy) - <http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ddclient>

inadyn (unixy) - <http://www.inatech.eu/inadyn/>

Namecheap's DNS update client (Windows) - [http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...](http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/28/11/do- you-provide-any-dynamic-dns-clients)

<comment><USER10> I'm a big fan of their free e-mail forwarding and customer support (they got a domain back for me that I had let expire out of its grace period).

But, I'm surprised so many people tolerated godaddy for this long just because of their control panel. Every time I have to go in there and help a client/friend, I begin to feel like an idiot almost immediately. It's impossible to find anything intuitively and I feel like their design changes every few months.

Namecheaps panel isn't pretty by a long shot, but it's so clutter free I just don't care.

<comment><USER11> Not to defend them, but GoDaddy's iPad app is pretty good, and I use that rather than their control panel whenever I can. I am fed up with them for other reasons, so this comes at a good time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's nice, but it remains to be seen if this is not just cheap (no pun intended) exploitation of sentiments. Some registrars, such as Gandi have always supported various causes (such as EFF, Creative Commons, Debian, etc.). How much does Namecheap donate of regular domain registrations, etc.? What have they done in the past for digital rights?

Also, as some people said before. This attack on Godaddy maybe a godsent diversion for SOPA supporters.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand the notion that this is somehow a distraction to the real SOPA fight. Maybe I'm alone in this issue having heightened my knowledge, opposition and action against the bill?

<comment><USER14> Go Daddy is totally insignificant in the scheme of things. The list of SOPO supporters is very deep and monopolizes many industries. Can you work out an effective boycott of all major record and movie producers, all major television networks, publishers (Elsevier, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and various coalitions), pharmaceuticals and beauty products (Pfizer, PhRMA, L'Oreal, Revlon, etc), banking (Visa, MasterCard, American Bankers Association), sports (NFL, MLB), Apple, and Microsoft?

[http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/SOPA%20Su...](http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/SOPA%20Supporters.pdf)

Hurting Go Daddy over this is fine, but I suspect it is inconsequential to whether SOPA passes, and most of the key supporters aren't concerned about boycotts anyway.

<comment><USER13> The point isn't how significant GoDaddy is. The point isn't how much business damage GoDaddy is suffering, if any.

The point is about how much awareness this event is raising and how much of an impact it is having on encouraging people to do something (anything) to express opposition to the bill. One example: I had not seen SOPA on the nightly news until now.

I don't think this event has been or will be considered "inconsequential". There's a small chance it will be one of the more important events in the opposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've used NameCheap ever since I found out how horrid GoDaddy's service and slimy policies were. NameCheap has always answered my noob questions with haste, and I've never had any issues with them. I have no connections with them other than being a happy customer. If I didn't already have all my domains through them, I'd switch them over.

</comment><comment><USER16> I couldn't be bothered waiting. I've some domains due for renewal at the end of the year and decided to beat the holiday rush and just move then all over to namecheap.com.

I started the process yesterday afternoon. Still haven't seen anything on the GoDaddy side indicating any pending transfers. I imagine this sort of delay will only be worse come the 29th.

Update: just got a slew of form mail from namecheap. Apparently every EPP/authorization key code I entered, taken from the list generated by GoDaddy, is wrong. Now I have to re-do every transfer.

<comment><USER17> > Apparently every EPP/authorization key code I entered, taken from the list > generated by GoDaddy, is wrong. Now I have to re-do every transfer.

They sure have had a lot of funny accidents lately....

<comment><USER16> It _may_ be that I entered the domain and EPP info into the namechaep form with some spaces (foo.com, x$fo!ss) and the namecheap form code was too clueless to realize that no EPP code is going to start with a space.

I also discovered that I cannot automatically transfer azhackers.com, apparently because it triggers some "bad, evil, we don't like it" domain name filter.

Are they really that upset with Arizona? :)

<comment><USER18> I transfer domains regularly between registrars because the transfer costs tend to be cheaper than the renewal costs. I've noticed that the last character of EPP values tend to be minor punctuation ([,.] etc.), which is ignored whenever I double-click to copy & paste.

I'd be certain this is intentional since those characters are ALWAYS (20+ domains transferred over a period of months) at the end of the code, although I cannot fathom the purpose since at that point you've already paid for the transfer and aren't going to give up the money you just spent.

Anybody know WTF the registrars are playing at?

<comment><USER16> _I've noticed that the last character of EPP values tend to be minor punctuation ([,.] etc.), which is ignored whenever I double-click to copy & paste._

I took the CSV exported from GoDaddy, striped it down to multiple lines of

domain, EPP domain, EPP domain, EPP ..

and pasted that in.

That failed.

When I removed the space between the comma and the first character of the EPP key, it worked (so far for the few I retried).

My guess is that the space confused the form parsing code. Or maybe it was just a glitch.

In any event, I've been now moving domains successfully, and in the morning I'll be re-trying the bulk of the remaining names.

BTW, in my initial retry attempt I noticed that some domains were being flagged as not transferable, something I didn't catch when i attempted to moe 30 names at once.

One name was "questionable", two others were too close to the expiration date. I got in touch with Namecheap support and they arranged to get these names transfered as well.

And once all the ducks were in a row I've been getting pretty quick turnaround times from both namecheap and GoDaddy.

So, so far so good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This incident will in a public relations textbook as a case study in ten years.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just keep in mind if you transfer to NameCheap - make sure you are happy with their full price for renewals - because you will NEVER get a discount for renewing. They only give new transfers in special pricing.

Ironically you'll be able to transfer back to GoDaddy in a year when they make some kind of "come back to us" offer for a few dollars to transfer in.

<comment><USER13> Namecheap's posted renewal rate is less than GoDaddy's. Does GoDaddy discount on renewals? Other registrars?

<comment><USER21> Coupons for GoDaddy renewals are generally available if you check RetailMeNot.com or other such sites. The codes tend to change every month/quarter, but I don't think I've ever renewed with them for more than ~$9.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone explain why would one want to transfer a domain from one US-based registrar to another given that all recent domain-related issues are US- centered?

<comment><USER23> Your choice of registrar is completely irrelevant; the registry itself is in the US (Verisign), and the government goes straight to the registry. Unless you plan to abandon the .com/.net/etc extensions, you're under US jurisdiction even if you register the domain in another country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They are being very careful not to mention any specific domain registrars. I wonder who they are talking about...

</comment><comment><USER25> I just transferred 20 general TLDs from GoDaddy to Namecheap. I did so based on the positive reviews here on HN, but also because Namecheap has been very verbal during this SOPA ordeal. The SOPAsucks coupon was a nice perk. Too bad Namecheap doesn't do transfers for ccTLDs like .nl and .es.

Can anyone suggest a good, affordable registrar with broad ccTLD support and a decent mobile site/app? Preferably an independent company with phone support in the US. (I looked into Hover, but they're owned by Tucows. I also looked into Gandi, but they're based in France.)

</comment><comment><USER26> I wish you could just give namecheap your GoDaddy credentials and have them move your domains properly for you. I am definitely not looking forward to figuring out GoDaddy's UI for all my domains.

<comment><USER27> This handy guide should help you through GoDaddy's maze of a UI. [http://blog.jeffepstein.me/post/14629857835/a-step-by- step-g...](http://blog.jeffepstein.me/post/14629857835/a-step-by-step-guide- to-transfer-domains-out-of-godaddy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd like to switch to !GoDaddy, and Namecheap seems popular. Are there any useful pro/cons I should know about Namecheap before switching?

<comment><USER5> One con is that unlike Joker and Gandi (and surely others), Namecheap is located in Los Angeles, CA and is therefore subject to US court judgements, US Internet policy, and US privacy laws (or lack thereof).

<comment><USER29> Isn't part of the whole current kerfuffle that the DoJ considers _any_ Verisign tld under US jurisdiction?

<comment><USER17> And wants a Great Firewall of America to block the sites which aren't under our jurisdiction....

<comment><USER5> Sure, but why make it easy for them and keep the domains under US jurisdiction where they don't even have to go to GFA lengths? Why keep your domain in a country with poor-to-nonexistent privacy laws?

<comment><USER17> No argument here! Just pointing out that they've got that covered, even if they obviously haven't thought it through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised no other registrars seem to have jumped on this in quite the way NameCheap have. Is it that they feel too small to take the risk of rocking the boat?

<comment><USER31> Speaking only for myself, there's only a certain amount of opportunism that I'm comfortable with in piling on when a competitor stumbles, especially when it is rooted in politics.

For example, Tucows does a ton of great work to support various causes and we've always (at least as long as I can remember) supported the development of the Open Internet but we've never had a huge animal rights component to our activism, so we didn't feel right adopting an elephant rescue charity for our giving. A few other registrars did, but it just felt weird for us to change our stripes for PR & marketing purposes.

Same dynamics at work with this issue (and it is much more of an issue than it is an opportunity). We do a lot of work with a lot of organizations that oppose SOPA and PIPA and similarly stupid bits of law that might destroy or inappropriately restrain the Internet commons and we're going to continue to do that, but to buddy up to the EFF and promise donations based on business volumes just isn't something we're comfortable with. We think our activism can be expressed much more productively.

We're continuing to talk about what works best for us and our customers while staying true to our values and we may or may not stay our current course - <USER2> is always a live issue, but as one of the largest registrars, I can definitely say that it isn't a case of being too small or not wanting to rock the boat. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> And as a bonus they get to stress test their servers ;-)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd like to point out that name.com (my current registrar) has been an EFF donor for some time already -- but I don't know to what extent.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why doesn't NameCheap donate a $1 for every domain moved since 12/22 or last week when all the SOPA issues with Godaddy were presented?

</comment><comment><USER35> I transfered from Namecheap to SpeedySparrow a couple of months ago.

Just consolidating vendors (domain and hosting) to simplify management.

</comment><comment><USER36> A similar initiative: fightsopa.org will donate 5$ to EFF for each developer solving one coding puzzle

</comment><comment><USER37> I recall reading that namecheap stores passwords in plaintext? I'd be interested if this was refuted. In any case, I'd be a bit wary to go along with the bandwagon to this particular registrar without further investigation.

<comment><USER38> I believe its Hover that you're remembering.

[http://help.hover.com/2011/07/07/hover-secures-passwords- wit...](http://help.hover.com/2011/07/07/hover-secures-passwords-with-bcrypt- and-enhances-usability-with-identity-verification-tools/)

<comment><USER31> That article is horribly outdated. Hover does not store passwords in plaintext.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> <http://byebyegodaddy.com> now points to <http://namecheap.com></comment>


Code Red: How software companies could screw up Obama's health care reform. - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.longman.html

<comment><USER2> This article is riddled with errors; apparently Philip Longman and his editor didn't bother to do even basic fact checking.

1\. IBM has not even remotely abandoned its propriety software business model. They contribute to numerous open-source projects, but most of their products are still proprietary closed source (some with quite high prices).

2\. Regarding CCHIT, less than a third of work group volunteers work for vendors (I am one of those few). The majority of participants work for health care provider organizations, and a lot of them are actually physicians. All of the member lists are available on the web site. <http://www.cchit.org/participate> While some stakeholders would have liked to see much more strict and comprehensive certification requirements, that would have been pointless since no one would have been able to pass. The approach CCHIT is taking is to gradually ratchet up the requirements in each new certification cycle. The next round of EHR certification will at least include some usability testing.

3\. VistA is a nice product in some ways, but since it was designed specifically for use in the VA it doesn't necessarily integrate well into other environments. <http://www.va.gov/VISTA_MONOGRAPH/> It's open source so in theory it can be be customized but consultants capable of actually doing that don't come cheap. So proprietary, closed-source solutions often end up being cheaper and delivering superior functionality. Furthermore, VistA is a client / server application whereas the modern trend is toward web applications.

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife works in a hospital, and hates Cerner. That's one more datapoint.

But it's absurd to say that pursuing open-source models would improve this. Whether the software is open or proprietary, the real barrier to what the author writes about is that hospital IT departments aren't up to the job. It seems that generally, hospital IT is little more than Help Desk and report builders. They can set up a new desktop PC or backup the server. They can write some reports or export data for financial modeling.

But actually developing the hugely-complex hospital management systems, with medical records, billing, etc., all integrated together, is beyond the means of any hospital IT department I've ever heard of.

So pursuing the author's ideas really has a prerequisite of changing the mindset of healthcare IT, tranforming the from helpdesk-related jobs into full-fledged developers.

<comment><USER4> "But it's absurd to say that pursuing open-source models would improve this. Whether the software is open or proprietary, the real barrier to what the author writes about is that hospital IT departments aren't up to the job."

That's also where I differ with the author; I have yet to see any evidence that open-source software could ever be up to the task.

In this case, relying on the kindness of strangers simply won't get the job done, since unless developers are doing this work for a living, odds are they won't be interested.

So as a hospital modernizing its IT system, you'd need to get a good development team to do it, and whether or not the end product is open source is irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I think this title is a bit misleading, the author is talking about attempts to reform and modernize healthcare-related IT; not overall healthcare and health insurance reform.

<comment><USER5> I don't - it doesn't carry an implication of malice for me, but rather an all- too-believable one of gargantuan cost overruns and subsequent recrimination and backbiting. I see the distinction you're making but the reform is heavily predicated on government's ability to deliver massive productivity savings by mandating a new information infrastructure for healthcare.

I have friends and relatives who hold very senior administrative positions in both private and public (European) healthcare, respectively. It's not going to be easy to computerize, and I am quite worried about the long term implications for the US economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Perversely, license agreements usually bar users of proprietary health IT systems from reporting dangerous bugs to other health care facilities. In open-source systems, users learn from each other's mistakes; in proprietary ones, they're not even allowed to mention them._

I knew EULA's could be bad, but they can _kill people_? Dammit, where'd I put that tinfoil hat?

<comment><USER5> Well, lost productivity in a medical context all too often equals mortality. From what I've heard (and I've heard a lot from inside this industry), the author isn't exaggerating in the least.

<comment><USER6> Oh... Sorry that seems to have come off wrong. I wasn't trying to mock the author for hyperbole. I believe in this case, hyperbole is nearly impossible.

The sheer immoral absurdity of a licensing agreement that forces you to keep it a secret if the system causes someone's _death_ smacks of conspiracy so diabolical that a tin foil hat might actually be required.

Its so far beyond funny that is past sad and almost to funny again, with a sardonic sigh at the end.

<comment><USER7> But it is nothing to do with the software. From the article:

 _For instance, it prompted doctors to follow guidelines for preventing infection when dressing wounds or inserting IVs, which in turn caused infection rates to fall by 88 percent._

Trained doctors need a computer to prompt them to "follow guidelines for preventing infection"? Apparently so... In that context, _any_ software is better than none.

<comment><USER5> For the same reason trained pilots use checklists before takeoff. I doesn't mean they're less good. When you're optimized to focus on high level problems, it tends to be the trivia which cause you to trip up. You might as well ask why programmers have this dependence on editors to do syntax highlighting and automatic indenting - "can they code or not? What can't they be happy with notepad?!"

Even in surgery, it turns out to be useful to do things like attach labels saying 'operate on this leg (or...)'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia predicts 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014#Date_unknown

<comment><USER2> The article linked suggesting that Moore's law will become redundant this year ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014#cite_note-2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014#cite_note-2)) was published in 2009. Is this still thought to be true?</comment>


Uber for planes isn't happening - <AUTHOR> http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2015/12/21/uber-for-planes-sharing-economy-startup-denied-by-court-faa/ <comment><USER2> I hate to say it, but as a pilot myself, I'm glad the FAA is doing this. Unregulated ride sharing in general aviation is not a good idea. There's just too many ways expectations can be mismanaged or things can go wrong.</comment>


ESR on autism, genius, and the power of obliviousness - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060 <comment><AUTHOR> > Yes, there is an enabling superpower that autists have through damage and > accident, but non-autists like me have to cultivate: not giving a shit about > monkey social rituals.

> Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and > status-maintainance activity. They have great difficulty sustaining interest > in anything that won't yield a near-immediate social reward. By an autist's > standards (or mine) they're almost always running in a hamster wheel as fast > as they can, not getting anywhere.

> The neurotypical human mind is designed to compete at this monkey status > grind and has zero or only a vanishingly small amount of bandwidth to spare > for anything else. Autists escape this trap by lacking the circuitry > required to fully solve the other-minds problem; thus, even if their total > processing capacity is average or subnormal, they have a lot more of it to > spend on what neurotypicals interpret as weird savant talents.

<comment><USER2> As is often the case, I agree with the _how_ , but not necessarily with the _why_. This is a nit I'm picking but I'm in a write-lots-of-words-because-why- not mood.

It seems accurate, also looking at myself, that there are many benefits to the fact that I don't care so much about status and the like, and instead spend that time on long-term obsessions and interests (which might well be two separate 'characteristics').

What strikes me as less accurate is that this is _caused_ by lacking circuitry. Perhaps 'different circuitry' is a better way of putting it. Whether this difference is deemed 'defective' is a matter of perspective.

The reason why I prefer 'different' is that based on my own experience (and that of others), I do not lack in empathy. In fact, affective empathy is probably stronger in me than with others. The reason why I often fail at cognitive empathy, or why I need a lot of time to process and analyze a situation to come to the right conclusion, is because my circuitry as a whole seems to work a bit differently, so I come to the wrong conclusions if I apply my own type of empathy.

A friend of mine is also mildly autistic. To outsiders, we might seem to constantly talk over each other, be rude and critical, not show affection, and generally lack in empathy.

But between us, the rudeness is perfectly acceptable, the criticism is fine if we think it makes sense, the lack of physical affection is pleasant (or just irrelevant), and while we might not _seem_ to take in the mutual info-dumps, we generally will store it and refer to it later.

Furthermore, we most definitely show our own forms of empathy to each other! Letting each other finish info-dumps that are not particularly interesting is one of those things. We both don't ultimately care if the other is interested, half the joy is just structuring verbally. And we know this about each other. Plenty of other-mind thinking, I'd say. And if one or both of us has/have an 'autistic meltdown', we usually quickly move on because we understand that in such moments we say and do things we don't mean to do - we are just in panic mode. We might have a long theoretical conversation about it though while hiding the fact that we are probably going to need some time to recover emotionally (but ideally by ourselves).

And if we're being overly abstract and theoretical, somehow we often know about each other when to stop and ask 'dude, is there some reason you are so obsessed about this topic?', then talk about the thing that's going on, and then both happily jump back to abstractions or gaming.</comment></comment>


OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - <AUTHOR> https://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabotage.html <comment><USER2> My grandmother had to work in factories under the Nazis toward the end of WWII, and anyone doing this sort of thing would have been taken outside and shot.

She says they were told not to work too slow, because that was sabotage, and not too fast, because that was bad for the morale of the others. Her main problems were with the POW workers (slaves), who tried to kill all the Germans they could. Several times, heavy weights were dropped off railings just above her, etc.

<comment><USER3> You've been voted up for a post that is ambiguous in its asertion. What did your grandmother do? How old was she at the time?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what's ambiguous. Certainly I'm generalizing ("anyone") from an anecdote; I'm not trying to make a rock-solid historical claim.

I think most of her factory work was making shells. She was born in 1921; this would presumably been in 1943-45 or so.

<comment><USER3> What I meant say was it isn't clear to me if she was a worker or ran the factory.

<comment><USER2> Oh! Just a worker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I were the OSS I would have written up this section of the booklet and then leaked it directly to the enemy at all possible levels. What better way to cause chaos among the German bureaucracy than to spread paranoia that anyone engaged in normal bureaucratic dithering, patriotic speechifying or bad handwriting might actually be a saboteur?

<comment> onreact-com In Nazi Germany everybody, like in other fascists dictatorships, was suspicious anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, so Dilbert is really about CIA conspiracy!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to read something interesting regarding sponsored subversion, I recommend 'Legacy of Ashes' by Tim Weiner. Fantastic hacks and incredible, yet true and widely uncredited events in US and world history executed by the OSS and CIA.

</comment><comment><USER6> (12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion

 _(e) Act stupid._

-clearly why we won the war

<comment><USER7> Which one and who is we ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This, incidentally, reads like a business how-not-to.

<comment><USER9> But also like a "how it is really done..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could be partly the little bureaucrats guide to heaven.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to, expedite decisions._

Ahahaha.

Post-war and enduringly postmillenial corporate America, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER12> At first I thought this was the training manual of French Administration personal...

</comment><comment><USER13> is this for real?

<comment><USER14> The PDF certainly seems authentic to me. The language and technology seems correct for the period. I was surprised that some of the units were mixed standard/metric, such as "75-100 grams for each 10 gallons of gasoline".

<comment><USER15> You meant mix of standard and imperial units? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this is the playbook that the GOP in congress is playing by.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's comical how much this sounds like some peoples' workplaces.

</comment><comment><USER18> a.k.a "Politics & Economics - The Missing Manual"

I'll be keeping this as a HOW-NOT-TO reference.

</comment><comment><USER19> For people like me, who get a Firefox security error message, try the links without the s in https:

[http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabota...](http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabotage.html)

<comment><USER9> Lol...

39a) All web necessary pages must established on secure servers with custom certs not recognized by any browser...

</comment></comment><comment> onreact-com "svn.cacert.org uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is not trusted."</comment>


Needed: A Tool To Help You Pay Attention to What You Are Paying Attention To - <AUTHOR> http://www.wordyard.com/2008/07/28/informational-self-audit/

<comment><USER2> <http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679></comment>


Ask HN: What can I do to make my web activity private? - <AUTHOR>

As a British citizen, I'm quite worried about the Snooper's Charter act becoming law so I want to start protecting my data.<p>Can HN recommend any resources that will help me accomplish this? <comment><USER2> For private browsing check out Tor: [https://www.torproject.org/](https://www.torproject.org/)

If you want to dive deeper then there is Tails: [https://tails.boum.org/](https://tails.boum.org/) \- an OS which is designed with privacy in mind.

[https://prism-break.org/en/](https://prism-break.org/en/) has a lots of links to various tools be they operating systems, messengers, browsers etc.

None of these tools are a silver bullet - most require some level of effort or perseverance to use and none of them will protect you against every attack imaginable. However, they will make it more expensive for an adversary to target you.

</comment><comment><USER3> not at all an expert but one of the first step might be getting a good VPN and TOR Browser.</comment>