The button that isn't - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/12/15/button-isnt/ <comment><USER2> The soviet setup for launch control is similar to the US - decentralised, manual actions all over the place to make it happen.

Visited a soviet silo just outside of Pervomais'k, Ukraine (thoroughly recommend a visit if you find yourself in that neck of the woods, you can sit atop a Satan missile and wave your cowboy hat until a burly Ukrainian tells you to get off before he shoots you) - it's a two-key system, with two buttons, on opposite sides of, well, a really tiny room. While one could reach both buttons and keys simultaneously, the idea was that the keys would be carried by separate people - however in practice, they both hung from a peg on the back of the chair, meaning that someone could have theoretically initiated a launch singlehandedly. Theoretically, because the other fun fact revealed was that most of the time they were nothing like launch ready, and perennially struggled with equipment failure.

Oh, and don't forget that the super-secret launch code for minuteman missiles across the US was... uh, 00000000, for several decades.

<comment><USER3> >Oh, and don't forget that the super-secret launch code for minuteman missiles across the US was... uh, 00000000, for several decades.

I believe this was the combination to the locks on the launch bunker access doors, not the actual launch codes.

Either way-- laughable security for the military's crown jewels.

<comment><USER4> > Either way-- laughable security for the military's crown jewels.

The military would disagree. The all-zeros combination code was chosen on purpose because it was felt that having a code at all was a reduction in security since the code revelation procedure became a single point of failure. These aspects of the nuclear security system were designed by politicians, and weren't exactly the best of ideas, so the military did what they needed to comply with the law but keep the nuclear arsenal secure _and_ available.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, the military felt strongly that it was reasonable to increase the chance of causing Armageddon by accident, in order to hold sacrosanct their ability to cause Armageddon on purpose, and resented attempts to reverse that equation.

It's weird how you say that like it was wise instead of horrifically insane, though.

<comment><USER6> They generally had great trust in their people, and didn't think the risk of someone deliberately disobeying orders and using a nuclear weapon was high. Meanwhile, they believed that the Soviets were looking for an opportunity to strike, and that the best and only realistic way to prevent a Soviet strike was to present them with certain devastating retaliation. They never planned to _cause_ Armageddon, only have the capability to respond to the other guy causing it in such a way that they'd never want to cause it.

The scary thing about the Cold War was that the participants generally had the best of intentions (aside from a few people like Curtis LeMay, and they never really got presented with the opportunity to express their evil side) but disaster could have easily happened anyway, purely by accident.

And I really shouldn't put this in the past tense. All of this stuff is still there. We all seem to have just decided to collectively pretend that MAD went away when the USSR dissolved, even though there are still thousands of missiles and nuclear warheads ready to wreck civilization at a moment's notice.

<comment><USER7> > And I really shouldn't put this in the past tense. All of this stuff is > still there. We all seem to have just decided to collectively pretend that > MAD went away when the USSR dissolved, even though there are still thousands > of missiles and nuclear warheads ready to wreck civilization at a moment's > notice.

Fully agreed. There seems to be this weird mode of thinking for most people 'I choose to ignore the bad stuff so that I am happier'. But the end result here might be exactly the opposite, the worst case.

For example, it is scary how lightheartedly people talk about 'war with Russia' in context of the current Ukraine crisis. Regardless on what political side one is, avoiding direct confrontation of nuclear powers should be the main concern.

Rather than all the talk and fuss and whatnot about more-or-less meaningful social justice causes, I would rather like to see a movement to put nuclear weapons into 'cold storage' and a verified international protocol to continuously check that they are there.

Seeing that it is unrealistic to have full disarmament, this would at least greatly reduce the risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of a large particle physics experiment I worked on. One of the detectors had a critical flaw, IIRC the output voltage of the detector modules was proportional to the number of particles passing through it. At every readout, it was reset to 0. Now, if you didn't read out the modules often enough (every few seconds), they would fry themselves. The problem wasn't noticed until the readout system crashed and a couple of modules were destroyed.

When the bug was presented in a meeting, there was one guy who insisted that we install a big red button to shutdown the system. There was even discussion on whether it should have a little lid or not. When that guy left the meeting early, they briefly considered to install a fake button.

In the end, what happened is that they built a "heartbeat" system that just zeros out the modules every second or so. The information in the modules is lost, but since there are millions of collisions each second, this had virtually no impact on data taking. But it prevented damage when the readout system crashed again.

They also made a little GUI in the control room showing a beating heart probably just to calm people down :-).

<comment><USER9> Interesting. I've observed at a number of telescopes and they all have a big red STOP button that will shut down the telescope immediately. I've only had to use it once. The telescope was poorly designed and it was possible to run it into its hard limit (you could basically run it into the ground). If you do that you have to stop it because the tracking motors will continue to try to drive the telescope into the ground.

The only exception was the Large Binocular Telescope, which is one of the largest telescopes around (even the largest, depending on how you define it). But there a lot more thought was put into the design so you wouldn't be able to run the telescope into the ground even if you tried. (It also helps that they have a dedicated night assistant whose job it is to point the telescope and make sure that the observers don't do anything stupid.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am reminded of the opening scene in War Games, when the two officers both need to perform a specific series of actions together to launch the missile. It gave an excellent perspective on not only what was probably the actual process, but the ethical dilemma of one of the officers.

And then there is the heretical "G.I. Joe: Retaliation", where all the world leaders are in one room with their breifcases containing big red buttons.

<comment><USER11> Funny you mention Wargames. That scene was probably the only realistic scene in the movie. They got that suspiciously good. The one before it, where he arrives at the LCF and it's a disguised farmhouse was idiotic.

<comment><USER12> In England we have defense facilities disguised as farmhouses. We don't have land-based missiles but this [0] is/was a government bunker from which launch orders could be given. I wondered if you meant idiotic in the sense of unrealistic for America, or as a bad idea tactically?

[0][http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/](http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/)

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I meant the US ones are nothing like that. It was totally inaccurate. In the USA, all the farmers/ranchers know where the stuff is.

"Excuse me, we're looking for Sierra 7." "Yeah, it's down this road for a mile, then left on 127."

And the Soviets wouldn't have been fooled either. So they look like military installations.

<comment><USER4> It's not about hiding the facilities from locals, it's about hiding them from satellites. Or at least providing enough uncertainty that the enemy doesn't know for certain how many or which installations are where.

More morbidly, in a first strike scenario you want the enemy to waste nukes on actual farmhouses it couldn't tell for certain were launch facilities or not. Then even if no facilities are missed (something you would be hoping for), that's still fewer nukes to be dropped on cities and conventional military installations.

<comment><USER11> Whatever the reasoning, the USAF didn't do the farmhouse thing. We did the big fence, nasty signs, and heavily armed guards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another misconception is that it's impossible to launch nukes without nuclear launch codes U.S president carries with him.

The president's emergency satchel (nuclear football) or cold codes (plastic card called the biscuit) contain codes to identify the president and __authorize__ nuclear attack. They are codes for authorization. They don't contain codes that are needed to execute the attack. There is also two-man rule in place. Secretary of Defense must confirm the authorization.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're into this kind of thing, then I cannot recommend the group blog, "Arms Control Wonk" enough!

[http://armscontrolwonk.com/](http://armscontrolwonk.com/)

It contains some seriously in-depth analysis of both current and historic nuclear weapons development, with a strong bend toward the diplomatic and political side of things.

</comment><comment><USER15> The linked blog usually has great in-depth content, but I think this one could be TLDR'ed as "No, for obvious reasons, there isn't actually a big red button that launches a mass nuclear strike. There's a massive infrastructure devoted to making sure they can be launched when they're needed, but won't ever be launched accidentally."

We could at least make an attempt to get into how making a strike would require planning exactly what targets to attack, what weapons to attack them with, and exactly when to launch which weapons, all depending on the political situation and what we're actually trying to accomplish. The idea of a big button on the President's desk to launch a strike is then pretty absurd.

<comment><USER6> Note that until 1962, there was a single nuclear attack plan that was to be followed in the event of all-out war, with no variations available. That meant that, for example, China would get a full nuclear strike no matter what the political situation was at the time, and if China had declared neutrality, the only options were to bomb the crap out of them regardless, or come up with a completely new plan on the fly, which was just about impossible.

Since 1962, the plans had built in variations, so that e.g. it would be possible to call for an all-out strike with a hold on China, and all the participants knew what to do for that case.

But still, all the planning was done in advance. US nuclear war planning assumed that we'd be retaliating for a strike on us, and thus time was of the essence. Strategic Air Command had a goal of getting all of their strike bombers airborne within 15 minutes of a warning, and they could do it. There was, of course, no actual big red button, but conceptually it was pretty close. Ordering an attack would have been a matter of authenticating the order-giver, and saying, launch the pre-planned attack.

Edit: I should probably link to Wikipedia's treatment of said plan: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_P...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_Plan)

<comment><USER15> Thanks, that's actually some interesting info. I was under the impression that the SIOP was a list of pre-planned strike patterns/plans, and whoever had the authority to order a strike would select one based on the political circumstances. Is that not the case?

It's also a little surprising, though believable, that there was only one dedicated emergency attack plan up to 1962.

<comment><USER6> Wikipedia says that the post-1962 version had five options:

1\. Soviet nuclear missile sites, bomber airfields, and submarine tenders.

2\. Other military sites away from cities, such as air defenses.

3\. Military sites near cities.

4\. Command-and-control centers.

5\. Full-scale "spasm" attack.

So, sounds more or less as you describe. The first one apparently didn't have anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought there was some russian commander who avoided a direct command to launch missles, and it turned out the command to launch was a mistake made by some other russian entity relying on faulty data. Seems as close to a "button" scenario as one could've had.

 __edit - point being that, at least in this case, in 1983, it contradicts the claim in the article that these "systems aren't centralized", and "requires a lot more activity, spread out across a vast geographical area". I'm sure it's better in current times.

 __*edit - oh, I thought he had the power to launch himself - I guess it changes slightly if his job was only "to report" up the chain of command.

<comment><USER17> There was also the B-59 incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis[1], when a Soviet sub -- its officers exhausted, out of contact with Moscow, and uncertain if war had broken out -- almost launched a nuclear torpedo against US forces.

XO Vasily Arkhipov, who had also been XO on the infamous K-19, was the only officer to oppose launching the sub's nuclear payload, and since launch required positive agreement from the Captain, XO and political officer, Arkhipov literally stopped World War Three by himself.

[1]([http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/](http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/))

<comment><USER18> I wonder, are there any stories where the "Political Officer" is actually the hero rather than the villain?

<comment><USER17> Well, I'm sure the Soviets printed quite a few. :) Actually, the role of the Soviet political officer ( _zampolit_ ) was by then subordinated to the commanding officer -- political officers were expected to function as field officers (pilots, artillery officers, and so on), in addition to political education, morale-raising, and individual counseling. They also had specific authority over Communist Party members within units, who basically operated something like senior NCOs. In practice, I think, the _zampolit_ system operated relatively smoothly -- the Red Army was never able to get rid of the political officers (Zhukov tried, and even he couldn't do it!), but they were able to effectively defang the position by being orthodox Communists themselves, and by insisting that political education not compromise practical competency.

<comment><USER19> >not compromise practical competency.

There's a quote from _The Last Sentry_ [1] regarding this:

"On major combatant vessels, the political officer was third in command, following the captain and his _starpom_ (short for _stariy pomoshnik_ , or senior assistant), who was the equivalent of an executive officer in the U.S. Navy. The _zampolit_ was required to qualify as an underway watch officer like any other officer on the ship and so had to have some operational competence."

I'm pretty sure that training and working with the regular crew would weaken the dedication to "The Party" over time.

[1]: [https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pThlAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT15&o...](https://books.google.com.au/books?id=pThlAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT15&ots=sXUZZ7-H9E&dq=zampolit&pg=PT15#v=onepage&q=zampolit&f=false)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did anyone ever actually believe that there was a fire-all-ze-missiles button? Even without specific knowledge, a reasonable person must realize that such things have to consist of complicated logistics and multiple levels of redundant failsafes both human and machine.

<comment><USER21> >Did anyone ever actually believe that there was a fire-all-ze-missiles button?

Well, a lot of us believed that there were only two possibilities for nuclear war: either no missiles got fired, or they all did -- either in an escalating pattern of strike and counterstrike, or in one big "let's knock them out before they get us" attack.

So I guess a "big red button" is as good a metaphor as any for the sort of on/off, all-or-nothing situation we were afraid of.

<comment><USER22> A strategy that nuclear strategist Herman Kahn ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn)) memorably described as a "wargasm."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nukes or nurse?

[http://500daysasunder.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/screen- sho...](http://500daysasunder.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/screen- shot-2012-10-04-at-12-17-56-pm-e1349368088807.png?w=694)

<comment><USER24> Where's this from?

<comment><USER23> Land of confusion by Genesis.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pkVLqSaahk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pkVLqSaahk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is also rampant cheating by the people being trained to be in charge of nuclear weapons, both air force and navy:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+cheating+scandal](https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+cheating+scandal)

Nice warm comforting thought.

Even better is how they solved cheating - they stopped giving them grades:

[http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/334501037/to-stop-cheating- nuc...](http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/334501037/to-stop-cheating-nuclear- officers-ditch-the-grades)

Yes, those are the people in charge of nuclear weapons, how safe do you feel now?

<comment><USER26> Unchanged.

The job required to fire a missile is somewhat prestigious but relatively simple - the command comes in, execute a pre-planned sequence of events that have been drilled into you by that point.

At that point it's no different from following the assembly steps for a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.. though with much greater consequences than a stomachache afterwards :)

<comment><USER25> If they don't have the morals not to cheat in the MILITARY, what makes you think they are trustworthy to consider the consequences of pushing the button on a nuclear missile?

Or are they just going to belittle the "enemy" in their minds like they are taught and then an hour later twice the number of nuclear warheads come crashing down on us from overseas in return.

Not their problem because they were "just obeying orders" and they are under a hardened site.

Kind of like how armed drone operators don't think about what they are are doing until months later when they get PTSD when they find out they killed innocent people

<comment><USER22> The problem is that none of those people in the silos expect they'll ever be called upon to _actually launch_ those missiles. Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, they've been a weapon without a plausible mission.

This has two pernicious effects. First, it leads the people in the silos to think to themselves: if none of this really matters, why _not_ cheat? It's all theater anyway, right? Why put your career prospects at risk over something that's pure theater?

And second, it means that the best and the brightest Air Force servicemembers, the ones who want to wear stars on their shoulders someday, don't want to serve in the silos to begin with. Promotions in the military flow from service in real wars, not imaginary ones. So the people who end up in the silos are the ones who can't get stationed somewhere (anywhere!) else -- and that's exactly the type of person who's going to be tempted to cheat to get ahead in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Meta: automate things that are frequent, not things that are risky; hence: no WOMPR, Wing Attack Plan R or "Big Red Button."

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one that immediately remembered radiolab's Buttons Not Buttons episode [1] ? They had a nice bit about the "cut the heart out" part and how it contrasts with how easy it is today to start a nuclear attack

[1] [http://www.radiolab.org/story/buttons-not- buttons/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/buttons-not-buttons/)

<comment><USER29> It's mentioned in like the third paragraph of the article...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why did the title get changed? It used to be the article title "The button that isn't"</comment>


Let Forest Fires Burn - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/science/let-forest-fires-burn-what-the-black-backed-woodpecker-knows.html <comment><USER2> Speaking as a Montanan here.

The policy of "let some fires burn" has been in practice for a few decades now in our corner of the woods. Ever since the Yellowstone fire in the 80's, we've focused our efforts on containment instead of extinguishment (i.e. make a best effort to keep it away from human settlements); letting land lost to the fires just burn out naturally while stopping them from claiming too much land. Should we let them burn more? Perhaps.

But it's never so easy. The cost of just letting some go when they're a couple dozen or even hundred acres can spiral out of control when you're suddenly attempting to stop a 300,000 acre fire that has already burned out 16 homes and is threatening towns. Yes, firefighters die fighting fires. Civilians also die when an uncontained fire goes from a theoretical threat on the horizon to consuming their house in a matter of minutes.

Fire doesn't respect property boundaries, and can travel a tremendous speeds (upwards of 10mph). And they aren't really like floods - it's not just the forests that burn, it's the flat lands with all the nice dead grasses. Grass fires can move even faster than forest fires, given a wind to push it along.

Humans aren't the only ones affected, either. The livestock which used that land for feed still has to be fed, or face starvation. Argue all you want about the inhumanity of our treatment of livestock generally; letting them starve due to a lack of hay (tied to a lack of money) is worse.

There are some who feel that they should not have to support those affected by natural disasters. I'm sure others will be happy to return the favor.

(300,000 acres ~= 142,000 ha)

[https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5399/](https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5399/)

<comment><USER3> Firefighters are dying to protect the private property of people who live in the forests so they can save money not building a fire-safe house. We need regular burns to keep the brush down, but we can't because rich people's houses are in the path. The forest was there first; it's time to stop protecting people from financial loss because of their poor decisions.

<comment><USER2> Rich, poor, farmers, ranchers, middle class; all kinds have property in forests. And firefighters work to protect them all pretty much equally.

As for your last sentence, that could apply evenly to any natural disaster. The [ocean|tectonic plates|flood plains|super cells] were there first. Let's stop protecting [hurricane|tornado|tsunami|earthquake] victims from loss due to their poor decisions.

<comment><USER4> > Rich, poor, farmers, ranchers, middle class; all kinds have property in > forests.

And none of them should.

<comment><USER5> Why? Have you spent time living outside a city?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but so? We shouldn't just be indiscriminately building anywhere we want, and risking lives.

<comment><USER6> Well then we should get rid of a lot of our cities because they are disasters waiting to happen. California has many millions of people living near fault lines. Talk about risking lives!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Some_ forests are self-regulating when it comes to fire. _Some_ forests are not. What defines _forest_ is actually pretty complicated, even for Federal and state agencies. Controlled burns work in conjunction with thinning practices and bone-piling (stacking big burns away from other areas).

The root of the problem has been and continue to be that structurally we separate "fuels" and "prevention" teams in the forest service. Where Fuels deals with assessing when and how to burn, and Prevention operationalizes it and also does fire fighting.

Lastly, fire management suffers from a lack of talent and shared learning as fire career paths involve people moving to different regions which are geographically incredibly diverse. You don't fight fire in the east side of Oregon like you do in Florida.

The lack of cohesion, mixed with a serious lack of funding, and a lot of common misconceptions publicly leads to a mishmash of fire management across the country.

source - was a firefighter. left because of all these issues.

<comment><USER8> Do you think it would help to hold some sort of conference every year or two about firefighting techniques and science?

<comment><USER7> They do have conferences. I think the bigger issue is that there isn't really a good budget for this stuff.

Most of the budget goes to handling fires that are really out of control, and there's more and more of those every year.

If you doubled the budget, hired fuels teams with scientists at the head of the teams (instead of fire fighters) and applied that budget to thinning and controlled burns, you'd probably have much safer more defensible forests areas.

Also, there's a huge gray area around what fires to prioritize and when to fight them. A good example of "letting it rip" and "let them log" was the Egley complex fire in 2007 (one of my last fires!): [https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/success/stories/2009/nf...](https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/success/stories/2009/nfp_2009_or_fs_manf_fuels.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are trees that cannot reproduce unless their seed pods are baked open

Animals coming back to scorched areas carry all kinds of seeds with them that love the mineral- and carbon-rich environment

Some deer can grow beautiful atypical racks only when feeding in areas ravaged by fire

And burning-out old growth and underbrush allows whole new generations of forest to start because their impediments to growth are gone

Seems like the best thing to do is to let the fires run their course (at least the ones started naturally) .. and maybe note the risks of living near treelines like people who live near water lines know they could be flooded

<comment><USER10> >There are trees that cannot reproduce unless their seed pods are baked open

Aspen and lodgepole pine

<comment><USER11> Jack pine is another, and a nearly-extinct bird really depends on these trees. The Kirtland's Warbler relies on large stands of young jack pine trees, and jack pine cones only open in intense heat of forest fires. Really sad, the birds can't survive in super cold climates and only like reproducing in jack pine forests, so the ending ice age and the formation of the Great Lakes trapped the birds in the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. They can't move into the Upper Peninsula or Canada where jack pine is more common because it's too cold, and can't move further south because there aren't any jack pine forests further south.

As the number of wildfires has declined, so has the number of large stands of young jack pines. This has had a devastating impact on the Kirtland's Warbler, who already had their natural habitat decimated.

<comment><USER12> Giant Sequoia is another: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum#Ecolo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum#Ecology)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Australia we do a lot of controlled burning through the winter. They're called "hazard reduction burns" and are carefully planned operations involving lots of firefighters and appliances.

The aim is to burn the leaf litter and other fuels, but not let the fire get hot enough to kill established trees.

You start to see signs of regrowth very quickly. HRs are usually done in the late winter. By mid spring the landscape is an incredible sight of bright green new growth out of black tree trunks.

There are a lot of species of trees and plants native to the Australian bush that need fire as part of their breeding and growth cycles. It's integral to land management here.

<comment><USER14> Not sure if you've ever been to parts of Australia where "fire-stick farming" [1] is still practised?

It's really amazing to witness being performed. These places don't seem to ever have wild damaging fires like other parts of Australia, due to a lack of fuel build up, and the environment in these places always look "immaculate", almost like a freshly cleaned apartment. The smell of these slow burning fires through winter is really nice.

I've spent a lot of time on the East Coast of Australia too, where the "bush" is managed the European way, and there is a lot of problems with wild fires, invasive species (introduced) and a less healthy looking landscape.

The hazard reduction burning in Australia seems to be more about establishing parameters to protect property more than anything else?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire- stick_farming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-stick_farming)

<comment><USER13> I'm aware of the practice, but haven't specifically sought out fire stick farmed areas to travel to. I'll have to check some out.

The literature you've read is _probably_ mostly focused on the Rural Fire Service (RFS) HR program. Their focus is protection of life and property in settled areas.

The land management burns are undertaken by National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). RFS often assists with these to provide extra manpower.

I imagine the various State Forestry agencies also have similar programs, but I don't know anything about them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I asked a firefighter what she thought about controlled burns awhile back. She said that one of the advantages of controlled burns is that you can set them when conditions are favorable so that they won't get out of control and burn areas they didn't want to burn just then.

So, the "just let it burn" strategy when fires start might lead to a lot more property damage than a strategy of proactive burning.

Also, from a carbon footprint point of view, it seems advantageous to mix burning and logging, so that not all the carbon returns straight into the atmosphere.

<comment><USER16>
      So, the "just let it burn" strategy when fires start might
      lead to a lot more property damage than a strategy of
      proactive burning.

The U.S. is _huge_. There's too much land to do controlled burning. And an intentionally set fire is morally perilous, so there are strong incentives to avoid burning except where it's easy and obvious; that is, _away_ from housing or in only very small patches to create fire breaks.

      Also, from a carbon footprint point of view, it seems
      advantageous to mix burning and logging, so that not all the
      carbon returns straight into the atmosphere.

But loggers are gonna take the good trees and leave behind the young ones, precisely the opposite of what a fire would do. I know this isn't how it's supposed to work on paper, but the incentives aren't well aligned. A natural fire isn't going to lobby Congress to increase its quota of high-value trees.

I think any practical land management plan that has a shot at restoring forest health requires letting many more natural fires burn, and to burn more widely. The dilemma is that things are so bad that these fires are much more dangerous than they'd normally be. But I don't see how you ever get over that hump unless you can send out an armada of autonomous, self-replicating robots to cut down the underbrush. Perhaps we'll just have to wait for that solution.

<comment><USER17> The US is only 25% bigger than Australia and has more than 10x the population.... soo the argument that the US is too big doesn't really hold much water.

* 3.797 to 2.97 square miles

* 323 / 24 million

<comment><USER18> This does not take into account the vastly greater proportion of habitable or treed land in the US than in Australia

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Letting fires burn is standard policy at this point. We learned it the hard way, particularly after the Big Burn, or the Great Fire of 1910.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910)

It is uncontroversial to let isolated fires burn, but fires close to houses must be contained and fires close to towns must be contained.

<comment><USER20> I'd say later than 1910, see the 1988 Yellowstone fires: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_fires_of_1988)

 _" Before the late 1960s, fires were generally believed to be detrimental for parks and forests, and management policies were aimed at suppressing fires as quickly as possible. However, as the beneficial ecological role of fire became better understood in the decades before 1988, a policy was adopted of allowing natural fires to burn under controlled conditions, which proved highly successful in reducing the area lost annually to wildfires."_

 _" In contrast, in 1988, Yellowstone was overdue for a large fire, and, in the exceptionally dry summer, the many smaller "controlled" fires combined. The fires burned discontinuously, leaping from one patch to another, leaving intervening areas untouched. Intense fires swept through some regions, burning everything in their paths. Tens of millions of trees and countless plants were killed by the wildfires, and some regions were left looking blackened and dead. However, more than half of the affected areas were burned by ground fires, which did less damage to hardier tree species. Not long after the fires ended, plant and tree species quickly reestablished themselves, and natural plant regeneration has been highly successful."_

I visited Yellowstone a decade ago, and remember seeing the great wide swathes of equally-sized small trees growing in the aftermath of the burnt-out areas. I met a few older people who had seen the park before the fire and were sad at its present state (some even said it was "ruined", though this has to be hyperbolic, as Yellowstone is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen), but to me it was a beautiful thing to get to witness the cycle of rebirth on such a grand scale.

<comment><USER2> > some even said it was "ruined", though this has to be hyperbolic, as > Yellowstone is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen

I visited Yellowstone before, during, and after those fires. The view _was_ ruined from one point of view - a lot of variety in tree size and age was lost in those fires, to be replaced with uniform coverage.

A large party of the beauty of Yellowstone can be attributed to its wildness - how untouched by human hands it is. Yellowstone's forests post fire... felt tamed. No matter how much of an illusion it is, that wildness is something we all feel and seek while in Yellowstone.

This has gotten better over the decades since, with trees no longer being as uniform in size and coverage, but it's still possible to make out the scars of those fires, if you know where to look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem with this is local politics. "Let wildfires burn" sounds great when it's not _your_ multimillion dollar vacation home going up in smoke. Yes, in the long run it would be better for everyone involved. But we humans are anything but longsighted when it comes to dollars and cents.

<comment><USER22> I don't think "let wildfires burn" is an accepted strategy anywhere that those fires could be threatening homes. It's a policy for wilderness fires, where it threatens a community it's not better in the long run for everyone involved. It would be disastrous to let a fire rip through a town just to reduce the fire hazard.

It's entirely possible to do proactive controlled burns and fuel reduction near towns, and let the fires burn when they aren't threatening a town. Letting fires burn and controlling, directing, and managing the fire are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER23> I think the biggest problem with a "let wildfires burn" strategy is that most forests in the continental United States are too small (or too populated) to make it feasible. Any "large" fire will always be near a town or homes.

<comment><USER24> A fair number of current active large fires aren't expected to be contained for weeks:

[https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/](https://fsapps.nwcg.gov/)

(clicking the markers brings up an info window with expected containment dates)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sure, sure, let the fires burn. It's an easy argument to make when it's not your property. What about when the fire does over $3 billion dollars in direct damages, burns 1.5 million acres and forces the evacuation of over 80K people [1]? I'm fine with tax dollars going towards trying to prevent that.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_Wildfire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Fort_McMurray_Wildfire)

<comment><USER26> One of the arguments, which the NYT piece mentions, is that decades of fire suppression causes a fuel buildup so that if/when a fire does occur, it is much larger, more dangerous, and harder to manage.

For example, [https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2016/0504/Did- fi...](https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2016/0504/Did-fire- suppression-actually-help-cause-Alberta-s-huge-wildfires-video) points out: "In order to prevent fire like this week's, Alberta has engaged in a robust fire suppression program, says MacDonald. But because the province has suppressed natural fires that burn off underbrush ever 50 or more years, forests are full of fresh tinder.

"Alberta has engaged in a robust fire suppression program that changed the age structure of the forest," MacDonald told the Monitor. "Typically, forests in that part of Alberta would burn every 50 to 200 years. But with strong fire suppression, there has been a tremendous buildup of fuel.""

As a politician, would you rather say "we'll have a forest fire in the area every 10 years" or "we'll make sure there are no fires" .. and conveniently or optimistically omit the "until after I'm long gone, but then we'll have a real doozy of a blaze which will be worse than all of the little fires put together".

In addition, as that Wikipedia article points out, fire fighters came in from other provinces, the national government, and even South Africa. Do you think the local people paid for all of that? Effectively this fire fighting acts as an insurance subsidy.

It's possible to build houses to withstand wildfires, as people have done in Australia and southern California. These designs work best when fires are more frequent, because those fires are less intense, with less fuel to burn. However, these designs are also more expensive.

If people are convinced that the fires will be suppressed, they are not going to spend the money, and the building codes won't change to require better wildfire resistance. Nor is it easy for individuals to switch to safer building designs because when the fires do come they will be much more intense than it should have been without decades of fire suppression.

<comment><USER25> If the theory were true, then why were the two largest fires in recorded North American history in 1919 and 1950 (which MacDonald, a wildfire expert, missed)? 5 and 4 million acres respectively, significantly larger than 2011 or 2016 Alberta fires.

The data does not support the theory, the fires over the past 70 years have been smaller.

<comment><USER26> There are two scales: intensity and size. The argument is that suppression leads to more intense fires when there are fires, and these are more damaging. Not just to human structures, but also to the forest; eg, high-intensity crown fires instead of just having the scrub catch fire.

The NYT article gives more concrete numbers to the sizes over the last 70 years: "reams of evidence suggest the acreage that burned was more than is allowed to burn today — possibly 20 million or 30 million acres in a typical year. Today, closer to four million or five million acres burn every year."

They are smaller because of fire suppression.

If that fuel isn't being burned now, by regular wildfires, what will happen to it when there finally is a fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem is that mature trees store things that humans need badly to survive.

When a forest burn entirely you can say goodbye to a lot of much needed water for years, and there is also a problem with carbon. We want carbon stored in the trees, not to be released in the air. And the soil layer needs decades to be created, but can vanish in a week. You can't just think in terms of 10 years. This creatures can live thousands of years.

What is very good for some animals, plants and fungi can be also very bad for other animals, plants and fungi. A net of burn areas isolating islands of intact areas would be a better solution probably providing a patched environment with lots of oportunities.

And we should remember that some very old forests reach a mature level that is fire resistent (plenty of humidity in soil). Laurisilva forests for example do not start burning unless a considerable amount of energy is applied.

</comment><comment><USER28> In a book about the smoke jumpers from several years ago, one of the members made a profound statement, jokingly, probably, but maybe not. He said that instead of battling wildfires the way we do now, we just throw money on the fire and wait until the rains come.

With the continued droughts throughout the west and up into Alaska and Canada along with the effects of global warming, the forest lands are just dry tinder waiting for a spark. Having the fires grow so large, they can't be put out will become more and more common. Maybe letting them burn until the rains come is the right solution.

<comment><USER2> One more thing that's really hurt has been beetle kill. There are stands of trees killed by beetles which have been waiting for the right spark. They've been working for years to clear out these tinderboxes, but it's hard work (especially since those efforts have to fight against the anti-logging camps).

[http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/pine- beetles/rosne...](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/pine- beetles/rosner-text)

<comment><USER29> ISTM that nothing would have been as good a firebreak against the beetle onslaught as actual firebreaks left by uncontrolled fires would have been?

<comment><USER2> Depends on how recent the burn was. Within a year, maybe two? Perhaps. After that? Plenty of new trees to chomp down on.

And unless explicitly directed, forest fires rarely create anything that could be considered to be a "break" between two sections of forest. Usually more like a "blob" in the middle of a forest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sometimes small and constant fires clean up the area, cleaning up dead leafs and so on. Constantly stopping those fires can lead to accumulation, until a great and wild fire comes and destroys more than the "nature following the natural fate" would have.

</comment><comment><USER31> The missing step is often that we continue to let communities pop up in these areas that we fully expect to periodically burn down.

Of course, we often still let people build their houses in flood planes, but we seem to be slowly getting better at that.

<comment><USER2> Or in zones where there are catastrophic earthquakes on a regular basis. Or hurricanes. Or tornadoes. Or blizzards.

> we often still let people build their houses in flood planes

The best farmland is on flood plains; good luck with holding them back.

Let's be honest for a moment: there's no place in America which is safe from every regularly occurring natural disaster. Yet we still live here.

<comment><USER28> Absolutely true. But we need to expose the dangers of building and living in these hazardous areas and make the owners share significant portions of the costs of protecting them. Here, in California, you can buy earthquake insurance but at a high premium and high deductabl but everyone is quite aware of the fact that the earth can shift any time. The same should be the case for building in areas subject to wildfires, or avalanches, or tidal surge, or tornadoes, or hurricanes.

<comment><USER2> > make the owners share significant portions of the costs of protecting them

Well, practically speaking, we do. In the form of taxes, which are redistributed according to need by FEMA and associated agencies. This is definitely one place I would not trust a for-profit insurance company given the typical cautions around fire insurance for a home - use it only as a last resort or find yourself unable to get coverage.

<comment><USER28> In the event of a major catastrophe, it really won't make any difference who is carrying the insurance. They're all going to run out of money and will only pay off the early birds or a fraction of the policy's coverage to all. And by major, here, I'm think an 8 earthquake rupturing the San Andreas fault from San Diego to the Tehachapis or a multi-state cat 5 tornado swarm in OK, NE, KS, IA, and MO. Are they likely? Sure but improbable. The joker, however, will be the effect of global warming and what its going to do to the weather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems that USA's War On Fire has had the same results as its other Wars, On Drugs and Terrorism: more fires with more harmful results.

We will be the laughingstocks of history, if humanity somehow survives us.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's well known that because of fire fighting, there are build ups of flammable material causing subsequent fires to be bigger and hotter. I wonder if theres a point where if we just let the fires burn, they'll be so hot that the natural benefits will be lost and the forest damaged for much longer than usual. Maybe we need to ease into it by not putting out the fires, but still keeping them from getting really intense.

<comment><USER33> I was certain this policy had been implemented decades ago. I remember seeing video of firefighters starting small, controlled fires to consume built-up debris. I must be having a 1984/Mandela/old moment.

<comment><USER34> You are correct:

[https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/dbnf/home/?cid=stelprdb528146...](https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/dbnf/home/?cid=stelprdb5281464)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am under the impression that fire departments regularly practice "controlled burns" to destroy brush and have fires occur "naturally", during damp times and away from properties.

At least I am under this impression from controlled burns happening in Talladega National Forest and Cohutta wilderness.

<comment><USER36> They used to do a lot more of them. Unfortunately, with cuts to that part of their budget, controlled burns in the Pacific North-West are a thing of the past.

Instead of spending money and time on controlled burns, we now spend money and time on fighting uncontrollable firestorms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Jared Diamond discusses western US wildfires in his fascinating book Collapse. Interesting perspective for anybody interested in this topic.

</comment><comment><USER38> Anybody know websites to discuss ideas and tech about forest fire fighting ? (be it thermodynamics, organization, monitoring, chemistry etc)

</comment><comment><USER39> This quote from the article is important:

 _Still, considerable disagreement remains among scientists about exactly how forests should be managed._

<comment><USER26> Really? I thought that was a wishy-washy statement.

As you crank up the tightness of "exact", you'll always get more and more disagreement.

Is there any large science-based policy decision where there is 100% agreement among scientists, or where there hasn't been considerable disagreement between some of them?

<comment><USER39> If scientists who have studied the field for years disagree, then we (who barely know anything about it) should be careful in choosing sides.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. There's is no field where that statement isn't true.

Take CFCs in the atmosphere, affecting the ozone layer.

DuPont scientists were against the Montreal Protocol, saying things like "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation" (quoted from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) ).

So saying simply that there is disagreement is wishy-washy and unimportant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I very much agree with this theory. The problem is that fire does not respect the anthropocene. We have changed the wilderness in nontrivial ways (e.g. forestry). Fuel is far more abundant and dense.

Every species (including plants) on the planet evolved to deal with a certain amount of fire - including the appropriate degree of propagation. We've unavoidably upset that balance and so a radically different solution is required. Although I don't know what that solution is, it looks nothing like what we are doing today.</comment>


Numbeo - comparison of cost of living around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/ <comment><USER2> I appreciate the hard work that went into this, but we still have to be careful as this is a very tricky measure.

E.G. Colombo, Sri Lanka :

[http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/city_result.jsp?country...](http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/city_result.jsp?country=Sri+Lanka&city=Colombo)

"Colombo" is actually pretty big and diverse.

Depending on which area and even street you turn into, which collection of shops you go to, the price will vary wildly. You can see this especially with regard to Bread (66.14 - 165.00), Tomato (60.00 - 150.00) etc...

I'm sure this will be very helpful in areas where this is not the case, but I don't think it's applicable where finer granularity is really needed. Good way to gauge this is to see how wide the green bar is and how different the prices. If you see a swath of wide green bars, then you know you need finer granularity or the chart isn't applicable due to the volatility in price.

<comment><USER3> This is the case almost everywhere (except places where some goods are government regulated). In Russia shops with a price of bread (same or almost same) from some like 70 cent to almost 10 dollars a loaf are commonplace within walking distance from each other. They just serve different demographics. And i think this is just fine and tells more good of Russian economy than bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm traveling around the world (5 continents) for 1 year and I couldn't never have done that properly without Numbeo's figures, really. Actually I'm surprised it has been "discovered" only now. Most people miss the point here as they tend to think of it as some "big data" or whatever, but it's right on spot for daily expenses at least in the almost-100-cities list I'm visiting (including my own, in Brazil). It's very useful to get an idea of what to expect budget-wise when you have no idea whatsoever about costs in random countries. But you have to use your brain as well and not trust the numbers blindly :-)

<comment><USER4> Btw, I'm in Nepal right now about to start trekking in the mountains, thanks Holy Engineers for wifi in the Himalayas! You can google translate it if you want: [http://alfanumerico.net](http://alfanumerico.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't the data taken from expatistan.com ? Are they affiliated somehow? Expatistan has been collecting data for a very long time now using crowdsourcing with expats.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, they have been around for a long time too, and have been collecting their own data. I have never heard of Expatistan, thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It'd be nice if there was a way to sort by multiple categories.

For example, what's the best balance between low crime, high quality of living, and cost of living?

The kind of filters you see on item databases for MMOs would be sensationally useful here.

<comment><USER7> You'd probably also want "available jobs in my industry" as a category. Low crime, low cost of living etc. doesn't do you any good if you can't pay for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain to me what happened in Australia? They've had a notable rising cost of living in the last few years.

<comment><USER9> Mining boom. There are legions of cashed up FIFO (fly in - fly out) bogans that have more money than sense, and so the price of everything has gone up.

<comment><USER10> Not just that - mining only accounts for 2% of our GDP. It's that our dollar was worth 50-60 US cents, and so all of our prices normalised to that. Then it strengthed quickly from the mining boom (somewhat abnormally) and achieved parity with the greenback. Local prices did not fall, of course...

Apart from housing, which saw some years of 30-40% increase in the late noughties, the cost of living hasn't risen much at all - inflation has been reasonably low for a while.

The housing market commentary has been pretty funny. The years of 30% increase had people going "this is pretty good". Now faced with a year of low single digit deflation, the newspapers act like the sky is falling...

<comment><USER11> _Local prices did not fall, of course..._

I think one reason for this is that rent, especially in shopping centres (malls), had kept pace and didn't drop away even though their tenants were facing tougher competition from abroad. Another is that distributors were less than keen to give up their slice. So, even when some retailers might've wanted to drop prices to compete, they were facing pressure on the cost of floor space as well as product.

<comment><USER12> Neither of these arguments stack up. COGS went down went the dollar went up. That meant gross profits went up. If rent stayed the same, retailers had more flexibility to cut prices and they chose not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used this site to gauge my future cost of living before moving to another country. Once I moved I noticed it was off a bit, but didn't think much of it.

Then one day, while bragging about how cool this site was, I noticed that it does other things (crime index, health care index, etc), and when I looked I was shocked to see that it listed some very wonky crime stats. So I looked over everything and realized that a) it's all based on voluntarily submitted data, with no checks on anything; and b) the sample size was very very small. No wonder people thought my Western Canadian town had more crime than the Tenderloin, SF. The sample sizes (at the time) were 8 vs 6

Super awesome site but it needs 300x as much data before it'll be particularly accurate

</comment><comment><USER14> My biggest problem with numbeo & expatistan is that they do not reflect the true cost of living. They are heavily biased towards data from travellers & expats. In particular these expats don't seem to speak the local language and refuse to live like a local - they seem to insist on western values of living.

Example, [http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/city_result.jsp?country...](http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/city_result.jsp?country=Thailand&city=Bangkok)

Says "Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre" ranges from 15,000 to 25,000. I had a fairly westernized place for 8,000 baht. If I had gone for a more thai place, I could have had a place for between 3,000-5,000.

<comment><USER15> > _heavily biased towards data from travellers & expats_

That's funny because I was about to say exactly the opposite -- that the data is biased towards data from and for residents.

Using Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as examples, Numbeo's figures make them seem quite inexpensive.

The problem is that as a tourist or as a business visitor, you are paying hotel prices, not rent. Hotels in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are surprisingly expensive (approaching New York City prices).

For reasons I can't understand, the ratio of hotel room price to annual rental price of an unfurnished apartment in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro is much worse than in other cities around the world I'm familiar with. Renting a furnished flat on a monthly basis is also very expensive.

This distorts the picture hugely. As a tourist or business visitor, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro end up being very expensive cities to visit, whereas as a resident, it wouldn't be so bad.

<comment><USER14> I see what you mean, actually in my experience even supposedly cheap countries turn out to be expensive, there isn't really many truly cheap places, and hotels tend to be surprisingly expensive, especially the ones that cater to westerners, that are found easily online (i.e. in english).

By the way, when I think of "Cost Of Living" I am thinking of long-term stay of 6+ months, especially since many landlords insist on 6-12+ months leases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The best feature is being able to compare two cities. They also have a national average feature. Unfortunately it seems you can't compare a national average to a city. See also: [http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of- life/country_result.jsp?cou...](http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of- life/country_result.jsp?country=New+Zealand)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd love to see this data combined with [http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/](http://mikemcbrearty.com/climate/) so you could query: somewhere with the same climate, but cheaper

<comment><USER3> ...and you end up in a total hole. Picking a place to live doesn't work that way. You want a place with nice interesting people, and these tend to be rich, and... oops you find yourself in a very expensive place. I have yet to see a place good for living which isn't reddish on numbeo map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> +1 for not using Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER19> Slightly off topic: I would like to know where it's still cheap to buy a beach front house that is accessible from the United States? Is anyone doing global real estate pricing?

<comment><USER20> That's quite an interesting search problem - I guess it depends on what you mean by "accessible from the United States" and the implicit requirement to be able to do something on the beach without hypothermia?

<comment><USER21> Owning a beachfront property in some countries might be easy, but there are some tricky logistics involved:

For example, there are some very cheap places in my country, Uruguay, and in neighbouring Brazil, but, are you going to pay for a housekeeper?. If you don't visit often, you're likely to find either a dismantled house or an illegal tenant.

Also, people from out of country might not know the local taxes or regulations, and you could have your house seized due to ignorance.

I think that renting is a much better solution, unless you expect to spend a significant amount of time in your beach house :)

BTW, The housekeeper is probably going to be more expensive than the house. Maintenance is often as expensive as the house too.

On the plus side, beach houses can be rented :) to get some expenses back.

<comment><USER19> What's a good place to search for rentals. I hear punta del este is nice in December ;-)

<comment><USER21> Hmm: locals usually check [http://www.gallito.com.uy/](http://www.gallito.com.uy/) , and Argentineans their local equivalents.

Many go for a weekend a month in advance, and look at the "For Rent" signs, then make a deal with the homeowner (usually haggling on price). That is of course not very practical for someone from the U.S. !!

Punta del Este is nice (though some people like other kinds of vacations, like Punta del Diablo), but it's very expensive (even for people from the U.S.), especially in January. December is a little cheaper.

The times I've been there I went to a hostel. My parents use the "haggling" option, so I don't have a good recommendation for online search. Airbnb is slightly more expensive than the average listing, but not by much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Actually, the prices are right on target for Seoul, South Korea.

Unlike most websites of this sort, I'm surprised to find the information accurate.

</comment><comment><USER23> Please put the currency on the charts! I have no idea what do those numbers mean!

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/cpi_explained.jsp](http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/cpi_explained.jsp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This has been there for a long time. Has there been any change recently?

</comment><comment><USER25> I really like it, it is very useful and accurate

<comment><USER26> Well, I don't think so, since I lived in multiple cities, the order is totally messed up.

Also for e.g. in Amman, public transportation, might cost 0.40 JD, but they don't get anywhere, and in most of times, walking is much faster that taking the bus.

Also there is no such thing as unlimited data plans there too.

So at least for the middle east, I don't think it's accurate.

<comment><USER27> It doesn't seem very accurate in Munich, either, particularly WRT housing — all the 1BR flats we saw were north of 1,200€/mo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> the numbers for my country (argentina) are at least 7 years outdated.</comment>


Anyone interested in trying out my book understanding prototype? We could focus on Founders at Work say. - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are interested in trying it out, please send an email to email@example.com.

This is sort of like a closed beta but the prototype is pretty preliminary. Nonetheless, it is already quite functional.</comment>


Ask HN: Are voice over artists still in demand? - <AUTHOR> I see that text to speech is becoming better due to deep networks. But what I'm curious about is whether actual human voice demand is still present. Do people still use voice over artists? If so, why? <comment><USER2> Every radio commercial, TV announcement, advertising video, movie, and animated program uses voice actors. Text to speech isn't good at emotion or character and those things will always be needed in the creative arts and the businesses based on them.</comment>


The Intercept Reporters Covering BlueLeaks Data Do an AMA - <AUTHOR> https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i3nnup/were_an_investigative_reporter_and_the_director/ <comment><USER2> [https://ddosecrets.com](https://ddosecrets.com)</comment>


4K-ing hell Will your shiny new Ultra HD TV actually display HD telly? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/20/feature_4k_confusion_over_specs_and_standards/

<comment><AUTHOR> My own take on 4K/UHD is that it will allow me to get a cheap 39" display. Nothing more.

I think the 'debacle' over the move to HD, the vague standards and the more recent 3D TV push has stayed my hand on upgrading my TV until this all settles down, probably by the end of 2015.</comment>


How Google 'Tricks' Users into Sharing Location Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.sherbit.io/how-google-tricks-users-into-sharing-location-data/

<comment><USER2> this is a good argument for building your own firmware image from source, but with a patch that simply removes location services.

If I want to use a map, I'll supply an address.

I found it disturbing a few months ago, to find that Apple Maps had my location down to within twenty feet.</comment>


OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_osx108_ubuntu

<comment><USER2> Some of these tests are clearly testing the compiler more than the OS. Looking over the scimark tests, for example, the FFT, LU, and SOR numbers are (at least) an order of magnitude too low to be using optimized libraries that are part of the system. For these benchmarks, we're seeing the compiler quality of compiler codegen on a reference C implementation (OS tasks like malloc/free efficiency may have a small effect, but it should be essentially negligible).

No one interested in performance would actually use that code on OS X or Ubuntu; you would use a tuned library.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like the article title, there is no clear winner but it does look like certain operations have been optimised on each platform in response to, I'd guess, expected user needs. Which isn't surprising, but it is interesting seeing what specifically each OS designer thinks is the expected use that does require time spent optimising.

Also, quite an in-depth piece of coverage, a lot of benchmarking doesn't take real world into account and just runs 3DMarks or similar.

<comment><USER2> If there are cases important to you as a user, file bug reports about the performance. OS developers can (and will) guess about what scenarios are most performance-critical, but feedback from developers and users ("doing X is important to me, and is slow on your system" / "why is Y slower on your system than on your competitors" / etc) is enormously valuable and quite welcome. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Speaking as an OS developer, poor performance absolutely is a bug, and your bug report will be taken seriously.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's specifically poor performance, but places that have attracted more optimisation attention. An operating system is a big old chunk of work, and not every element can be honed to a fine edge. It's good that OS developers do actually respond and focus on areas users have flagged up as well, builds better systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No clear winner...

I'd say there is a winner : Linux. Isn't it interesting that a software developped by a team of hacker (I'd say a chaotic, huge and ever growing) can make a monster like Ubuntu and get performances that don't pale against another OS which is designed by a very organised, super funded, super focused team of carefully selected programmers...

Ok, I assume a rather romatic view of linux development, but I'd bet I'm not that far from reality :-)

<comment><USER5> Your argument is that Linux is the winner because despite all odds, it doesn't suck shit as much as you'd expect it to?

<comment><USER6> It's a pretty solid argument if the premises are correct:

The article benchmarks the performance of Ubuntu and OSX, and finds them to be in a dead heat.

Ubuntu was developed at a lower investment on Canonical's part (OR with a larger team of less skilled developers, I can't tell which is more important to frownie).

Therefore Ubuntu represents a greater achievement relative to the resources invested than OSX does.

<comment><USER7> Let's not forget that GNU/Linux is intended to run on any damn machine you throw at it, while the latest version of OSX is only intended to run on Apple hardware that is no more than 3 years old. It's amazing that Ubuntu is even competitive with OSX given these circumstances.

<comment><USER8> Well... Right from the article:

        Unfortunately, switchable/hybrid graphics remain
        a pain in the ass under Linux. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS,
        the 2010 MacBook Pro had problems with either
        open-source driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a waste of time, OS X has a usable, stable graphical interface, Ubuntu doesn't ( a lot of the lack of usability comes from the lack of quality of third-party apps ). The only use for Ubuntu is as a server, which means testing things for speed that are server related. And only on a Mini.

And yes, I've tried both Ubuntu 12.04 and OS X 10.8 for several days as my only work-based machine to road test both properly.

<comment><USER10> You're going to get flack for that opinion, but you have a point.

The truth is, Unity sucks. A lot. Even after you get used to it. It was a poor decision by a set of developers out of touch with reality or their user-base, and it's only beginning to recover and move in the right direction slowly.

Everyone I know is migrating to Mint and Xfce/KDE4/Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork), and with good reason.

OSX is still way ahead of the curve, but Linux (not necessarily only Ubuntu) still has a chance. The idea of Linux is still great: we're hackers, so if you feel there's a problem, help fix it. Not easy, but the fact that you can is pretty cool.

<comment><USER9> Oh yeah, the Ubuntu fanboys will be busy. But seriously, I need my main work machine to _just work_ (TM). I need audio to work without a 4 second lag on skype (I know that's skype's fault). I need Eclipse to default to fonts that I don't notice, rather than spending 20 minutes tweaking. I need Teamviewer to work correctly when I have 2 monitors on Ubuntu.

I know that's off-topic, but I really think everyone/thing Ubuntu related should be focusing on the fact that the desktop doesn't cut it, the OA is off- topic if you like. When you write software, you write it first, properly, then worry about optimization when it's functional (with a few exceptions). If it doesn't do its job, who cares that it can unzip twice as fast.

<comment><USER11> "I really think everyone/thing Ubuntu related should be focusing on the fact that the desktop doesn't cut it"

So, the problem with this is that what you think is important might not be what other Ubuntu users think is important.

Also, I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my MacBook Pro, and it _just worked_ (TM) out of the box.

"If it doesn't do its job, who cares that it can unzip twice as fast."

Unless of course you're day to day work involves unzipping large amounts of data, in which case it ends up being important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _The ioquake3-based Urban Terror game was also much faster with Apple's graphics drivers for the Intel HD Graphics than under Ubuntu Linux with Mesa._

They're comparing apples to oranges. Mesa are like default graphic drivers, with very little or no hardware acceleration.

<comment><USER13> that's incorrect. mesa is the 3d graphic library on top of the native intel hd graphic drivers.

the comparison actually make sense. you're not going to intel's osx drivers running in linux and you're not going to get mesa and intel's linux drivers running in osx, you realize that right? right? Oh right it's just trendy to hit on Phoronix for no reason.

Well, they're testing the same games in the different environments to decide which environment is the fastest. That's very much apple to apple.

I'd like to hear your test that's so much more accurate between Linux and Apple gaming with the same hardware. PLEASE ENLIGHTEN US.

<comment><USER14> You seem to be really angry about this. I mean, shockingly so.

Your comment just really jumped out at me and caught me by surprise. So much so that I felt like it might be good for someone to point it out to you.

I'd like to prescribe an afternoon of UrT. Take about 45 minutes to frag the hell out of a Steve Jobs avatar and post back in the morning. :)

<comment><USER15> Anger aside, he's right. mesa is used even if the intel driver is used too. mesa includes a software implementation, but it's also the gateway to the hardware drivers.

<comment><USER16> Better stated: the Intel graphics driver is part of the Mesa/DRI2 framework. Mesa's core provides the OpenGL front end (API implementation, shader compilers, high level optimizers). Intel provides a low level component that takes that shader stream and turns it into programs and commands for the hardware, which is managed by a DRI driver in the kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I haven't yet benchmarked any flavour of Linux running natively on my current- gen Ivy Bridge 13" MacBook Pro, but I have compared Windows 7 to both System 10.7 and 10.8. Consistently Win7 out performs OS-X on "raw" math-heavy benchmarks.

I've only uploaded my results form Geekbench-2, but the other benchmarking utils show similar numbers:

Geekbench-2 Scores and [Results]:

      OS-X 10.8: 8743 [1]
      Windows 7: 10092 [2]

Getting a Linux install to run via Bootcamp on this MBP is one of my next projects (most likely Gentoo), and I'm curious to see how well its performance stacks up against the other two. That is taking some time as... well, some things just don't work yet. (Thankfully I don't have to deal with the hybrid GPU setup that's in the Retina MBP.)

      1: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/902437
      2: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/810264

</comment><comment><USER18> 15 pages for this article seems quite excessive

<comment><USER19> Mildly OT, but...

Agreed. Unfortunately, nearly every hardware review like this does that. I almost invariably skip to the last page to read the conclusion first, and only poke through the middle pages if I'm curious why the reviewer drew the conclusion they did.

This one is particularly bad, though, because the pages aren't labeled, and there's no table of contents. Which makes "poke through the middle pages" for the purpose of finding a specific test related to the conclusion hard.

We all know it's to bump up the number of page views and therefore ad revenue, but I wonder: For a review like this, how many ad impressions do you need to break even on the reviewer's time, hardware cost (if any), and other overhead? Is ridiculous pagination a necessary evil for these sorts of reviews to exist? Or is it solely to pad margins?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lots of data, but preciously little information. For example:

\- Why is python so much slower on Mac OS X? if I had to guess, I would say it is more due to a version difference than due to a compiler change. It might also be some particularly slow library code on Mac OS X, though.

\- What is causing the sometimes huge differences in CPU-only tasks such as the matrix computations? Compiler, system overhead due to inefficient code, system overhead because the system also performs other work (for example, did the OS index files during some of the runs?), or maybe architectural choices that lead to system overhead (for example, a scheduler might switch tasks more often in order to keep UI response low)?

With such info, this would have been a great article. As it stands now, all I conclude from it is that OpenGL is slower under Ubuntu, and that Linux filesystems are faster (but there, it would help to know why. HFS probably is a large part of the explanation, but it also might be that Mac OS ports of various tools do slightly different things, e.g. By flushing to disk more aggressively.

</comment><comment><USER21> Things like TLB might also affect your performance, at the cost of memory fragmentation. For example bigger page size (1, 2 or 4MB) would need only two 2 page directory/table lookups, while 4096 pages would need 3.

It's just one of the examples. For example 4096bytes vs 4MB page size:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X86_Paging_4K.svg>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X86_Paging_4M.svg>

</comment><comment><USER22> I was just about to try Xubuntu on my MBP, but after seeing those power consumption stats I don't think I can justify it. Sad but true: Linux worked better in the old school Desktop era when batteries, power consumption, sleep/hibernation and wireless networks weren't there to mess things up.

</comment><comment><USER23> All these benchmarks are great and all... but in terms of using Linux on a Macbook Pro, the shitty support for the multitouch trackpad/touchpad alone makes linux barely usable. Unless this has changed recently, in which case someone please correct me

</comment><comment><USER24> Power consumption has been such a big problem on Linux. Their was PCIe-ASPM bug before and now new power bugs. Their is no end to it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm kind of wondering why you would use a Mac without using OSX. The only reason to have that computer is to run the OS that ONLY runs on that computer. Otherwise you can get a better computer for less money that is more flexible.

<comment><USER26> Apple laptops are (IMHO the best, but let's say among) the best in the market. So it is no surprise that Linux users may want one but without osx.

<comment><USER27> Do you run Linux on a macbook? If yes how is it performing?

<comment><USER28> In case you're not being rhetorical/sarcastic:

Linux (or any other OS) runs terribly on Apple hardware, because the hardware is intentionally designed to run OS X and only OS X. If you try to run, say, Ubuntu on a Macbook, you'll notice that you won't be able to do basic things like adjust the fan speed (it'll be turned up to the max the entire time) and the battery life will thus be horrible, not to mention that the computer will also be insanely hot.

This is because of the way an alternate OS is installed on Apple hardware - it's actually running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from having proper access to the hardware.

The only time I've ever heard of people running into driver issues these days on Linux for basic work is on Apple hardware, and that's the reason. So even if you like Apple hardware, you _still_ wouldn't be getting your money's worth running any other OS on it.

If you want to run Linux, go for almost any other laptop on the market - you'll get better priced hardware, _and_ the performance will be better.

<comment><USER29> "This is because of the way an alternate OS is installed on Apple hardware - it's actually running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from having proper access to the hardware."

This is entirely inaccurate. Even using the BIOS CSM ("Boot Camp") gives you full access to the hardware, and people are moving away from that to native UEFI booting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Campaign for a new HTTP Error code: 451 - Blocked for legal reasons - <AUTHOR> http://www.451unavailable.org/ <comment><USER3> Seems like a good idea, but the wrong way to achieve it. The right way, as I understand it, would be to write it up as an RFC and submit it to the IETF; and to contribute code for it to some of the popular web servers (apache, nginx, etc). The site doesn't make any mention of either of those things.

Edit: oops, I was wrong. There is an RFC and it's linked from [http://www.451unavailable.org/what-is- error-451/](http://www.451unavailable.org/what-is-error-451/)

<comment><USER4> Since the sites blocked on ISP level code contribution to apache/nginx or other web servers is irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer: I work for an ISP and every ISP in Russia is legally required to do the censorship (and mirror all traffic to FSB black boxes, but that's another story). I'm not partucilarly happy with the situation, but can't do anything about that.

Nginx is totally relevant as many ISPs including our use GNU/Linux boxes running Nginx as a highly performant transparent proxy (there are TPROXY patches for Nginx) to dive into HTTP traffic and do URL filtering (obviously, after initial crude IP-based filtering). Costs less than those fancy Cisco solutions, and it's not like we're willing to spend additional money on something that downgrades the service.

Also, there are cases where actual sites are legally forced to remove resources. Well, not really forced, but it's just a sort request too many sites can't really decline. You either comply and remove a single page (blocking for Russian visitors only seems sufficient), or get blocked on ISP level and since many ISPs (including several giant ones) just blacklist a whole IP address, that means your site becomes completely unavailable.

<comment><USER6> > I work for an ISP and every ISP in Russia is legally required to do the > censorship (and mirror all traffic to FSB black boxes, but that's another > story).

I hate the censorship but I like the fact you're not gagged and can talk about the fact traffic is being mirrored.

<comment><USER7> OR, he's not allowed to, and he's doing it anyway.

<comment><USER5> Nope, it's codified in the law, in a legalese, but right in the open.

The sad thing is, practically nobody cared about that, for years. The dissatisfaction became visible only when government granted themselves an ability not only sniff on others communications (which is obviously invisible to end user) but also actively censor them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once worked somewhere where some resources could not be displayed to all clients. We chose to (ab)use HTTP 409 Conflict.

> 10.4.10 409 Conflict

> The request could not be completed due to a conflict with the current state > of the resource. This code is only allowed in situations where it is > expected that the user might be able to resolve the conflict and resubmit > the request. The response body SHOULD include enough

> information for the user to recognize the source of the conflict. Ideally, > the response entity would include enough information for the user or user > agent to fix the problem; however, that might not be possible and is not > required.

> Conflicts are most likely to occur in response to a PUT request. For > example, if versioning were being used and the entity being PUT included > changes to a resource which conflict with those made by an earlier (third- > party) request, the server might use the 409 response to indicate that it > can't complete the request. In this case, the response entity would likely > contain a list of the differences between the two versions in a format > defined by the response Content-Type.

</comment><comment><USER9> Discussion on HN from when the IETF Draft was created [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099751](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099751)

My blog post which helped inspire it [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/06/there- is-no-http-code-for-ce...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/06/there-is-no-http- code-for-censorship-but-perhaps-there-should-be/)

Simultaneously glad and disgusted that there is a campaign around this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this saying:

"As a web user I want our ISPs/governments to give us a nice error page so we understand what is going on when they DNS block or seize websites"

Or is it saying:

"As a web-master, when have to take down content due to legal proceedings I want a nice HTTP code to return"

They give example of the first (Virgin Media), but that takes down an entire domain, so it's kind of irrelevant if the correct HTTP code is returned, it's not like that is going to be resolved quickly. 503 would be the correct code here.

The second might be useful to spiders (who might want to back-off spidering so often for a while), but then wouldn't you just want to show your users a 404 with a nice reason why the content has gone.

<comment><USER11> I understood it as the latter. Something that a webmaster can display to show a DMCA or geographical legal issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't get it? There are already drafts for it, which were created close in time to when Bradbury died.

[http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tbray-http-legally- restrict...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tbray-http-legally-restricted- status-00)

<comment><USER13> A draft is not an implementation. And an implementation in browsers is not an implementation in providers or webservers.

This is a very good way to make people aware of legal blocking, and to make sure that it is adopted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surprised no one has made any reference to Farenheit 451.

Allow me to be the first.

Thankfully websites are not flammable.

<comment><USER15> The error code for censorship is the reference. I guess not everyone would recognize that, but I immediately noticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For some reason, this article is blocked from my work due to proxy avoidance.

Somehow seems fitting.

</comment><comment><USER17> Surely this should be within the 5xx range of status codes? I get there's a reference to be had using 451 but this is more of a server error than client.

<comment><USER18> Is the 451 a reference to something?

<comment><USER13> Yes, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

A dystopian novel about a world where all books are banned and fire squads roam around to burn them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, the cool thing about HTTP error codes is that you don't need a campaign or get permission from the W3C, you can just start using them if you want.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but that's true of other standards. Eg, I can start putting <haiku> tags in my HTML if I want.

The issue is whether anyone else will expect this tag or code and do anything meaningful with it.

<comment><USER21> I get what you mean but I don't think this is the same thing. HTML has a DTD, something that people conform to when writing, so your <haiku> tag would not follow that guideline, whereas companies like Twitter can implement their own error codes as they see fit. See error code 420, Enhance Your Calm.[0]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes)

<comment><USER22> Well, sure, just like I can create my invented domain name like hacker.news and use my own IP addresse 188.8.131.52 without being allocated them. The Internet interoperates by everyone agreeing to follow the same agreed conventions, but there is no rule that says you have to. The registry for HTTP status codes has no 420 code and could be assigned for a different purpose in the future: [http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status- codes](http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is a lot of discussion below on whether 451 is the right error code and how to implement it properly, but I'm missing one thing - what's the benefit of doing it as a status code at all?

If you're going to say that it raises censorship awareness - <USER2> protocols are intended as useful technical standards for programs to communicate, not vehicles for political goals.

What is the _technical_ benefit of failing with a different error code? Is there need for client software to react differently to a 451 and a 403? The status code is not intended for the human user. If we want to raise awareness, than we already have means to do that - a 403 with a descriptive page citing the reasons. Many websites already do that when complying to DMCA takedowns.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some sites in Russia actually return 451:

curl -I [http://lurkmore.to/Конопля](http://lurkmore.to/Конопля)

<comment><USER25> I have no idea what this is or what 451 means in this context, but I'm upvoting this as a legitimate technical reason not to use 451.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Technically speaking 403 can be returned if it's blocked for legal reasons, but obviously it would be nice to know why it is forbidden.

<comment><USER27> There is some reasoning about this on: [http://www.451unavailable.org/why-do- we-need-error-451](http://www.451unavailable.org/why-do-we-need-error-451)

Still, imho, 4XX could be a response for a given URL, but when "a website is blocked" (from the text of the previous URL), we should go to 5XX, as in 503 - service unavailable.

<comment><USER28> 5xx does not really make sense for a single page removed due to DMCA.

<comment><USER27> Yes, I don't know if two codes (one for URL and one for the entire site) could make sense in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I bet you they are really happy you submitted this smack in the middle of the holiday of their main employee/volunteer :-).

Messages to their volunteer address get a vacation message that they're away until September 1st.

</comment><comment><USER29> We should absolutely not be standardizing censorship.

<comment><USER30> In this form I totally agree. Reason being that by haveing a block at the web server level in essence places the blocking to be done by the hosting site and blocking based upon location and content. This places the onus of censorship upon the host, which they can already code for if they want.

Not sure placeing the onus of censorship into the hands of the host and not the goverment with there IP/DNS blocks or however they impose such blocks (China has a nice firewall for outside China sites and I dare to think of how they block a website inside China though can bet it is just as effective).

That all said the posiblility to volantarly do the blocking in a way that the powers that be will accept and with that allow there country's owners to see parts of yoru site that are legal and not the illegal parts for them. Well that would possibily have uses and opens your site up still instead of a blanket ban.

      Piratebay has legal torrents, yet they are blocked as some form of descrimnation blanket ban.  So it does have it's possibilities, albiet a dangerous path that should not be tread lightly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I got Access Denied at work...

</comment><comment><USER32> Is this really necessary? How about 456 - unavailable because someone spilled coffee on our backend server? Or 467 - unavailable because garden gnomes invaded our offices?

</comment><comment><USER33> I can see some reasoning behind this, but the reasoning is that the emphasis of the problem is "people are angry at the site because something is blocked so let's show an error code reflecting the real reason." Using 451 would take the emphasis away from the site and onto the legal oppressor.

On the other hand, why not inverse all inaccessible content to legal oppressors? Change the default meaning of 403 for example to "Access denied for permissive or legal reasons".

<comment><USER34> Change the default meaning of 403? I don't think that's a good idea. When a user needs to be logged in to do something and they aren't, you show them 403. When access is restricted to people outside a network, they see 403. It'll be hard to force a new behaviour onto the existing web, easier to add a new HTTP code.

<comment><USER35> My understanding is that the server should respond with 401 Unauthorized when someone is attempting to access a resource that requires authentication. What is the case for using 403 instead?

<comment><USER34> OK, 401 makes more sense in that context. But another 403 case would be "the authorized user lacks permission to open resource."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The whole point of this is wrong... The internet is free, content shouldn't be blocked for legal reasons

<comment><USER37> The whole point of this is right, its highlighting the government breaking the Internet.

Content shouldn't be blocked, the Internet should be free and open. However without letting people know what's happening they will not complain.

Of course what the browser should display is:

451: The Right Honourable Claire Perry MP has deemed that you shouldn't be able to look at this site.

<comment><USER36> I have no clue about US politics but this sounds cool!

<comment><USER38> In case you didn't know, MP Clair Perry is a British Member of Parliament, sadly. She is one of those people who know better, than us "plebs".

IMHO, she is ignorant(1) and irrational(1), and there for scared witless of the internet, so she seeks to control it. I don't think she knows how wrong she is, there for I don't see her as evil, as such. However, it does seem our vote whore of a Prime Minister listens to her every word, hence the attempts to block porn and make people opt in to avoid the blocks, since her position ties in to an awful lot of right wing voters, who are equally, if not more, ignorant and irrational. They are the kind of people who genuinely believed Rock and Roll was the work of the devil, and that black people are a different species.

(1)I use these words for their real meaning and not the insult, judgement, or political value. I honestly think many people literally do not understand the technical issues, and act illogically as a result. I believe this is a lot to do with the traditional media, who politicians rely on, issuing scare stories about the internet because their business were and still are threatened by it. My "evil" in this is those who spread the lies, ie, the media. I hate to admit this, but in many ways I see the likes of Clair Perry as well intentioned victims and mules of the media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 452 Blocked for reasons which may or may not be legal but I probably shouldn't say either way

</comment><comment><USER40> How does this interact with the effort to encourage the use of HTTPS everywhere?

<comment><USER41> If the 451 code is returned by the web server because the site got a DMCA request, then HTTPS doesn't matter because the destination web server already decrypted the session to find the request that you're making before returning the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Unfortunately, that page return 200 OK. Why does not it return 451 status code?

</comment><comment><USER43> That would be great when you have to block access to OFAC listed countries

</comment><comment><USER44> Tried to open this link at work. Blocked for legal reasons :)

</comment><comment><USER45> That is a dumb error code.

404 already exists.

<comment><USER46> 404 is for "not found". 451 would be for "found, but we can't show it to you".

<comment><USER47> > 451 would be for "found, but we can't show it to you".

"The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it" is already 403.</comment></comment></comment>


Web Application Development on a Chromebook 11? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently using a Macbook Pro, which I love.
I have little to no issues, however the Chromebook 11 looks great and I'm considering a smaller machine. This won't be full time change, as I know some of the limitations.
However I'll love to hear some persons' experiences who have used or currently use a Chromebook for development.
Currently I use- Sublime Text & iTerm2 <comment><USER2> I use one and find it pretty good. I go between crouton with xfce for development using vim or using nitrous.io in the browser. I mostly use the setup for angular or python coding.

I'm pretty happy with nitrous, I do kind of find the context switching a bit strange in that I can have browser tabs open and tabs in nitrous open - ctrl- tab obvious changes the browser tab, but my brain, when I'm editing code in a tabbed environment, still sometimes expects the code editor to switch tabs. Still, I have to say I ran an experiment on nitrous and if Vim is more your thing, you can actually run a shell inside the browser and fire up vim.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do 80% of my programming on my Chromebook... kinda.

I enabled developer mode on my Chromebook and I SSH into another machine I have set up. From there I use tmux and vim.

Essentially, my workflow is as such:

1\. SSH into the server

2\. Attach to tmux session

3\. Code

4\. Detach from tmux session

5\. Logout from the server

You can set up a machine at home to use or even rent a $5 VPS. You could even SSH into your current machine.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been using ShiftEdit([https://shiftedit.net/](https://shiftedit.net/)) & secure shell extention ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure- shell/pnhec...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure- shell/pnhechapfaindjhompbnflcldabbghjo/reviews)).

This setup works great. Only thing I miss is debugger.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been developing on Chromebook for over a year using [https://www.neutrondrive.com/](https://www.neutrondrive.com/)

You can store and edit code on Google Drive or connect it to a development server to run your code.

</comment><comment><USER6> Enabling Dev Tools Experiments makes chrome a good front-end editor [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/revolu...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/revolutions2013/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I use an older HP 14" Chromebook for my web development (Rails, JS, etc) and enjoy it. Most of the time I use Nitrous.io, but it annoyingly disconnects a lot. Other than that love the simple setup.</comment>


Using Require.js in an ASP.NET MVC application - <AUTHOR> http://tech.pro/tutorial/1156/using-requirejs-in-an-aspnet-mvc-application

<comment><USER2> Another way to attack a similar set of problems is through the new bundling and minification settings in .Net 4.5[1]. It doesn't address everything, for example you need to know and account for the dependencies yourself. However, my early experiences with using it have been very positive.

[1][http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2011/11/27/new- bundli...](http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2011/11/27/new-bundling-and- minification-support-asp-net-4-5-series.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff! I was first exposed to AMD and Require.js through the Dojo Toolkit[1]. I'm a big fan of Ninject and IoC in general but for some reason it never occurred to me to apply those techniques to javascript. Our Dojo application is built on MVC3 and once it became fairly large I was glad to have learned about Require.js. :)

[1] <http://dojotoolkit.org></comment>


Ask HK: Why do you want to work with us? - <AUTHOR> More and more start ups tend to over emphasise how they're the coolest company in earth, that they've drinks, ping pong tables and etc. etc. etc.
And then the question comes, why us? Which they obviously wait for an answer of why do you love them more than your wife. That company that sometimes you only came across in a job board...
What do you guys usually answer?
Note: I really enjoy working at startups but the more established companies usually don't have all of that bs. you want money, they want dev, done. <comment><USER2> _" And then the question comes, why us? Which they obviously wait for an answer of why do you love them more than your wife."_

Some companies might indeed expect that kind of answer (and they'd be companies I probably wouldn't want to work for). But the question could just be a way for the interviewer to find out whether the job applicant has actually spent some time researching the company to find out what they do. If you can't express an interest in anything the company does, it suggests that you might not be very happy working at this company.

</comment><comment><USER3> This tweet says it all: [https://twitter.com/Wu_Tang_Finance/status/69838431638495641...](https://twitter.com/Wu_Tang_Finance/status/698384316384956417)

</comment><comment><USER4> For the MONEY!</comment>