Benares

Our startup uses a pair of Sonicwall TZ215s to establish a site-to-site tunnel between our China branch office and our U.S. HQ.

It has been quite difficult to get the tunnel stable enough to survive for more than a few hours. We had to use lower security settings and more uncommon modes to fix our constant disconnections. SSL-VPN has always worked well, but that is only an option for our remote workers; site-to-site does not offer that option. Dell support engineers have generally been clueless on the matter.

This is a fabulous speech. Should be required viewing for HN folks.

I went on a Piracetam (Nootropil) phase during high school for about 3 months. I would not qualify the effects as subtle. They were quite dramatic in my case. Razor-like focus and amazing retention of study material. No side-effects that I can remember.

It's been many years, and I would like to self-experiment again. Where can a U.S. citizen get Piracetam from these days?

Filco with cherry browns. I love it.

Bonus: the keys can be easily desoldered from the PCB, opened, and cleaned. Comes in handy when you spill beer all over...

I don't know of anything good for under $300.

I would recommend looking at the Discovery Back family of OfficeMaster task chairs: http://officemaster.com/products/index.php?view=family&p...

I especially recommend one with the "DCS" feature (extra memory foam.) I have had an OM chair for a year now (from a different family; the "Yes" line), and the seat foam is still as cushiony as when it was new. Beats my old Aeron hands down. I miss the scapular impedance feature that is in the Discovery Back line, though.

P.S.: whatever you choose, be careful. Mesh chairs are nice for light/medium duty use, but they're just too hard for extended duty use. That's my experience, anyways.

Good to see multi-billion dollar manned spaceflight programs making some real scientific progress!

Less humans, moar robots in space. Kthx.

First, find a TLD that isn't administered by a company doing business in the U.S. on http://iana.org/

If relevant to your domain's future content, optionally consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa...

Then register your domain(s) with an ethical registrar that does not do business in the U.S. and will only respond to court orders in their own country.

A possible option would be http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/st.html through http://www.nic.st/ . The company (Bahnhof) has a vocal history of protecting it's clients against corporate depredations; see http://www.thelocal.se/18882/20090416/

Nothing like a blackout will get visitors to sit up and take notice.

Blackout for justice.

I have used StartCom for a few years, and have had positive experiences every time I needed to contact a person for help. They seem to be an ethical company.

I've snapped awake from night terrors many times, and my personal experience is that exploding head is an altogether different phenomenon (although the adrenaline rush is the same.)

Yes. Along with my exploding head, very occasionally I wake into a hypnagogic panicked state where I cannot catch a breath or move. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps sleep apnea.

If it's not really, really loud and sudden, I would guess that not exploding head, but a hallucination common to hypnagogic states.

For me, it's usually like an electrical buzz. But sometimes it's more like a gunshot, a tearing sheet of paper, or an indecipherable vocal shout.

The sound does not feel dreamlike at all (like sounds you imagine while in a hypnagogic state.) I can imagine a first-timer might mistake it for an external event and rising in shock to look for the source of the disturbance.

The sound is of short duration (about 0.2s) and is loudest at the end of the sound, cutting off sharply into total silence ("...wwwWWWHOMP!") It's very loud, but not painful like a real report in a quiet room would be. The loudness feels like 120 dB or so. The sound is absolutely "pure," missing environmental cues like position, echo, and pressure. I perceive the location to be smack-dab in the middle of my head, not anywhere outside my physical body (a bit like headphones.) Because of this, and because I have been cued to the impending sound (see below), there is no danger of mistaking it for something real.

The chronology when my head goes boom:

T minus 30 seconds: I'm in bed, eyes closed. It always happens before or at the beginning of hypnagogia.

T minus 10 seconds: I get a feeling somewhat akin to a sudden pressure drop in my ears (but without any popping or physical symptoms). This is a cue that tells me to expect an explosion.

T: The pseudo-aural pressure cue suddenly ends by "transforming" into a short, explosive sound. Heart rate starts to rise rapidly. My eyes remain closed and my musculoskeletal system usually don't react, as the sound doesn't scare or surprise me.

T plus 5 seconds: Heart is beating as fast as it can go. At this point it feels almost exactly like right after snapping awake from a night terror, but without the fear component.

T plus 60 seconds: Heart rate begins to decline to normal levels.

Thank you for posting this. I "suffer" from EHS but never knew there was a name for it.

Just as the WP entry says, I experience it just after lying down to sleep. Probably happens 10 or 20 times a year. A loud banging, crashing, or tearing sound occurs in my head. My heart rate goes through the roof immediately, but it's not scary at all. It's very odd. :D

My sites are relatively insignificant, I only reach an audience of 100k-200k users.

My post was intended as a message of encouragement for those with a significant non-techie userbase to bite the bullet and consider a protest shutdown.

It's my belief that non-techie users are far more likely to take an anti-SOPA shutdown maintenance page more seriously than a forum post or added element in the regular page layout of a site.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:

All actions in 102(c)(2) are extremely broad. An entire "foreign infringing site" can be knocked offline and blacklisted solely on the assertion (of self-interested corporate players and their AG cronies) that there is criminal copyright infringement occurring on the site. A public forum with 1 million non-infringing posts and 1 infringing post can theoretically be killed by the AG. In my opinion this will lead to an uptick in self-censorship by website owners desperate to avoid losing everything. And those that do get targeted get no chance to make their case in the court of law or even file a counter-notice like the DMCA so _graciously_ allows (and we all know how effective that system has turned out to be.) A public forum is blacklisted and all you get is a nice letter in the mail.

I also believe the danger of prior restraint comes into play in the immunity clauses of 102(c)(5). No claim or cause of action against service providers, domain registrars, search engines, payment networks, or ad services is allowed for "reasonable acts" designed to comply with SOPA court orders. The likely result of this is hair-trigger blocking of websites at the first sniff of a court order. Why not? They get immunity for that behavior.

The anti-circumvention penalties in 102(c)(4) are naked censorship provisions. In my opinion, code is a form of speech, potentially protected by the 1st amendment. The authors of SOPA obviously feel differently.

And finally, SOPA will mandate the build-out of a new infrastructure dedicated to censoring websites quickly, based on a "master list" stewarded by the AG and compiled by his corporate paymasters. Others have argued, and I tend to agree, that the mere existance of such an infrastructure makes it all the more likely that lawmakers will seek to expand it's purview to other areas (domestic sites, "terrorist sites", etc.) in the future.

He's in a better place, now.

http://explosm.net/comics/2645/