The Year 2038 Problem

[Bill Godfrey]

But TinyURL is EVIL. It provides no way to show the destination of a
TinyURL and give the following as a reason to use TinyURLs:

From http://tinyurl.com/bill ...

$ telnet unicyclist.com 80 <- I typed this
Trying 66.98.140.48...
Connected to unicyclist.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /tinyurl/redirect.php?num=bill <- I typed this too
Location: <snipped> <- Here it is.

Bill, dancing.

 

[Goran Larsson]

If you really must know the redirection destination in advance, just
make a TCP connection to port 80 of tinyurl.com, type two lines of
HTTP protocol, and read the HTTP headers coming back from the server.

I know I can find out the destination this way, but why should I? It
is much easier to just ignore this kind of links.

 

[Mabden]

More likely, with source not available in the first place.


I.e. software irrelevant to the current computing community. The one
that is relevant has been carefully kept and maintained. I don't know if
CERNLIB is still maintained, but its origins can be easily traced to about
40 years ago.


Why not, as long as the information is relevant to the people
responsible for environment protection?


No one expects any posted signs to survive, merely to be carefully
maintained. This would also take care of the language issue.

Of course, one could imagine scenarios involving the catastrophic
destruction of the current civilisation and its replacement by the
descendants of a few tribes of bushmen that survived the catastrophe
by chance. But, barring such scenarios, we have the technology necessary
to preserve the information about nuclear waste dumps *and* the motivation
for preserving it, as long as needed by the radioactivity level of the
nuclear waste.

I still say that humans are their own worst enemy. At some point someone
will re-open the containers. Perhaps is will be military, perhaps
ignorance. Either way, the "Do Not Open" sign on Pandora's box will be
ignored.

 

[Gordon Burditt]

Of course, one could imagine scenarios involving the catastrophic

I still say that humans are their own worst enemy. At some point someone
will re-open the containers. Perhaps is will be military, perhaps
ignorance. Either way, the "Do Not Open" sign on Pandora's box will be
ignored.

Any sign on something that looks well-secured might as well say
"Steal Me". Some people have used this to advantage to have their
trash picked up during garbage strikes by wrapping it up pretty
and locking it in their car parked in the mall.

Where is the data from the people responsible for the protection
of the environment from early Egyptian times? While we don't know
whether there is anything really dangerous in those pyramids (like
Goa'uld in stasis and the Stargate), it seems the early Egyptians
tried to keep people out with physical barriers, sometimes even
physical traps, and writings about curses. So what did archaeologists
in the last century or two do?

Gordon L. Burditt

 

[Thomas Stegen]

But anyway, the disagreement also shows that the effects of moderate
amounts of radiation are far from devastating, or we *would* know!

What would happen the world if we detonated 500 nuclear weapons in the
atmosphere with an average yield of about 1 megaton? Nothing much,
apparently, because we have done...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation

Look especially at the table somewhere in the middle, the human
body can withstand quite large doses of radiation it seems.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Now consider the recently passed Y2K problems, which largely
revolved around software written and used for 25 years, with
source and documentation forgotten. Look at people trying to find
20 year old software on alt.folklore.computers and comp.os.cpm.
Do you really think that knowledge about care and treatment of
nuclear dump facilities is going to last for 10,000 years? Should
any posted signs survive, the language in which they are written
probably will not.

If the waste is buried deep underground, sealed, and forgotten, people
aren't going to be digging it up, are they? And even if they do, waste-
filled glass would be bad for you, but it doesn't emit a mystical green
cloud that turns villagers into zombies overnight.

People would learn that using it for bedwarmers makes you sick. And
they would probably stop, eventually, and bury the stuff again, except
the bits they are trying to make Philosophers' Stone out of.

I doubt it would cause death on anything like the scale of the natural
non-radioactive mineral asbestos, also found underground, but not
carefully sealed, or marked with signs.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Martin Dickopp]

I know I can find out the destination this way, but why should I? It
is much easier to just ignore this kind of links.

Sure, you are free to ignore them. I didn't mean to imply that this
isn't perfectly your right.

Martin

 

[Dan Pop]

How do you know who to trust on the Internet? I do, however, know that
I shouldn't trust those who post links using TinyURL.

Bullshit. Plenty of perfectly honest people use TinyURL to abbreviate
long links. There is no a priori reason not to trust them.

Why should I accept TinyURLs, something created to con and deceive
web surfers?

Bullshit. This is not the primary purpose of TinyURL. Just because a
tool can be misused doesn't automatically mean that *any* use is a
misuse.

With a search engine I can see the URL and perhaps make an educated guess
where the link will end up.

Most of the time you cannot make any educated guess. If you were familiar
with the site in question, you wouldn't be using a search engine in the
first place.

With a TinyURL this information is deliberately hidden from me.

More bullshit, as others have already pointed out.

If a link is posted with the comment that an interesting article is
available on CNN, then the difference between a genuine cnn.com link
and a deceiving TinyURL link is obvious.

What is the *obvious* way to tell whether a TinyURL link is a legitimate
abbreviation of a cnn.com link or something else? Concrete example:
http://tinyurl.com/ys356

I've lost the count of TinyURLs I've used without having any problems.
All of them pointed exactly where they were advertised to point.
If you're paranoid, thoday's Internet is not the right place for you...

Dan

 

[Paul E. Black]

No one expects any posted signs to survive, merely to be carefully
maintained. This would also take care of the language issue.

Of course, one could imagine scenarios involving the catastrophic
destruction of the current civilisation and its replacement by the
descendants of a few tribes of bushmen that survived the catastrophe
by chance.

If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
the repository seems okay.

-paul-

 

[Programmer Dude]

No you can't, and for goodness sake don't try this at home. Hydrogen
diffuses into the surrounding air VERY quickly, and burns almost
immediately. Did you never set fire to a test-tube of the stuff in school?

Almost.

Had a fun/goofy JHS science teacher who once gave a demonstration on
cracking water. He collected the H in a test tube and then clicked a
Bunsen burner igniter near the mouth.

Made a nice, startling "POP!"

Then he decided to try collecting the H in a beaker.

He (and we!) were all VERY surprised.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Almost.

Had a fun/goofy JHS science teacher who once gave a demonstration on
cracking water. He collected the H in a test tube and then clicked a
Bunsen burner igniter near the mouth.

Made a nice, startling "POP!"

Then he decided to try collecting the H in a beaker.

He (and we!) were all VERY surprised.

I remember a similar experiment, but with different results. The POP
came from the O2.

{shrug} ymmv

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Dan Pop <[email protected]> coughed up the following:

....[thwack]...

If you're paranoid, thoday's Internet is not the right place for
you...

Today's internet requires /clinical/ paranoia...

 

[Keith Thompson]

Bullshit. This is not the primary purpose of TinyURL. Just because a
tool can be misused doesn't automatically mean that *any* use is a
misuse.

I agree, but the statement about affiliate links is on tinyurl.com's
main page:

Hide your affiliate URLs

Are you posting something that you don't want people to know what
the URL is because it might give away that it's an affiliate
link. Then you can enter a URL into TinyURL, and your affiliate
link will be hidden from the visitor, only the tinyurl.com address
and the ending address will be visible to your visitors.

I think it's unfortunate that they chose to advertise this "feature",
but I don't consider that sufficient reason to boycott the service.
YMM, of course, V.

 

[jpd]

If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
the repository seems okay.

If there still is backfill. Are you sure it won't be washed away in a
few centuries? Maybe even decades? Possibly the rains have gone even
more acid, possibly enough to burn through that kind of steel in a
century. After that, well, I'm sure nature will come up with something.

Since we're talking end-of-the-world scenarios and a timescale even
engineers usually don't think about, there's simply no telling what
will happen. I'm not willing to bet on ``seems okay'' with that kind of
stuff. If you can't expect people to make sure it won't be touched (you
can't, revolutions do happen) you can't expect nature to abide by the
``no trespassing'' signs.

 

[Richard Bos]

I know I can find out the destination this way, but why should I? It
is much easier to just ignore this kind of links.

FWIW, I agree with you. Apart from untrustworthy posters, there is
always the risk of typos; at least with a normal URL, you stand a
fighting chance of spotting it. Besides, why should I take extra trouble
to find out whether a link is worth following? If it doesn't _look_
worth the trouble, odds are that it isn't.

Richard

 

[Dan Pop]

If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
the repository seems okay.

The idea was that that those few tribes of bushmen would eventually
repopulate the world and create a civilisation with no "memory" of the
previous one.

Dan

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

I know I can find out the destination this way, but why should I? It
is much easier to just ignore this kind of links.

Completely agree----I don't think I'd ever click on something without
knowing where I was going to land. Whenever there is an anchor with
text replacing the link, I always hover over it. In fact, in many spam
messages I've discovered that the text is often another link than the
link itself. Sneaky.

 

[Dan Pop]

I remember a similar experiment, but with different results. The POP
came from the O2.

You're misremembering it. It was the H2 that POPed, while the O2 turned
a slowly burning thingie into a first class flame. It's O2 (at sea level
pressure) that was responsible for the Apollo 1 tragedy (some sparks
ignited violently things that don't burn in ordinary air or even in the
lower O2 pressure the capsule was supposed use on orbit).

Dan

 

[gswork]

The idea was that that those few tribes of bushmen would eventually
repopulate the world and create a civilisation with no "memory" of the
previous one.

Whatever happened you can be sure that, eventually, Charlton Heston
would arrive, see evidence of the previous civilisation and say "my
god it's true....", ... maybe ...

 

[Bill Marcum]

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.unix.misc.]
lynx -head