To allow the sender to set the TTL, right? Without adding another field to the packet header.
If you count up from zero, then you'd also have to include in every packet how high it can go, so that a router has enough info to decide if the packet is still live. Otherwise every connection in the network would have to share the same fixed TTL, or obey the TTL set in whatever random routers it goes through. If you count down, you're always checking against zero.
Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.
You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)
Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
Over on Android it's the opposite situation. The voice interface to Google Assistant was very reliable for simple things like reminders and appointments, and even for general knowledge questions. It was part of why I didn't switch to an iPhone. Then Gemini came along, and that core functionality got a lot worse.
If PA works like some other places I know, there would be something of a rivalry between those two schools, so it was a little unusual to see the two threads on the frontpage at the same time.
The purpose of firing Inspectors General en masse is so that there are no independent overseers to investigate illegal or corrupt actions within the executive branch during your term in office.
There's a famous annotated version of Unix V6 that falls into this category. I heard that it had copyright issues for years, though. It'd be interesting to see people write more of these about open source code.
That's one of my pet peeves on hn, the comments on microplastics studies, or I guess any in-progress science in general. If it's a study on the level of microplastic contamination the environment, or levels and sources of exposure, or to what extent it enters the body, people complain that we don't know yet if they cause harm. When is a study on potential harm, people complain that other substances might also cause harm. They complain generally that the studies don't have total answers, without understanding that this is how science gets us to the big picture.
> They complain generally that the studies don't have total answers, without understanding that this is how science gets us to the big picture.
I think this is one of the big disconnects caused by a lack of good scientific education. A scientist’s default state is “I don’t know.” The rest of our institutions, if you say “I don’t know”, they want to kick you out of office, fire you, or call you incompetent.
Truth is discovered step wise, little by little, with lots of groping around in the dark. But our society seems allergic to the concept of not having all the answers served up to us on a dinner plate.
Carl Sagan often was asked, “Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial life” He’d answer, he didn’t know
and explain what the data was. The questioner would usually press him asking, “but what’s your gut feeling?”. Here’s his reply:
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.
If you count up from zero, then you'd also have to include in every packet how high it can go, so that a router has enough info to decide if the packet is still live. Otherwise every connection in the network would have to share the same fixed TTL, or obey the TTL set in whatever random routers it goes through. If you count down, you're always checking against zero.