Reminds me of a tv commercial I saw a while ago. I forget what the product was for but the commercial showed a lone scientist sitting in front of a huge video monitor in a NASA-style control room. On the monitor was the rover. The scientest turned his head for a minute and when he looked back at the screen the rover was up on cinder blocks, it's wheels were gone, and it had been vandalized in one or two other ways. Finally, conclusive proof of intelligent(?) life on Mars!
Reminds me of something I saw when I was a kid. My dad and I were fishing off the coast of Cape Cod. The boat we were in was a 23' center console with twin 135hp engines. If memory serves me (this was some 25+ years ago) the boat would do about 40mph on a flat calm. Anyway... There was a good stiff breeze, good for sailing, kight flying, etc. At one point not too far in the distance we saw an orange kite flying in the sky. It was one of those $1.99 plastic things you can buy in any toy store. Well it didn't take us too long to realize that nobody was flying the kite because they'd have to be in the water given its location, and there weren't any other boats in the area. We decided to investigate (the fish weren't biting) so we headed towards the kite at full-throttle. It took us about 45 minutes but we eventually caught up with the kite. The string had apparently snapped or whoever was flying it had let go of the string. Enough string was dragging in the water to create just enough drag to keep the kite aloft, and the kite was dragging it through the water at a pretty decent speed. If the boat wasn't as fast as it was we probably wouldn't have caught the kite. We figured it could have made it all the way to Europe in a week or so if we let it. (Makes for a good story anyway) But it ended up in our closet instead.
I suppose as long as the kites in this ladder-thingy are designed properly they would continue to fly upright. But unless they have enough drag (like the string in my little tale) I'd suspect that the wind would just blow it out of the sky if the line were to break.
Why does everybody think this is just a case of some kid who bought a handheld laser pointer and is trying to point it at an airplane that flew overhead?
Come on people, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out that a combination of a commercial/scientific laser along with a good quality sighting scope mounted on a high quality tripod wouldn't be too difficult or expensive to slap together. Hell, just get a good laser and mount it on top of a good pair of military observation binoculars and you'd probably be ready to rock & roll.
It also doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to realize that from a mountain top or other high peak of land you could target aircraft flying directly towards your position from a few miles away. If it's flying in your direction then its horizontal and lateral positions won't change very much so you wouldn't need a sophisticated tracking system. You wouldn't even need a very high position if you intend on targeting aircraft that are landing - just an open area a mile or so from the end of the runway.
There is no way that a hand-held laser can track a plane flying at 300mph at 8500 feet
Where does it say that it was a hand-held laser? One of the articles says it'd have to be " fairly sophisticated to track a plane traveling at that altitude". That sure doesn't sound like a hand-held laser to me.
I would imagine that a good quality laser mounted on a high quality tripod along with a powerful sighting scope wouldn't be all that difficult to whip up. If tv camera people can track the space shuttle from a distance of a few miles then a strategically positioned laser/scope along the axis of the airplanes flight path should be able to target the cockpit enough to get noticed.
It wouldn't need to be completely evacuated. Most of the populated areas on the eastern seaboard is relatively "high"
Tell that to the people who live in Manhattan, Long Island, Boston, and other major cities along the eastern seaboard. I live outside Boston, and a 100 foot tsunami would probably devestate a huge chunk of the city. Cape Cod would likely be obliterated, and a mass evactuation of that area would easily take a full day, if not more. The traffic jams just on summer weekends getting of the Cape can easily run 4-6 hours on a bad day. Long Island and Manhattan would be in similar situations - huge population centers only a few feet above sea level, with a limited amount of escape routes.
most users simply aren't capable of installing all that crap even if they wanted to
If/when I start getting calls from friends/family who have bought DRM'd DVD's and can't get them to play I'll suggest:
Return it to the store for a refund
If the store claims they won't accept it because it's been opened then:
complain to the manager
Tell them its unusable because of the DRM
Tell them the packaging is misleading if the DRM isn't fully documented
Tell them you'll file a complaint with the state consumer protection and/or attorney generals office
Tell them you'll start documenting the problems everywhere on the web you can
Tell them you'll contact the local press (many local TV news shows have consumer alert segments)
Follow through on the above threats
If you bought the DVD from a big chain like Best Buy write a letter of complaint to their HQ
Only by doing the above are you likely to get your money back and/or start generating some noise about consumer problems with DRM. It's only by making a big stink about these problems with DRM that people will start to notice. If big companies like Best Buy start getting significant numbers of returns & complaints they're more likely to go to their distributers and tell them to stop using DRM. (Yeah, I know... I'm smoking crack) But think about it - the alternative is that the masses will quietly be the sheep that they are and accept that in order to watch a DVD they have to run a Microsoft Windows-based media player that requires a full-time net connection, has to download a different DRM utility for each DVD you own, tells the suits in Hollywood when you're watching Attack of the Killer Tomatos for the 42nd time, and won't let you watch the movie if it decides the moons of Jupiter aren't in the proper alignment.
They were obviously destroying evidence because they didn't want anyone to see how the building really came down so easily.
Bullshit. It's common knowledge why the building came down so quickly despite all the conspiracy theories that have run rampant ever since that fateful day. The bomb was parked almost immediately next to one of 5 major supporting beams along the front of the building. The beam vaporized the instant the shockwave hit it. The shockwave then lifted two or three of the floors above it. When they dropped back down the fact that the support was gone caused a domino effect that pulled the floors above down with them.
If you get the National Geographic tv channel check out their new series "Seconds from Disaster". They do an excellent job of debunking the conspiracy theories and demonstrating exactly how the bomb did all the damage that it did.
As someone whose father is one of the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing
I'm glad to hear your father survived that horrible event. I knew two people on board Pan Am 103 and one who came very close to being on one of the 9/11 airplanes, so these sorts of events have a huge impact on me. Oklahoma also hit me fairly hard, not because I knew anybody there but just from seeing some of the results in person.
I had a Coast Guard related trip to Oklahoma a couple years after the bombing and it was an experience I'll never forget. The CO of the Coast Guard Institute (located near the airport) invited me out to his place for dinner, which was about an hour from downtown. He said that when the bomb detonated he thought they were having an earthquake. That's one hell of a shockwave to feel it 50+ miles away. The night before I left he took me downtown, and I can still recall it like it was yesterday. The remains of the Murrah building had been torn down and the lot was surrounded by a chain link fence. A number of surrounding buildings still had scars & other visible damage, as did some of the trees that had survived. What I recall the most vividly, however, were all the flowers, photos, etc. that people had hung on the fence as tributes to the victims. I clearly recall one beautifully framed photograph of one of the children with a "happy birthday" sign and other birthday cards with it. Ever since then any time I think of Oklahoma I remember that picture. Some day I'd like to come back and visit the memorial & museum.
This overly-simple example would not even compile. The return value is missing:)
That depends on the compiler you use and how you tell the compiler to handle errors/warnings. gcc compiles this fine without even so much as a warning. Using -Wall with gcc does generate the following warning but it still compiles into an executable that you can run:
foo.c:6: warning: `return' with no value, in function returning non-void
That's precisely why I used this example to demonstrate a bug that's irrelevant. It's technically a bug that a compiler might generate a warning about (but the bug will never be reached) and it does compile successfully.
Only if you compile this with something like "-Wall -Werror" will it treat this as an error and fail to compile.
Keep in mind that you need to know the definition of a bug. It's not necessarially what you think it might be, but what the researchers defined. By their definition a condition that could never occur could be considered to be a bug. For example:
int foo () {
if (0)
return;
do_something();
return (0); }
This overly-simple example could be considered to be a bug. If the condition is ever true the function will return an undefined value, but the condition will never be true so you couldn't possibly return an undefined value. It's not at all uncommon to find code with similar logic scattered throughout - improperly defined loops, conditionals, etc. could result in theoretical bugs that no path of execution can actually get to.
Then there are the kinds of bugs that only occur in extremly specific situations. About 13 years ago I had to track down a bug that caused a report package to crash. It took me a while to figure it out but eventually I did. The program would crash only on specific days. It'd only crash on Wednesdays. It'd only crash on certian Wednesdays - Wednesdays in September. Even more specifically, usually only the 3rd or 4th Wednesday in September.
The bug was that whoever wrote the code that printed a header on the reports was extremely anal about memory usage. He calculated exactly how many characters it would take for a buffer to hold the full date. The problem was he miscalculated by 1 character. With "Wednesday" being the longest day spelled out and "September" being the longest month, a 2 digit date (eg. Wednesday September 23) meant that the full date string would overflow the buffer by 1 character. This kind of bug wouldn't show up very often - only a few times a year - but it was a pretty nasty one when it did.
These changes have completely fscked up links to usenet posts. A web page I know of that documents a lawsuit (won't post here since I don't want it to get slashdotted) provided links to relevant usenet posts. It now points instead to completely different unrelated posts in other newsgroups.
For example, the link http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&ic=1&selm=a n_638071147 used to point to a post in news.admin.net-abuse.email. It now redirects for me to http://groups-beta.google.com/group/it.discussioni.auto/browse_thread/thread/dadced92c14aee94?ic=1 which points to an article in it.discussioni.auto. So Google seems to think there's some sort of correlation between news.admin.net-abuse.email and Italian car discussions???
For years SAN's from EMC, fault tolerant serves from Stratus, etc. have all had the ability to phone home when they detect a failure is imminent or has occured. Usually the customer doesn't realize there's even a problem until a service tech shows up with replacement parts.
Of course getting this down to the level of home users is still a long way away...
All TiVo has to do is change its programming a bit.
Agreed. But they could even do more than what you propose. I've seen my TiVo resolve conflicts by recording the second show when it is aired on a different station at a different time. I've seen cases where something like the Simpsons would air Sunday night at 8:00 (it's regular time slot) then an affiliate would re-air the same episode 3 or 4 days later around 11:30 or so. So you might have to wait a bit to get the show you want but you'd still get the full episode.
Another thing TiVo could do would be to make their boxes communicate with each other if you have more than one on a home network. I'm hearing of more and more people who have 2+ TiVos at home. If they could talk to each other then one could record the first show and the other record the second one. Let's see Hollywood deal with that!
That's odd... When I first posted this message I'd checked my website & the links I had to groups.google.com were redirecting to groups-beta.google.com. It's no longer doing that. Somebody at Google must have fscked up their DNS for a little while.
It seems to me that Google has decided to make Google Groups their own private message board and are relegating usenet newsgroups to the back room. The old interface let you easily drill down through the usent hierarchy (alt., comp., sci., rec., and so on). With this new (less) improved interface they've pushed the usenet groups off to one side. From the main page there's now a " Browse all of Usenet..." option at the bottom, and if you click on that you get taken to a page where you can select from an alphabetical list of newsgroups. They couldn't even be bothered to keep the same easy to use hierarchical method of navigating groups.
I wonder how long it'll be before Google simply drops the usenet portion altogether. Probably just as soon as their own private groups reach a critical mass and they decide usenet isn't worth the effort any more.
Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
Jee, nice "improvements"... I personally have linked to individual posts on a web page summarizing a lawsuit I was involved in that was directly related to posts in a newsgroup. I know others who have linked to posts in similar situations. I just checked my web page and the links to those posts no longer work.
Google just took a HUGE step backwards in my opinion.
How about, "In yet another attempt to make the Internet relevant to the average person?"
Sorry, but Microsoft hasn't been interested in the "average person" since at least Windows 95. Windows has become so amazingly complex that just about every "average" user I know complains constantly about it. Don't confuse "average person" with "average person with a technical background" - there are a LOT more of the first type. Just about every time I get a call from a family member or non-technical friend these days at least part of that call involves problems they're having with their Windows PC's. If Microsoft really cared about the average person then they would focus on making an OS that somebody with NO technical abilities whatsoever could feel comfortable using rather than trying to shoehorn every whatever-the-latest-hot-trend-of-the-week-is into Windows.
If he could only have held out just another year then who knows....
IMHO he probably would have had to wait a lot longer than just a year. From reading the articles it sounds like this woman had an injury to her lower spinal cord. The accident she was in apparently damaged her back & hips, but her arms still worked fine. So she was a paraplegic (only her legs didn't work) which indicates a lower spinal injury. Reeves' injury was to his neck, which left him a quadraplegic (couldn't move arms or legs). He also needed assistance in breathing, etc. which indicates a more severe upper spinal cord injury. So chances are that a LOT more research & testing would have to be done before this procedure could be used on somebody in his condition.
All that aside I share your sympathy. It would have been a great site to see him able to breath on his own, use his hands, and eventually to even walk again.
Slashdot Mirror
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Give that man a cigar!
Just found the ad on the Pepsi website. Here's the link (cached on Akami). Sorry - wmv format only...
Reminds me of a tv commercial I saw a while ago. I forget what the product was for but the commercial showed a lone scientist sitting in front of a huge video monitor in a NASA-style control room. On the monitor was the rover. The scientest turned his head for a minute and when he looked back at the screen the rover was up on cinder blocks, it's wheels were gone, and it had been vandalized in one or two other ways. Finally, conclusive proof of intelligent(?) life on Mars!
Give yourself a gift certificate!
Nice Logans Run reference. Now, without relying on IMDB or Google, what was Logan's full name?
I wonder about what happens if the line breaks.
Reminds me of something I saw when I was a kid. My dad and I were fishing off the coast of Cape Cod. The boat we were in was a 23' center console with twin 135hp engines. If memory serves me (this was some 25+ years ago) the boat would do about 40mph on a flat calm. Anyway... There was a good stiff breeze, good for sailing, kight flying, etc. At one point not too far in the distance we saw an orange kite flying in the sky. It was one of those $1.99 plastic things you can buy in any toy store. Well it didn't take us too long to realize that nobody was flying the kite because they'd have to be in the water given its location, and there weren't any other boats in the area. We decided to investigate (the fish weren't biting) so we headed towards the kite at full-throttle. It took us about 45 minutes but we eventually caught up with the kite. The string had apparently snapped or whoever was flying it had let go of the string. Enough string was dragging in the water to create just enough drag to keep the kite aloft, and the kite was dragging it through the water at a pretty decent speed. If the boat wasn't as fast as it was we probably wouldn't have caught the kite. We figured it could have made it all the way to Europe in a week or so if we let it. (Makes for a good story anyway) But it ended up in our closet instead.
I suppose as long as the kites in this ladder-thingy are designed properly they would continue to fly upright. But unless they have enough drag (like the string in my little tale) I'd suspect that the wind would just blow it out of the sky if the line were to break.
Maintaining such a system of giant kites in such strong winds is going to be a problem, as is lightning, storms, etc.
And if they install some along the US/Mexico border as the article suggests then there's also drug-smuggling aircraft.
This just in... The city of Dallas was plunged into darkness when a kite was struck by a cocaine-laden aircraft.
Why does everybody think this is just a case of some kid who bought a handheld laser pointer and is trying to point it at an airplane that flew overhead?
Come on people, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out that a combination of a commercial/scientific laser along with a good quality sighting scope mounted on a high quality tripod wouldn't be too difficult or expensive to slap together. Hell, just get a good laser and mount it on top of a good pair of military observation binoculars and you'd probably be ready to rock & roll.
It also doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to realize that from a mountain top or other high peak of land you could target aircraft flying directly towards your position from a few miles away. If it's flying in your direction then its horizontal and lateral positions won't change very much so you wouldn't need a sophisticated tracking system. You wouldn't even need a very high position if you intend on targeting aircraft that are landing - just an open area a mile or so from the end of the runway.
There is no way that a hand-held laser can track a plane flying at 300mph at 8500 feet
Where does it say that it was a hand-held laser? One of the articles says it'd have to be " fairly sophisticated to track a plane traveling at that altitude". That sure doesn't sound like a hand-held laser to me.
I would imagine that a good quality laser mounted on a high quality tripod along with a powerful sighting scope wouldn't be all that difficult to whip up. If tv camera people can track the space shuttle from a distance of a few miles then a strategically positioned laser/scope along the axis of the airplanes flight path should be able to target the cockpit enough to get noticed.
It wouldn't need to be completely evacuated. Most of the populated areas on the eastern seaboard is relatively "high"
Tell that to the people who live in Manhattan, Long Island, Boston, and other major cities along the eastern seaboard. I live outside Boston, and a 100 foot tsunami would probably devestate a huge chunk of the city. Cape Cod would likely be obliterated, and a mass evactuation of that area would easily take a full day, if not more. The traffic jams just on summer weekends getting of the Cape can easily run 4-6 hours on a bad day. Long Island and Manhattan would be in similar situations - huge population centers only a few feet above sea level, with a limited amount of escape routes.
If/when I start getting calls from friends/family who have bought DRM'd DVD's and can't get them to play I'll suggest:
Only by doing the above are you likely to get your money back and/or start generating some noise about consumer problems with DRM. It's only by making a big stink about these problems with DRM that people will start to notice. If big companies like Best Buy start getting significant numbers of returns & complaints they're more likely to go to their distributers and tell them to stop using DRM. (Yeah, I know... I'm smoking crack) But think about it - the alternative is that the masses will quietly be the sheep that they are and accept that in order to watch a DVD they have to run a Microsoft Windows-based media player that requires a full-time net connection, has to download a different DRM utility for each DVD you own, tells the suits in Hollywood when you're watching Attack of the Killer Tomatos for the 42nd time, and won't let you watch the movie if it decides the moons of Jupiter aren't in the proper alignment.
...to all the spam I get.
Tell that to the cockroaches...
Just wait until we sick the robots on them!
They were obviously destroying evidence because they didn't want anyone to see how the building really came down so easily.
Bullshit. It's common knowledge why the building came down so quickly despite all the conspiracy theories that have run rampant ever since that fateful day. The bomb was parked almost immediately next to one of 5 major supporting beams along the front of the building. The beam vaporized the instant the shockwave hit it. The shockwave then lifted two or three of the floors above it. When they dropped back down the fact that the support was gone caused a domino effect that pulled the floors above down with them.
If you get the National Geographic tv channel check out their new series "Seconds from Disaster". They do an excellent job of debunking the conspiracy theories and demonstrating exactly how the bomb did all the damage that it did.
As someone whose father is one of the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing
I'm glad to hear your father survived that horrible event. I knew two people on board Pan Am 103 and one who came very close to being on one of the 9/11 airplanes, so these sorts of events have a huge impact on me. Oklahoma also hit me fairly hard, not because I knew anybody there but just from seeing some of the results in person.
I had a Coast Guard related trip to Oklahoma a couple years after the bombing and it was an experience I'll never forget. The CO of the Coast Guard Institute (located near the airport) invited me out to his place for dinner, which was about an hour from downtown. He said that when the bomb detonated he thought they were having an earthquake. That's one hell of a shockwave to feel it 50+ miles away. The night before I left he took me downtown, and I can still recall it like it was yesterday. The remains of the Murrah building had been torn down and the lot was surrounded by a chain link fence. A number of surrounding buildings still had scars & other visible damage, as did some of the trees that had survived. What I recall the most vividly, however, were all the flowers, photos, etc. that people had hung on the fence as tributes to the victims. I clearly recall one beautifully framed photograph of one of the children with a "happy birthday" sign and other birthday cards with it. Ever since then any time I think of Oklahoma I remember that picture. Some day I'd like to come back and visit the memorial & museum.
This overly-simple example would not even compile. The return value is missing :)
That depends on the compiler you use and how you tell the compiler to handle errors/warnings. gcc compiles this fine without even so much as a warning. Using -Wall with gcc does generate the following warning but it still compiles into an executable that you can run:
foo.c:6: warning: `return' with no value, in function returning non-void
That's precisely why I used this example to demonstrate a bug that's irrelevant. It's technically a bug that a compiler might generate a warning about (but the bug will never be reached) and it does compile successfully.
Only if you compile this with something like "-Wall -Werror" will it treat this as an error and fail to compile.
I'm gonna call bullshit on this figure.
Keep in mind that you need to know the definition of a bug. It's not necessarially what you think it might be, but what the researchers defined. By their definition a condition that could never occur could be considered to be a bug. For example:
int foo ()
{
if (0)
return;
do_something();
return (0);
}
This overly-simple example could be considered to be a bug. If the condition is ever true the function will return an undefined value, but the condition will never be true so you couldn't possibly return an undefined value. It's not at all uncommon to find code with similar logic scattered throughout - improperly defined loops, conditionals, etc. could result in theoretical bugs that no path of execution can actually get to.
Then there are the kinds of bugs that only occur in extremly specific situations. About 13 years ago I had to track down a bug that caused a report package to crash. It took me a while to figure it out but eventually I did. The program would crash only on specific days. It'd only crash on Wednesdays. It'd only crash on certian Wednesdays - Wednesdays in September. Even more specifically, usually only the 3rd or 4th Wednesday in September.
The bug was that whoever wrote the code that printed a header on the reports was extremely anal about memory usage. He calculated exactly how many characters it would take for a buffer to hold the full date. The problem was he miscalculated by 1 character. With "Wednesday" being the longest day spelled out and "September" being the longest month, a 2 digit date (eg. Wednesday September 23) meant that the full date string would overflow the buffer by 1 character. This kind of bug wouldn't show up very often - only a few times a year - but it was a pretty nasty one when it did.
These changes have completely fscked up links to usenet posts. A web page I know of that documents a lawsuit (won't post here since I don't want it to get slashdotted) provided links to relevant usenet posts. It now points instead to completely different unrelated posts in other newsgroups.
a n_638071147 used to point to a post in news.admin.net-abuse.email. It now redirects for me to http://groups-beta.google.com/group/it.discussioni .auto/browse_thread/thread/dadced92c14aee94?ic=1 which points to an article in it.discussioni.auto. So Google seems to think there's some sort of correlation between news.admin.net-abuse.email and Italian car discussions???
For example, the link http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&ic=1&selm=
For years SAN's from EMC, fault tolerant serves from Stratus, etc. have all had the ability to phone home when they detect a failure is imminent or has occured. Usually the customer doesn't realize there's even a problem until a service tech shows up with replacement parts.
Of course getting this down to the level of home users is still a long way away...
"After a legal agreement the firm provided victims with compensation averaging $500 (£300)."
So that's what a life is worth to a multinational corporation?
All TiVo has to do is change its programming a bit.
Agreed. But they could even do more than what you propose. I've seen my TiVo resolve conflicts by recording the second show when it is aired on a different station at a different time. I've seen cases where something like the Simpsons would air Sunday night at 8:00 (it's regular time slot) then an affiliate would re-air the same episode 3 or 4 days later around 11:30 or so. So you might have to wait a bit to get the show you want but you'd still get the full episode.
Another thing TiVo could do would be to make their boxes communicate with each other if you have more than one on a home network. I'm hearing of more and more people who have 2+ TiVos at home. If they could talk to each other then one could record the first show and the other record the second one. Let's see Hollywood deal with that!
That's odd... When I first posted this message I'd checked my website & the links I had to groups.google.com were redirecting to groups-beta.google.com. It's no longer doing that. Somebody at Google must have fscked up their DNS for a little while.
It seems to me that Google has decided to make Google Groups their own private message board and are relegating usenet newsgroups to the back room. The old interface let you easily drill down through the usent hierarchy (alt., comp., sci., rec., and so on). With this new (less) improved interface they've pushed the usenet groups off to one side. From the main page there's now a " Browse all of Usenet..." option at the bottom, and if you click on that you get taken to a page where you can select from an alphabetical list of newsgroups. They couldn't even be bothered to keep the same easy to use hierarchical method of navigating groups.
I wonder how long it'll be before Google simply drops the usenet portion altogether. Probably just as soon as their own private groups reach a critical mass and they decide usenet isn't worth the effort any more.
Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
Jee, nice "improvements"... I personally have linked to individual posts on a web page summarizing a lawsuit I was involved in that was directly related to posts in a newsgroup. I know others who have linked to posts in similar situations. I just checked my web page and the links to those posts no longer work.
Google just took a HUGE step backwards in my opinion.
How about, "In yet another attempt to make the Internet relevant to the average person?"
Sorry, but Microsoft hasn't been interested in the "average person" since at least Windows 95. Windows has become so amazingly complex that just about every "average" user I know complains constantly about it. Don't confuse "average person" with "average person with a technical background" - there are a LOT more of the first type. Just about every time I get a call from a family member or non-technical friend these days at least part of that call involves problems they're having with their Windows PC's. If Microsoft really cared about the average person then they would focus on making an OS that somebody with NO technical abilities whatsoever could feel comfortable using rather than trying to shoehorn every whatever-the-latest-hot-trend-of-the-week-is into Windows.
If he could only have held out just another year then who knows....
IMHO he probably would have had to wait a lot longer than just a year. From reading the articles it sounds like this woman had an injury to her lower spinal cord. The accident she was in apparently damaged her back & hips, but her arms still worked fine. So she was a paraplegic (only her legs didn't work) which indicates a lower spinal injury. Reeves' injury was to his neck, which left him a quadraplegic (couldn't move arms or legs). He also needed assistance in breathing, etc. which indicates a more severe upper spinal cord injury. So chances are that a LOT more research & testing would have to be done before this procedure could be used on somebody in his condition.
All that aside I share your sympathy. It would have been a great site to see him able to breath on his own, use his hands, and eventually to even walk again.