Has anybody gone through his resume and attempted to contact his (supposed) former employers to hear what they have to say about him, if anything? Did he really work for who he said he did? Is he committing fraud?
"Xbox has two things that Game cube dosn't. DVD playback capability,"
Customers that want DVD playback capability as well as GameCube games can get the Panasonic Q. And like the PS2 (and UNLIKE the XBox), it will play DVDs out of the box.
"and an easy, low effort revenue stream for successful Win PC game makers."
As has been repeated ad nauseum, there is no such thing as an easy way to transition from PC to console game writing. No patches, no add-ons, no expansion packs, not even a real operating system. Making a dent in the console world requires a different philosophy than in the PC world. Once a game is released, it had better be self-contained and done.
Besides, how many PC gamers do you know of that, if given the chance, would buy an Xbox and however many games instead of a shiny new PC?
"After seeing their latest offerings (the N64 and Gamecube) lose money hand over fist,"
N64, perhaps (but keep in mind even then they were able to hold their own even with no real third-party developers). But GameCube?
"Nintendo finally learned that their core competency was in creating mediocre handheld gaming systems,"
"Finally?" Nintendo has known since at least the early N64 era that Game Boy is its bread and butter and has gone after intrusions into the market with a vengeance. Towards the end of the N64's life-cycle in Japan, we saw all sorts of accessories to connect the Game Boy Color to the N64, from the Transfer Pak that came out with Pokemon Stadium in the US to the cable that connects the game link port on the GBC to a controller port on the N64 (attatching the GBA to the GameCube isn't a new idea).
And also note that the GBA is their first backwards-compatible anything. Again, trying to tap into their bread-and-butter.
"and blaming a dearth of features on the "compromises" they needed to make in order to accomodate the handheld form factor."
It's not just the form factor they were trying to fit into, but the price factor as well. iPaqs are real nice and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but they also cost over five times as much. It's enough to make you want to play it but not so much you're afraid of breaking it.
And these "compromises" has given us a 32-bit system that does 2-D graphics better even than a Sega Saturn (let alone a PSX). It fits in the palm of my hand and it costs less than a PS One. Not too shabby in my book.
"Unfortunately, Nintendo's poor business sense and lack of R&D has finally caught up to them. They are fighting an 800-lb gorilla that has billion$ of dollars to spend on dominating every area of the market that it enters. And it looks like Microsoft is about to release a very versatile, multipurpose handheld device that will blow all of Nintendo's offerings right out of the water."
If Microsoft is an 800# gorilla, then when it comes to handhelds Nintendo must me a man with a machine gun. This isn't the console market, where the dominant player rotates every generation. We're talking about Game Boy, the Ali of the gaming world. I can think of no less than seven handheld systems offered by six different companies with all sorts of advantages (both real an imagined) that got smacked down by Game Boy and smacked down HARD! The closest thing to a second place I've seen in the field is Sega's Game Gear, and half the people that have posted here don't even remember its name.
And even before anybody thought of a hand-held video game system (where "anybody" means Gumpei Yokoi), guess who dominated the hand-held electronic games market? That's right, still Nintendo and their Game & Watch line. They've been around so long that the associated patent on a plus-shaped directional pad terminated only shortly before Sega made their Dreacast controller.
In today's world, when was the last time you saw a dominant anything that's been on the throne for over a decade? If you ask me, Microsoft would have a better chance of breaking into the CPU business. At least we've seen that there's room for competition there.
"As the article even states, this is in line with the industry average, even compared to Nintendo who has more console building experience than anyone else in the market hands-down."
They said the defective number of units is the norm. They didn't say that the lousy customer experience was. I've talked to Nintendo customer support several times over the years about various things, and have yet to have anything but a downright pleasurable experience. I've even e-mailed Sony once about their PS2 before I bought one and they actually CALLED me to answer my question. I can't say that my experiences with Microsoft support have been quite so rosy.
"Is it so surprising that the new player on this market might have a few snags with third-party customer service companies?"
As the article points out, this console market is possibly as competitive as it has ever been. They will receive zero mercy from Nintendo and Sony (remember, business is war). If this is a sign that Microsoft doesn't have all it's ducks in a row, then they're going to get left in the dust in a bad way. Investors might want to know about this as well as consumers.
"Just because it's Microsoft doesn't mean their problems with third party CS companies equate to a poor product or a general neglect of their customers. This molehill is not that mountain."
On the other hand, just because they're Microsoft means that they should have problems with customer support. While they may be new to the console wars, customer support is something they're supposed to have been doing since the mid 80's.
"People sometimes need to understand that just b/c you paid $300 for something does not mean that it is going to work and it isn't going to get repaired that instant. Chill."
Then Microsoft needs to understand that just because I paid $300 for it doesn't mean I don't expect it to work, and that I won't return it to the store and share my bad experiences with all my friends if I have a bad experience. If $300 isn't a high enough threshold for functioning hardware, then at what point DO I get what I pay for? $500? $1000? $5000?
"I enjoy my PS2. It has the time behind it and the games that are great. You just can't beat what it has."
There was another system that had "the time" behind it. It was called the Dreamcast.
"These are not merely foolishly infatuated fans. This is being done intentionally and thoughtfully as an "art project"."
From the looks of it, these two aren't exactly sacrificing themselves for this art. They didn't sit around thinking "You know, somebody needs to sit in front of a movie theater for five months, and since nobody else is doing it, we had better be the ones to do it. It's a tough job, but..." This is "We need an excuse to do this, to make it sound legimitate..."
Just look at the first sentence you quoted. "This project also explores..." not "This project explores..."
"Living on the street for five months is hardly "forsaking all real human contact". In fact I expect they will have much more interesting human contact than most of us who are chained to our computers for 40+ hours a week."
But you know, the people I see on Friday are the same people I see on Monday, and there will be a continuing relationship with those people. That's the real human contact I was referring to. These people will have as much contact with people as caged animals in a zoo. And even then that analogy falls short, as the animals at least have care-takers...
"Whereas sitting around on Slashdot posting this drivel about their lack of "lives" will be about all your "life" has to recommend it. I'm not sure who's winning that particular relay race."
I'm reading about them on Slashdot and they're sitting on the sidewalk. I form an opinion of them and post it and they're still sitting on the sidewalk. I go away from my computer and do some other stuff for a little bit and they're still sitting on the sidewalk.
To make a long story short, four months later I'll have forgotten about this whole thing, and we both know where they'll be...
Think about it. They're, what, 20-something? And what they are doing now they will remember as being the best time of their "lives." They didn't cure cancer, they weren't the first on Mars, no, they stood in line for five months for a two-hour movie. They'll be sitting around the "retirement village" and boring those around them with the retelling of what happened on day 37 for the umpteen millionth time.
It's entertainment. It's not real, it's meant as a temporary escape. If you're willing to spend five months waiting for a two hour escape, forsaking all real human contact for a brief work of fiction, what you should be waiting in line for is a shrink.
Seriously, how can these people differentiate what they're doing from what the crack whore is doing just a few blocks away?
... they use the extra bandwidth and digital broadcasting technology to, say, put more tv stations and programming into a channel. I get few enough broadcast channels as it is (many of which are televangelists), and Clear Channel (the people who make satellite radio look so damned tempting) is wasting perfectly good television bandwidth for this gimmick, this DirecPC wanna-be? And at least satellite internet doesn't rob potential viewing bandwidth from an entire broadcast area (customers of the service or not).
The more I hear about the cluster-fuck HDTV is turning out to be in the US, the more I think that the hundreds or thousands of dollars I'm expected to pay to upgrade my receivers for it will instead go into a 6' C-band dish in the back yard. Broadcasters, cable companies and TV manufacturers can do what they want, I'll still be able to watch the whole thing collapse on C-SPAN and the BBC.
"Pathetic WWII design - Aircraft carriers with damage control"
I'm assuming you're still talking about that vague reference to "that carrier" you can't name.
"armour scheme"
Armor?
We're living in an age where surface combattants never get within visual range to damage each other. In order for a plane or missile to reach a CVN to damage it, it would need to avoid the Aegis system in its battlegroup as well as any Hawkeyes that may be airborne. Once they're spotted, they have to deal with the fighters flying CAP. If it's a low-flying missile, it still has to deal with the several Phalanxes mounted on the ship.
Submarines have to avoid the destroyers in the battlegroup, and will have to also deal with helicopters if the DDs find anything questionable.
Why do you need armor, especially when designing a ship that needs to go fast enough for carrier operations as well as get to the other side of the globe ASAP?
"I didn't know the USS Cole was attacked in a naval action."
You seem to have a problem calling it naval action. If it "doesn't count" becuase it was a suicide attack, what were the dozens of ships sank by kamikazes experiencing? If it's the sneak attack by an undeclared combatant while in port that bothers you, what was Pearl Harbor? And if you're having a problem with the way the attackers weren't formally members of a foreign military, I reccomend you look up the so-called Quasi-War with France and the Barbary Wars early in US history.
The USS Cole was crippled by an attack from a hostile surface vessel. Period. Just because it wasn't Trafalgar or Jutland or Coral Sea doesn't mean it wasn't "naval action."
Do you even consider the threat to USS Vincennes to have been "naval action?"
"this friend of yours that didn't exist until you found your argument was too weak"
Josh Parlett was from Churchville, MD. I grew up in Harford County and his sister was engaged to a friend of mine from high school. He took the death kinda hard because they had a fight shortly before shipping off for the last time.
... not that you'll believe me after this, and not that it matters either way. He's still just as dead.
"An Aegis cruiser simply has a slightly less obsolete fire control computer than the rest of the western world. They have the same radar and sonar/sosus."
From http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/weapo ns/wep-aeg.html
The Aegis system was designed as a total weapon system, from detection to kill. The heart of the system is an advanced, automatic detect and track, multi-function phased-array radar, the AN/SPY-1. This high powered (four megawatt) radar is able to perform search, track and missile guidance functions simultaneously with a track capacity of over 100 targets.
"Lets face it, no US ship has actually been attacked in decades,"
I know someone that might have been able to argue with you, but he died on the USS Cole.
"they all still suffer the legacy of the pathetically designed ships of WWII."
What, they all have rows upon rows of anti-aircraft guns? The main weapon of choice is still the gun? A ship's main defense is still several feet of steel armor? Submarines can only submerge for a few hours at a time? A ship's main navigation tool is its chronometer? We still build our navies around our battleship fleet?
If anything, design ideas from WWII are shunned too much. The battleship is still very valuable in brown-water operations (if not cheaper in the long run than missile barges), and a steel armor belt instead of glorified aluminum foil would have saved several RN ships in the Faulklands from Exocets.
"Remember that electrical fire that crippled a carrier for days?"
No. Details? The most recent carrier fire I can think of USS Forrestal (sp?), and that wasn't electrical.
"What if that had been a missile strike or bomb hit?"
Missiles have to deal with Phalanxes, bombers have to deal with a whole mess of fighters. Next question.
"A visual search of even a thousand square miles (That's approx the possible area after 5 hours at 30 knots) would take a horrendous amount of time, and even then you'd have found one ship and would need the satellite to be fairly dedicated to tracking it."
You neglect to mention the size of the wake of a ship going at 30 knots. It's easy to find something small when you have two long lines pointing right to it.
Also, you ignored the infrared. Unless these things are nuclear, it's going to have a tail pipe and the corresponding exhaust plume.
"Radar and sonar are still the only reliable ways to find ocean going vessels, and the technology to severely reduce the effectiveness of sonar has been around for quite a while."
For underwater vessels. For an awful lot of money you can make a submarine somewhat harder to find with passive sonar, but a submarine doesn't have to slice through the surface of the water. Which brings us back to the wake...
"Adding radar mitigating tech to a ship is the last step to making it effectively dissapear, espacially with a few dozen of them around to track..."
Stealth doesn't make it impossible to find, only difficult (making it impossible would violate a thermodynamic law or two), and it becomes quite easy once you know the signature of what you're looking for. Besides, hiding from the radar on your average destroyer is one thing, hiding from an Aegis cruiser is something else.
"The best place for a solar power satellite is probably geosynchronous orbit (40,000 km). This needs a football-field sized transmitter and a mile-wide receiver; still pretty big, but maybe manageable. And the transmitter and receiver don't move relatively. A lunar array would have to keep switching between different receivers as the Earth turns. An SPS in a lower orbit would also have to keep switching receivers, but at least it would have smaller antennas."
There is one advantage of the moon-based solution that isn't mentioned, though: The moon's orbit won't degrade any time soon. However, even geostationary satellites need to be replaced regularly every few years. So you either keep switching easily-maintained ground stations or you keep refitting and/or replacing hard-to-maintain orbital platforms.
"At least, I assume that it isn't meteroids headed for the moon that this is supposed to shoot down?"
I was under the impression that you were supposed to detect these things outside of the earth-moon system, hopefully at least two weeks outside it.
Basic Orbital Dynamics (duh!)
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"a sort of super-sized Star Wars program on the Moon, giant lasers set up to blast incoming space debris and not, of course, anyone here on Earth."
Does the phrase "tide locked" mean anything to you? The moon's rotation and revolution match each other, so anything set up on the far side of the moon to target incoming debris will never be able to hit earth-based targets, or at least not any time this eon.
"I find it quite interesting that while many users of the Internet are quick to claim that 'information wants to be free' and to fight against censorship and restriction of their liberties, spam remains an area where the same people rush to seek legislation."
Simple: both closed-source programmers and spammers are the same in that they both seek absolute control over the information in question. Microsoft wants to have a say in how their customers use their computing resources by placing artificial limitations on it. Spammers want to have a say in how their potential customers use their computing resources by forcing them to use it to process the ads.
"Perhaps where things need to be tightened up in order to address the problem of spam in a consistent manner is in the area of unapproved use of resources like SMTP servers."
Why must it be limited to SMTP servers? Why can't I have a say in unauthorized SMTP traffic going through any of my networking hardware, even if that hardware is just a modem?
"Probably won't be that easy to collect, especially if they didn't even show up in court."
If they fail to show up, they're found guilty by default. If they fail to pay, not only can you pass that info on to credit-reporting and background-check agencies but (if it's anything like a traffic ticket) a bench warrant is issued for their arrest (results of that vary depending on the state).
As an example I have a friend that was arrested in Florida for defaulting on debts in Virginia. The creditors filed suit in Virginia, he never showed, the court found him guilty, he got pulled over in Florida for some reason, and ended up spending the night in jail.
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs would be held accountable for the damages caused by not enforcing their AUPs.
Has anybody gone through his resume and attempted to contact his (supposed) former employers to hear what they have to say about him, if anything? Did he really work for who he said he did? Is he committing fraud?
If an alien civilization received this, would they get an Outlook virus from it?
It doesn't matter how many colors you can display if the graphics don't look hand-drawn and the animation isn't smooth and fluid.
"Xbox has two things that Game cube dosn't. DVD playback capability,"
Customers that want DVD playback capability as well as GameCube games can get the Panasonic Q. And like the PS2 (and UNLIKE the XBox), it will play DVDs out of the box.
"and an easy, low effort revenue stream for successful Win PC game makers."
As has been repeated ad nauseum, there is no such thing as an easy way to transition from PC to console game writing. No patches, no add-ons, no expansion packs, not even a real operating system. Making a dent in the console world requires a different philosophy than in the PC world. Once a game is released, it had better be self-contained and done.
Besides, how many PC gamers do you know of that, if given the chance, would buy an Xbox and however many games instead of a shiny new PC?
"After seeing their latest offerings (the N64 and Gamecube) lose money hand over fist,"
N64, perhaps (but keep in mind even then they were able to hold their own even with no real third-party developers). But GameCube?
"Nintendo finally learned that their core competency was in creating mediocre handheld gaming systems,"
"Finally?" Nintendo has known since at least the early N64 era that Game Boy is its bread and butter and has gone after intrusions into the market with a vengeance. Towards the end of the N64's life-cycle in Japan, we saw all sorts of accessories to connect the Game Boy Color to the N64, from the Transfer Pak that came out with Pokemon Stadium in the US to the cable that connects the game link port on the GBC to a controller port on the N64 (attatching the GBA to the GameCube isn't a new idea).
And also note that the GBA is their first backwards-compatible anything. Again, trying to tap into their bread-and-butter.
"and blaming a dearth of features on the "compromises" they needed to make in order to accomodate the handheld form factor."
It's not just the form factor they were trying to fit into, but the price factor as well. iPaqs are real nice and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but they also cost over five times as much. It's enough to make you want to play it but not so much you're afraid of breaking it.
And these "compromises" has given us a 32-bit system that does 2-D graphics better even than a Sega Saturn (let alone a PSX). It fits in the palm of my hand and it costs less than a PS One. Not too shabby in my book.
"Unfortunately, Nintendo's poor business sense and lack of R&D has finally caught up to them. They are fighting an 800-lb gorilla that has billion$ of dollars to spend on dominating every area of the market that it enters. And it looks like Microsoft is about to release a very versatile, multipurpose handheld device that will blow all of Nintendo's offerings right out of the water."
If Microsoft is an 800# gorilla, then when it comes to handhelds Nintendo must me a man with a machine gun. This isn't the console market, where the dominant player rotates every generation. We're talking about Game Boy, the Ali of the gaming world. I can think of no less than seven handheld systems offered by six different companies with all sorts of advantages (both real an imagined) that got smacked down by Game Boy and smacked down HARD! The closest thing to a second place I've seen in the field is Sega's Game Gear, and half the people that have posted here don't even remember its name.
And even before anybody thought of a hand-held video game system (where "anybody" means Gumpei Yokoi), guess who dominated the hand-held electronic games market? That's right, still Nintendo and their Game & Watch line. They've been around so long that the associated patent on a plus-shaped directional pad terminated only shortly before Sega made their Dreacast controller.
In today's world, when was the last time you saw a dominant anything that's been on the throne for over a decade? If you ask me, Microsoft would have a better chance of breaking into the CPU business. At least we've seen that there's room for competition there.
"As the article even states, this is in line with the industry average, even compared to Nintendo who has more console building experience than anyone else in the market hands-down."
They said the defective number of units is the norm. They didn't say that the lousy customer experience was. I've talked to Nintendo customer support several times over the years about various things, and have yet to have anything but a downright pleasurable experience. I've even e-mailed Sony once about their PS2 before I bought one and they actually CALLED me to answer my question. I can't say that my experiences with Microsoft support have been quite so rosy.
"Is it so surprising that the new player on this market might have a few snags with third-party customer service companies?"
As the article points out, this console market is possibly as competitive as it has ever been. They will receive zero mercy from Nintendo and Sony (remember, business is war). If this is a sign that Microsoft doesn't have all it's ducks in a row, then they're going to get left in the dust in a bad way. Investors might want to know about this as well as consumers.
"Just because it's Microsoft doesn't mean their problems with third party CS companies equate to a poor product or a general neglect of their customers. This molehill is not that mountain."
On the other hand, just because they're Microsoft means that they should have problems with customer support. While they may be new to the console wars, customer support is something they're supposed to have been doing since the mid 80's.
"Which puts us almost at a mere two weeks after Christmas. Not even quite yet."
When it comes to retail sales in the US, "over the holidays" means that month-long gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
"People sometimes need to understand that just b/c you paid $300 for something does not mean that it is going to work and it isn't going to get repaired that instant. Chill."
Then Microsoft needs to understand that just because I paid $300 for it doesn't mean I don't expect it to work, and that I won't return it to the store and share my bad experiences with all my friends if I have a bad experience. If $300 isn't a high enough threshold for functioning hardware, then at what point DO I get what I pay for? $500? $1000? $5000?
"I enjoy my PS2. It has the time behind it and the games that are great. You just can't beat what it has."
There was another system that had "the time" behind it. It was called the Dreamcast.
"These are not merely foolishly infatuated fans. This is being done intentionally and thoughtfully as an "art project"."
From the looks of it, these two aren't exactly sacrificing themselves for this art. They didn't sit around thinking "You know, somebody needs to sit in front of a movie theater for five months, and since nobody else is doing it, we had better be the ones to do it. It's a tough job, but..." This is "We need an excuse to do this, to make it sound legimitate..."
Just look at the first sentence you quoted. "This project also explores..." not "This project explores..."
"Living on the street for five months is hardly "forsaking all real human contact". In fact I expect they will have much more interesting human contact than most of us who are chained to our computers for 40+ hours a week."
But you know, the people I see on Friday are the same people I see on Monday, and there will be a continuing relationship with those people. That's the real human contact I was referring to. These people will have as much contact with people as caged animals in a zoo. And even then that analogy falls short, as the animals at least have care-takers...
"Whereas sitting around on Slashdot posting this drivel about their lack of "lives" will be about all your "life" has to recommend it. I'm not sure who's winning that particular relay race."
I'm reading about them on Slashdot and they're sitting on the sidewalk. I form an opinion of them and post it and they're still sitting on the sidewalk. I go away from my computer and do some other stuff for a little bit and they're still sitting on the sidewalk.
To make a long story short, four months later I'll have forgotten about this whole thing, and we both know where they'll be...
Think about it. They're, what, 20-something? And what they are doing now they will remember as being the best time of their "lives." They didn't cure cancer, they weren't the first on Mars, no, they stood in line for five months for a two-hour movie. They'll be sitting around the "retirement village" and boring those around them with the retelling of what happened on day 37 for the umpteen millionth time.
It's entertainment. It's not real, it's meant as a temporary escape. If you're willing to spend five months waiting for a two hour escape, forsaking all real human contact for a brief work of fiction, what you should be waiting in line for is a shrink.
Seriously, how can these people differentiate what they're doing from what the crack whore is doing just a few blocks away?
"that just shows how good the previous movie was"
You know... ten million people CAN be wrong...
... they use the extra bandwidth and digital broadcasting technology to, say, put more tv stations and programming into a channel. I get few enough broadcast channels as it is (many of which are televangelists), and Clear Channel (the people who make satellite radio look so damned tempting) is wasting perfectly good television bandwidth for this gimmick, this DirecPC wanna-be? And at least satellite internet doesn't rob potential viewing bandwidth from an entire broadcast area (customers of the service or not).
The more I hear about the cluster-fuck HDTV is turning out to be in the US, the more I think that the hundreds or thousands of dollars I'm expected to pay to upgrade my receivers for it will instead go into a 6' C-band dish in the back yard. Broadcasters, cable companies and TV manufacturers can do what they want, I'll still be able to watch the whole thing collapse on C-SPAN and the BBC.
"Pathetic WWII design - Aircraft carriers with damage control"
I'm assuming you're still talking about that vague reference to "that carrier" you can't name.
"armour scheme"
Armor?
We're living in an age where surface combattants never get within visual range to damage each other. In order for a plane or missile to reach a CVN to damage it, it would need to avoid the Aegis system in its battlegroup as well as any Hawkeyes that may be airborne. Once they're spotted, they have to deal with the fighters flying CAP. If it's a low-flying missile, it still has to deal with the several Phalanxes mounted on the ship.
Submarines have to avoid the destroyers in the battlegroup, and will have to also deal with helicopters if the DDs find anything questionable.
Why do you need armor, especially when designing a ship that needs to go fast enough for carrier operations as well as get to the other side of the globe ASAP?
"I didn't know the USS Cole was attacked in a naval action."
You seem to have a problem calling it naval action. If it "doesn't count" becuase it was a suicide attack, what were the dozens of ships sank by kamikazes experiencing? If it's the sneak attack by an undeclared combatant while in port that bothers you, what was Pearl Harbor? And if you're having a problem with the way the attackers weren't formally members of a foreign military, I reccomend you look up the so-called Quasi-War with France and the Barbary Wars early in US history.
The USS Cole was crippled by an attack from a hostile surface vessel. Period. Just because it wasn't Trafalgar or Jutland or Coral Sea doesn't mean it wasn't "naval action."
Do you even consider the threat to USS Vincennes to have been "naval action?"
"this friend of yours that didn't exist until you found your argument was too weak"
Josh Parlett was from Churchville, MD. I grew up in Harford County and his sister was engaged to a friend of mine from high school. He took the death kinda hard because they had a fight shortly before shipping off for the last time.
... not that you'll believe me after this, and not that it matters either way. He's still just as dead.
From http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/weap
I know someone that might have been able to argue with you, but he died on the USS Cole.
"they all still suffer the legacy of the pathetically designed ships of WWII."
What, they all have rows upon rows of anti-aircraft guns? The main weapon of choice is still the gun? A ship's main defense is still several feet of steel armor? Submarines can only submerge for a few hours at a time? A ship's main navigation tool is its chronometer? We still build our navies around our battleship fleet?
If anything, design ideas from WWII are shunned too much. The battleship is still very valuable in brown-water operations (if not cheaper in the long run than missile barges), and a steel armor belt instead of glorified aluminum foil would have saved several RN ships in the Faulklands from Exocets.
"Remember that electrical fire that crippled a carrier for days?"
No. Details? The most recent carrier fire I can think of USS Forrestal (sp?), and that wasn't electrical.
"What if that had been a missile strike or bomb hit?"
Missiles have to deal with Phalanxes, bombers have to deal with a whole mess of fighters. Next question.
"A visual search of even a thousand square miles (That's approx the possible area after 5 hours at 30 knots) would take a horrendous amount of time, and even then you'd have found one ship and would need the satellite to be fairly dedicated to tracking it."
You neglect to mention the size of the wake of a ship going at 30 knots. It's easy to find something small when you have two long lines pointing right to it.
Also, you ignored the infrared. Unless these things are nuclear, it's going to have a tail pipe and the corresponding exhaust plume.
"Radar and sonar are still the only reliable ways to find ocean going vessels, and the technology to severely reduce the effectiveness of sonar has been around for quite a while."
For underwater vessels. For an awful lot of money you can make a submarine somewhat harder to find with passive sonar, but a submarine doesn't have to slice through the surface of the water. Which brings us back to the wake...
"Adding radar mitigating tech to a ship is the last step to making it effectively dissapear, espacially with a few dozen of them around to track..."
Stealth doesn't make it impossible to find, only difficult (making it impossible would violate a thermodynamic law or two), and it becomes quite easy once you know the signature of what you're looking for. Besides, hiding from the radar on your average destroyer is one thing, hiding from an Aegis cruiser is something else.
"Or is it just that they didn't know if it was *water* ice or not?"
No, we've known for quite a while that the ice caps are frozen carbon dioxide, not hydrogen monoxide.
"The best place for a solar power satellite is probably geosynchronous orbit (40,000 km). This needs a football-field sized transmitter and a mile-wide receiver; still pretty big, but maybe manageable. And the transmitter and receiver don't move relatively. A lunar array would have to keep switching between different receivers as the Earth turns. An SPS in a lower orbit would also have to keep switching receivers, but at least it would have smaller antennas."
There is one advantage of the moon-based solution that isn't mentioned, though: The moon's orbit won't degrade any time soon. However, even geostationary satellites need to be replaced regularly every few years. So you either keep switching easily-maintained ground stations or you keep refitting and/or replacing hard-to-maintain orbital platforms.
"At least, I assume that it isn't meteroids headed for the moon that this is supposed to shoot down?"
I was under the impression that you were supposed to detect these things outside of the earth-moon system, hopefully at least two weeks outside it.
"a sort of super-sized Star Wars program on the Moon, giant lasers set up to blast incoming space debris and not, of course, anyone here on Earth."
Does the phrase "tide locked" mean anything to you? The moon's rotation and revolution match each other, so anything set up on the far side of the moon to target incoming debris will never be able to hit earth-based targets, or at least not any time this eon.
Suing spammers is one thing. It'd also be nice to sue ISPs that neglect to enforce their AUP.
"I find it quite interesting that while many users of the Internet are quick to claim that 'information wants to be free' and to fight against censorship and restriction of their liberties, spam remains an area where the same people rush to seek legislation."
Simple: both closed-source programmers and spammers are the same in that they both seek absolute control over the information in question. Microsoft wants to have a say in how their customers use their computing resources by placing artificial limitations on it. Spammers want to have a say in how their potential customers use their computing resources by forcing them to use it to process the ads.
"Perhaps where things need to be tightened up in order to address the problem of spam in a consistent manner is in the area of unapproved use of resources like SMTP servers."
Why must it be limited to SMTP servers? Why can't I have a say in unauthorized SMTP traffic going through any of my networking hardware, even if that hardware is just a modem?
So, if I discover I have Magic Lantern on my computer, can I sue for an electronic attack, illegal search and siesure, or both?
"Probably won't be that easy to collect, especially if they didn't even show up in court."
If they fail to show up, they're found guilty by default. If they fail to pay, not only can you pass that info on to credit-reporting and background-check agencies but (if it's anything like a traffic ticket) a bench warrant is issued for their arrest (results of that vary depending on the state).
As an example I have a friend that was arrested in Florida for defaulting on debts in Virginia. The creditors filed suit in Virginia, he never showed, the court found him guilty, he got pulled over in Florida for some reason, and ended up spending the night in jail.
Because you'll buy it.