AFAIK the main purpose for a SysRq key on the IBM PC was so that you could use it as an SNA or Bisync terminal. To quote from somewhere obscure in the world of terminal protocols:
VTAM issues a Bind Session Command (BIND) to the terminal. The terminal is now connected to the application. The terminal operator can issue a command (System Request) to terminate the connection with the application (UNBIND) and reconnect to VTAM so that a different application can be selected.
I don;t think that Bill Gates has demonstrated enough greed or contempt for the legal system or ruthless business practices to be a viable contender for American high office. Compared to the likes of Dickless Cheney, "Sir Bill" is but an amateur.
Well, damn. I wondered why all of a sudden my local Sears, Lowes and (somewhere else which I can't remember, might have been Roche Brothers) had what looked like the same scanners mounted on posts all through the store.
I figured some salesman had just had one heck of a good month.
You know why RFID tagging on the supply side is a good idea for stores and their suppliers?
(1) It lets the supplier easily track cases and pallets all the way down the distribution chain down to point of final delivery. Right now what happens is that a semi-trailer full of stuff backs up to the loading dock, and someone counts/looks at/checks what they can see and signs for it. All the way down the line. That takes time, and is error prone, especially when things get busy. So if the truck driver has stolen a couple of cases of something, or the distribution center has "lost" a pallet, usually someone only spots this after the truck is long gone. Which then leads to the question, "Did someone steal it from here, or were we short 3 cases on the last order?"
In a previous life, I worked on a point-of-sale system for a catalog store in Canada. and "shrinkage" (as it was known) was running about 5-15%.
With an evil RFID tag on each case and pallet, a reader or two on each loading dock and a bunch of software behind it, you can at least track how many cases and pallets are being moved on and off each truck as the pallets are being loaded/unloaded. So the supplier/distributor/customer (that's the store itself, not you or I buying a pack of razor blades) knows more reliably what they received. "Hey, there's only 157 cases on these pallets -- we're three short"
(b) By knowing that a given set of pallets and cases have been received at the customer site, then the correct billing information can be generated. Large companies have an awful lot of money tied up in "disputed stock".
Example: "The SlashDot Karma Korporation" claims to have shipped 200 cases of clues to "Microsoft", but "Microsoft" has no record of receving them. Sometimes it can take several billing cycles (say one month for each cycle) to sort this out; sometimes the vendors will just give up. Large corporations have millions and millions of dollars tied up in disputes like this. Note that I'm assuming that the customer is acting in good faith and has lost the paperwork or something.
Coupling RFID tags on pallets and cases with some sort of electronic inventory control/purchase order control system at the vendor level speeds up the process by which money changes hands for goods. We have an electronic transaction which says, "I received 157 cases of clues on these pallets on this date. This was part of purchase order #65535".
There's a couple of sets of people that this is bad for -- the people who steal from warehouses and trucks, and the odd disreputable vendor/distributor/customer who will have a harder time claiming "we sent it/we never got it/pallet, wot pallet?".
In general, it is good for the vendor, the distributor and the corporate customer -- they can all track what was shipped where and when. This is new technology, and it will be a while before it all works reliably -- I think the public announcements that "our suppliers must be using this by the end of 2005" are in the nature of mission statements, and the reality will be later than that. I was working with software driving bar-code readers in 1975 in a similar set of applications, so this is nothing new!
But that's the promise of this technology, and that's why certain large companies (Wal*mart and DoD for example) are driving this supply side initiative. There's a lot of money (no, a LOT of money) at stake here, with lots of potential savings for both the vendor and the corporate consumer. Whether those savings get passed on to teh consumer I'll leave as an exercise to the student.
So for me this looks like a good idea. I can see the privacy issues in having bar-codes on consumer packaging/embededd inside your under-shorts, but this is not that.
And to paraphrase Robin Williams, My opinion of CASPIAN is that Kathrine Albrecht needs to get laid more than any white woman in history,
"Golf-cart"? Are you thinking of the Insight (the Honda Hybrid testbed for the engine in the new Civic)?
That was a very light car and (to me) felt tinny and somehow fragile.
The Prius felt a lot more solid, a lot more like a car. And yes, YMMV (-:
We just bought a 2003 Prius from a friend who upgraded to the newer Prius (gotta love wealthy gadget lovers) and it rides like a car. It is disconcerting (at least at first) when the internal combustion engine stops at a traffic light, especially as I upgraded from an '88 Caddy that occasionally exhibited the same behavior.
"You always want the (strategic) high ground," U.S. Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, chairman of the Senate commerce subcommittee on science, technology and space, told Reuters. Such thinking echoed a key aim of the 1960s U.S. space race against the Soviet Union.
[snip]
U.S. security officials have said military dominance in space was essential, especially following China's first manned space flight last year. NASA's 2003 strategic plan says the agency's mission was widened to include the Pentagon's space effort.
I've read in a couple of places that various US military advisors (one assumes not the same ones who know where the WMD are in Iraq or where Osama bin Laden is) are trying to set up a military force around the earth to ensure that no-one can launch a spaceship without US approval. Might this be part of the inclusion of the "Pentagon's space effort" in NASA's budget?
I wouldn't put it past this administration to develop some sort of "Homeworld Security Agency".
Technically, this makes your credit card invalid. Not many retailers actually enforce the terms-and-conditions of the agreement with (for example) Visa, but if I'm reading the damn thing correctly, then they should not accept a card that does not have a valid signature on it.
I always swore that the child-leashes in malls were a bad idea, too, until a friend's kid got snatched. They closed the mall and found the guy- in less than five minutes he'd changed the kid's clothes and dyed his hair (which was still wet with the dye.)
Which mall? When? Which police department handled the case?
Just curious, because this has the ring of one of the older urban legends, so if you have a hard cite for when and where it happened, I'd be truly grateful (and might be able to win some money placing bets in the office too).
Probably. There's a fairly lucrative market out there for someone quickly to come up with a voting machine that you can sell to every polling-place in a state. And there's a certain set of well-defined problems that need somewhat clever solutions (making sure the right people vote, making sure all the votes get counted, leaving the correct auditing information... in a way that doesn't lead to a massive data explosion) that will be common across most platforms.
So I have the choice (as VP of Engineering of a large company hoping to make money making voting machines). Do I
keep my code to myself (closed source with audit under NDA) so that my super-smart engineers can beat the competition to market and we can all make money and retire
post the source code somewhere where my competition can see it and steal/re-purpose the work of my team, so they get to market quicker with different code from mine, so they get rich and we don't
post the source code somewhere where every idiot with an axe to grind can crawl through it and figure out cheat codes ("hey, if I do UP-DOWN-LEFT-LEFT-LEFT-UP-DOWN-RIGHT, I see Lara topless") or places where the system can be rendered useless to make a point.
Now the people still living in their mother's basement (or in the ground floor mens room of the LCS) are undoubtedly going to pick option (3). Out in the real world, that's not going to happen. If nothing else, what do you do when someone sends you a "fix" -- who validates it and puts it in the system, who supports it once it is in place, who fixes the seven other things it breaks? As a friend of mine heard at a major trade show recently, "When the software goes wrong, I don't want to be phoning some student in Finland and begging him for the fix!"
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I think it is the reality. There is a lot of money involved here, and I mean legitimate money, not back-door bribes to make sure our guy wins.
And as a thought, why do people assume (after the last presidential election) that Florida was the only state with election issues? Wouldn't that be a remarkable thing?
My favorite version of this:
"A superior pilot will use superior judgement to avoid those situations where superior skills are needed"
Will the results be ready for the next election?
on
The Case for the Moon
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· Score: 1
Biggest problem I'm seeing right now with all of this stuff is two-fold:
(1) It's expensive to build space vehicles and programs to go to the Moon (or beyond)
(2) It takes a long time to get a program running and producing results.
So without some sort of national vision (such as the one espoused by John Kennedy which led to the Apollo program), there's no government support. As Tip O'Neill said, "all politics is local". No politician is going to go out on a limb for a program which will not see any appreciable result for many many years. Not when that politician has to be re-elected at least once during that time, and his/her opponents will make the usual pork-barrel sound-bites in an effort to win election from the fickle and easily mislead general public.
It's depressing. When I first read 2001 (back when it was first published), I figured that there was a real good chance that by now we would have a functional orbiting space station which I would have a chance to visit (either on business or as a tourist if I made enough money). I wasn't sure that it would happen by 2001, but I figured that it would happen before 2010. Now I don't think that will happen. The ISS is a joke -- designed by a committee, built by the lowest bidder, and designed for propaganda rather than actual use.
Remember Mir? ISS is no better than decades-old russian technology -- indeed without the aged Russian technology, there would be no-one up there now.
And what do you want to bet (especially if the current American political climate continues for another 4 years) that the Chinese get added to the "Axis of Terror" for having a missile program that could be used to attack the US? This current collection of short-sighted politicians (and their financial backers) would be more likely to start a ground war against the Chinese than restart the moon-race.
Well, if you're looking for an '88 Caddy Fleetwood, I just happen to have one left. 150,000 miles, no fancy electronics (aside from a heating system "computer"), no GPS, no fancy interlocks, and you're guaranteed to be supporting the American petro-chemical industry (or "Iraqi Governing Council") every 300 miles or so.
Probably because Stallman doesn't set agendas at this point.
He's become a babbling extremist, and has probably done as much harm as good to the open source movement. Especially in the Eastern MA area where many many people have actually met or heard him.
I've been a hiring manager for a number of years in various companies (some of which are still in business). I've found a number of recruiters that I have worked with in the Boston area, and there's at least four or five of them that I would heartily recommend. Winter Wyman has been mentioned, and I've had good luck with a couple of small (one, two or three person) agencies and with specific recruiters at larger companies.
There's probably an equal number that I will not talk to again under any circumstances, either as a hiring manager or as a candidate.
What makes a good recruiter/head-hunter?
Well, for me it has been the ones who have taken the time to get to know me, my strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes over and above what is posted on the resume. They tend to find the companies where I would be a good match, and steer me away from the ones where I would be driven crazy (well OK, crazier). Equally, when talking to me as a hiring manager, they take the time to understand the work environment and ethics of the company, rather than just a list of skills and a base salary.
My opinion is that, even when the job market is weak (like now), a recruiter can get you into places that are not advertized. And yes, we all have friends (or at least an informal circle of pimps) who might be able to find jobs at their company but there's more out there than that.
Things to steer clear of:
Recruiters that ask you to pay them. A recruiter gets a percentage of your first year salary as a commission for placing you. Asking you to front the cash is a sure sign of a used-car-salesman.
Recruiters that don't listen to you.
ME: "Hey, I want to work at a small, informal company"
THEM: "Great. I've sent your resume to Raytheon Missile Systems -- you have an interview Tuesday"
Or, on the hiring side, recruiters who will send you every resume with the token "C++" in it somewhere when you're looking for someone with specific experience.
Recruiters that lie to you (this actually happened to a friend of mine). She was told that a company in Boston had seen her resume and they were way anxious to meet her; put on the good clothes and go expecting to spend all day talking to the Software team. She heads off into town to find that the company had expressed no interest, but had agreed to her coming down for an informational interview with the HR-droid to see if there might be some point in keeping her resume on file.
Recruiters are especially useful to a hiring manager when you need someone with specific skills. If I put a request onto Monster or similar board, I will get inundated with resumes from people who can barely spell EJB, let alone who know how to write one.
Anyway, that's just my thinking. There are good recruiters out there, and they are actually quite common. During the Internet Bubble (anyone remember that?) everyone and his dog was getting into the recuiting business (shit, someone once offered me a job as a recuiter, and those who know me understand how ridiculous that idea is), but I think that things are more stable now.
Many years ago, I worked for a company called PCDocs, who made a variety of document management systems. For those of you whose answer to "Document Management" is EMACS, here's a short blurb about the capabilities of a doc management system from PCDocs website:
Hummingbird DM?, a core element of Hummingbird Enterprise, is a content management platform that enables knowledge workers to receive the right information when and where they need it. Powerful search tools and web access ensure content is available across global organizations, while versioning and security profiles safeguard document integrity. Add Records Management to oversee the content lifecycle while minimizing risk, plus companion solutions for Collaboration, Workflow, Imaging, Web Publishing, and Engineering file management...
This nasty Microsoft "advance" is just a continuation of building document management features into what started life as a fairly decent word processor. By the way, such systems typically allow a user to check out a document (eg to a laptop) so you can read the controlled information on the plane if you want.
There are a lot of companies that want this level of control over their sensitive documentation. This isn't new. This isn't dangerous. This isn't going to lead to Microsoft taking over the world.
Fault-tolerant/robust system engineering
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I was reading somewhere (possibly Scientific American) about the building of systems (computer software or robots) which can tolerate a restart or failureof one or more of them and keep working.
Rather than the monolithic system which we all secretly love (which allegedly produces Blue Screens of Death when things go squiffy, although my own XP Home system has been thundering on with nary a problem for quite a while now), you build systems which can tolerate components restarting themselves. I don't care if you're RMS writing the purest code with GNU/Ada for the EFF Air Force, you're not going to write something that will never fail. Better to design and build an overall system which can tolerate minor interruptions, especially if you are going to be flying into a war zone.
In any case (I worked on some of the stuff on the fringes of the F22 program a long long time ago), there are a bunch of computers in the air vehicle; it's an airborne network. Saying "oh my god, I can't believe the plane is rebooting" is dissingenuous.(aside from the many Windows jokes). It's akin to "I had to power-cycle the printer twice today -- I can't believe the network stayed up for the 35 seconds it took the Lexmark to come back to life!".
Rebooting a subsystem computer works quite well in robotics too, which further leads into the concept of many small robots rather than one large beast screaming "Danger Will Robinson".
to tell you the truth, the kid in the article would have had a VERY GOOD CHANCE of having such a motion succeed
I think not. If the kid had decided to hire a lawyer (assuming that he couldn't find anyone to do it pro bono), he would have been gambling that his money wouldn't run out before the case went to court. Do you want to bet that the RIAA lawyer (or any lawyer worth his pay) couldn't have kept the case going for a month or two.
How much legal time will $12,000 buy anyway? And what are the odds that a "motion-to-dismiss" would be granted on the first day in something as ill-defined as this? Kid could have ended up at the wrong end of an expensive legal bill, so bought his way out for $12,000.
It's more that the usual FUD from the sensation-seeking media whores. Here's a link to the referenced CAA Report CAA Paper 2003/03: Effects of Interference from Cellular Telephones on Aircraft Avionic Equipment
This Paper gives details of the testing of a set of avionic equipment for susceptibility to cellphone interference. The testing was done under controlled conditions in a test chamber. The equipment, comprising of a VHF communications transceiver, a VOR/ILS navigation receiver and a gyro-stabilised remote reading compass system, was assembled to create an integrated system.
A number of anomalies were found and are detailed in the report. The test results endorse current policies restricting the use of cellphones in aircraft.
Slashdot Mirror
But what did you do when her beeper went off? How long did you wait for her to come back?
God help us if you got slashdotted. It would sound like a sack full of rocks in a washing machine.
Ahh, an international terrorist proposing an attack. We should be invading Canada any day now...
I don;t think that Bill Gates has demonstrated enough greed or contempt for the legal system or ruthless business practices to be a viable contender for American high office. Compared to the likes of Dickless Cheney, "Sir Bill" is but an amateur.
I figured some salesman had just had one heck of a good month.
Thanks. I learne dsomething on /. -- is that OK?
(1) It lets the supplier easily track cases and pallets all the way down the distribution chain down to point of final delivery. Right now what happens is that a semi-trailer full of stuff backs up to the loading dock, and someone counts/looks at/checks what they can see and signs for it. All the way down the line. That takes time, and is error prone, especially when things get busy. So if the truck driver has stolen a couple of cases of something, or the distribution center has "lost" a pallet, usually someone only spots this after the truck is long gone. Which then leads to the question, "Did someone steal it from here, or were we short 3 cases on the last order?" In a previous life, I worked on a point-of-sale system for a catalog store in Canada. and "shrinkage" (as it was known) was running about 5-15%.
With an evil RFID tag on each case and pallet, a reader or two on each loading dock and a bunch of software behind it, you can at least track how many cases and pallets are being moved on and off each truck as the pallets are being loaded/unloaded. So the supplier/distributor/customer (that's the store itself, not you or I buying a pack of razor blades) knows more reliably what they received. "Hey, there's only 157 cases on these pallets -- we're three short"
(b) By knowing that a given set of pallets and cases have been received at the customer site, then the correct billing information can be generated. Large companies have an awful lot of money tied up in "disputed stock".
Example: "The SlashDot Karma Korporation" claims to have shipped 200 cases of clues to "Microsoft", but "Microsoft" has no record of receving them. Sometimes it can take several billing cycles (say one month for each cycle) to sort this out; sometimes the vendors will just give up. Large corporations have millions and millions of dollars tied up in disputes like this. Note that I'm assuming that the customer is acting in good faith and has lost the paperwork or something.
Coupling RFID tags on pallets and cases with some sort of electronic inventory control/purchase order control system at the vendor level speeds up the process by which money changes hands for goods. We have an electronic transaction which says, "I received 157 cases of clues on these pallets on this date. This was part of purchase order #65535".
There's a couple of sets of people that this is bad for -- the people who steal from warehouses and trucks, and the odd disreputable vendor/distributor/customer who will have a harder time claiming "we sent it/we never got it/pallet, wot pallet?".
In general, it is good for the vendor, the distributor and the corporate customer -- they can all track what was shipped where and when. This is new technology, and it will be a while before it all works reliably -- I think the public announcements that "our suppliers must be using this by the end of 2005" are in the nature of mission statements, and the reality will be later than that. I was working with software driving bar-code readers in 1975 in a similar set of applications, so this is nothing new!
But that's the promise of this technology, and that's why certain large companies (Wal*mart and DoD for example) are driving this supply side initiative. There's a lot of money (no, a LOT of money) at stake here, with lots of potential savings for both the vendor and the corporate consumer. Whether those savings get passed on to teh consumer I'll leave as an exercise to the student.
So for me this looks like a good idea. I can see the privacy issues in having bar-codes on consumer packaging/embededd inside your under-shorts, but this is not that.
And to paraphrase Robin Williams, My opinion of CASPIAN is that Kathrine Albrecht needs to get laid more than any white woman in history,
Given the US Air Farce's propensity for attacking friendlies on the ground, I think you'd be safer without air cover.
That was a very light car and (to me) felt tinny and somehow fragile.
The Prius felt a lot more solid, a lot more like a car. And yes, YMMV (-:
We just bought a 2003 Prius from a friend who upgraded to the newer Prius (gotta love wealthy gadget lovers) and it rides like a car. It is disconcerting (at least at first) when the internal combustion engine stops at a traffic light, especially as I upgraded from an '88 Caddy that occasionally exhibited the same behavior.
I wouldn't put it past this administration to develop some sort of "Homeworld Security Agency".
So unless your name is "Ask for ID"...
Which mall? When? Which police department handled the case?
Just curious, because this has the ring of one of the older urban legends, so if you have a hard cite for when and where it happened, I'd be truly grateful (and might be able to win some money placing bets in the office too).
Probably. There's a fairly lucrative market out there for someone quickly to come up with a voting machine that you can sell to every polling-place in a state. And there's a certain set of well-defined problems that need somewhat clever solutions (making sure the right people vote, making sure all the votes get counted, leaving the correct auditing information... in a way that doesn't lead to a massive data explosion) that will be common across most platforms.
So I have the choice (as VP of Engineering of a large company hoping to make money making voting machines). Do I
Now the people still living in their mother's basement (or in the ground floor mens room of the LCS) are undoubtedly going to pick option (3). Out in the real world, that's not going to happen. If nothing else, what do you do when someone sends you a "fix" -- who validates it and puts it in the system, who supports it once it is in place, who fixes the seven other things it breaks? As a friend of mine heard at a major trade show recently, "When the software goes wrong, I don't want to be phoning some student in Finland and begging him for the fix!"
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but I think it is the reality. There is a lot of money involved here, and I mean legitimate money, not back-door bribes to make sure our guy wins.
And as a thought, why do people assume (after the last presidential election) that Florida was the only state with election issues? Wouldn't that be a remarkable thing?
My favorite version of this:
"A superior pilot will use superior judgement to avoid those situations where superior skills are needed"
(1) It's expensive to build space vehicles and programs to go to the Moon (or beyond)
(2) It takes a long time to get a program running and producing results.
So without some sort of national vision (such as the one espoused by John Kennedy which led to the Apollo program), there's no government support. As Tip O'Neill said, "all politics is local". No politician is going to go out on a limb for a program which will not see any appreciable result for many many years. Not when that politician has to be re-elected at least once during that time, and his/her opponents will make the usual pork-barrel sound-bites in an effort to win election from the fickle and easily mislead general public.
It's depressing. When I first read 2001 (back when it was first published), I figured that there was a real good chance that by now we would have a functional orbiting space station which I would have a chance to visit (either on business or as a tourist if I made enough money). I wasn't sure that it would happen by 2001, but I figured that it would happen before 2010. Now I don't think that will happen. The ISS is a joke -- designed by a committee, built by the lowest bidder, and designed for propaganda rather than actual use.
Remember Mir? ISS is no better than decades-old russian technology -- indeed without the aged Russian technology, there would be no-one up there now.
And what do you want to bet (especially if the current American political climate continues for another 4 years) that the Chinese get added to the "Axis of Terror" for having a missile program that could be used to attack the US? This current collection of short-sighted politicians (and their financial backers) would be more likely to start a ground war against the Chinese than restart the moon-race.
Let the bidding start!
Well, isn't that the driving force behind the "Free Software" movement?
I wonder how much better off we would be if Stallman had been emotionally capable of holding down a well-paying job...
He's become a babbling extremist, and has probably done as much harm as good to the open source movement. Especially in the Eastern MA area where many many people have actually met or heard him.
There's probably an equal number that I will not talk to again under any circumstances, either as a hiring manager or as a candidate.
What makes a good recruiter/head-hunter?
Well, for me it has been the ones who have taken the time to get to know me, my strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes over and above what is posted on the resume. They tend to find the companies where I would be a good match, and steer me away from the ones where I would be driven crazy (well OK, crazier). Equally, when talking to me as a hiring manager, they take the time to understand the work environment and ethics of the company, rather than just a list of skills and a base salary.
My opinion is that, even when the job market is weak (like now), a recruiter can get you into places that are not advertized. And yes, we all have friends (or at least an informal circle of pimps) who might be able to find jobs at their company but there's more out there than that.
Things to steer clear of:
ME: "Hey, I want to work at a small, informal company"
THEM: "Great. I've sent your resume to Raytheon Missile Systems -- you have an interview Tuesday"
Or, on the hiring side, recruiters who will send you every resume with the token "C++" in it somewhere when you're looking for someone with specific experience.
She was told that a company in Boston had seen her resume and they were way anxious to meet her; put on the good clothes and go expecting to spend all day talking to the Software team. She heads off into town to find that the company had expressed no interest, but had agreed to her coming down for an informational interview with the HR-droid to see if there might be some point in keeping her resume on file.
Recruiters are especially useful to a hiring manager when you need someone with specific skills. If I put a request onto Monster or similar board, I will get inundated with resumes from people who can barely spell EJB, let alone who know how to write one.
Anyway, that's just my thinking. There are good recruiters out there, and they are actually quite common. During the Internet Bubble (anyone remember that?) everyone and his dog was getting into the recuiting business (shit, someone once offered me a job as a recuiter, and those who know me understand how ridiculous that idea is), but I think that things are more stable now.
This nasty Microsoft "advance" is just a continuation of building document management features into what started life as a fairly decent word processor. By the way, such systems typically allow a user to check out a document (eg to a laptop) so you can read the controlled information on the plane if you want.
There are a lot of companies that want this level of control over their sensitive documentation. This isn't new. This isn't dangerous. This isn't going to lead to Microsoft taking over the world.
Rather than the monolithic system which we all secretly love (which allegedly produces Blue Screens of Death when things go squiffy, although my own XP Home system has been thundering on with nary a problem for quite a while now), you build systems which can tolerate components restarting themselves. I don't care if you're RMS writing the purest code with GNU/Ada for the EFF Air Force, you're not going to write something that will never fail. Better to design and build an overall system which can tolerate minor interruptions, especially if you are going to be flying into a war zone.
In any case (I worked on some of the stuff on the fringes of the F22 program a long long time ago), there are a bunch of computers in the air vehicle; it's an airborne network. Saying "oh my god, I can't believe the plane is rebooting" is dissingenuous.(aside from the many Windows jokes). It's akin to "I had to power-cycle the printer twice today -- I can't believe the network stayed up for the 35 seconds it took the Lexmark to come back to life!".
Rebooting a subsystem computer works quite well in robotics too, which further leads into the concept of many small robots rather than one large beast screaming "Danger Will Robinson".
How much legal time will $12,000 buy anyway?
And what are the odds that a "motion-to-dismiss" would be granted on the first day in something as ill-defined as this? Kid could have ended up at the wrong end of an expensive legal bill, so bought his way out for $12,000.
Sure am, Brain, but how are we going to teach a chimp to use dental floss?
No. You have the opposite problem.
CAA Paper 2003/03: Effects of Interference from Cellular Telephones on Aircraft Avionic Equipment