... to have an official "start time" for files, posted in advance, so that people can get ready then hit it all at once. Makes more sense than just posting a file at random, with people all over the world at different time zones trying to make use of the features of bit torrent to not do it correctly, ie "at the same time for maximum effect".
ehhh, canadians are the same as anyplace else. We have national governments, which are all mostly corrupt, stupid, bribed off, blackmailed off, top heavy and slow to adapt. Theirs isn't any different from the US. There are differences in which areas they are more stoopid at. The people are just "people", normal. Want to work, take care of their kids, get ahead a little, and bitch about stuff in their spare time, and basically be left alone by government. It's fun though, I'll agree, to complain about nation-x, everyone does it.. I see the ubernationalism, and uber political party-ism posts on slashdot as roughly equivalent to sports team cheerleaders. Everyone's waste products have malodorus effluvium and attract flies./me shrugs shoulders goes "eh"
I think that SARS right now is much worse than they are letting on, all around the world, just a lot of folks aren't dying from it, but getting a case of the month long "flu-like experience", and then it doesn't get reported as SARS. It's a *medical establishment* variant of the big level accounting scandals, where for some reason they can report a liability as an asset, and show inflated "goodness". Same with mad cow (CJK) now is being reported as "alzheimers". Same with the US buck tanking, this is now mysteriously a "good thing". I just heard an interesting data-no verification, heard it on the radio and too lazy to google for it-that the iraqi dinar was trading against the buck pre-wewar at so many thousands per buck, now it's 600 to one buck. That should tell people in the market and with savings account in the banks something *real*, but they'll wait for permission off the 6 o clock news or something to notice it./me stares at precious metals stashed, ability to stay self quarantined away from masses of humans for years, fuel stashed, food stashed, and lots of bullets. It's a good thing. I don't trust "official" spokespeople on anything now, lying is as good as the truth for them, and they are interchangeable.
And with that said, if canada was just a scosh different I'd like to move there, right now though, flawed as it is, the US still "barely" gets the nod. That might change though, and fast. IF canada was to seperate into self governing soverign nations, I would consider one of the western provinces if they rolled back a lot of their big brotherism and followed roughly a US styled constitution or better, the articles of confederation, which to me was a better governmental design. Or if any US states did that, perhaps along the Freestate project guidelines. And if those guys pick Idaho, I WILL move.
One sector on the hard drive needs to talk to the appropriate bios. If it can't, it won't boot or be readable--allegedly anyway. I read about this earlier in the day (yesterday) on another site.
There's probably some ways to beat this, but for joe average it won't be easy, nor even worth it.
I would have to disagree, pretty strongly. their track record is dismal. they barely escaped a complete breakup from the tip of the ice berg abuses that came out in the Church hearings. They have a bad habit of supporting, funding, training, and trading with bad guys like saddam, osama, noriega, and way back, castro. They've been caught in massive drug dealings. Not penny ante, massive, serious bales of cash big. Plane loads. Even the DEA has been warned off of approved cia shipments. Afghanistan is now running the largest amount of opium production in their history, with their support, I mean, we got spooks and military all over that place, we own it, so???? They also actually STOPPED the afghan war, called a time out, flew out some thousands-up to 8 thousand by some numbers- of top Taliban and al queda members to bases inside pakistan, and got away with it, then the war re started. That story poofed fast, but it really happened. They trained with, supported, sheltered, transported, armed and funded elements of the KLA albanian narco terrorist gangs. They are involved in money laundering, the rigged bankruptcy courts, take overs of various other legitimate businesses, and the worst, various crimes against humanity in the second and third world,including murder and torture, and most likely certain elements, with help from the mafia and inside the DIA were also involved with JFK's whack and some others.
The entire organization top to bottom, every member, isn't corrupt, I am not saying that, but it's so infested with long term chronic serial corruption,at managerial and leadership positions, and is so unavailable for any open investigations, that they need to be just stopped, and a new intel agency created in their place, with better oversight, better vetting, cross vetting, and severe penalities for going rogue, right up to treason charges. They need not one more penny, no more human assets, or electronic assets. It's not one rotten apple in the barrel now, it got WAY beyond that by 30 years ago, or longer. And it's so compartmentalised that it's just too hard now to even have an entity as powerful as the US legislature to even investigate, because, quite frankly, they can just lie about anything they want to, and it's almost impossible for the investigators to find out anything, from them being able to serious alter and forge documents and data, and from the huge sums of black market cash they operate with, ie, "no records".
The nation needs GOOD intelligence services,this is a gimmee, but services that are ALSO honest and not run as overlapping rogue profit mercenary outfits. Throwing good money after bad is never a wise decision. Spook work is always dirty, and sometimes they need to deal with dirty characters, that doesn't give them carte blanche to become dirty themselves.
... yes, but in California, all computrons must pass state EMF emissions tests, and because of contamination with "e-vile bits" that have leaked into the grounding rods, a Superfund Cleanup effort has to be funded with more state bonds to the tune of 87 billion dollars. Grey Davis claims that the state was ripped off by middleman bit traders after deregulation passed, and was forced by contracts to purchase overly expensive bits. The Green Party has issued a press release saying that the evile bits are DOUBLY evile, because they were created with "brown" power, not green. The Libertarian party has issued a statement saying "who cares, let the bit bucket market decide who pays what". The Democratic party has issued a statement saying that cronies of the current administration established shell companies in offshore havens in order to not pay "their fair share" of the cleanup. The Republican party has issued a release calling everyone a "cyberterrorist" and has established "computer camps" at guantanamo bay where recalcitrant anti e-vile bit protesters go to break large bits into smaller bits with hammers. The Reform party has said that all the evile bits have apparently crossed over the border illegally, and Pat Buchanan has said we all must "breed more americans before it's too late". The Constitution party has said "toldyaso, it's the debble" and advised that all evile bits be blasted with 12 gauges. The EFF has fled to an armored compound in maryland where combining hacked GPS receivers and supertrooper stage lasers manned by union stagehands, they have issued a decree to "You want some of this? Come and get us, ****wads!"
So all in all, looks like another bad idea by those dastardly multinational heartless corporations.
Technogeek website slash-n-burninator website is exploding with posts decrying that "it's all SCOs fault, or microsoft, and we don't care who gets nuked"
Mozilla.org has issued an emergency decree that henceforth, all bits will be named firebits, until next week, when they will be called phonexiabits.
Gentoo supporters are dropping like flies as they try to compile programs that are contaminated with evile bits, and vow to never speak the word california again.
*BSD users have moved to canada en massee, the largest IT refugee movement in world history, where they have issued a release saying " eh, it's colder up here, eh, but we don't care mon, look what's legal here now".
France, Germany, China and Russia have stopped all trade with california, and the UN has put california on the "sandbox" list of contaminated areas. Unfortunately, drudgereport has broken with a scoop that in reality, all the contaminated batches of evile bits got sent to california on Cosco container ships, with joint funding from the various "axis of dastards" nations. They are also issuing a demand via the UN that all computron evil bits be measured using the metric system "or else".
In the mideast, it's the same ole crap, and no one cares really.
Time warner AOL msnbc fox cnn abc and the RIAA and MPAA have declared that they have checked and there are "no" contaminated bits anyplace in their websites, but 85 million zaZZaers dispute this, as all files that have been traded since the begining of the crisis all say $%^&**((*%^&%%&&^*^* YOU!!, and have been apparently been done by the trio of madonna, yoko ono, and william shatner.
It's GENERAL MAYHEM AND PANDEMONIUM!
In economic news, sales of manual adding machines and typewriters were brisk today.....
Would the ISPs consider it your bandwith to pay for, for all the unrequested probes and scans you get sent?
Either way, it's about the only "good" thing I can see to metered, it will make them take active measures upstream from the user and in the "bad guy" political arena to help stop the crap you really don't want. I know if I got charged for that stuff, I'd be in court as soon as possible, mylogs versus theirs to prove I requested all this stuff I don't want. And they can then bump it up the economic food chain as far as they want to then.
IF ISPs go back to metered bandwith almost universally, they are going to be INNUNDATED with complaints that spam and getting hacked with viruses and worms are eating all the customers bandwith. I can see thousands of suits over this almost immediately. And the legit streaming providers will get slammed as well, people would be outraged that they couldn't use the internet along the lines of those flashy commercials with tunes and video. It will also affect what remaining internet advertising that exists, because people will turn off images before they give up surfing hours over using up their "allotment" of bandwith.
It would also really embarrass a lot of people when they demand to see where they "used up their bandwith" and after the ISP logs are presented with the urls it turns out to be tons 0 porn, back to the "Well! I never! I must have been hacked, YOU fix it Mr. ISP or OS vendor, it's all your fault" and etc.
It's not a can, it's a case of worms. It might happen though, given the RIAA and MPAA efforts in lobbying, and "we need CYBERSECURITY' and whatnot. Bandwith caps, severely restricted ports, etc.
I think we are in the wild wild west days of the net, I expect something like these severe restrictions combined with increased costs. It's the nature of political reality and really big brand money now. And even if a few major ISPs hold out, they'll eventually go under if all the rest of the ISPs are back to making money with their restrictions and filtering efforts. Isn't the very large bandwith more or less a similar priced commodity now? Once you get far enough upstream it's roughly the same, or am I wrong on that? If it's similar, there's no way the unlimited flat rate providers could compete with the limited but significantly cheaper providers, if they are paying the same bulk rates.
..so what's next? Say they successfully build one that lasts just a tiny amount of time and evaporates? Now think, these are uber geeks. UBER brand geeks, but still geeks. What DO geeks do? They get all hyped up, want to build a bigger/faster/ longer lasting one. If and when that works, they repeat this process. This is just what geeks do after all.
Now, who's going to tell them to stop, and when? You can see this discussion now "Well, it's working good now, we'll just slap some more watts to this baby and...." And you KNOW some insane military goofus with billions to throw around with some black budget funding will think "hmm, sounds like we could make a WEAPON outta this thing somehow, hmmm" and that's EXACTLY how those guys think and do, too.
The little experiment is nothing *as it stands now* but the progression of the experiment is sorta... nuts.
--the non profits have choices-accept, not accept, or just keep using what they already have perhaps, not get sucked into upgrading cycles. Here on slashdot, you also have a choice, in your user preferences, you can de select the microsoft articles, can't you? If they are burdensome? You can also keep the articles, then go to the link, read the entire article, then skip the commentary where the bashing might be offensive. Lot of choices there.
Now, because this is a forum and anyone may post their views, I would say, yes, microsoft deserves bashing. They have been proven many times to be highly predatory, to use questionable and illegal business tactics, and now, combined with all the other articles, you can plainly see they are afraid of open source and free software. They simply have no way in the future to keep making mega profits unless they maintain their mindshare. Them giving away "free" software that is in essence almost zero cost to them to make copies of, and getting "tax breaks" for that, is yet again another example of a deseperation move on their part, because they can SEE mindshare evaporating on them, daily now. They are big, powerful, so enamored of themselves they border on megalomaina, but buried inside them they are terrorized now. They waited too long. There was just one worm too many, one virus too many, open source and really free software has gotten too good. If I can be punny they lost their "window of opprtunity" for the new century already, they waited just too long. They have few options left, this is one of them. I expect them to be forced into dropping prices across the board soon. You could see this coming 3 years ago clearly. Right now, yes, still a big company, making profits, this is not likely to continue for much longer.
Tell you a story, I owned two different studebakers, when they were still a big company. Times change, don't they?
It may take awhile, but microsoft is on it's way back down to a much smaller and much less important company. All it will take is a few of the top retailers to have already installed linux on machines at the retail level that most people get exposed to, and wham, that's it. Add in some more governments, a few big other corporations. It'll happen.
You don't see many people switching back to microsoft, once they really start using linux, and it used to be macintosh. It just doesn't happen,but you will see people switching away, oine here, one there, a thousand here, ten thousand there. So microsoft has no choice now, like these car companies out there. 0% interest and cash back and all sorts of things they weren't offering just a few years ago. Business changes, times change, reality changes. Microsoft will increasingly just be forced to give it away,give it away, keep sweetning the pot, until they are free as well, if they want to stay in any sort of business, until there's a leveling, then it will be down to the concepts of useability and service versus useability and service. Paid-for software is dying out, and fast, except for custom in house written. The OS in particular.
Now if they were REALLY smart, they could shock the world, change overnight, and give it all away, just offer paid-for service plans at a reasonable rate, with automatic free upgrades. They are so used to making money the easy way, they have no conception of this as a business model, whereas with linux et al it's about the *whole* business model, which is *what most people think it's worth*.
This is just like the music business hanging onto to last centuries business model, doomed to failure unless they change with the times. And the reason WHY is that code or sounds or pictures are so EASILY copied and distributed now, there's no absolute reason to charge these huge amounts of money. You retail based on low volume, high profit, or huge volume, low profit, or service, and THAT'S IT, that's all business can offer..
Microsoft leveraged themselves into a near monopoly, charged a premium, then stopped producing like the
Thanks for your detailed reply, and absolutely no problem with any delay or whatever, I just thought you might be interested in it and I was interested in your comentary.. I'm just trying to get a better handle on the whole SARs issue, so I get info from a variety of places. Most of what I have read comes from more mainstream news sources, and rense also quotes a lot of those as well. His site is great! He covers such a wide range of topics that there's something to both annoy and delite just about everyone. Truly A to Z, so just pick out something. I treat it the same way I do any place else, like I could say (some of my who cares and dislikes)"I think nascar,football, baseball, basketball, and hockey and the brides/weddings pages, the astrology page and local gossip page are useless, so I won't read or give any credence to the [pick any newspaper that has those sections].
His is a "no sacred cows" type of place, so I'd suggest don't throw the baby out with the bathwater on his site. Give it some time, catch his shows, pick the subjects you are interested in, ignore the others. If you link over to his archived shows, you can go back, just tons of various topics. It's a news site with a twist, and rense himself always says he doesn't necessarily agree or disagree with any subjects he covers or guests he has on, he just wants people to get the more contrary or unusual or unique views of everything that isn't part of the bulk of the repetitious completely massaged 6 o clock news you get every place else.
Good idea. It would probably be more proper though to have received one of the threatening letters, and to also be using linux in a business capacity, or have a client who has declined a bid or contract from you involving the "controversial" linux from you based on a letter they had received from SCO. Even judge judy wants to see documents.
With that said, I forget exactly how many letters sent out, but it sure seems like anyone receiving one could sue in small claims. Not very expensive and the good part is most places (that I am aware of, I could be corrected) they can't use lawyers in the presentation!
I agree, let's lockup the government welfare bums! The people who steal tax money and divert it to who knows where. How about start with over TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in stolen tax money. I say, lock all those bums up! Kick them out of their lazy ass chairs! Take their benefits away from them, give them all some hard time working in a labor camp someplace!
Here's an even better idea, let's TRASH the entire keynesian economic style of government and busy-ness, money creating, and debt based boom and bust cycles, and allowing personhood to artifical constructs called corporations. And reintroduce liability and being productive and creating HONEST wealth in the first place, and knocking down most government back to the states and local levels mostly, and put a smackdown on creeping and ineffectual and top heavy overly managed centrism and theft, ya know, something radical, like the ORIGINAL DESIGN of our government.
Welfare doesn't start at the bottom economic levels of our society, it started at the top, then got worse and worse, until that top heavy welfare created huge numbers of poorer people. Right now we have a huge assault on the US middle class, which will continue until there isn't much of a middle class left except for government bureaucrats and their mercenaries. We HAD millions of decent middle class jobs, but losing over one million a year for the past many years is NOT a smooth move, EXCEPT for the very highest levels of personal profit "welfare" law creating and tax dodging conmen who masquerade as USians but are in fact, raging international globalist pirates and thieves, and now, murderers.
Good point! I'll give it a shot! How I first installed open source! Here I go!
Cool,my geek friend in town handed me these disks, he said he downloaded them off his dads cable! Got me the new belchdata free OS vs1.34alpha
slap cd in, turn it on!...aww shoot, forget to set "biosphere", need to tell it which thingee to look at fust, OK, try again...now, you must mash [enter]
Wow, a PERFECT screen! I can read everything, crystal clear! Better than the old screen and it's not installed yet! This ought to be GOOD!!...now, you must mash [enter]
hmm, pick out a nation... hmm ashcanistan, no... hmm, polynesia, that sounds nice, hot babes, beaches... now, you must mash [enter]
select keyboard? Where's the dang YES button,yes I want a *ing keyboard, yas cretins...now, you must mash[enter]
select mouse type? hmm, it got buttons and wires wif it...now, you must mash[enter]
select time, "are you underwater in greenwhichs merididan at midnight" ??huh..... what is that, metric??? I'm a MURICAN! I want REAL TIME, and after 5 o clock, I DEMAND real time and a half!...now, you must mash [enter]
OK, now it sez I get to install! first, select my "bootloader". hhmm, I lookdown "danners" next...now, you must mash [enter]
partition? naw,I could care less about the middle east, what's up asking all these stupid geography questions???? I just want to install it, next......now, you must mash [enter]
password? WTF is this??? I don't got no passport, I never go to any of them furrin places, so I don't need no steenking passport word! next....now, you must mash [enter]
OK, select one, desktop, workstation,media center,server,laptop, scientifical platform, games....hmmm, which am I ? CUSTOM! COOL BEANS,that means HOTROD! I CAN PICK WHUT I WANT!...now, you must mash [enter]
WHUT the HECK are all these things???? Huh, there's 5,000 *ING things I never heard of! Where the HECK does it say "intarweb" and "email" and "tunes" what the ***k is up with all this stuff?!? WHUT, I need to "go online" to find out? I JUST TRASHED MY COMPUTER YOU DIP WADS, I CAN'T GET ONLINE NOW! grumble.....OK-I seem to have selected a nice selection, using the "every other one" method, let's see what happens now, clickety.....
AAAAK! I JUST SAW 100 MEGS OF URDU COMPILER GO BY! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE URDU IS ON THE GLOBE! 100 MEGS! BACK TO THE FREEKING GEOGRAPHY LESSONS AGAIN! AND COMPILER, WHAT IS THAT? It's already hit 4 gigs of piles of stuff! It don't need to pile up no more!
----- go off wagon, bring back case of suds and two bottles of rotgut----
now, you must mash [enter] & [enter]
...one hour later....
WHOOP! It looks like I'm done! Now it wants me to make a floppy "boot" disk! WTF again! All this CRAP and it can't turn itself on? What is this "boot" fetish, are these guys pre-verts or whut?
..grumble, find some old floppy that works....
..20 floppies later, I find one that appears to accept the data..
now, you must mash [enter]
Finished! Now it sez it will automagically reboot! I'm IN LIKE FLINT! YAHOO!
...box starts making noises, weirdo crap floats by on screen..wow, lookit all that stuff!..wish I knew what it was, uh oh, looks like it's finishing!
and here it is!
uhhh
WTF HAPPENED TO MY SCREEN! HOWCOME THE SCREEN IS ALL FORKED UP NOW? IT WAS WORKING ALL THROUGH THE INSTALL, WHY THEY CHANGE IT?
... 3 hours later....
now, you must mash [enter]
..hmm, it sez to plz to set horizontal frequency and vertical syncronization as approved by the amalgamated druids of outer finland...???
huh..uhhh OK, sure......
OK, I guess some numbers in the middle,this is a medium priced computer, that should work......
Both. My old mac classic is still easier to use than linux or any windows I ever tried, for me anyway. Never had to reinstall the OS. Once in awhile I ran norton disk doctor, that was it, like every few months. The only problems I ever had with it-that's just ME, I'm sure other people experienced other bad things happening- were netscape freezes. Then I switched to iCab and stopped getting freezes. I'd still be using it but it won't hold enough ram anymore for modern multimedia and a lot of web pages apparently, locked at 64 megs max, which it has. It's just slow to use now, but stability wise it's the same as ever, it just works. If I wanted to I could get the daughter card G3 cpu upgrade, but I won't pay 3 or 400$ for that, that's just nuts. 99$, maybe, I'd think about it. If they ever drop the prices down I'll get a card, until then, oh well. PB 1400, BTW.
I'd like some sort of modular notebook/small laptop where the phone slid into it. The deal with these different devices is you need the different devices, or all of them, laptop, pda, phone. Now if they integrated with each other in one case, hot swappable somehow. Need a full laptop with a real keyboard? Swell, it's there. Just want the phone part, it's there, either leave it plugged into the laptop where it's your wireless modem and/or phone, or slide it out, carry it with you. The pda part of the combo contains the entire hard drive of the laptop,plus the main cpu stuff, this slides out as well. All assembled,and close proximity to each other, perhaps they all communicate with each other with bluetooth.
Kinda of like the docking concept, but integrated in a nice laptop-like case/chassis that has the full size keyboard and the lcd screen, most of the stuff that does the real work is in the phone and pda.
race specific bioweapons certainly *appear* to be one of the holy grails for these sorts of insane madmen researchers. That was one of my first efforts to discover when I heard of the "new mystery flu" being reported, but it soon turned out to be not true, that it affects all comers. The mortality rate though, is through the roof, well above spanish flu. Hopefully it can be contained, I am not all that hopeful though, and with random and fast mutations, yes, no one is really an expert nor is this all that "preditable".
As to the US having dirty hands,with bio weapons and misuse of other biological agents, yes, unfortunately, the anecdotal that is available shows to more than a bit of duplicty on their part. Along with several other nations,the UN, and several international pharmcos, so we aren't alone in this monstrous endeavor.
I really do think advanced biotechnological research wil hold out the promise of the most amazing and for-the-good things imaginable,and will have some great successes, but in the end it will be *the* disaster (or series of overlapping disasters really) that scribes finis to the human species. Our arrogance in always assuming scientific invincibility will cause this.
well, speaking as a newb, my point was ANY documentation is better than no documentation, at least in most cases, and I wanted the writer to know that his efforts were appreciated. Not as sexy as a new video card or latest sco gossip, but at the time I posted, it was being mostly ignored..
I'm still at the point that I can't code,and I can't even help write documentation for anything, you need to fully understand a subject first before you can write about it. At least when the creators write some documentation, it's a starting point.
And I'd disagree on IRC, I think very well archived web forums, where the rule to keep headers inside of common sense keyword limitations, would be much better. IRC is useful, for very fast detailed questions, that require short fast answers. Just some things take more than a sentence or two, and it's better to not have to answer the same question over and over again, you can tell that gets annoying to the answerers, heh.. I've had MUCH better luck just doing newsgroups searches and straight web searches, just need those topics better indexed. re:re:re:re:re: sure gets a lot of hits on the ole intarweb........
On the skill level answers, yes, I would agree whole heartedly. Crawl>walk>run is the usual progression. It's also a bother but something that needs to be said, linux is distro specific a lot of times in the picky details, which to me makes it trebly hard. "Close enough" will still not answer your question or allow you to accomplish your task in a lot of cases, or can seriously bork you.
I am surprised there are not better commercial sites out there that have paid staffers for this purpose,answering questions and having DECENT searchable archives and well written documentation, and charge reasonable subcriptions and are well moderated. There's a business that might be going begging..perhaps, it might exist, I don't know.
The official US government APPROVED policy is first, elect board members to high office from large international corporations. Then they *divest themselves* from their holdings so they are now squeaky clean in their political decisions. Then you hire the companies that they *used to work for* for big ticket government contracts. Then you hire PR managers to keep repeating that there is no conflict of interest. This "bidding" deal is unpatriotic, and so old fashioned and unnecessary and inefficent now, and even suggesting it will result in the person becoming a "person of interest"..
heh
Seriously, sounds like some sort of plan. Competition might actually work.
Thanks for the input. I really can't be more specific other than I smell a rat with it. If you would like to read and comment on some detailed work (I can't, no idea what 99% of this stuff is and you sound like you do), go to rense.com, scroll to all the links about SARS, especially several of the released "world exclusive" research links, and the "whistleblower" links. There's quite a few so I won't link them all, they are easy to find there though.
If you would like I mean, and if you are interested.
I think if you can hypothesize the conversation with the astronauts who were stranded it might be aliong these lines: "Yo, astronauts, we can see from our telescopes that your wing,somethings is wrong, it appears to be damaged, you can't land in that thing, would you like us to attempt some sort of hail mary rescue attempt? over"
"uhh, does the phrase HELL YES mean anything to ya'all on the ground? over"
Ya, they shoulda tried, and they should have used the telescopes they OWN to take better pics of it, when they knew a pice of whatever broke off and smacked into the wing. I remember wehen they said they saw it happen, then for the whole mission it was more or less forgotten about. That they didn't even bother to take much better pictures to any great extent means SOMEONE should have been at least fired over this, just like after 9-11 attack, we didn't get near enough heads to roll over that, just promotions and bonuses and giving them more power. NASA is the same way obviously, always plenty of named humans for the kudos on successes and to cash the fat pay checks, then all the named humans disappear like rats when there's a big FUBAR. Pick any government agency, always the same deal.
And WHAT happened to those interesting pics that that person in cal took, the "purple beam", that NASA sent a t-38 jet over to snag his camera and go "investigate". That story has poofed too near as I have seen. Maybe I missed it, but after a few days it evaporated, and I don't recall seeing them release the pics.
I have mixed feelings on the US space program, GENERALLY I have always supported it, SPECIFICALLY, it seems to be run by lowest common denominator committe, with the peter principle being paramount in hiring and promotions. Maybe it's just time to eliminate them entirely, let private business and enthusiasts take over. Maybe. Or completely 100% change the way they are funded, that might be a good start. Make any of their public funding be good for a decade, not a year or something, try to drag the politics out of it. These projects are too big to jump through yearly hoops.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, not too accurate a survey if they tried to call people who don't have a phone!
"ringgg!! Hello! do you have a phone? computer connected to it? yes? thankyou." click, next surveyed person....
... to have an official "start time" for files, posted in advance, so that people can get ready then hit it all at once. Makes more sense than just posting a file at random, with people all over the world at different time zones trying to make use of the features of bit torrent to not do it correctly, ie "at the same time for maximum effect".
Around here in bubba land it's "nooklure", not to be confused with a wallet full of benjamins and a platinum card in a strip club.
ehhh, canadians are the same as anyplace else. We have national governments, which are all mostly corrupt, stupid, bribed off, blackmailed off, top heavy and slow to adapt. Theirs isn't any different from the US. There are differences in which areas they are more stoopid at. The people are just "people", normal. Want to work, take care of their kids, get ahead a little, and bitch about stuff in their spare time, and basically be left alone by government. It's fun though, I'll agree, to complain about nation-x, everyone does it.. I see the ubernationalism, and uber political party-ism posts on slashdot as roughly equivalent to sports team cheerleaders. Everyone's waste products have malodorus effluvium and attract flies. /me shrugs shoulders goes "eh"
/me stares at precious metals stashed, ability to stay self quarantined away from masses of humans for years, fuel stashed, food stashed, and lots of bullets. It's a good thing. I don't trust "official" spokespeople on anything now, lying is as good as the truth for them, and they are interchangeable.
I think that SARS right now is much worse than they are letting on, all around the world, just a lot of folks aren't dying from it, but getting a case of the month long "flu-like experience", and then it doesn't get reported as SARS. It's a *medical establishment* variant of the big level accounting scandals, where for some reason they can report a liability as an asset, and show inflated "goodness". Same with mad cow (CJK) now is being reported as "alzheimers". Same with the US buck tanking, this is now mysteriously a "good thing". I just heard an interesting data-no verification, heard it on the radio and too lazy to google for it-that the iraqi dinar was trading against the buck pre-wewar at so many thousands per buck, now it's 600 to one buck. That should tell people in the market and with savings account in the banks something *real*, but they'll wait for permission off the 6 o clock news or something to notice it.
And with that said, if canada was just a scosh different I'd like to move there, right now though, flawed as it is, the US still "barely" gets the nod. That might change though, and fast. IF canada was to seperate into self governing soverign nations, I would consider one of the western provinces if they rolled back a lot of their big brotherism and followed roughly a US styled constitution or better, the articles of confederation, which to me was a better governmental design. Or if any US states did that, perhaps along the Freestate project guidelines. And if those guys pick Idaho, I WILL move.
One sector on the hard drive needs to talk to the appropriate bios. If it can't, it won't boot or be readable--allegedly anyway. I read about this earlier in the day (yesterday) on another site.
There's probably some ways to beat this, but for joe average it won't be easy, nor even worth it.
I would have to disagree, pretty strongly. their track record is dismal. they barely escaped a complete breakup from the tip of the ice berg abuses that came out in the Church hearings. They have a bad habit of supporting, funding, training, and trading with bad guys like saddam, osama, noriega, and way back, castro. They've been caught in massive drug dealings. Not penny ante, massive, serious bales of cash big. Plane loads. Even the DEA has been warned off of approved cia shipments. Afghanistan is now running the largest amount of opium production in their history, with their support, I mean, we got spooks and military all over that place, we own it, so???? They also actually STOPPED the afghan war, called a time out, flew out some thousands-up to 8 thousand by some numbers- of top Taliban and al queda members to bases inside pakistan, and got away with it, then the war re started. That story poofed fast, but it really happened. They trained with, supported, sheltered, transported, armed and funded elements of the KLA albanian narco terrorist gangs. They are involved in money laundering, the rigged bankruptcy courts, take overs of various other legitimate businesses, and the worst, various crimes against humanity in the second and third world,including murder and torture, and most likely certain elements, with help from the mafia and inside the DIA were also involved with JFK's whack and some others.
The entire organization top to bottom, every member, isn't corrupt, I am not saying that, but it's so infested with long term chronic serial corruption,at managerial and leadership positions, and is so unavailable for any open investigations, that they need to be just stopped, and a new intel agency created in their place, with better oversight, better vetting, cross vetting, and severe penalities for going rogue, right up to treason charges. They need not one more penny, no more human assets, or electronic assets. It's not one rotten apple in the barrel now, it got WAY beyond that by 30 years ago, or longer. And it's so compartmentalised that it's just too hard now to even have an entity as powerful as the US legislature to even investigate, because, quite frankly, they can just lie about anything they want to, and it's almost impossible for the investigators to find out anything, from them being able to serious alter and forge documents and data, and from the huge sums of black market cash they operate with, ie, "no records".
The nation needs GOOD intelligence services,this is a gimmee, but services that are ALSO honest and not run as overlapping rogue profit mercenary outfits. Throwing good money after bad is never a wise decision. Spook work is always dirty, and sometimes they need to deal with dirty characters, that doesn't give them carte blanche to become dirty themselves.
... yes, but in California, all computrons must pass state EMF emissions tests, and because of contamination with "e-vile bits" that have leaked into the grounding rods, a Superfund Cleanup effort has to be funded with more state bonds to the tune of 87 billion dollars. Grey Davis claims that the state was ripped off by middleman bit traders after deregulation passed, and was forced by contracts to purchase overly expensive bits. The Green Party has issued a press release saying that the evile bits are DOUBLY evile, because they were created with "brown" power, not green. The Libertarian party has issued a statement saying "who cares, let the bit bucket market decide who pays what". The Democratic party has issued a statement saying that cronies of the current administration established shell companies in offshore havens in order to not pay "their fair share" of the cleanup. The Republican party has issued a release calling everyone a "cyberterrorist" and has established "computer camps" at guantanamo bay where recalcitrant anti e-vile bit protesters go to break large bits into smaller bits with hammers. The Reform party has said that all the evile bits have apparently crossed over the border illegally, and Pat Buchanan has said we all must "breed more americans before it's too late". The Constitution party has said "toldyaso, it's the debble" and advised that all evile bits be blasted with 12 gauges. The EFF has fled to an armored compound in maryland where combining hacked GPS receivers and supertrooper stage lasers manned by union stagehands, they have issued a decree to "You want some of this? Come and get us, ****wads!"
So all in all, looks like another bad idea by those dastardly multinational heartless corporations.
Technogeek website slash-n-burninator website is exploding with posts decrying that "it's all SCOs fault, or microsoft, and we don't care who gets nuked"
Mozilla.org has issued an emergency decree that henceforth, all bits will be named firebits, until next week, when they will be called phonexiabits.
Gentoo supporters are dropping like flies as they try to compile programs that are contaminated with evile bits, and vow to never speak the word california again.
*BSD users have moved to canada en massee, the largest IT refugee movement in world history, where they have issued a release saying " eh, it's colder up here, eh, but we don't care mon, look what's legal here now".
France, Germany, China and Russia have stopped all trade with california, and the UN has put california on the "sandbox" list of contaminated areas. Unfortunately, drudgereport has broken with a scoop that in reality, all the contaminated batches of evile bits got sent to california on Cosco container ships, with joint funding from the various "axis of dastards" nations. They are also issuing a demand via the UN that all computron evil bits be measured using the metric system "or else".
In the mideast, it's the same ole crap, and no one cares really.
Time warner AOL msnbc fox cnn abc and the RIAA and MPAA have declared that they have checked and there are "no" contaminated bits anyplace in their websites, but 85 million zaZZaers dispute this, as all files that have been traded since the begining of the crisis all say $%^&**((*%^&%%&&^*^* YOU!!, and have been apparently been done by the trio of madonna, yoko ono, and william shatner.
It's GENERAL MAYHEM AND PANDEMONIUM!
In economic news, sales of manual adding machines and typewriters were brisk today.....
Would the ISPs consider it your bandwith to pay for, for all the unrequested probes and scans you get sent?
Either way, it's about the only "good" thing I can see to metered, it will make them take active measures upstream from the user and in the "bad guy" political arena to help stop the crap you really don't want. I know if I got charged for that stuff, I'd be in court as soon as possible, mylogs versus theirs to prove I requested all this stuff I don't want. And they can then bump it up the economic food chain as far as they want to then.
IF ISPs go back to metered bandwith almost universally, they are going to be INNUNDATED with complaints that spam and getting hacked with viruses and worms are eating all the customers bandwith. I can see thousands of suits over this almost immediately. And the legit streaming providers will get slammed as well, people would be outraged that they couldn't use the internet along the lines of those flashy commercials with tunes and video. It will also affect what remaining internet advertising that exists, because people will turn off images before they give up surfing hours over using up their "allotment" of bandwith.
It would also really embarrass a lot of people when they demand to see where they "used up their bandwith" and after the ISP logs are presented with the urls it turns out to be tons 0 porn, back to the "Well! I never! I must have been hacked, YOU fix it Mr. ISP or OS vendor, it's all your fault" and etc.
It's not a can, it's a case of worms. It might happen though, given the RIAA and MPAA efforts in lobbying, and "we need CYBERSECURITY' and whatnot. Bandwith caps, severely restricted ports, etc.
I think we are in the wild wild west days of the net, I expect something like these severe restrictions combined with increased costs. It's the nature of political reality and really big brand money now. And even if a few major ISPs hold out, they'll eventually go under if all the rest of the ISPs are back to making money with their restrictions and filtering efforts. Isn't the very large bandwith more or less a similar priced commodity now? Once you get far enough upstream it's roughly the same, or am I wrong on that? If it's similar, there's no way the unlimited flat rate providers could compete with the limited but significantly cheaper providers, if they are paying the same bulk rates.
..so what's next? Say they successfully build one that lasts just a tiny amount of time and evaporates? Now think, these are uber geeks. UBER brand geeks, but still geeks. What DO geeks do? They get all hyped up, want to build a bigger/faster/ longer lasting one. If and when that works, they repeat this process. This is just what geeks do after all.
... nuts.
Now, who's going to tell them to stop, and when? You can see this discussion now "Well, it's working good now, we'll just slap some more watts to this baby and...." And you KNOW some insane military goofus with billions to throw around with some black budget funding will think "hmm, sounds like we could make a WEAPON outta this thing somehow, hmmm" and that's EXACTLY how those guys think and do, too.
The little experiment is nothing *as it stands now* but the progression of the experiment is sorta
--the non profits have choices-accept, not accept, or just keep using what they already have perhaps, not get sucked into upgrading cycles. Here on slashdot, you also have a choice, in your user preferences, you can de select the microsoft articles, can't you? If they are burdensome? You can also keep the articles, then go to the link, read the entire article, then skip the commentary where the bashing might be offensive. Lot of choices there.
Now, because this is a forum and anyone may post their views, I would say, yes, microsoft deserves bashing. They have been proven many times to be highly predatory, to use questionable and illegal business tactics, and now, combined with all the other articles, you can plainly see they are afraid of open source and free software. They simply have no way in the future to keep making mega profits unless they maintain their mindshare. Them giving away "free" software that is in essence almost zero cost to them to make copies of, and getting "tax breaks" for that, is yet again another example of a deseperation move on their part, because they can SEE mindshare evaporating on them, daily now. They are big, powerful, so enamored of themselves they border on megalomaina, but buried inside them they are terrorized now. They waited too long. There was just one worm too many, one virus too many, open source and really free software has gotten too good. If I can be punny they lost their "window of opprtunity" for the new century already, they waited just too long. They have few options left, this is one of them. I expect them to be forced into dropping prices across the board soon. You could see this coming 3 years ago clearly. Right now, yes, still a big company, making profits, this is not likely to continue for much longer.
Tell you a story, I owned two different studebakers, when they were still a big company. Times change, don't they?
It may take awhile, but microsoft is on it's way back down to a much smaller and much less important company. All it will take is a few of the top retailers to have already installed linux on machines at the retail level that most people get exposed to, and wham, that's it. Add in some more governments, a few big other corporations. It'll happen.
You don't see many people switching back to microsoft, once they really start using linux, and it used to be macintosh. It just doesn't happen,but you will see people switching away, oine here, one there, a thousand here, ten thousand there. So microsoft has no choice now, like these car companies out there. 0% interest and cash back and all sorts of things they weren't offering just a few years ago. Business changes, times change, reality changes. Microsoft will increasingly just be forced to give it away,give it away, keep sweetning the pot, until they are free as well, if they want to stay in any sort of business, until there's a leveling, then it will be down to the concepts of useability and service versus useability and service. Paid-for software is dying out, and fast, except for custom in house written. The OS in particular.
Now if they were REALLY smart, they could shock the world, change overnight, and give it all away, just offer paid-for service plans at a reasonable rate, with automatic free upgrades. They are so used to making money the easy way, they have no conception of this as a business model, whereas with linux et al it's about the *whole* business model, which is *what most people think it's worth*.
This is just like the music business hanging onto to last centuries business model, doomed to failure unless they change with the times. And the reason WHY is that code or sounds or pictures are so EASILY copied and distributed now, there's no absolute reason to charge these huge amounts of money. You retail based on low volume, high profit, or huge volume, low profit, or service, and THAT'S IT, that's all business can offer..
Microsoft leveraged themselves into a near monopoly, charged a premium, then stopped producing like the
Thanks for your detailed reply, and absolutely no problem with any delay or whatever, I just thought you might be interested in it and I was interested in your comentary.. I'm just trying to get a better handle on the whole SARs issue, so I get info from a variety of places. Most of what I have read comes from more mainstream news sources, and rense also quotes a lot of those as well. His site is great! He covers such a wide range of topics that there's something to both annoy and delite just about everyone. Truly A to Z, so just pick out something. I treat it the same way I do any place else, like I could say (some of my who cares and dislikes)"I think nascar,football, baseball, basketball, and hockey and the brides/weddings pages, the astrology page and local gossip page are useless, so I won't read or give any credence to the [pick any newspaper that has those sections].
His is a "no sacred cows" type of place, so I'd suggest don't throw the baby out with the bathwater on his site. Give it some time, catch his shows, pick the subjects you are interested in, ignore the others. If you link over to his archived shows, you can go back, just tons of various topics. It's a news site with a twist, and rense himself always says he doesn't necessarily agree or disagree with any subjects he covers or guests he has on, he just wants people to get the more contrary or unusual or unique views of everything that isn't part of the bulk of the repetitious completely massaged 6 o clock news you get every place else.
I have a question, to anyone: How does all this SCO nonsense affect Synaptic, which is a fine program?
Good idea. It would probably be more proper though to have received one of the threatening letters, and to also be using linux in a business capacity, or have a client who has declined a bid or contract from you involving the "controversial" linux from you based on a letter they had received from SCO. Even judge judy wants to see documents.
With that said, I forget exactly how many letters sent out, but it sure seems like anyone receiving one could sue in small claims. Not very expensive and the good part is most places (that I am aware of, I could be corrected) they can't use lawyers in the presentation!
I agree, let's lockup the government welfare bums! The people who steal tax money and divert it to who knows where. How about start with over TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in stolen tax money. I say, lock all those bums up! Kick them out of their lazy ass chairs! Take their benefits away from them, give them all some hard time working in a labor camp someplace!
Here's an even better idea, let's TRASH the entire keynesian economic style of government and busy-ness, money creating, and debt based boom and bust cycles, and allowing personhood to artifical constructs called corporations. And reintroduce liability and being productive and creating HONEST wealth in the first place, and knocking down most government back to the states and local levels mostly, and put a smackdown on creeping and ineffectual and top heavy overly managed centrism and theft, ya know, something radical, like the ORIGINAL DESIGN of our government.
Welfare doesn't start at the bottom economic levels of our society, it started at the top, then got worse and worse, until that top heavy welfare created huge numbers of poorer people. Right now we have a huge assault on the US middle class, which will continue until there isn't much of a middle class left except for government bureaucrats and their mercenaries. We HAD millions of decent middle class jobs, but losing over one million a year for the past many years is NOT a smooth move, EXCEPT for the very highest levels of personal profit "welfare" law creating and tax dodging conmen who masquerade as USians but are in fact, raging international globalist pirates and thieves, and now, murderers.
Cool,my geek friend in town handed me these disks, he said he downloaded them off his dads cable! Got me the new belchdata free OS vs1.34alpha
slap cd in, turn it on!...aww shoot, forget to set "biosphere", need to tell it which thingee to look at fust, OK, try again...now, you must mash [enter]
Wow, a PERFECT screen! I can read everything, crystal clear! Better than the old screen and it's not installed yet! This ought to be GOOD!!...now, you must mash [enter]
hmm, pick out a nation... hmm ashcanistan, no... hmm, polynesia, that sounds nice, hot babes, beaches... now, you must mash [enter]
select keyboard? Where's the dang YES button,yes I want a *ing keyboard, yas cretins...now, you must mash[enter]
select mouse type? hmm, it got buttons and wires wif it...now, you must mash[enter]
select time, "are you underwater in greenwhichs merididan at midnight" ??huh..... what is that, metric??? I'm a MURICAN! I want REAL TIME, and after 5 o clock, I DEMAND real time and a half!...now, you must mash [enter]
OK, now it sez I get to install! first, select my "bootloader". hhmm, I lookdown "danners" next...now, you must mash [enter]
partition? naw,I could care less about the middle east, what's up asking all these stupid geography questions???? I just want to install it, next......now, you must mash [enter]
password? WTF is this??? I don't got no passport, I never go to any of them furrin places, so I don't need no steenking passport word! next....now, you must mash [enter]
OK, select one, desktop, workstation,media center,server,laptop, scientifical platform, games....hmmm, which am I ? CUSTOM! COOL BEANS,that means HOTROD! I CAN PICK WHUT I WANT!...now, you must mash [enter]
WHUT the HECK are all these things???? Huh, there's 5,000 *ING things I never heard of! Where the HECK does it say "intarweb" and "email" and "tunes" what the ***k is up with all this stuff?!? WHUT, I need to "go online" to find out? I JUST TRASHED MY COMPUTER YOU DIP WADS, I CAN'T GET ONLINE NOW! grumble.....OK-I seem to have selected a nice selection, using the "every other one" method, let's see what happens now, clickety.....
AAAAK! I JUST SAW 100 MEGS OF URDU COMPILER GO BY! I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE URDU IS ON THE GLOBE! 100 MEGS! BACK TO THE FREEKING GEOGRAPHY LESSONS AGAIN! AND COMPILER, WHAT IS THAT? It's already hit 4 gigs of piles of stuff! It don't need to pile up no more!
----- go off wagon, bring back case of suds and two bottles of rotgut----
now, you must mash [enter] & [enter]
WHOOP! It looks like I'm done! Now it wants me to make a floppy "boot" disk! WTF again! All this CRAP and it can't turn itself on? What is this "boot" fetish, are these guys pre-verts or whut?
now, you must mash [enter]
Finished! Now it sez it will automagically reboot! I'm IN LIKE FLINT! YAHOO!
and here it is!
uhhh
WTF HAPPENED TO MY SCREEN! HOWCOME THE SCREEN IS ALL FORKED UP NOW? IT WAS WORKING ALL THROUGH THE INSTALL, WHY THEY CHANGE IT?
now, you must mash [enter]
huh..uhhh OK, sure......
OK, I guess some numbers in the middle,this is a medium priced computer, that should work......
now, you must mash [enter]
AARRGGHH! ME EYES! WHAR ME COMPUTER GO TO?
Both. My old mac classic is still easier to use than linux or any windows I ever tried, for me anyway. Never had to reinstall the OS. Once in awhile I ran norton disk doctor, that was it, like every few months. The only problems I ever had with it-that's just ME, I'm sure other people experienced other bad things happening- were netscape freezes. Then I switched to iCab and stopped getting freezes. I'd still be using it but it won't hold enough ram anymore for modern multimedia and a lot of web pages apparently, locked at 64 megs max, which it has. It's just slow to use now, but stability wise it's the same as ever, it just works. If I wanted to I could get the daughter card G3 cpu upgrade, but I won't pay 3 or 400$ for that, that's just nuts. 99$, maybe, I'd think about it. If they ever drop the prices down I'll get a card, until then, oh well. PB 1400, BTW.
I'd like some sort of modular notebook/small laptop where the phone slid into it. The deal with these different devices is you need the different devices, or all of them, laptop, pda, phone. Now if they integrated with each other in one case, hot swappable somehow. Need a full laptop with a real keyboard? Swell, it's there. Just want the phone part, it's there, either leave it plugged into the laptop where it's your wireless modem and/or phone, or slide it out, carry it with you. The pda part of the combo contains the entire hard drive of the laptop,plus the main cpu stuff, this slides out as well. All assembled,and close proximity to each other, perhaps they all communicate with each other with bluetooth.
Kinda of like the docking concept, but integrated in a nice laptop-like case/chassis that has the full size keyboard and the lcd screen, most of the stuff that does the real work is in the phone and pda.
--in this case it would be coldwar driving.....
cool, thanks man, that's the sort of stuff I was looking for. Decent website!
zzzzzaaaaapppp!
now, the "why's?" need to be asked, who profits, and why?
race specific bioweapons certainly *appear* to be one of the holy grails for these sorts of insane madmen researchers. That was one of my first efforts to discover when I heard of the "new mystery flu" being reported, but it soon turned out to be not true, that it affects all comers. The mortality rate though, is through the roof, well above spanish flu. Hopefully it can be contained, I am not all that hopeful though, and with random and fast mutations, yes, no one is really an expert nor is this all that "preditable".
As to the US having dirty hands,with bio weapons and misuse of other biological agents, yes, unfortunately, the anecdotal that is available shows to more than a bit of duplicty on their part. Along with several other nations,the UN, and several international pharmcos, so we aren't alone in this monstrous endeavor.
I really do think advanced biotechnological research wil hold out the promise of the most amazing and for-the-good things imaginable,and will have some great successes, but in the end it will be *the* disaster (or series of overlapping disasters really) that scribes finis to the human species. Our arrogance in always assuming scientific invincibility will cause this.
well, speaking as a newb, my point was ANY documentation is better than no documentation, at least in most cases, and I wanted the writer to know that his efforts were appreciated. Not as sexy as a new video card or latest sco gossip, but at the time I posted, it was being mostly ignored..
I'm still at the point that I can't code,and I can't even help write documentation for anything, you need to fully understand a subject first before you can write about it. At least when the creators write some documentation, it's a starting point.
And I'd disagree on IRC, I think very well archived web forums, where the rule to keep headers inside of common sense keyword limitations, would be much better. IRC is useful, for very fast detailed questions, that require short fast answers. Just some things take more than a sentence or two, and it's better to not have to answer the same question over and over again, you can tell that gets annoying to the answerers, heh.. I've had MUCH better luck just doing newsgroups searches and straight web searches, just need those topics better indexed. re:re:re:re:re: sure gets a lot of hits on the ole intarweb........
On the skill level answers, yes, I would agree whole heartedly. Crawl>walk>run is the usual progression. It's also a bother but something that needs to be said, linux is distro specific a lot of times in the picky details, which to me makes it trebly hard. "Close enough" will still not answer your question or allow you to accomplish your task in a lot of cases, or can seriously bork you.
I am surprised there are not better commercial sites out there that have paid staffers for this purpose,answering questions and having DECENT searchable archives and well written documentation, and charge reasonable subcriptions and are well moderated. There's a business that might be going begging..perhaps, it might exist, I don't know.
The official US government APPROVED policy is first, elect board members to high office from large international corporations. Then they *divest themselves* from their holdings so they are now squeaky clean in their political decisions. Then you hire the companies that they *used to work for* for big ticket government contracts. Then you hire PR managers to keep repeating that there is no conflict of interest. This "bidding" deal is unpatriotic, and so old fashioned and unnecessary and inefficent now, and even suggesting it will result in the person becoming a "person of interest"..
heh
Seriously, sounds like some sort of plan. Competition might actually work.
Thanks for the input. I really can't be more specific other than I smell a rat with it. If you would like to read and comment on some detailed work (I can't, no idea what 99% of this stuff is and you sound like you do), go to rense.com, scroll to all the links about SARS, especially several of the released "world exclusive" research links, and the "whistleblower" links. There's quite a few so I won't link them all, they are easy to find there though.
If you would like I mean, and if you are interested.
I think if you can hypothesize the conversation with the astronauts who were stranded it might be aliong these lines: "Yo, astronauts, we can see from our telescopes that your wing,somethings is wrong, it appears to be damaged, you can't land in that thing, would you like us to attempt some sort of hail mary rescue attempt? over"
"uhh, does the phrase HELL YES mean anything to ya'all on the ground? over"
Ya, they shoulda tried, and they should have used the telescopes they OWN to take better pics of it, when they knew a pice of whatever broke off and smacked into the wing. I remember wehen they said they saw it happen, then for the whole mission it was more or less forgotten about. That they didn't even bother to take much better pictures to any great extent means SOMEONE should have been at least fired over this, just like after 9-11 attack, we didn't get near enough heads to roll over that, just promotions and bonuses and giving them more power. NASA is the same way obviously, always plenty of named humans for the kudos on successes and to cash the fat pay checks, then all the named humans disappear like rats when there's a big FUBAR. Pick any government agency, always the same deal.
And WHAT happened to those interesting pics that that person in cal took, the "purple beam", that NASA sent a t-38 jet over to snag his camera and go "investigate". That story has poofed too near as I have seen. Maybe I missed it, but after a few days it evaporated, and I don't recall seeing them release the pics.
I have mixed feelings on the US space program, GENERALLY I have always supported it, SPECIFICALLY, it seems to be run by lowest common denominator committe, with the peter principle being paramount in hiring and promotions. Maybe it's just time to eliminate them entirely, let private business and enthusiasts take over. Maybe. Or completely 100% change the way they are funded, that might be a good start. Make any of their public funding be good for a decade, not a year or something, try to drag the politics out of it. These projects are too big to jump through yearly hoops.