TFA talks a lot about fraud, but what do you call it if I finish reading the article, and I click the nice linkies at the bottom with no intention of buying anything? What if I don't need a "Trojan remover download", credit report restoration, a work-from-home scheme, or (my favorite) to "Make Money With Adsense" with help from some outfit called cash-sense dot com.
So if I do four shift-ctl-clicks (open in a new window, keeping current window active, I love Opera), am I a bored 'net surfer, or have I just committed Click Fraud? For the advertiser, is there really any difference?
When I recently visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science (for the Body Worlds travelling exhibit -- cool!), I noticed that their Hall of the Americas included Ken and Linda Lay as contributors. You don't see it on the website -- in fact, Google doesn't show any instances of his name on the hmns.org site at all -- but up at the Americas exhibit, there's a big, glowing sign proclaiming the Lay family's generosity.
I wondered at the time whether they just hadn't gotten around to applying the duct tape, like they did at Enron Field, since renamed to something more wholesome. But now that we* can look back and say "Aw, poor schmuck", maybe the HMNS and the other museums that benefitted from Lay's largesse can put the duct tape away for good.
* "we": For values of "we" that don't include Enron shareholders as of late 2001.
I just signed up, but I took the time to read the Content Policies, aka "Unacceptable product categories". It's a large list, ranging from the obvious ("Counterfeit and unauthorized goods") to the head-scratchers ("Subscriptions").
Then, when I signed up, I was presented with a list of online retailers where I can get $10 off a $20 purchase thanks to their participation. Third from the bottom:
Magazines.com Coupon code: google10
A quick click to the site revealed that magazines.com is, indeed, a site that calls itself "your subscription headquarters". I'm trying to figure out how this fits with Google's definition of the forbidden item: "Subscriptions to online or offline content (including magazines and newspapers)"
Left hand, meet right hand?
Also, there's another head-scratcher:
Occult goods: Materials, goods or paraphernalia for use in satanic, sacrificial, or related practices
That's an awfully broad definition. What if I buy a chicken? Does a communion wafer count as "sacrificial paraphernalia"?
Also, for anyone wondering "why Western Ontario?", UWO is home to a very well respected wintunnel lab, which has tested many very well known buildings...
Unfortunately, the "wintunnel" doesn't include hardware support for the buildings, and depends on Windows to supply such things as nails and sheetrocks.
Texas has no I-80. The I-80 runs from Chicago to San Francisco.
I was going to point that out, too... but this entire topic has so many misstatements that induce vomiting in sensitive roadgeeks like myself, I could spend days refuting them!
It could be pointed out, though, that Texas *used* to have an 80... US 80, once a grand coast-to-coast route, crossed the breadth of the state on its way from Georgia to San Diego. The route now ends just short of Dallas (right at the city limit, in fact, though that's just a coincidence).
To me (and to you, I'm sure), there's a huge difference between I-80 and US 80. Like night and day. But my non-roadgeek wife tells me all she cares about is the number -- the shape of the shield is irrelevant to her. Kinda sad, really...
... here is the contact page for the library system. Be sure to send in an email or give a call to the Bergen County Cooperative Library System in support of Michele Reutty.
I used the form, and received a nice (but understandably short) reply:
The site is getting positively flooded with support! Mine is the one near the top, referencing my high school's "1984 day", back *in* 1984. We thought the idea of losing our freedom by the actions of our own leaders was pretty outlandish back then...
I still do not think this is enough evidence to convince T-mobile of Phone Cloning. So I am thinking of switching either my number or my service provider.
You ask the question, "Has my cell number been cloned?" I ask the more pressing question... "Has your brain turned to mush?" DUH, if you're getting calls that you're not getting, then there's a problem.
You say "Both representatives hung up on me, thinking I was trying to con them or something." I say, you need to adjust your message to give them the facts -- customer support reps are only human. If you ramble on with your life story, or rant and rave, or interject useless details, then you might get hung up on. But T-Mobile gave me good service when I had them (I only dropped them because they didn't have good service in the middle of nowhere, where I live). If you call and say "Here are the calls that I neither made nor received. Please remove them from my bill and block me from ever recieving calls from the associated numbers." I can't imagine they'd refuse.
There's also the distinct possibility that the owner of the second line isn't being straight with you. I'm reminded of a poem I read on the bus:
By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying - Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.
At least it's obvious that the folks who know what they're doing, know that MS products aren't the best solution. From the doc:
Microsoft Word XP/2003: Microsoft has attempted to remedy certain issues with Metadata in Office XP and up by including a menu option to remove personal information (metadata). There is also a tool available for free from MS, Remove Hidden Data 1.0 (for XP) and 1.1 (for Office 2003), hereafter referred to as RHD, that allows batch removal information from Word documents. None of these will remove sensitive information from the main document; neither will they remove all metadata of possible concern. And RHD 1.0 suffered from stability issues. Reliance of these tools may give a false sense of security.
The fact that MS tools are in use at all in these situations -- as opposed to free, open-source solutions that can be customized for high security applications -- may show the ineptitude of whatever management keeps signing off on their purchase.
It was August 1992. There were no wireless laptops, no BlackBerries, no blogs, no rush to flip on cell phones as soon as your plane hit the runway. Yet, in his hand-written memo, sparked after attending an Apple-organized conference in Hakone, Japan, Kaiser took a peek into a crystal ball of technology and proposed that the company "design the world's first electronic newspaper."
1992? What a joke! The folks at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, with help from some local techies, produced "the world's first electronic newspaper" in 1982!
StarText was an online ASCII-based computer service that was officially launched on May 3, 1982 by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Tandy Corporation. Its name was derived from Star representing the newspaper which would provide the content and Text representing the computer company which would provide the technology.
StarText was marketed in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex newspaper circulation area of North Texas, USA. It quickly evolved into an electronic magazine written by unpaid journalists who had paid to be subscribers of the service. Its eventual demise came with the growth of the Internet. In May of 1996 an additional Internet service was offered and called StarText. Net with the original service being rebranded as StarText Classic. The original service finally closed down on March 3, 1997 and in June of 1998, StarText. Net morphed into Star-Telegram Online Services which in turn eventually became a conventional online Internet service of the Knight-Ridder group.
Well sure sounds like that'll BLOW AWAY 35mm film and definitely be about comprable to 4x5 film.
I was actually looking for a funny link, but this guy makes a great point -- a good scanner and a roll of that 4x5 film -- yes, four inches by five inches, absolutely huge compared to a 35mm roll -- will get you 100 megapixels of resolution for a couple thousand bucks.
It reminds me of a story I saw (on PBS or Discovery Channel) about modern medicine in developing countries. People will pay extra for a "digital X-Ray", even though the cheap equipment produces a digital image that has far less resolution than a plain old film X-Ray. But it's "digital", so it must be better.
What kind of techniques or tools are there to make writing manuals a bit friendlier and faster?
I'd suggest a spelling checker. It would catch things like "Manual Writting Tools?".
Today, the existent manual used was developed with reStructuredText, a very nice piece of software; unfortunately, we're not able to create classes or templates for things like similar interfaces (that share the same functions), which means we need to write more code and that means more editing.
Also, consider physically removing the semicolon from your keyboard. Between the giggles over the misspelled title and the confusion of the above sentence, I have no idea what this article is about.
Seriously, if you want to write something that people will *read*, you've got to keep the human audience in mind -- even if you're just writing program-level documentation. Unless your only goal is to produce a sheaf of paper for the Sarbanes-Oxley auditors, you want your document to be useful for the poor guy who gets stuck debugging the app when the lead programmer gets run over by a bus.
The schools on Jupiter (and in surrounding areas) are stellar... or so I hear.
Much better than on Mars. Mars ain't no kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them if you did. At least, that's what a passing rocket man told me. Of course, he also mentioned all this science he didn't understand, too.
Jupiter's Finest Florist Guaranteed Same Day Local Delivery 100's of items to choose - Save $10 www.11Flowers.com/Jupiter
Local Jupiter Florist Same Day Jupiter Delivery Guarantee Family Owned For Over 90 Years! www.FlowerShopping.com/Jupiter
I'm especially interested in Same Day Jupiter Delivery. That would be a great scientific *and* floral achievement. In particular, the "Local Jupiter Florist" that's been "Family Owned for over 90 Years" -- is the Jupiter location new, or have they been there since around 1915 (thereby missing that terrible flu outbreak)? I can't imagine there would have been much business for flowers on (or near) Jupiter in the early 1900's, but then, making a living would come in a distant second behind "staying alive" in that location.
Foo: How does Wen Ho Lee say anything about Bush? He was an issue in 1996, under Clinton. Bar: It doesn't, but why let facts stand in the way of a little Bush-bashing?
Finally, someone who understands me!:)
I do stand corrected, though I did point out in the original post that the author of the book took previous administrations to task as well. All that is why I didn't vote for either bozo in the last elections. Go Green!
Just last Monday, NPR's Fresh Air program featured investigative reporter Sharon Weinberger, who has just written a book titled Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. In the interview, Weinberger breaks down how the US Military has gone from bad to worse in terms of science, rejecting even its own internal peer-review system (including the JASONs) in favor of administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons".
Of course, the problem isn't new -- she points out in the interview that the Clinton administration was just as quick as anyone else to slam the door on global warming results that didn't match their polices. And in fact, the first two-thirds of the interview are studiously neutral in tone. But by the end, after host Terri Gross and Weinberger have laid the factual foundation, the Bush administration comes out looking pretty pathetic. With the current administration's secrecy, paranoia (the Wen Ho Lee fiasco at Los Alamos gets particular attention), and general disregard for the scientific method, it's pretty clear that if Los Alamos falls, it didn't jump -- it was pushed.
This bit from TFA about the ERCOT scandal here in Texas shows why the Supreme Court's recent weakening of whistleblower protections, plus Yahoo & Co's willingness to turn over customer records, combines to be a really Bad Thing.
Still, Shoquist and the others might never have been apprehended had it not been for several whistle-blowers within ERCOT.
Beginning in late 2004, these employees e-mailed members of the Texas Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and Randy Chapman, executive director of the Texas Legal Services Center, with numerous allegations concerning Shoquist and the others, Chapman says. The first reaction was shock, says one of the recipients, Paul Hudson, chairman of the Texas PUC: "The second was concern about the systems' vulnerability based on the materials that we had received." There was ample reason for concern. Most of the so-called security work that had supposedly gone into protecting ERCOT over the previous year was as shadowy as the companies that provided it.
Resolution: When the whistle-blowers initially surfaced with their anonymous e-mails, ERCOT's reaction was to attack the messengers and ignore the message. In November 2004, it sued two Internet service providers, Yahoo and Time Warner, in the Travis County District Courthouse to force them to reveal the identities of the employees who had leaked information about the fraud. The suits were filed based on ERCOT's claim that the e-mails were defamatory and "solicited ERCOT employees to turn over confidential information to outside entities."
"The lawsuits had a chilling effect at a time when we required absolute openness and accuracy," says Texas PUC chairman Hudson. Within a few days, the Public Utilities Commission and various state politicians convinced ERCOT to drop the lawsuits. At the same time, the PUC held an emergency open meeting to review ERCOT's audit procedures and controls. "It was a sad state of affairs," says Chapman, who met with the ERCOT board. "There were no checks and balances in place. At the time, ERCOT wouldn't even allow a state auditor to come in because they claimed that an outsider would be too intrusive."
Note that it wasn't the protection of the law, but political pressure that forced ERCOT to drop the lawsuits. If it hadn't happened in the wake of the California energy "crisis", there's every indication that nobody outside the situation would have cared. It's cases like this that make me cringe when politicians tell us that they need ISPs to hold login information indefinitely. When I "think of the children", I worry about the mess that current "if you're not with us, you're with the [terrorists|pedophiles]" mentality will leave for them to clean up.
"Another Sky Press Driving Neo-Patronage" -- yet another in the time-honored tradition of new-economy names colliding with old-school English grammar.
I first read it as "[Another Sky] [Press-Driving] [Neo-Patronage]", and wondered what "Press-Driving" meant -- would it be something similar to Astroturfing?
Then I read it again, as "[(yet) Another] [Sky Press] [Driving Neo-Patronage]". A little closer to the true intent, but I wondered what a "Sky Press" is, and how many others are out there if this is just yet another one?
So I read the article -- crazy and dangerous, I know -- and found out that it's "[Another Sky Press] [Driving Neo-Patronage]". Ok, I get it now. Thanks.
That didn't even make any sense... gamma rads don't hang out like alpha or beta... *brain snaps* ARRGGHHH!! KILL!!! *whips out his 'Environmentally Friendly Shotgun (TM)'*
A previous AC reply suggests avoiding lead shot to avoid annoying your "friends" for the remainder of their (shortened) lives. I disagree. As you forcibly instill your mixture of the three stable isotopes of lead, you can explain how the encapsulation and delivery method you're demonstrating will provide protection against any radioactive exposure -- topical, ingested, or inhaled -- for their entire post-treatment lifetime.
Just one word: UPS. If it's important enough to need redundancy, it's important enough to need battery backup, and it would not take much battery power (=weight) to power a wireless transceiver for a short period of time.
That was my initial thought, but after reading the reports on EgyptAir 990 (pdf available on this page), I'm starting to wonder. That was the one where the First Officer attempted to dive the plane into the ocean, was thwarted when the Captain returned to the flight deck... and then we don't know what happened, because the FO cut off power to the engines and the data and voice recorders lost power. All we know after that point is from radar -- the plane climbed back up before breaking apart and crashing into the ocean after all.
Even in the ValuJet case in my original post, we don't have flight and voice data after the fire burned away the power lines. There may be some good reason not to put batteries all over the plane -- corrosion or fire concerns, or perhaps weight in older-technology batteries. I was hoping that such details would come up in the discussion, but then, this is Slashdot: a bunch of guys who know a lot about computers, which enables them to think they know a lot about everything else.
Like some VB hack who thinks he knows about avionics and control surfaces... oh, sorry, that's me, never mind. Strike that last comment from the record.
Most of the early comments seem to be in the vein of "OMG wireless hax!", but consider a real worst-case scenario, like the one that brought down ValuJet 592. It was caused by a fire in the cargo hold that cut critical links between the cockpit controls and the hydraulic systems needed to keep the plane running.
As long as you have a physical connection from point A to point B, it is vulnerable to the most brute-force of DOS attacks: cut the connection and it's lost. A wireless link between the pilot and the control surfaces, on the other hand, can't be cut by a fire in the cargo hold, or even by a shoulder-fired missle (as long as it missed the kablooie stuff).
In a real-world application, I'd expect both wired/optical links *and* wireless backup links. Such a fully redundant system would work both as a sanity check (both systems should be reporting the same results) and as a backup (wired works when wireless is jammed, wireless works when wire is cut).
Plus, I can hardly wait for the netstumbler/kismet folks to write a monitor program to let me monitor things from the comfort of my tray table (on the emergency exit row, of course).
Slashdot Mirror
My first thought, of course, was:
{o,o}
|)__)
-"-"-
O RLY?
{o.o}
|)_(|
-"-"-
YA RLY
{o,o}
(__(|
-"-"-
NO WAI!
(Courtesy of the usual suspects)
TFA talks a lot about fraud, but what do you call it if I finish reading the article, and I click the nice linkies at the bottom with no intention of buying anything? What if I don't need a "Trojan remover download", credit report restoration, a work-from-home scheme, or (my favorite) to "Make Money With Adsense" with help from some outfit called cash-sense dot com.
So if I do four shift-ctl-clicks (open in a new window, keeping current window active, I love Opera), am I a bored 'net surfer, or have I just committed Click Fraud? For the advertiser, is there really any difference?
When I recently visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science (for the Body Worlds travelling exhibit -- cool!), I noticed that their Hall of the Americas included Ken and Linda Lay as contributors. You don't see it on the website -- in fact, Google doesn't show any instances of his name on the hmns.org site at all -- but up at the Americas exhibit, there's a big, glowing sign proclaiming the Lay family's generosity.
I wondered at the time whether they just hadn't gotten around to applying the duct tape, like they did at Enron Field, since renamed to something more wholesome. But now that we* can look back and say "Aw, poor schmuck", maybe the HMNS and the other museums that benefitted from Lay's largesse can put the duct tape away for good.
* "we": For values of "we" that don't include Enron shareholders as of late 2001.
Unfortunately, the article now includes only this limited summary:
Slashdot strikes again!
Then, when I signed up, I was presented with a list of online retailers where I can get $10 off a $20 purchase thanks to their participation. Third from the bottom:
Magazines.com Coupon code: google10
A quick click to the site revealed that magazines.com is, indeed, a site that calls itself "your subscription headquarters". I'm trying to figure out how this fits with Google's definition of the forbidden item: "Subscriptions to online or offline content (including magazines and newspapers)"
Left hand, meet right hand?
Also, there's another head-scratcher:
That's an awfully broad definition. What if I buy a chicken? Does a communion wafer count as "sacrificial paraphernalia"?
Also, for anyone wondering "why Western Ontario?", UWO is home to a very well respected wintunnel lab, which has tested many very well known buildings...
Unfortunately, the "wintunnel" doesn't include hardware support for the buildings, and depends on Windows to supply such things as nails and sheetrocks.
(obligatory WTF? link.)
Texas has no I-80. The I-80 runs from Chicago to San Francisco.
I was going to point that out, too... but this entire topic has so many misstatements that induce vomiting in sensitive roadgeeks like myself, I could spend days refuting them!
It could be pointed out, though, that Texas *used* to have an 80... US 80, once a grand coast-to-coast route, crossed the breadth of the state on its way from Georgia to San Diego. The route now ends just short of Dallas (right at the city limit, in fact, though that's just a coincidence).
To me (and to you, I'm sure), there's a huge difference between I-80 and US 80. Like night and day. But my non-roadgeek wife tells me all she cares about is the number -- the shape of the shield is irrelevant to her. Kinda sad, really...
I used the form, and received a nice (but understandably short) reply:
The site is getting positively flooded with support! Mine is the one near the top, referencing my high school's "1984 day", back *in* 1984. We thought the idea of losing our freedom by the actions of our own leaders was pretty outlandish back then...
I still do not think this is enough evidence to convince T-mobile of Phone Cloning. So I am thinking of switching either my number or my service provider.
You ask the question, "Has my cell number been cloned?" I ask the more pressing question... "Has your brain turned to mush?" DUH, if you're getting calls that you're not getting, then there's a problem.
You say "Both representatives hung up on me, thinking I was trying to con them or something." I say, you need to adjust your message to give them the facts -- customer support reps are only human. If you ramble on with your life story, or rant and rave, or interject useless details, then you might get hung up on. But T-Mobile gave me good service when I had them (I only dropped them because they didn't have good service in the middle of nowhere, where I live). If you call and say "Here are the calls that I neither made nor received. Please remove them from my bill and block me from ever recieving calls from the associated numbers." I can't imagine they'd refuse.
There's also the distinct possibility that the owner of the second line isn't being straight with you. I'm reminded of a poem I read on the bus:
By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
-Dorothy Parker, Unfortunate Coincidence
At least it's obvious that the folks who know what they're doing, know that MS products aren't the best solution. From the doc:
The fact that MS tools are in use at all in these situations -- as opposed to free, open-source solutions that can be customized for high security applications -- may show the ineptitude of whatever management keeps signing off on their purchase.
Now these guys, on the other hand...
Oh. My. [expletive & blasphemy removed].
You just raised the bar on "ridiculous". And you made my day. Thanks!
1992? What a joke! The folks at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, with help from some local techies, produced "the world's first electronic newspaper" in 1982!
From the usual source:
1992... we had y'all beat by ten years.
Well sure sounds like that'll BLOW AWAY 35mm film and definitely be about comprable to 4x5 film.
I was actually looking for a funny link, but this guy makes a great point -- a good scanner and a roll of that 4x5 film -- yes, four inches by five inches, absolutely huge compared to a 35mm roll -- will get you 100 megapixels of resolution for a couple thousand bucks.
It reminds me of a story I saw (on PBS or Discovery Channel) about modern medicine in developing countries. People will pay extra for a "digital X-Ray", even though the cheap equipment produces a digital image that has far less resolution than a plain old film X-Ray. But it's "digital", so it must be better.
And don't even get me started about overpriced digital stereo cable!
What kind of techniques or tools are there to make writing manuals a bit friendlier and faster?
I'd suggest a spelling checker. It would catch things like "Manual Writting Tools?".
Today, the existent manual used was developed with reStructuredText, a very nice piece of software; unfortunately, we're not able to create classes or templates for things like similar interfaces (that share the same functions), which means we need to write more code and that means more editing.
Also, consider physically removing the semicolon from your keyboard. Between the giggles over the misspelled title and the confusion of the above sentence, I have no idea what this article is about.
Seriously, if you want to write something that people will *read*, you've got to keep the human audience in mind -- even if you're just writing program-level documentation. Unless your only goal is to produce a sheaf of paper for the Sarbanes-Oxley auditors, you want your document to be useful for the poor guy who gets stuck debugging the app when the lead programmer gets run over by a bus.
The schools on Jupiter (and in surrounding areas) are stellar... or so I hear.
Much better than on Mars. Mars ain't no kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell. And there's no one there to raise them if you did. At least, that's what a passing rocket man told me. Of course, he also mentioned all this science he didn't understand, too.
Google supplied these ads for the article:
Jupiter's Finest Florist
Guaranteed Same Day Local Delivery 100's of items to choose - Save $10
www.11Flowers.com/Jupiter
Local Jupiter Florist
Same Day Jupiter Delivery Guarantee Family Owned For Over 90 Years!
www.FlowerShopping.com/Jupiter
I'm especially interested in Same Day Jupiter Delivery. That would be a great scientific *and* floral achievement. In particular, the "Local Jupiter Florist" that's been "Family Owned for over 90 Years" -- is the Jupiter location new, or have they been there since around 1915 (thereby missing that terrible flu outbreak)? I can't imagine there would have been much business for flowers on (or near) Jupiter in the early 1900's, but then, making a living would come in a distant second behind "staying alive" in that location.
Foo: How does Wen Ho Lee say anything about Bush? He was an issue in 1996, under Clinton.
:)
Bar: It doesn't, but why let facts stand in the way of a little Bush-bashing?
Finally, someone who understands me!
I do stand corrected, though I did point out in the original post that the author of the book took previous administrations to task as well. All that is why I didn't vote for either bozo in the last elections. Go Green!
Just last Monday, NPR's Fresh Air program featured investigative reporter Sharon Weinberger, who has just written a book titled Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. In the interview, Weinberger breaks down how the US Military has gone from bad to worse in terms of science, rejecting even its own internal peer-review system (including the JASONs) in favor of administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons".
Of course, the problem isn't new -- she points out in the interview that the Clinton administration was just as quick as anyone else to slam the door on global warming results that didn't match their polices. And in fact, the first two-thirds of the interview are studiously neutral in tone. But by the end, after host Terri Gross and Weinberger have laid the factual foundation, the Bush administration comes out looking pretty pathetic. With the current administration's secrecy, paranoia (the Wen Ho Lee fiasco at Los Alamos gets particular attention), and general disregard for the scientific method, it's pretty clear that if Los Alamos falls, it didn't jump -- it was pushed.
Note that it wasn't the protection of the law, but political pressure that forced ERCOT to drop the lawsuits. If it hadn't happened in the wake of the California energy "crisis", there's every indication that nobody outside the situation would have cared. It's cases like this that make me cringe when politicians tell us that they need ISPs to hold login information indefinitely. When I "think of the children", I worry about the mess that current "if you're not with us, you're with the [terrorists|pedophiles]" mentality will leave for them to clean up.
"Another Sky Press Driving Neo-Patronage" -- yet another in the time-honored tradition of new-economy names colliding with old-school English grammar.
I first read it as "[Another Sky] [Press-Driving] [Neo-Patronage]", and wondered what "Press-Driving" meant -- would it be something similar to Astroturfing?
Then I read it again, as "[(yet) Another] [Sky Press] [Driving Neo-Patronage]". A little closer to the true intent, but I wondered what a "Sky Press" is, and how many others are out there if this is just yet another one?
So I read the article -- crazy and dangerous, I know -- and found out that it's "[Another Sky Press] [Driving Neo-Patronage]". Ok, I get it now. Thanks.
As long as I can still get to the OMG!!! PONEYS!!! version of Slashdot, I'll be fine. At least I'll always be able to make my own sign.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
So much for reporting on ASCII art. *sigh* Where do I find that bunny sig virus?
That didn't even make any sense... gamma rads don't hang out like alpha or beta... *brain snaps* ARRGGHHH!! KILL!!! *whips out his 'Environmentally Friendly Shotgun (TM)'*
A previous AC reply suggests avoiding lead shot to avoid annoying your "friends" for the remainder of their (shortened) lives. I disagree. As you forcibly instill your mixture of the three stable isotopes of lead, you can explain how the encapsulation and delivery method you're demonstrating will provide protection against any radioactive exposure -- topical, ingested, or inhaled -- for their entire post-treatment lifetime.
Just one word: UPS. If it's important enough to need redundancy, it's important enough to need battery backup, and it would not take much battery power (=weight) to power a wireless transceiver for a short period of time.
That was my initial thought, but after reading the reports on EgyptAir 990 (pdf available on this page), I'm starting to wonder. That was the one where the First Officer attempted to dive the plane into the ocean, was thwarted when the Captain returned to the flight deck... and then we don't know what happened, because the FO cut off power to the engines and the data and voice recorders lost power. All we know after that point is from radar -- the plane climbed back up before breaking apart and crashing into the ocean after all.
Even in the ValuJet case in my original post, we don't have flight and voice data after the fire burned away the power lines. There may be some good reason not to put batteries all over the plane -- corrosion or fire concerns, or perhaps weight in older-technology batteries. I was hoping that such details would come up in the discussion, but then, this is Slashdot: a bunch of guys who know a lot about computers, which enables them to think they know a lot about everything else.
Like some VB hack who thinks he knows about avionics and control surfaces... oh, sorry, that's me, never mind. Strike that last comment from the record.
Most of the early comments seem to be in the vein of "OMG wireless hax!", but consider a real worst-case scenario, like the one that brought down ValuJet 592. It was caused by a fire in the cargo hold that cut critical links between the cockpit controls and the hydraulic systems needed to keep the plane running.
As long as you have a physical connection from point A to point B, it is vulnerable to the most brute-force of DOS attacks: cut the connection and it's lost. A wireless link between the pilot and the control surfaces, on the other hand, can't be cut by a fire in the cargo hold, or even by a shoulder-fired missle (as long as it missed the kablooie stuff).
In a real-world application, I'd expect both wired/optical links *and* wireless backup links. Such a fully redundant system would work both as a sanity check (both systems should be reporting the same results) and as a backup (wired works when wireless is jammed, wireless works when wire is cut).
Plus, I can hardly wait for the netstumbler/kismet folks to write a monitor program to let me monitor things from the comfort of my tray table (on the emergency exit row, of course).