While Microsoft/Danger has not made any statements regarding the root cause that took out all sidekick users in North America last week, it is curious that it happened right as word was circulating that the LX 2009 model was do for an OTA update.... hmmm thats interesting.
It's now been almost a week since the outage started and there are still thousands of LX 2009 owners that have missing email, phonebooks, and notes. T-Mobile sent out an urgent message to users last weekend warning sidekick owners NOT to hardware reset their phones. What many Sidekick owners I know experienced was their phones were reset remotely by either Microsoft/Danger or T-Mobile Friday morning when the outage began. Adding insult to injury, one friend noted that her Sidekick has been hardware reset remotely now no less than 10 times since the outage began. Additionally, while her network service has been restored, the phone is behaving worse than it ever had before the outage.
While I am no expert on how the Sidekick works I can make some observations based on comments my friend and other have made about their experiences last weekend:
1. The LX 2009 appears to silently store phonebook and other user generated information, and preferences in volatile RAM, rather than the Sim card or Flash. This appears to be a default configuration. 2. While both T-Mobile reps and glossy into claims the SideKick stores personal info either on Microsoft/Danger's servers and/or on the user's SIM card, my friend was unable to find any preference settings on the phone relating to this feature.
3. Maybe this is a sign that cloud services are a bad idea for storing mission critical information. For many people their address/phonebook ARE mission critical. 4. Microsoft/Danger and T-Mobile may be due for a massive class action here. The sad thing is that my friend has been very happy with T-Mobile's service for years. From what she tells me the failure of the sidekick LX 2009s in North America rests squarely on Microsoft/Danger's shoulders.
5. Back in May there were strong indications that Microsoft gutted the Sidekick development team shortly after the LX 2009 was shipped... http://www.zimbio.com/Sidekick+3+Ringtones/articles/171/Microsoft+Lays+Off+Danger+Employees Could it be that Microsoft has backstabbed Sidekick owners to finish killing off the platform? By cutting internal support for critical Danger services it could easily be written off as a terrible mistake. Microsoft would clearly have good reason to take a plausibly deniable swipe at T-Mobile for forcing them to make the last Sidekick.... Other possible causes might include disgruntled ex-employee sabotage of the Danger back-end...
How does a mission critical server, owned by the largest software company in the world get taken out so completely that it takes 5 full days to bring it back up? I could see this being an accident for a small startup with weak IT processes, but at Microsoft? Something doesn't add up.
Back to Sony for a moment:
It seems unlikely that Sony intended to brick PS3's with this update, but on the other hand all of the console makers tend to treat their customers like indentured licensees... so outcomes like this are sure to occur more often until some serious lawyering and lawmaking gets invoked.
My hunch is that these issues are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Rodents do things like defecate and urinate when captured. They also release other chemical scents that seem to be connected to fear and death. I have seen the same thing with rat traps.
My process evolved during a 1 year stint as a grounds keeper for a small motel. Here is the progression:
I used peanut butter to trap a rat using a traditional spring-bale trap. After removing the victim I reset the trap and put it back in the high traffic area. No further rats trapped. Even moving the trap to other areas had no effect.
Washed trap in bleach. Re-baited with peanut butter. No further rats trapped after 2 days. Moving the trap did help a bit. Managed to get one more kill.
Re-baited washed trap with cheddar cheese. Successful trapping that night.
Washed trap and re-baited with beef jerky. Successful trapping that night.
Washed and re-baited with swiss cheese. Successful trapping that night.
Continued with this process using multiple traps until it was apparent that the population was dropping. Tried changing washing chemical, and purchasing fresh traps. I was concerned that the bleach might be acting as an association. Campaign ended when I couldn't get any hits on any imaginable bait on two week intervals for over 3 months.
Carefully cleaned former high traffic areas and watched for droppings.... No further rat activity seen for over 3 months.
Just so PETA types don't get on my case.. This trapping campaign was carried out within a two story building, not in outdoor areas. No animals other than rats were trapped. (This surprised me! I expected to get mice too.)
Conclusions: Dead rats do tell tales! They communicate with their living peers by "fear and violence and blood" scents left on the trap. The specific food used as bait is avoided by peers who encountered the "murder scene." Due to how mobile rats are during their active periods, I am assuming that all of the rats in a population can be expected to encounter the "murder scene" before the night is over. There were a few exceptions early on as I discovered the process that allowed rats to avoid traps. This leads me to think that a few rats may have missed the memo, and got nailed for being out of the loop.
I'm sure that there is probably someone out there who's going to find a document confirming my observations. Don't bother. I know it works, and it seems obvious to me. At the time I was doing this I had no internet access and had never before been tasked with trapping rats.
Imagine putting a charged phosphorus plate a short distance away (no idea exactly how far... a millimeter? A few 100 microns?) from the last atom in the carbon chain. If you charge the other end of the chain. From to ~450 volts electrons will scatter off the atom. Apparently that scattering, as an earlier poster pointed out, will have a coherent pattern based on the shell those electrons were thrown off of. The electron pattern expands over the distance, until it hits the phosphor plate.
In this respect it's like taking a picture using a pin-hole camera... In this case the pin-hole is Carbon atom throwing electrons toward the phosphor plate. The phosphor plate glows in response to the electrons. Take a photo of the glowing phosphor plate.... Bet it was a REALLY long exposure.
This is no different than the electron accelerator in a CRT. Except in this case the electron emitter is exactly 1 atom wide.
It seems to me that you might be able image some other configurations at least with elements that will bond onto the end of a carbon chain. If TFA and TFE is for real it's a very interesting.
Lol had the same experience on my MacOS system....
The malware server didn't want to give me the Trojan. Had to shake it loose using wget. Guess it was noticing that I was running MacOS. I also couldn't get the Trojan to run on my "sandboxed" XPP VM... It seems to be checking for something that VMWare doesn't emulate.... The binary also came up totally clean when checked with McAfee. Not really surprised there.
Oh well I don't have a properly instrumented sandbox anyway...
When the insurance company dereferences the VIN from the Plate Number you gave them... they have a pretty good idea of exactly what color your car is. The Manufacturer encodes it in the VIN, along with a lot of other details about the build.
Obviously if you have your car repainted.......
I am not suggesting they even care... but it would not be hard for them to have a pretty good idea.
FCC rules are just that rules. They are binding on the broadcaster because the broadcaster has accepted a license with the FCC that makes them beholden to those rules. There IS some legislation but that regards the FCC being able to take action on broadcasters that are unlicensed, or equipment that in effect becomes a broadcast source (RF noise from a computer)
The magsafe cords detached instantly, offering no resistance and leaving power sockets undamaged.
Finally, the stiff unibody shells meant that the villains could grab the notebooks one-handed from a corner with no flexing, and no risk to the internal circuitry, the tough aluminum bodies resisting the jostling clanks inside the sacks.
And so we see that it is true that Apple really does design for the end-user, with small efficiencies that all add up. Thanks to Apple, the scoundrels managed to load up their booty 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones and nine iPod Touches in just 31 seconds.
The CNN writer is an idiot. The machines stolen were boxed units. Anything on display is cable chained to the desktop/display to prevent snatch and run theft during business hours.
Apple has made an effort to reduce the bulk of their packaging, so this did work in the thieves favor. Still 5 MBPs 3 iPhones, and 2 iPodTouches per thief is quite a haul... The MBP packages are still kinda big to stuff 5 of them into a rucksack...
Look, here's the disclaimer: I am a software engineer. No, not hardware, software.
But I've written camera drivers from schematics and datasheets alone. It's *just not that hard*. Even for a software guy. I don't have an EE, just an interest in electronics.
And digital electronics are, quite frankly, rather simple. If you know ohm's law, and can read a datasheet or two, you could very easily put together a digital camera module. PCB express will happily etch the board for you, and you *might* have to do some soldering. Unless, of course, you buy one of the cameras from sparkfun or other hobby supplier.
Until you have a * CORRECTLY WORKING* system that you designed from scratch from your own PCB design, you should probably not make such statements. You have appear to have no idea what you are talking about.
I just went through this process over the last 4 months to design, build, and code a simple SMD soldering oven. I know considerably more than you appear to about 'Ohm's Law' and a few data sheets. I am not an EE; like you I am a software/firmware guy. I build hardware as a hobbyist. It's not a simple drag and drop editing solution by any stretch of the imagination. It's a major engineering project. Even for a few components. Why? For the same reason a word processor doesn't make a great writer, and Photoshop doesn't make a great photographer. These tools assume a knowledge base that you and I do not have. This knowledge base must be learned to get even marginal success. Making that stretch is much harder than you appear to be implying.
I'll go further: It is much easier for an EE to become a software engineer, than for software engineer to become a hardware engineer. Why? I think it's because the tools used to develop software are considerably more advanced than the tools hardware engineers need to use. Is that used O-Scope really telling you what you think it's telling you? Do you really understand, in your bones what your DVM is telling you when you probe a node? When your carefully crafted (by the data sheets) prototype starts crashing unexpectedly do you know where to start looking for anomalies?
I challenge you to go ahead and make something; ANYTHING with something as seemingly simple as a PIC mpu and a few analog sub-circuits, on a PCB you designed, and get back to me when you have it in your paws, working as designed. It's not as easy as it looks. I am sure you can do it. You just need to make the effort. Your journey will be the reward, and you should document it.... warts and all as I have: http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=13239
I have been using their services for two years without so much as even a minor glitch. They host my domains and a vLAMP server the domains are pointed at. My service is not unlimited. I get up to 150GB of storage, and 15GB of traffic per month. I've never even come close to either cap, even hosting a few large videos for limited access to friends and family. I use it as my personal playground in The Cloud..... So far it's been much easier to manage than a 'bedroom' server. I do also maintain a local server swinging moderately big iron: it's also configured as a headless Ubuntu LAMP.
I write what I write and that is what I mean. I can't be held accountable for what you think I'm implying.
"The meaning of the communication is the result you get."
That makes YOU the WRITER responsible for the impression you give the READER. Get with the fuxing program.
IT is truly arrogant to believe you are such a great communicator that nothing you write might be misunderstood.
You and many other fools assume that your ability to string words together in a coherent manner is flawless. This is not true.... and you need to come to terms with it.
The odd thing is that this orange goo has been qualified for use in Motorcycle racing body armor. Thats not something I'd expect from a gimmicky respin of Silly Putty.
I suspect they still have some ridged material over the goo to keep it from abrading. Could be just Kevlar layers or some other flexible abrasion resistant material. It seems to me that the IP holder is being very careful not to let the cat out of the bag before they have a lot of licenses tied up. It might be that there is a whole class of related materials they want to develop.
for the purposes of an SAM or an AIM, an unpowered blimp has no signature to lock on to. Now that said.. a modified missile might just track the transmitter signature. But you'd still need to get within 340 miles to fire it. Getting AIM or SAM to work at those ranges is not easy. This blimp is not useful if you don't already have and effective air canopy and ground support.
Yes lets factor in survivability, since you think that it's important. Guess what. Aircraft carriers have zero survivability. You know what keeps them alive? They seem to have an air defense canopy and the rest of the battle group which consists of a lot of ships to reduce the risk from subs. ACCs do not go where they cannot guarantee their air superiority.
With a view of 340+ miles this blimp is going to be able to see just about anything on the ground trying to sneak up, and once again. Such a system is not deployed unless you already have air superiority by other means. AWACS costs a lot more money than a blimp to fly, and puts a lot more human assets at risk for the same job.
Domestic use is not likely to be all that appealing. I think a blimp moored at 10,000 feet is going to raise a lot of noise in the local political process.
Local and state authorities already have a much less expensive solution: They flight light planes with spotters on board along highways and large public areas, looking for anomalous things on the ground. They find a lot of marihuana fields this way in California. No blimp required.
Oh... and as for resigning (can one say he was really given a chance to do so properly) and giving the passwords to someone who was not supposed to get them, he could quite possibly be held responsible for the resulting damages if it was contrary to procedures. And given that this has all the appearances of being one pissing match of a turf war... I would be very afraid that that would be the case were I in his position, and as such, the case is IMO totally absurd, and perhaps just has some folks wanting to make a name for themselves...
This kind of situation came up for me a couple of years ago. I was sysadmin for a number of mission critical systems. I was laid off. Following procedure I relinquished all passwords for root and sysop access to the machines. A few days later the CEO contacted me and demanded that I provide the password for one particular machine they could not access, or I would be sued. I told her that I no longer remembered ANY password for their systems. I asserted that the password in question was in the file I relinquished, and any further discussion of the issue would be through my attorney... [EOF][HUP]
Oh FFS, we are talking about a net change in arriving solar radiation of less than 0.1% over 11 year cycles, and though its likely there are some larger fluctuations that modulate the 11 year cycle, we haven't been measuring long enough. The notion that this data predicts a 'mini-ice age' is about as useful as using sunspot counts to predict the weather. Which is not useful at all. Sun spot counts don't predict weather at all. Even the proxies don't really link us to what is going on, though they do seem to loosely track solar oscillations. How long is the lag on those proxy relationships? Are they indicative of some other process that is being influenced by solar activity? No one knows. We don't have long enough direct solar activity measurements.
As the dominant dim bulbs around here are fond of echoing: Correlation is not causation.
As for global climate change due to our Industrial Age farting dinosaurs back into the atmosphere, we do need to get a grip on that. I doubt very seriously that some prediction of a long solar minimum is going to change the outcome much, if at all.
This was still largely true until Microsoft came up and changed the game. Though, to be fair I think IBM getting it's ass kicked by the early clone makers kinda set the trend.
The first 'large' piece of commercial code I saw in source was the Apple II+ auto-start ROM. Which was printed in the back of the Apple II Reference Manual. Early IBM PC reference manuals also had source for the BIOS printed in them. This was also true of the Atari xx00 line, the Commodore line, Radio Shack line, most 80's arcade game systems(far less detail on ROMs), Sinclare's line, and a few other less popular platforms.
I seem to recall a lot of interface cards for many systems had source code for their driver ROMs printed in the back of the reference manual along with a complete 'Theory of Operation' section including the register mappings.
While none of these sources were Free(as in beer,) yet they were open source.
It might be thought provoking from a teen perspective to re-examine their relationship to their Toons in WoW... or SL. I for one would appreciate 'the monkey at the keyboard' taking responsibility for the actions of the digital-selves. It is possible that a movie like this might provoke some thought on this.
Go back and look at the original Teaser for The Matrix, and tell me that you thought that it was going to be as thought provoking as it ended up being. To me this is kinda like judging a book by it's cover.
Slashdot Mirror
4 in a million sounds more remote a chance that 1 in 250,000....
seems that the writer wanted to avoid panicking the sheeple....
Sony and Nintendo aren't the only ones who have botched their firmware update processes.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10368709-56.html
While Microsoft/Danger has not made any statements regarding the root cause that took out all sidekick users in North America last week, it is curious that it happened right as word was circulating that the LX 2009 model was do for an OTA update.... hmmm thats interesting.
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2009/10/02/firmware-update-for-buggy-sidekick-lx-2009-on-its-way/
It's now been almost a week since the outage started and there are still thousands of LX 2009 owners that have missing email, phonebooks, and notes. T-Mobile sent out an urgent message to users last weekend warning sidekick owners NOT to hardware reset their phones. What many Sidekick owners I know experienced was their phones were reset remotely by either Microsoft/Danger or T-Mobile Friday morning when the outage began. Adding insult to injury, one friend noted that her Sidekick has been hardware reset remotely now no less than 10 times since the outage began. Additionally, while her network service has been restored, the phone is behaving worse than it ever had before the outage.
While I am no expert on how the Sidekick works I can make some observations based on comments my friend and other have made about their experiences last weekend:
1. The LX 2009 appears to silently store phonebook and other user generated information, and preferences in volatile RAM, rather than the Sim card or Flash. This appears to be a default configuration.
2. While both T-Mobile reps and glossy into claims the SideKick stores personal info either on Microsoft/Danger's servers and/or on the user's SIM card, my friend was unable to find any preference settings on the phone relating to this feature.
3. Maybe this is a sign that cloud services are a bad idea for storing mission critical information. For many people their address/phonebook ARE mission critical.
4. Microsoft/Danger and T-Mobile may be due for a massive class action here. The sad thing is that my friend has been very happy with T-Mobile's service for years. From what she tells me the failure of the sidekick LX 2009s in North America rests squarely on Microsoft/Danger's shoulders.
5. Back in May there were strong indications that Microsoft gutted the Sidekick development team shortly after the LX 2009 was shipped... http://www.zimbio.com/Sidekick+3+Ringtones/articles/171/Microsoft+Lays+Off+Danger+Employees
Could it be that Microsoft has backstabbed Sidekick owners to finish killing off the platform? By cutting internal support for critical Danger services it could easily be written off as a terrible mistake. Microsoft would clearly have good reason to take a plausibly deniable swipe at T-Mobile for forcing them to make the last Sidekick.... Other possible causes might include disgruntled ex-employee sabotage of the Danger back-end...
How does a mission critical server, owned by the largest software company in the world get taken out so completely that it takes 5 full days to bring it back up? I could see this being an accident for a small startup with weak IT processes, but at Microsoft? Something doesn't add up.
Back to Sony for a moment:
It seems unlikely that Sony intended to brick PS3's with this update, but on the other hand all of the console makers tend to treat their customers like indentured licensees... so outcomes like this are sure to occur more often until some serious lawyering and lawmaking gets invoked.
My hunch is that these issues are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Rodents do things like defecate and urinate when captured. They also release other chemical scents that seem to be connected to fear and death. I have seen the same thing with rat traps.
My process evolved during a 1 year stint as a grounds keeper for a small motel. Here is the progression:
I used peanut butter to trap a rat using a traditional spring-bale trap. After removing the victim I reset the trap and put it back in the high traffic area. No further rats trapped. Even moving the trap to other areas had no effect.
Washed trap in bleach. Re-baited with peanut butter. No further rats trapped after 2 days. Moving the trap did help a bit. Managed to get one more kill.
Re-baited washed trap with cheddar cheese. Successful trapping that night.
Washed trap and re-baited with beef jerky. Successful trapping that night.
Washed and re-baited with swiss cheese. Successful trapping that night.
Continued with this process using multiple traps until it was apparent that the population was dropping. Tried changing washing chemical, and purchasing fresh traps. I was concerned that the bleach might be acting as an association.
Campaign ended when I couldn't get any hits on any imaginable bait on two week intervals for over 3 months.
Carefully cleaned former high traffic areas and watched for droppings.... No further rat activity seen for over 3 months.
Just so PETA types don't get on my case.. This trapping campaign was carried out within a two story building, not in outdoor areas. No animals other than rats were trapped. (This surprised me! I expected to get mice too.)
Conclusions: Dead rats do tell tales! They communicate with their living peers by "fear and violence and blood" scents left on the trap. The specific food used as bait is avoided by peers who encountered the "murder scene." Due to how mobile rats are during their active periods, I am assuming that all of the rats in a population can be expected to encounter the "murder scene" before the night is over. There were a few exceptions early on as I discovered the process that allowed rats to avoid traps. This leads me to think that a few rats may have missed the memo, and got nailed for being out of the loop.
I'm sure that there is probably someone out there who's going to find a document confirming my observations. Don't bother. I know it works, and it seems obvious to me. At the time I was doing this I had no internet access and had never before been tasked with trapping rats.
Cheers.
It seems to me:
Imagine putting a charged phosphorus plate a short distance away (no idea exactly how far... a millimeter? A few 100 microns?) from the last atom in the carbon chain. If you charge the other end of the chain. From to ~450 volts electrons will scatter off the atom. Apparently that scattering, as an earlier poster pointed out, will have a coherent pattern based on the shell those electrons were thrown off of. The electron pattern expands over the distance, until it hits the phosphor plate.
In this respect it's like taking a picture using a pin-hole camera... In this case the pin-hole is Carbon atom throwing electrons toward the phosphor plate. The phosphor plate glows in response to the electrons. Take a photo of the glowing phosphor plate.... Bet it was a REALLY long exposure.
This is no different than the electron accelerator in a CRT. Except in this case the electron emitter is exactly 1 atom wide.
It seems to me that you might be able image some other configurations at least with elements that will bond onto the end of a carbon chain. If TFA and TFE is for real it's a very interesting.
Lol had the same experience on my MacOS system....
The malware server didn't want to give me the Trojan. Had to shake it loose using wget. Guess it was noticing that I was running MacOS. I also couldn't get the Trojan to run on my "sandboxed" XPP VM... It seems to be checking for something that VMWare doesn't emulate.... The binary also came up totally clean when checked with McAfee. Not really surprised there.
Oh well I don't have a properly instrumented sandbox anyway...
When the insurance company dereferences the VIN from the Plate Number you gave them... they have a pretty good idea of exactly what color your car is. The Manufacturer encodes it in the VIN, along with a lot of other details about the build.
Obviously if you have your car repainted.......
I am not suggesting they even care... but it would not be hard for them to have a pretty good idea.
there's no anti-payola legislation.
IANAL:
FCC rules are just that rules. They are binding on the broadcaster because the broadcaster has accepted a license with the FCC that makes them beholden to those rules. There IS some legislation but that regards the FCC being able to take action on broadcasters that are unlicensed, or equipment that in effect becomes a broadcast source (RF noise from a computer)
Cheers.
Gee I guess you have never been to an Apple Store then.
Quoth CNN's article [cnn.com]:
The magsafe cords detached instantly, offering no resistance and leaving power sockets undamaged.
Finally, the stiff unibody shells meant that the villains could grab the notebooks one-handed from a corner with no flexing, and no risk to the internal circuitry, the tough aluminum bodies resisting the jostling clanks inside the sacks.
And so we see that it is true that Apple really does design for the end-user, with small efficiencies that all add up. Thanks to Apple, the scoundrels managed to load up their booty 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones and nine iPod Touches in just 31 seconds.
The CNN writer is an idiot. The machines stolen were boxed units. Anything on display is cable chained to the desktop/display to prevent snatch and run theft during business hours.
Apple has made an effort to reduce the bulk of their packaging, so this did work in the thieves favor. Still 5 MBPs 3 iPhones, and 2 iPodTouches per thief is quite a haul... The MBP packages are still kinda big to stuff 5 of them into a rucksack...
Look, here's the disclaimer: I am a software engineer. No, not hardware, software.
But I've written camera drivers from schematics and datasheets alone. It's *just not that hard*. Even for a software guy. I don't have an EE, just an interest in electronics.
And digital electronics are, quite frankly, rather simple. If you know ohm's law, and can read a datasheet or two, you could very easily put together a digital camera module. PCB express will happily etch the board for you, and you *might* have to do some soldering. Unless, of course, you buy one of the cameras from sparkfun or other hobby supplier.
Until you have a * CORRECTLY WORKING* system that you designed from scratch from your own PCB design, you should probably not make such statements. You have appear to have no idea what you are talking about.
I just went through this process over the last 4 months to design, build, and code a simple SMD soldering oven. I know considerably more than you appear to about 'Ohm's Law' and a few data sheets. I am not an EE; like you I am a software/firmware guy. I build hardware as a hobbyist. It's not a simple drag and drop editing solution by any stretch of the imagination. It's a major engineering project. Even for a few components. Why? For the same reason a word processor doesn't make a great writer, and Photoshop doesn't make a great photographer. These tools assume a knowledge base that you and I do not have. This knowledge base must be learned to get even marginal success. Making that stretch is much harder than you appear to be implying.
I'll go further: It is much easier for an EE to become a software engineer, than for software engineer to become a hardware engineer. Why? I think it's because the tools used to develop software are considerably more advanced than the tools hardware engineers need to use. Is that used O-Scope really telling you what you think it's telling you? Do you really understand, in your bones what your DVM is telling you when you probe a node? When your carefully crafted (by the data sheets) prototype starts crashing unexpectedly do you know where to start looking for anomalies?
I challenge you to go ahead and make something; ANYTHING with something as seemingly simple as a PIC mpu and a few analog sub-circuits, on a PCB you designed, and get back to me when you have it in your paws, working as designed. It's not as easy as it looks. I am sure you can do it. You just need to make the effort. Your journey will be the reward, and you should document it.... warts and all as I have: http://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.php?t=13239
Cheers
I have been using their services for two years without so much as even a minor glitch. They host my domains and a vLAMP server the domains are pointed at. My service is not unlimited. I get up to 150GB of storage, and 15GB of traffic per month. I've never even come close to either cap, even hosting a few large videos for limited access to friends and family. I use it as my personal playground in The Cloud..... So far it's been much easier to manage than a 'bedroom' server. I do also maintain a local server swinging moderately big iron: it's also configured as a headless Ubuntu LAMP.
YMMV
Ah but Evil spelled backwards is Live.... and we all want to Live don't we?
There is no Santa Clause, NO Tooth Fairy and NO MORE Mr. Mikey!!!!
I write what I write and that is what I mean. I can't be held accountable for what you think I'm implying.
"The meaning of the communication is the result you get."
That makes YOU the WRITER responsible for the impression you give the READER. Get with the fuxing program.
IT is truly arrogant to believe you are such a great communicator that nothing you write might be misunderstood.
You and many other fools assume that your ability to string words together in a coherent manner is flawless. This is not true.... and you need to come to terms with it.
What and sacrifice your plausible deniability?
I don't think you have any clue how to play this game, Noob!
""I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out..."
Oops wrong speech.
Fail.
The odd thing is that this orange goo has been qualified for use in Motorcycle racing body armor. Thats not something I'd expect from a gimmicky respin of Silly Putty.
I suspect they still have some ridged material over the goo to keep it from abrading. Could be just Kevlar layers or some other flexible abrasion resistant material. It seems to me that the IP holder is being very careful not to let the cat out of the bag before they have a lot of licenses tied up. It might be that there is a whole class of related materials they want to develop.
Anyhoo.... neat stuff.
Because most monkeys(even monkeys who should know better) think the hydrogen is what caused the Hindenburg to burn.
OTOH: It's hard to argue that managing huge volumes of Hydrogen is somehow less risky than huge volumes of Helium.
for the purposes of an SAM or an AIM, an unpowered blimp has no signature to lock on to. Now that said.. a modified missile might just track the transmitter signature. But you'd still need to get within 340 miles to fire it. Getting AIM or SAM to work at those ranges is not easy. This blimp is not useful if you don't already have and effective air canopy and ground support.
Yes lets factor in survivability, since you think that it's important. Guess what. Aircraft carriers have zero survivability. You know what keeps them alive? They seem to have an air defense canopy and the rest of the battle group which consists of a lot of ships to reduce the risk from subs. ACCs do not go where they cannot guarantee their air superiority.
With a view of 340+ miles this blimp is going to be able to see just about anything on the ground trying to sneak up, and once again. Such a system is not deployed unless you already have air superiority by other means. AWACS costs a lot more money than a blimp to fly, and puts a lot more human assets at risk for the same job.
Domestic use is not likely to be all that appealing. I think a blimp moored at 10,000 feet is going to raise a lot of noise in the local political process.
Local and state authorities already have a much less expensive solution: They flight light planes with spotters on board along highways and large public areas, looking for anomalous things on the ground. They find a lot of marihuana fields this way in California. No blimp required.
I, for one, welcome our helium-filled overlords!
Oh... and as for resigning (can one say he was really given a chance to do so properly) and giving the passwords to someone who was not supposed to get them, he could quite possibly be held responsible for the resulting damages if it was contrary to procedures. And given that this has all the appearances of being one pissing match of a turf war... I would be very afraid that that would be the case were I in his position, and as such, the case is IMO totally absurd, and perhaps just has some folks wanting to make a name for themselves...
This kind of situation came up for me a couple of years ago. I was sysadmin for a number of mission critical systems. I was laid off. Following procedure I relinquished all passwords for root and sysop access to the machines. A few days later the CEO contacted me and demanded that I provide the password for one particular machine they could not access, or I would be sued. I told her that I no longer remembered ANY password for their systems. I asserted that the password in question was in the file I relinquished, and any further discussion of the issue would be through my attorney... [EOF][HUP]
Oh FFS, we are talking about a net change in arriving solar radiation of less than 0.1% over 11 year cycles, and though its likely there are some larger fluctuations that modulate the 11 year cycle, we haven't been measuring long enough. The notion that this data predicts a 'mini-ice age' is about as useful as using sunspot counts to predict the weather. Which is not useful at all. Sun spot counts don't predict weather at all. Even the proxies don't really link us to what is going on, though they do seem to loosely track solar oscillations. How long is the lag on those proxy relationships? Are they indicative of some other process that is being influenced by solar activity? No one knows. We don't have long enough direct solar activity measurements.
As the dominant dim bulbs around here are fond of echoing: Correlation is not causation.
As for global climate change due to our Industrial Age farting dinosaurs back into the atmosphere, we do need to get a grip on that. I doubt very seriously that some prediction of a long solar minimum is going to change the outcome much, if at all.
Wobot Season!
Duck Season!
Wobot Season!
Duck Season!
WOBOT SEASON!
DUCK SEASON!
Shoot him now!
Oh be quiet he doesn't have to shoot you now!
Oh, er sorry...
This was still largely true until Microsoft came up and changed the game. Though, to be fair I think IBM getting it's ass kicked by the early clone makers kinda set the trend.
The first 'large' piece of commercial code I saw in source was the Apple II+ auto-start ROM. Which was printed in the back of the Apple II Reference Manual. Early IBM PC reference manuals also had source for the BIOS printed in them. This was also true of the Atari xx00 line, the Commodore line, Radio Shack line, most 80's arcade game systems(far less detail on ROMs), Sinclare's line, and a few other less popular platforms.
I seem to recall a lot of interface cards for many systems had source code for their driver ROMs printed in the back of the reference manual along with a complete 'Theory of Operation' section including the register mappings.
While none of these sources were Free(as in beer,) yet they were open source.
It might be thought provoking from a teen perspective to re-examine their relationship to their Toons in WoW... or SL. I for one would appreciate 'the monkey at the keyboard' taking responsibility for the actions of the digital-selves. It is possible that a movie like this might provoke some thought on this.
Go back and look at the original Teaser for The Matrix, and tell me that you thought that it was going to be as thought provoking as it ended up being. To me this is kinda like judging a book by it's cover.