What exactly is so humiliating about being seen sunbathing in public? If you are lounging around in your swimsuit in the middle of an open field where anyone and their brother can walk past and see you, then do you really think you are probably worried that anyone can see you? For that matter, as I understand the law (IANAL and all that), in most cases, if you are sunbathing in public, it is perfectly legal for me to snap a picture of you and post it on my web site, even if I have a worldwide distribution of 2000000000 people (I wish...). How is it any different if Google happens to catch you? I just don't get it. The controversy over snapping a picture through the window is a little different (although I still don't have a lot of sympathy for you if you leave your windows open while getting dressed, etc.), but the Google girls...yeah, that's a non-issue.
There are a few really simple tools that I've written and posted on-line under the GPL. In my case, I wrote a program (well, a few scripts, actually) to solve a problem that I found interesting. I'm busy enough as it is, so I don't particularly want to take the time that it would take to market and sell the code myself, but I would like to see it used by others who can benefit from it. Furthermore, I use a lot of open source software myself, so in my mind at least, I see that I owe something back to the Open Source community.
If a company were to use my scripts in a commercial project, then I would be glad because first, my software is doing something useful, second, I get bragging rights for the original project, and third, hopefully they can take the original code and make it better. Who knows; if something like this were to happen, then having contributed to a commercial project may help me land a job somewhere, some day.
Agreed, for the most part. The only difference is that, in IT, there are usually a much greater number of jobs -- and a far greater number of jobs that pay *reasonably* well -- for a given pool of applicants. Celebrities, be it in music, Hollywood, athletics or anything else, are a very, very exclusive club. Anyone who is reasonably competent can get a decent IT job. It might not be Google or IBM, but you can make enough to live pretty comfortably. On the other hand, for every Mick Jagger, Britney Spears or Trent Reznor, there are literally thousands of wannabes waiting tables and playing tiny clubs for pocket change. Some of them will get their lucky break, but most never do.
You are either heavily biased (for obvious reasons)
Entirely possible, except that I've also been present when other musicians played off the cuff, and dude, it rocked.
or have horrible taste in music
Entirely possible -- you certainly aren't the first person to suggest this.
I like the energy that good bands have when playing live. To suggest that a group of talented musicians cannot create something phenomenal on the spot is, in my opinion, elitist. Do you think people like B.B. King, Clapton, Miles Davis, or David Sanborn play the same songs the same way every single time? At the core, rock and jazz are improvisational art forms. The best rock and jazz musicians make a lot of it up as they go. If you prefer music that is set in stone, then there's a place for that (classical). You take a great risk when you try to make it up as you go, and yeah, you can fail spectacularly when doing so (been there, done that...). But when it works, it really works and nothing else comes close.
Uh, because it pisses off their customers when they discover that, despite paying the yearly extortio--excuse me, subscription--fee, their computers still aren't protected?
Treat me honestly, fairly and openly, and I'm a customer for life. But if you sell me a "security suite" then nickel and dime me for all of the add-ons to provide the protection I thought I was getting in the first place, then I'll go elsewhere.
I used to use McAfee on my wife's Windows desktop (I use Linux, thank you very much) until I noticed two things happening: 1) the size of the product, and the resources it needed to run, kept growing, and 2) the protection it offered kept shrinking. Despite running the full malware protection on her computer, she *still* kept getting infected, and it was all I could do to keep her machine running. I've since switched to http://www.eset.com/Nod32 and have been, for the most part, pretty happy with it. It's fairly lightweight, works pretty well and has some cool features that reasonably competent system administrators will like (e-mail notifications, for example), although it doesn't tolerate unstable Internet connections during updates, unfortunately.
and often may be making up music and/or lyrics on the spot.
What's wrong with that? I've gotten together with other musicians just to jam, and we've come up with some really good stuff like that. When you get into a groove with other musicians, it's magical, and if you can capture it on tape (or whatever), then why not release it? There's a mood, an energy, to live music that you often just can't recreate in the studio (think "Cocaine" by Eric Clapton for a good example).
There's this dude I know named Dennis who is a very talented, very passionate musician. I've watched him play several times, and he never does a song the same way twice because he understands that making music is a creative process. Therefore, he follows the music; he doesn't script it. The result is that his music is honest and soulful. I'm trying very hard to learn to make music like he does, and just let it out rather than trying to direct and control it.
That, in my mind, is the mark of a real musician. Making it up on the spot isn't the sign of a clueless amateur; it's the pinnacle of musicianship.
Have you tried it? My wife's drum instructor spent years playing clubs like mad trying to catch his big break. Eventually, he dropped out and got a day job in IT. He's easily one of the best drummers I've ever heard. My cousins are in Nashville trying to get their big break, but after a couple of years there, they have realized that for every band that gets signed, there are hundreds more of equally -- if not more -- talented bands that never end up in the right place at the right time. My brother and some of my best friends are currently playing every gig they can line up trying to promote their band. All of them are incredibly talented (in fact, I played a gig with one of them and his wife this weekend, and it went incredibly well).
IMHO, success in the music biz is more about luck and timing than talent. There are plenty of mediocre musicians who "knew somebody" and got lucky and plenty of very, very talented artists who are still unknown. Your music may speak for itself, but unless you can get it out there where the right person hears it, you'll never be "discovered", no matter how good you are.
There are...lots of them, in fact. For example, I write, record and release music on http://www.soundclick.com/. Most of the stuff I put there is still scratch pad versions, since I've been a bit too busy to record polished versions lately. I'm also trying to build an Internet radio web site to stream the music of indy musicians, but again, I haven't had time to get it working yet. I'm sure there are others who are doing the same thing.
No, I don't think so. I've got a Dell d820 with a 15 in. screen, and I use it on the airlines all the time, and yes, even in coach. It's maybe a little large, but not so much so that I would sacrifice that beautiful screen or better performance to get an Eee PC.
Factories that mass-produce goods will probably be able to make things cheaper, but not necessarily better than you can.
A factory is motivated by one thing: profit. A business -- any business -- will try to find the balancing point where the product is good enough to be accepted by consumers but cheap enough to to maximize profit. If you make the product cheaper, consumers get fed up with the shoddy quality and buy a competitor's product instead. If you make the product better, costs (usually) go up, and again consumers buy a competitor's product.
On the other hand, someone looking to fabricate an item for their own personal consumption can take as long as they want to get the product exactly the way they want it, since they are not seeking to maximize profit.
Case in point: I own a bass guitar that was built by a guy at my church. The bass is a work of art; the inlays and detail work are incredible, it's got a neck-through-body design for better sustain, it has absolutely stunning highly-figured woods for the body, and it plays like a dream. Tonal quality is simply amazing. For him, building basses is a hobby, a way to unwind after work and on the weekends. He doesn't care if he makes a profit on his guitars. While I also own some really nice Fender guitars, they aren't nearly as nice as my custom bass, because -- other than the Custom Shop guitars, which are designed to fill a really small niche -- Fender is in the market to make guitars that are good enough, but not so good as to be priced out of reach of amateur musicians like myself.
If you look around, you will see this played out in any market you want to research. Do you own a Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, etc., or a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Hummer, etc.? Is Windows (or even OS-X, for that matter) a high-end product, or is it good enough, most of the time? Do you wear a Timex/Casio/Armitron watch or a Rolex?
So yeah, a factory will probably make it cheaper, but better? Not necessarily. If you are a passionate amateur craftsman, you can probably make a better product if you are willing to spend the time to get it exactly right.
I really don't get why labelling things as "online" makes them new and edgy.
Exactly. TFA says that teachers are not generally considered to be "public persons" therefore libel cannot be used to prosecute the pranksters. However, aren't laws like slander, defamation of character and the various hate crime laws already sufficient to prosecute the kids that are truly stepping over the line? If they are, then what difference does it make if it is done on-line or off? If not, then perhaps what the kids are doing isn't truly evil enough to prosecute, no? I don't get why the fact that it's being done on-line makes any difference at all.
When my youngest brother learned Visual Basic, he wrote a small program to display an alert window with the following message:
"Hard drive error detected...reformat C:\?"
The only response option it gave was "OK". Then he put the program in the autoexec.bat file on my dad's computer. It only took my dad about two or three seconds to figure out that it was only a prank, but for those two or three seconds, he was white as a ghost. It was priceless to watch.
If my plants need to twitter me to ask for water, I've got bigger problems...like "what happened to all the water in the aquarium?" and "are my fish only good for fertilizer now?" (pair of amazon swords and a half dozen tetras sitting on my desk).
There's a really good restaurant in the city where I live that is run by a Korean family. The food was pretty good, so I ate there a lot, and got to know the people working there. One day they had a big family get-together at the restaurant, complete with several varieties of kimchi. One of the people working there saw me, and brought a plate full of the different kinds of kimchi to me. I had eaten their kimchi before and liked it, so I eagerly tried the other types, too. Most were really good, but one in particular was just nasty. If he got hold of one of the more...ummm...exotic types of kimchi, I can understand exactly how he could have only tried it once and thought it was revolting.
On the flip side, I've eaten a lot of poorly prepared Western foods that were pretty revolting too, even though the exact same food when prepared well is absolutely delicious. Not everyone is equally gifted in the kitchen, unfortunately.
At what point in the war? In the beginning of WWII, Russia was an axis power. It wasn't until later, when the USSR became afraid of Hitlers march north towards them that they decided maybe they'd be better off with the allies. At that point, they became, as you said, "a big part of it" but even then, they had U.S. aid.
I've made three trips in small airplanes from the northwestern U.S. to Alaska. British Columbia, the Yukon Territory and Alaska are all dotted with really nice 5000+ foot long runways. Do you know why? Because after the USSR joined the allied powers, the U.S. built these airstrips and began shuttling fighter and bomber planes and pilots to the Russians to help them fight the Germans. I'm not saying the Russians couldn't have kicked Hitlers backside without these reinforcements, but they sure didn't decline the help.
I've got to disagree with you there. The dude's got cojones so large, I'm amazed he can still walk.
Look at it this way. His attorney general when he first announced the program has left the post in disgrace. Congress refused to pass an act providing retroactive immunity to the telcos who first participated in program. The ACLU and EFF have filed lawsuits because of the wiretapping program. People across the county have spoken out against the program. And still he announces that the warrantless wiretapping has resumed. Sounds pretty brazen to me.
On the one hand, I want to believe that he is doing it with the best of intentions but is just to stupid to realize the long-term implications of such a thing. On the other hand, I am very, very afraid that he knows exactly what he is doing. In either case, this program is a (tm) Bad Thing and needs to end, permanently.
I've got to say that I am blown away by this. Look at it in these terms: where I work, we are really proud of the fact that we've got a router that has an uptime of something like 2 1/2 years. It's in a data center in a very remote village in Alaska -- the only way in is via airplane. However, it is reachable, it's in a more or less climate-controlled environment and it has (relatively) stable power.
By contrast, Ulysses is traveling in one of the most hostile environments we can imagine. Everything in the shade is approaching -400F (IIRC) while everything on the side facing the sun is getting blasted with the full fury of solar radiation. There's no way to reach it for maintenance. It's technology is 17 years old now. It has no protection other than its own skin from any micro-meteors it encounters. And it has been running continuously since it was launched. You've gotta admit that's an impressive feat. Yeah, I'd say the NASA engineers responsible for Ulysses are 1) definitely geniuses, and 2) very deserving of congratulations.
According to the summary above, the Rupp bill says..."...with increased penalties if committed by an adult over 21 against a minor under 17."
Okay,/.'ers -- how old am I? If you say something mean to me on/. that "causes severe emotional distress" to me, do you know if you are flaming someone under 17? For the record, I'm not, but determining that is not always an easy task.
Furthermore, people respond very differently to comments other people make. Something that might make me roll my eyes in irritation might be enough to send someone else over the edge. For example, I once worked as an abuse administrator at an ISP. One night, we received a call from a parent who was threatening everything short of bodily harm against everybody they could think of because their teenage daughter had flipped out while reading her e-mail. Apparently, she had opened a porn e-mail without realizing what the message contained. That might make some of us annoyed, or even somewhat angry, but in this case it made the girl borderline suicidal. As a young child, this girl had been raped and the e-mail had essentially triggered a flashback.
Point being that it's essentially impossible to know for certain what stimuli might trigger any given person, particularly when conversing with strangers without the benefit of the feedback we get from body language. The tone of an e-mail or post can be mistaken. Cultural differences can cause someone to take offense at what was intended to be innocent. We can do our best not to offend others, but in an electronic world that does not know national borders, there's no way to be certain that we aren't going to seriously upset our on-line neighbors.
Hmmm...you might have a point there if the tank is insulated on the inside (or made from two layers of titanium with a layer of insulation between). If the insulation is on the outside, however, I doubt it would survive reentry. Since I've never built a hydrazine tank for a satellite, I don't know which case is correct, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't mean we can't do better, though. Just sayin'.
What exactly is so humiliating about being seen sunbathing in public? If you are lounging around in your swimsuit in the middle of an open field where anyone and their brother can walk past and see you, then do you really think you are probably worried that anyone can see you? For that matter, as I understand the law (IANAL and all that), in most cases, if you are sunbathing in public, it is perfectly legal for me to snap a picture of you and post it on my web site, even if I have a worldwide distribution of 2000000000 people (I wish...). How is it any different if Google happens to catch you? I just don't get it. The controversy over snapping a picture through the window is a little different (although I still don't have a lot of sympathy for you if you leave your windows open while getting dressed, etc.), but the Google girls...yeah, that's a non-issue.
There are a few really simple tools that I've written and posted on-line under the GPL. In my case, I wrote a program (well, a few scripts, actually) to solve a problem that I found interesting. I'm busy enough as it is, so I don't particularly want to take the time that it would take to market and sell the code myself, but I would like to see it used by others who can benefit from it. Furthermore, I use a lot of open source software myself, so in my mind at least, I see that I owe something back to the Open Source community.
If a company were to use my scripts in a commercial project, then I would be glad because first, my software is doing something useful, second, I get bragging rights for the original project, and third, hopefully they can take the original code and make it better. Who knows; if something like this were to happen, then having contributed to a commercial project may help me land a job somewhere, some day.
Agreed, for the most part. The only difference is that, in IT, there are usually a much greater number of jobs -- and a far greater number of jobs that pay *reasonably* well -- for a given pool of applicants. Celebrities, be it in music, Hollywood, athletics or anything else, are a very, very exclusive club. Anyone who is reasonably competent can get a decent IT job. It might not be Google or IBM, but you can make enough to live pretty comfortably. On the other hand, for every Mick Jagger, Britney Spears or Trent Reznor, there are literally thousands of wannabes waiting tables and playing tiny clubs for pocket change. Some of them will get their lucky break, but most never do.
Entirely possible, except that I've also been present when other musicians played off the cuff, and dude, it rocked.
or have horrible taste in music
Entirely possible -- you certainly aren't the first person to suggest this.
I like the energy that good bands have when playing live. To suggest that a group of talented musicians cannot create something phenomenal on the spot is, in my opinion, elitist. Do you think people like B.B. King, Clapton, Miles Davis, or David Sanborn play the same songs the same way every single time? At the core, rock and jazz are improvisational art forms. The best rock and jazz musicians make a lot of it up as they go. If you prefer music that is set in stone, then there's a place for that (classical). You take a great risk when you try to make it up as you go, and yeah, you can fail spectacularly when doing so (been there, done that...). But when it works, it really works and nothing else comes close.
Uh, because it pisses off their customers when they discover that, despite paying the yearly extortio--excuse me, subscription--fee, their computers still aren't protected?
Treat me honestly, fairly and openly, and I'm a customer for life. But if you sell me a "security suite" then nickel and dime me for all of the add-ons to provide the protection I thought I was getting in the first place, then I'll go elsewhere.
I used to use McAfee on my wife's Windows desktop (I use Linux, thank you very much) until I noticed two things happening: 1) the size of the product, and the resources it needed to run, kept growing, and 2) the protection it offered kept shrinking. Despite running the full malware protection on her computer, she *still* kept getting infected, and it was all I could do to keep her machine running. I've since switched to http://www.eset.com/Nod32 and have been, for the most part, pretty happy with it. It's fairly lightweight, works pretty well and has some cool features that reasonably competent system administrators will like (e-mail notifications, for example), although it doesn't tolerate unstable Internet connections during updates, unfortunately.
What's wrong with that? I've gotten together with other musicians just to jam, and we've come up with some really good stuff like that. When you get into a groove with other musicians, it's magical, and if you can capture it on tape (or whatever), then why not release it? There's a mood, an energy, to live music that you often just can't recreate in the studio (think "Cocaine" by Eric Clapton for a good example).
There's this dude I know named Dennis who is a very talented, very passionate musician. I've watched him play several times, and he never does a song the same way twice because he understands that making music is a creative process. Therefore, he follows the music; he doesn't script it. The result is that his music is honest and soulful. I'm trying very hard to learn to make music like he does, and just let it out rather than trying to direct and control it.
That, in my mind, is the mark of a real musician. Making it up on the spot isn't the sign of a clueless amateur; it's the pinnacle of musicianship.
Have you tried it? My wife's drum instructor spent years playing clubs like mad trying to catch his big break. Eventually, he dropped out and got a day job in IT. He's easily one of the best drummers I've ever heard. My cousins are in Nashville trying to get their big break, but after a couple of years there, they have realized that for every band that gets signed, there are hundreds more of equally -- if not more -- talented bands that never end up in the right place at the right time. My brother and some of my best friends are currently playing every gig they can line up trying to promote their band. All of them are incredibly talented (in fact, I played a gig with one of them and his wife this weekend, and it went incredibly well).
IMHO, success in the music biz is more about luck and timing than talent. There are plenty of mediocre musicians who "knew somebody" and got lucky and plenty of very, very talented artists who are still unknown. Your music may speak for itself, but unless you can get it out there where the right person hears it, you'll never be "discovered", no matter how good you are.
There are...lots of them, in fact. For example, I write, record and release music on http://www.soundclick.com/. Most of the stuff I put there is still scratch pad versions, since I've been a bit too busy to record polished versions lately. I'm also trying to build an Internet radio web site to stream the music of indy musicians, but again, I haven't had time to get it working yet. I'm sure there are others who are doing the same thing.
$ cat /proc/meminfo
:)
MemTotal: 2072216 kB
...
I love my Dell
No, I don't think so. I've got a Dell d820 with a 15 in. screen, and I use it on the airlines all the time, and yes, even in coach. It's maybe a little large, but not so much so that I would sacrifice that beautiful screen or better performance to get an Eee PC.
I hope there IS global warming. This winter was frikken cold!
Factories that mass-produce goods will probably be able to make things cheaper, but not necessarily better than you can.
A factory is motivated by one thing: profit. A business -- any business -- will try to find the balancing point where the product is good enough to be accepted by consumers but cheap enough to to maximize profit. If you make the product cheaper, consumers get fed up with the shoddy quality and buy a competitor's product instead. If you make the product better, costs (usually) go up, and again consumers buy a competitor's product.
On the other hand, someone looking to fabricate an item for their own personal consumption can take as long as they want to get the product exactly the way they want it, since they are not seeking to maximize profit.
Case in point: I own a bass guitar that was built by a guy at my church. The bass is a work of art; the inlays and detail work are incredible, it's got a neck-through-body design for better sustain, it has absolutely stunning highly-figured woods for the body, and it plays like a dream. Tonal quality is simply amazing. For him, building basses is a hobby, a way to unwind after work and on the weekends. He doesn't care if he makes a profit on his guitars. While I also own some really nice Fender guitars, they aren't nearly as nice as my custom bass, because -- other than the Custom Shop guitars, which are designed to fill a really small niche -- Fender is in the market to make guitars that are good enough, but not so good as to be priced out of reach of amateur musicians like myself.
If you look around, you will see this played out in any market you want to research. Do you own a Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, etc., or a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Hummer, etc.? Is Windows (or even OS-X, for that matter) a high-end product, or is it good enough, most of the time? Do you wear a Timex/Casio/Armitron watch or a Rolex?
So yeah, a factory will probably make it cheaper, but better? Not necessarily. If you are a passionate amateur craftsman, you can probably make a better product if you are willing to spend the time to get it exactly right.
You are afraid for a very good reason: "Glass, china, and reputation are easily cracked and never well mended."
There. Fixed it for you
Exactly. TFA says that teachers are not generally considered to be "public persons" therefore libel cannot be used to prosecute the pranksters. However, aren't laws like slander, defamation of character and the various hate crime laws already sufficient to prosecute the kids that are truly stepping over the line? If they are, then what difference does it make if it is done on-line or off? If not, then perhaps what the kids are doing isn't truly evil enough to prosecute, no? I don't get why the fact that it's being done on-line makes any difference at all.
When my youngest brother learned Visual Basic, he wrote a small program to display an alert window with the following message:
"Hard drive error detected...reformat C:\?"
The only response option it gave was "OK". Then he put the program in the autoexec.bat file on my dad's computer. It only took my dad about two or three seconds to figure out that it was only a prank, but for those two or three seconds, he was white as a ghost. It was priceless to watch.
If my plants need to twitter me to ask for water, I've got bigger problems...like "what happened to all the water in the aquarium?" and "are my fish only good for fertilizer now?" (pair of amazon swords and a half dozen tetras sitting on my desk).
There's a really good restaurant in the city where I live that is run by a Korean family. The food was pretty good, so I ate there a lot, and got to know the people working there. One day they had a big family get-together at the restaurant, complete with several varieties of kimchi. One of the people working there saw me, and brought a plate full of the different kinds of kimchi to me. I had eaten their kimchi before and liked it, so I eagerly tried the other types, too. Most were really good, but one in particular was just nasty. If he got hold of one of the more...ummm...exotic types of kimchi, I can understand exactly how he could have only tried it once and thought it was revolting.
On the flip side, I've eaten a lot of poorly prepared Western foods that were pretty revolting too, even though the exact same food when prepared well is absolutely delicious. Not everyone is equally gifted in the kitchen, unfortunately.
Ummm...Guy "Fawkes", perhaps?
At what point in the war? In the beginning of WWII, Russia was an axis power. It wasn't until later, when the USSR became afraid of Hitlers march north towards them that they decided maybe they'd be better off with the allies. At that point, they became, as you said, "a big part of it" but even then, they had U.S. aid.
I've made three trips in small airplanes from the northwestern U.S. to Alaska. British Columbia, the Yukon Territory and Alaska are all dotted with really nice 5000+ foot long runways. Do you know why? Because after the USSR joined the allied powers, the U.S. built these airstrips and began shuttling fighter and bomber planes and pilots to the Russians to help them fight the Germans. I'm not saying the Russians couldn't have kicked Hitlers backside without these reinforcements, but they sure didn't decline the help.
I've got to disagree with you there. The dude's got cojones so large, I'm amazed he can still walk.
Look at it this way. His attorney general when he first announced the program has left the post in disgrace. Congress refused to pass an act providing retroactive immunity to the telcos who first participated in program. The ACLU and EFF have filed lawsuits because of the wiretapping program. People across the county have spoken out against the program. And still he announces that the warrantless wiretapping has resumed. Sounds pretty brazen to me.
On the one hand, I want to believe that he is doing it with the best of intentions but is just to stupid to realize the long-term implications of such a thing. On the other hand, I am very, very afraid that he knows exactly what he is doing. In either case, this program is a (tm) Bad Thing and needs to end, permanently.
I've got to say that I am blown away by this. Look at it in these terms: where I work, we are really proud of the fact that we've got a router that has an uptime of something like 2 1/2 years. It's in a data center in a very remote village in Alaska -- the only way in is via airplane. However, it is reachable, it's in a more or less climate-controlled environment and it has (relatively) stable power.
By contrast, Ulysses is traveling in one of the most hostile environments we can imagine. Everything in the shade is approaching -400F (IIRC) while everything on the side facing the sun is getting blasted with the full fury of solar radiation. There's no way to reach it for maintenance. It's technology is 17 years old now. It has no protection other than its own skin from any micro-meteors it encounters. And it has been running continuously since it was launched. You've gotta admit that's an impressive feat. Yeah, I'd say the NASA engineers responsible for Ulysses are 1) definitely geniuses, and 2) very deserving of congratulations.
According to the summary above, the Rupp bill says..."...with increased penalties if committed by an adult over 21 against a minor under 17."
/.'ers -- how old am I? If you say something mean to me on /. that "causes severe emotional distress" to me, do you know if you are flaming someone under 17? For the record, I'm not, but determining that is not always an easy task.
Okay,
Furthermore, people respond very differently to comments other people make. Something that might make me roll my eyes in irritation might be enough to send someone else over the edge. For example, I once worked as an abuse administrator at an ISP. One night, we received a call from a parent who was threatening everything short of bodily harm against everybody they could think of because their teenage daughter had flipped out while reading her e-mail. Apparently, she had opened a porn e-mail without realizing what the message contained. That might make some of us annoyed, or even somewhat angry, but in this case it made the girl borderline suicidal. As a young child, this girl had been raped and the e-mail had essentially triggered a flashback.
Point being that it's essentially impossible to know for certain what stimuli might trigger any given person, particularly when conversing with strangers without the benefit of the feedback we get from body language. The tone of an e-mail or post can be mistaken. Cultural differences can cause someone to take offense at what was intended to be innocent. We can do our best not to offend others, but in an electronic world that does not know national borders, there's no way to be certain that we aren't going to seriously upset our on-line neighbors.
Hmmm...you might have a point there if the tank is insulated on the inside (or made from two layers of titanium with a layer of insulation between). If the insulation is on the outside, however, I doubt it would survive reentry. Since I've never built a hydrazine tank for a satellite, I don't know which case is correct, unfortunately.