Some large corporation sysadmins will be thrilled that certain Google apps won't work correctly anymore.

My computing environment is heavily managed with group policy and very few user rights, and my company has many many thousands of users worldwide. We cannot even use thumb drives or install any software or hardware. For web connection, we are firmly stuck with IE6 and other outdated web software, mainly because of poorly-programmed corporate web apps with ultra-high security requirements (ironically) that the admins cannot afford to update for fear of the unknowns in new browsers. (For crying out loud, we still have a mandatory installation of Netscape!)

So the admins are always blocking off as many non-work-related sites as possible, and having such sites NOT work correctly will only further discourage users from trying them. For example, we can't use GMail or any other popular webmail sites. And I'm honestly surprised they haven't blocked Google Docs or Google Calendar yet, as they could "leak" data to the outside world.

I'd be that most large corporations are also in a similar fight against their users' desires for newer browsers and freer internet access. So I doubt that this move will really encourage many companies to ditch IE6 faster, and may in fact have the opposite effect in some cases.

I have read that one primary reason that the shipping companies don't allow weapons on board is that they fear they'll be used against their own ships. A non-trivial percentage of merchant crew members are bottom-of-the-barrel sailors, who might not be as trustworthy as desired. Give them easy access to weapons, and they might decide to do a little hijacking of their own - from within. Millions of dollars of ransom is a pretty powerful temptation.

With that said, I'm all for arming them anyway - just give the captain indisputable control over access to the weapons, to remove the temptation.

I'm an aerospace engineer - I work on planes, but the concepts are familiar and common.

The upper stage DID tumble immediately. The other three aerospace engineers and test pilots watching with me also immediately said "That didn't look right."

The high-zoom ground tracking camera and onboard cameras showed it much better during the replays, where it's clear the separation wasn't as clean as it should have been. But it did not look like the stages hit each other.

It appeared that not all eight of the retro-rockets fired. They were designed to slow the first stage enough to separate the two stages, before the "tumble rockets" fired. From the footage, the retro-rocket flame is visibly asymmetrical. It appeared that only a few of the retro-rockets fired on one side of the aft skirt fairing. As a result, I suspect that the initial separation was not purely fore-aft, but included a healthy rotational component which nudged the second "dummy" stage in a similar slow tumble.

Some comments on this board say "no worries"; the second stage was just an unpowered dummy mass, and the tumble would have been stopped by the final design's engine. Not completely true. They need a clean, non-rotational separation before the second stage engine fires and can fully stabilize the flight path. So the tumble will DEFINITELY concern the engineers.

Finally, don't worry too much about the onboard cameras cutting in and out. Speaking from personal experience in the flight test industry, telemetry is no trivial matter, and downlinking gigabits/sec of data and video is no small feat. Minor mis-alignments in antenna angle can cause momentary signal dropout. Strong jolts (stage burnout, etc.) can also jostle wiring and cause interruptions.

Despite this tumble, the flight appeared to be overall a great success. As the launch director noted to his crew shortly after the flight, the only real delays on the first launch of a very complicated test vehicle were weather-induced (plus the small matter of a fabric probe cover sock that snagged on something yesterday). All in all, I'm quite impressed.

This "arms race" in DNA technology reminds me of the parable of the king and the inventor.

An inventor goes to the king and proudly shows him a suit of armor which he says is impenetrable. After a convincing demonstration by his archers and swordsmen, the king quickly agrees to buy it for 100 gold coins. The inventor thanks the king, then tells him he has also developed a secret weapon which will penetrate the armor, and the king can buy it for 200 coins. Naturally the king agrees after a suitable demonstration. Then the inventor says he has another armor coat which can deflect the super weapon... after a couple more rounds of this, the king simply has the inventor killed and his inventions burned, realizing that the inventor could easily sell the same technology to his enemies, and the status quo is worth more to him than an arms race or a temporary gain in his military superiority.

Yeah, "another hard drive" is a good system. My policy is to never rebuild a flaky hard drive. If Windows goes wonky, which seems to happen every so often (with four XP machines at home, I seem to need to do some form of system repair every year at least), I just buy a new hard drive and either restore to it or start from scratch.

Then, the older hard drive gets shelved. That way, I have at least a snapshot in time, even if it's a few years old, and even if Windows won't boot I do have the critical files accessible. It's easy to access them by sticking the drive in a USB external shell.

But my DAILY backup routine is Norton Ghost doing weekly baselines and nightly incrementals, to external USB drives. This saved me many hours of rebuilding my wife's machine this week, when XP encountered the dreaded MUP.SYS freeze on bootup. I simply bought a new (larger) hard drive, shelved the dead one, and restored from Norton Ghost's backup. Aside from a few hours of MUP.SYS troubleshooting (to determine it WAS a dead drive and not some wonky peripheral), total restore time to a "just like she left it" system was a few hours, mostly waiting for the 100+ Gb to transfer from the USB external.

Finally, every so often I dupe my backup externals to a second external. These "safety" backups get stored in a second building on my property, so I have fire insurance.

I signed up with Postini just as it was acquired by Google. Before that I'd used SpamSoap, which worked great but was declining in effectiveness (more false negs) but not in price ($30 per month is a lot for a small business). Postini and then Google were far more reasonable at just $3 per year per address (for the less-flexible controls). I get maybe one or two delivered spam per week, usually when I also see a corresponding spike in filtered spam which indicates a new attack of some kind. I get only one or two false positives a month.

The biggest thing I have noticed lately is that the spammers have started collating domain name "from" lines. I now routinely get a lot of spam (in the quarantine) listed as coming from the other valid e-dresses in that domain. This is new as of a month or so ago.

The real problem with Google/Postini is that, as others note in this discussion, they don't answer tech support AT ALL. You either take what they offer, or you don't. The control panel (for the $3/month option) is rather limited, and you have no blacklist features. There seems to be no way to tweak things, ask for assistance with filtering issues, etc. You just get what they offer.

For me, for a savings of $27 per address per year, that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

And by the way, I provide filtering for my family for free... it costs a few dollars extra per year, but I figure it's money well spent since Mom and Dad and the less geeky in my family don't get infected and I do less tech support than before.

It ain't cheap, and I doubt you could even buy one if you had the cash, but for state of the art, do a little research into the HMD for the JSF (helmet mounted display for the Joint Strike Fighter / F-35). From the Rockwell Collins website:
"Vision Systems International (VSI), a joint venture between Rockwell Collins and Elbit Systems Ltd. of Israel, is developing the Helmet Mounted Display (HMD) for the JSF. VSI's HMD offers a compact, versatile, lightweight and extremely rugged display with low power consumption. The JSF HMD is a binocular off-the-visor display providing the pilot with a large field-of-view video/calligraphic image to both eyes."

http://www.vsi-hmcs.com/f35.htm

From what I've read, it's simply amazing. The pilot will be able to look in ANY direction (including straight thru his body or the bottom or rear of the cockpit) to see augmented reality - with data fused from multiple sensors including infrared and radar, overlaid on the real world.

http://uscockpits.com/Jet%20Fighters/F-35_Cockpit_(dusk_with_virtual_HMD).jpg

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f-35-hmds-pulls-the-gs-04088/

By the way, "calligraphic" is worth noting. A normal video image simply cannot create very bright and precise light points, because it's a raster image. But a calligraphic display effectively overcomes this limitation, by using a separate CRT gun to hit the same phosphors with much more power in a non-raster format. So the display is a combined raster and beam system, providing some ability to provide very precise details at much higher brightness, while also allowing normal full-color display.

>some of us don't have perfectly aligned eyes and the "3D" effect
>isn't cool to people like me it gives me a raging headache for hours

This gave me an idea (maybe I should patent it)... how about "2D glasses" for the 3D movies? Offer patrons a choice, either watch it in 2D, or in 3D.

How?

Really simple. Simply make SOME of the glasses with both eyes having identically-polarized lenses. That way, both eyes see the same image, and you just get one of the two simultaneously-shown frames.

So for anyone who hates having stuff pop out of the screen, or gets headaches from the frequent depth transitions, they can still enjoy the movie along with everyone else.

Visit http://www.spaceweather.com/ for a real time holographic view of the far side of the sun. They've been able to detect far-side sunspots for several years now. Full details and images are available, as well as a primer about the process; look on the left sidebar beneath the front-side daily photograph.

I had a similar issue a couple years back setting up an ad for my software product, which is trademarked as "Worship LIVE!" (with the exclamation point). Google initially rejected the ad campaign because the exclamation is prohibited. I politely emailed them back, asking for special dispensation because it IS a trademark, and I don't want it to be confused with more generic but similar phrases. Within a few days they wrote back and approved the ad.

So I'd recommend that you simply be polite and concise in your request for reconsideration. Who knows, you may get what you want.

Note that torrent may be a trademarked term, but there are many terms that are also common in other usage, and as such should not be automatically denied unless the USE of the trademark confuses the viewer. In this case, I'm assuming that the product is NOT for some filesharing software, and as such, will not confuse the reasonable individual, and should be easily approved.