I travelled with a large external hard disk as well, once - which also got taken to one side and swabbed for stuff. Internal monologue: OH NO MY PRECIOUS DATA ... Oh, it's just the possibility of it being a bomb they're worried about.

On another occasion, I had fun with my home-made, Arduino-powered dSLR timelapse gadget - it got thoroughly inspected by the TSA. I'd already opted out of the backscatter X-ray whatsit, only for a swab-for-explosives test to give a (false-)positive. Eek. Cue being taken to one side, where they looked in my bag and found the timelapse-o-tron...

To give the screeners their due, they let me go after a few minutes - after I'd heard their complaints about the potential radiation doses they and the passengers were receiving from the backscatter X-ray thingers, and after I'd provided advice on what sort of camera to look into buying for a budding photographer.

Security fun elsewhere: carrying a plastic bag of loose change through the Eurostar security in Brussels (it basically looked like an amorphous, completely opaque lump on the X-ray) - and a random customs check at a UK airport giving a (false-)positive swab for some sort of illicit drugs. Eek.

Unfortunately, it's a fairly standard business tactic.

Corp X has assets and debts. They sell the assets to Corp Y, which includes products, staff, equipment, etc. Corp X holds the debts. Wen they declare bankruptcy, there's no way to recover the debt, so it's gone.

Corp Y may be operating in the same office, with the same people at the same desks, doing the same jobs. The only real difference is that employee paychecks now say the new name, as does all new marketing materials and letterhead.

So what about the people owed money from Corp X? They get nothing. Or if they're lucky there's something left and they'll get pennies on the dollar.

Sometimes it's done for the right reasons, and they will work out deals with those owed. For examine (if I read the article right), 2600 is owed $100K. That may be broken up to $10K/mo over 10 months, or $1K/mo over 100 months. In the end, they get their money. Unfortunately when they already have high dollar events scheduled, it hurts.

Of course, because of ... Betteridge's law of headlines.

I guess I'm weird. I use text editors.

On the server(s) or dev boxes, I use vim for anything.

When I'm on a Windows desktop, I use UltraEdit. I don't use most of the extra functionality, but the brace matching lines are nice. I could almost do just as well with notepad.

I have to pay more attention to what I'm doing, but I end up writing better code than I see churned out by a lot of people with overly helpful IDEs.

A while back, I was thinking about how to to make an ultra-long range drone. Like something I could send off on a mission, and expect it to come back on it's own later on. One of the ideas, if it were battery powered, was to instruct it to land on or near power lines. That would have been a nightmare to figure out though.

To be stealthy, it would need to fly around 5K to 10K feet. It wouldn't be able to approach ground level, except in uninhabited areas. There's no way you'd get a map of all the high tension power lines in the world, and I don't know of any method of detecting them miles away. Well, other than Hollywood magic methods, which unfortunately don't translate well to the real world. :)

To land on power lines or on the connecting towers, it would have to hover, which is battery expensive. Automatically picking an arbitrary landing spot isn't exactly easy. Once you're parked close to the power lines (like on them, or on the towers) inductive loops could handle farming electricity without human intervention or needing to deploy charging mats.

In the end, I gave up on the idea. I don't really have a reason to make one. If I did, and it worked, I'd have all the lovely three-letter-agencies knocking on my door to have a chat over a nice cup of tea.

Maybe "nice" would be optional in their opinion, and cup of tea would be room temp water in an interrogation room. Either way.

A bus is a lot bigger than a car, with a lot less margin for error. I have a city bus that's converted to be a RV. All that extra space beside a car becomes pretty much non-existent. According to the FHWA, lanes are 9 to 12 feet wide. My bus is 8.5 feet wide, so on a narrow road, that gives me 3 inches on either side on a local road, along the 40 foot length of it.

The last drive I took it for a drive, I cruised down a 6 lane "local" road, with 9' lanes. It was like threading a needle with giant steel elephant, and people get stupid around large vehicles. Sure, it can stop on a dime, as long as that dime is the size of a Buick.

Bus passengers tend to be more annoying too. They tend to argue, just because they can.

The "don't talk to the driver" rule is mostly there so the driver can say "Go away, I'm driving." I've had plenty of bus drivers that like some idle conversation. I'm not asking how to get to some obscure place, or demand that they take the bus off-route to drop them off, so they like talking to me. :)

Passengers scream a lot more about perceived threats too. :) They may see something out of the corner of their eyes (or directly in their line of sight). The person on the other end of a phone call rarely sees your driving hazards.

It sounds like the formula for an urban legend.

Take a little bit of truth. Just enough to be believable. Build up that truth with whatever lies you can tie to it, get enough suckers to believe it, and you'll have the next Snopes entry.

I could build an inductive receiver. Given enough time, it could charge a small battery. Believers will see "enough time" as being minutes or hours. People analyzing it will see it's really centuries. The whole time, I never lied. I just let their misconceptions carry it along.

+1, Interesting.

(Thanks!)

I guess "fully steerable" means "within ~20 of zenith" to you. But that's not what the rest of the world considers "fully steerable".

Oops. That was in reference to his Green Bank Telescope link - Arecibo being only partially steerable...

The Extremely Large Telescope is a compromise - what they really wanted was the 100m-diameter Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

Their naming committees are either entirely humourless or gloriously taking the piss.

The worlds largest single dish telescope is still the Green Bank Telescope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope), which at 100m is ~6x the size.

World's largest fully-steerable single-dish telescope - the Arecibo Observatory is larger still at a diameter of 300m! (Impressive Arecibo exploration video here. The thing's sodding enormous.)

I went looking for the largest diameter multi-dish radio telescope. It looks like the biggest terrestrial 'telescope' is the Global VLBI system created by combining the European VLBI Network with the US Very Long Baseline Array - it's like some massive team of superheroes combining to save the Earth from some terrible secret of space. Or whatever. Apparently they can also add space-based telescopes when that just isn't enough. Which, quite frankly, is showing off...

My thoughts when seeing one of the beautiful, 10m diameter Keck optical telescopes up close a few years ago? I've had full control of a telescope bigger than that.

Radio Astronomers: Compensating For Something.

Questioning and asking are two completely different things, otherwise one wouldn't "ask a question", one would either ask or question.

To question something is to doubt the premises that lead to a given statement. To ask something is to enquire about something. When one has doubts a conclusion (i.e.: questions), one normally asks to ascertain the veracity of the conclusion. This leads to the construct "to ask a question" as in "to resolve a doubt".

Simon