Counter-nits:

US Airways Flight 1549 is recorded as an Airbus A320-214. The crusing speed of an A320 is Mach 0.78. Mach 0.78 is 593.7415 miles per hour, which is closer to 600 than 500, I believe. In holding with being a complete bastard, 91% of Mach 1 is 692.698416 miles per hour, fully 98.95 miles per hour more than your claim. (The speed of sound being 761.207051 miles per hour, for reference.)

You are correct about the rate-of-climb at the time of incident, though - it was grossly less than the cruse speed.

Also, nits - not nicks - are often picked, unless you're creating a new account.

Agreed to the point of the destruction of the recovered disk. If the disk was still any good, it probably wouldn't have needed SpinRite in the first place. Trash it - GBs are cheap these days.

Psh. Your puny mesh screen isn't going to stop the bird; it just means his death-by-CF6 sentence is commuted, only instead to being put through a fine mesh screen.

Yes, but then you include metal rounds as a class of objects that likely will be SUCKED INTO THE ENGINE. If my options for aspirating something are a bird versus a bullet, I think the plane would fair better ingesting a bird. Not to mention the hazard of turning one falling (suckable) objects into many falling (suckable) objects.

Generally, yes, the flocks are difficult to pick up on radar, due to the small cross-section, and generally squishy nature of birds. The speed of an aircraft is also an issue - moving at 600mph (~880 feet per second) - means the flock (given radar / VFR issues) will probably already be upon you even before you have a chance to react. Even if you did have time to react, an Airbus A320 doesn't exactly (safely) turn on a dime.

This is so true that it's sad.

And, of course, the apps were originally outsourced to India, developed by GroupX. Now, GroupY will be brought in to re-tool them, and management asks 'But it already works. Why do we need to update it?'

The business doesn't see it as a value - it's not broken, to them, and therefore doesn't need to be fixed (or have a dime spent on it).

SpinRite works to identify bad sectors on a track on magnetic media. Once it locates a bad sector, it attempts to re-read (repeatedly) the bitmap from that sector. If successful, it will re-write that bitmap to an unused sector, mark the original sector as bad, and provide a pointer in the index of the drive to the newly created sector.

For me, SpinRite has successfully corrected fubared Windows installations (STOP error at boot, unreadable boot volume, registry .xxx missing at boot time, etc), repairing a disk with a FileVaulted sparseimage (allowing it to mount), repairing a disk that was TrueCrypted (allowing it to mount), as well as repairing a drive enough to the point where I can make an image copy of it and recover atleast some (and in some cases, most) of the data on it.

SpinRite is also the only tool I'm comfortable running on an encrypted volume.

It's not voodoo, and I run it quarterly for maintenance purposes.

Except those who would simply dBAN the device and run Linux on it. There are quite a few machines out there that can't run Vista for shit, but as soon as you load Ubuntu/Kubuntu/SuSE on them, they handle the task pretty well. The only gripes are super proprietary wireless drivers, and those've come a good long way in the last 18 months.

My MSI Wind (U 100, h4ckint*sh :-O!) use a standard SATAii 2.5" drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148371 - with that 500GB Seagate drive being all of $90, the future is now.

I wish 3G in the States was that cheap.

It's seriously between thirty and sixty dollars a month here, depending on your subscription area, and data plan.

...I need credit. I'm a student whose made some poor decisions and my credit is in the pooper. It's getting better, but not better enough to the point where I can take out a loan for a car. Which would be really nice, honestly.

...and no data on any flash drive is ever permanent. Usually, the first thing I do with one before I start using it for whatever task I've picked it up for is wipe it. There's a folder on my file server of .dmgs - snapshots of 'important' jumpdrive stuff that I'm not confident is being replicated everywhere. But I have convinced myself that ever an SD card, CF card, USB drive, whathaveyou is found, the data onboard is transient.

These cards are not intended as long-term storage, they're portable medium until you can get the data onto something with more iron. If the data is important to you, transfer it to the drobo, or file storage, or CD or something. Just not on the portable media.

It's the same old story: backup, backup, backup.

I work for a Very Large Company. Unfortunately, this particular company has built quite a bit of business process around Microsoft's tattered and broken products. For starters, the client engineering group requires that you use a build of IE6. Without several security patches. Why? Because a lot of the web portal applications do not run on anything but IE6. Upgrade to IE7? Unsupported. Chances are, the app won't work, or won't display correctly. For most of the apps that have forms, upgrading to IE7 means you'll never see the 'Submit' button, either because it's not there, or was rendered off of the page (and there's no horizontal scroll). Worse, most of these rely on stupid IE6 javascript tricks that don't quite work right in Firefox or Chrome or Safari. Firefox is semi-usable for most things, though you will eventually hit a page that just won't "Work". Unfortuantely, this corps makes up a not-insignificant chunk of the population. It's groups like that that would need to take care of in-house breakware before an adoption of Firefox or Chrome can be taken seriously.

Full print article should anyone not want to deal with the multipage click-through: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D235027,00.asp