That's bullshit. There were no bread lines in 80's (lines, indeed, were everywhere, but not for basic stuff). And Gulag for dissidents was practically over too (for casual rumblings anyway). Sure, it was a shitty place to live, but not for reasons you stated. Stop trivializing.

I'm in a scientific field, so here is my anecdotal take on it. Yes, I use Mac. No, I don't give a shit that it's a unix. No actual development happening with Mac as a target - everything is running on Linux servers (desktops are too puny). The only reason - Mac has better xserver comparing to what we have for windows. And IT guys refuse to support any kind of Linux on desktops.

Ha!

Happened to me too! Had to call Comcast several times until got through drones to a supervisor. He confirmed that account was properly closed, said "what's the fuck?" and faxed me a letter to send to collectors. Also, it seems, he did something on his side too - issue got resolved without any blemishes to my credit history.

Actually ( and surprisingly) Swiss have bad reputation when it comes to all things crypto. Google "Crypto AG"...

Technically, the fact that a signal is below noise level does not forbid it's reception. GPS, for example, is below noise floor.

Killer whales are dolphins.

I know that this is not a purely gaming card bla bla bla. But here is another ping: in this month's graphics card review at Tom's hardware AMD totally dominated... in all categories. I mean a clean sweep! What's going on? Or is it just bad timing?

Result of Nvidia's crippling DP floating point performance on mainstream graphic cards is people started to look for ways around this bullshit.

Case in point: linear algebra libraries (like 80% of scientific computing). Basically people are modifying algorithms so that bulk of computation is done in single precision and then cleaned up in double. Those mixed mode algorithms often outperform pure DP ones even on non crippled cards (for example MAGMA library).

People don't like to be screwed with...

I suspect it's more like a form of protectionism. They can't slap some serious tariffs due to WTO or whatever. So in order to protect fledgling local production they do a form of bang-bang control: now you can watch that and now you can't.

Am I is the only one concerned about amount of RAM?

I mean, everybody is so excited about DDR4... But do people understand that instead of 8 dimm slots we'll get only 4 (1 dimm per channel instead of 2-3)? So while keeping costs on this side of reasonable, we're getting only half the amount of memory?

WTF?!!

Well, am an engeneer and a scientist.
And considering that arcs (as presented) do not have error brackets on them is a dead giveaway that qualifications of people who did the calculations are highly suspect.

Considering that the arcs are, well, arcs, I'll take a wild guess and say that they had data from only one satellite...
Some spy birds might help, but they tend to focus on land areas.

Data from other planes will not help much - mostly only to set error brackets. The ill-conditioness of the problem does not go away.

And what if the sphere does not intersect earth? :)

Navy guys will need more data.

Those much hyped arcs from Inmarsat are pretty much bogus. The trouble is that the problem is badly conditioned - because satellite is way too far (geosynchonous orbit - not your friendly neighborhood gps) and it's right on top of the search area. In other words - small errors in time/distance measurements, satellite position, etc. produce huge errors in estimation. They're lucky they placed the airplane on earth.