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Comment Re:Talk to a lawyer (Score 1) 99

Unfortunately this case is not even to the state of courts. His livelihood (or part of it ) is being denied without any court at all so far.

Even in losers pay areas, you still have to front the money and if you run out, are you still going to win? But more interesting might be the value of the app verses the costs of courts. If the app only generates $5k a year income, How do you justify a million or even 50k dollars in defense costs knowing you might lose and possibly have to pay their costs.

It also means a lot less legitimate case goto court too.

Comment Re:India?? (Score 2) 77

I don't think Linux users is the intended market here. It's more likely a move to get lower income people to purchase. They might keep linux installed or void the warranty and install some pirated windows version. When i say void the warranty, I mean disqualify the setup for support and make it difficult to get warranty support (because the diagnostic utilities don't run right in user supplied operating systems ).

Comment Re:absolute BS (Score 1) 242

Another posted pointed out to me that it was the brits in world war two not the cold war. In my civil air patrol days of the mid 1980s as a cadet (before i discovered the preacher's daughter and drugs/alcohol) I'm pretty sure i was told it was the cold war but i or the guy telling the story could be wrong.

Of course we heard a lot of stories. Part of the experience probably had more primitive camping than the boy scouts wished for in training for the search and rescue (sar) portion. But the CAP, as part of it's mission was propaganda er educating the public.

Comment Re:absolute BS (Score 4, Interesting) 242

Perhaps this patent is part of a psychological operations in which someone wants to make someone else believe we have capabilities we don't.

This is where the rabbit wearing glasses thing comes from. We hid our radar capabilities in the early days of the cold war by saying carrots improved your vision and our pilots ate tons of them. This had the added benefit of spys recording locations of orange people and we got good ideas on locations of Soviet air bases as well as identities of suspected pilots that could be worked for info.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 225

How do I figure?

Let's imagine for a minute that bees rely more on the sun and its pisition than the available food sources. We do know after all that bees navigate and communicate by the sun and representations of it.

So why would bees migrate if readily available food sources were already nearby? Or perhaps if they do, it is at a lot slower pace than other animals or insects. So let's assume that the location is relatively static which is why there appears to not be any northern movement. Now we need to figure out why the southern boundaries are shrinking. The food sources are not disappearing and climate change has been happening longer than this observed trend. So what is different in the south than the north? Pests is likely the difference. More pests means more pesticides in use. Those pesticides have gotten more efficient and we know bees get addicted to some of them.

But let's see if we can make a car analogy out of this. Let's suppose we have two different areas. In one area (north) you have a few bars and a mild drug problem. In the other (south ) you have 10 times as many bars per square mile and a heavy heroin problem. Which area is likely to have more deaths from drunken/drugged driving accidents? Which area is likely to have an overall better health?

Comment Re:Mercury switched = pin ball tilt switch (Score 3, Insightful) 431

Its breaking and entering in my neck of the woods if you enter any premises unlawfully or by deception, or coercion with the intention of committing a crime. There is no need to actually break anything physically.

I'm assuming they did talk to the boy. However, would you volunteer information that could further convict you of criminal acts? I sure wouldn't so even if i was building a bomb, i wouldn't admit to it without knowing they already knew. Even then i would likely deny it. The cops probably know i would not be the first person to ever think that way. Their caution was justified even though it turned out to be for nothing.

Comment Re:Mercury switched = pin ball tilt switch (Score 2) 431

The mercury switches were a source of mercury not a source of switches. The presence of chemicals suggest the possibility of making mercury fulminate which is a friction and pressure sensitive explosive that can be used to trigger larger explosive charges.

In other words, The fear wasn't that he would make some elaborate Hollywood bombs, it is that he would make blasting caps and explode real explosives that could be a bomb. If you have a legitimate reason - and yes experiments is legitimate - to have mercury, you can order it. There will be a record and paper trail though. Stealing mercury suggests that for whatever reason he doesn't want the paper trail or more likely the hassle or expenses of it.

I can understand why they treated this the way they did. You as an outsider would not know what it is being used for until you saw evidence of its use. When it's use can be completely innocent or explosive, you need to approach the situation with as much caution as the worse case scenario deems necessary. If the guy wasn't breaking and entering to steal the shit, this story likely wouldn't have played out.

Comment Re:Outage.. (Score 1) 377

Something similar. Took almost an entire ISP down. Had a few servers with about 200 domains running bsd located at thier "data center " which was more like a couple shelve and a long bench. Anyways, they where supposed to be running a script to verify two servers were mirroring the other two. I got lazy and stopped checking the logs for it and eventually they stopped running the backups or the script to verify it. One day a drive failed and about 50 domains were off line. I couldn't remote into any server and started getting a run around from their techs so i loaded up all the backup servers i had and a file share with copies of everthing and drove the 200 miles to the isp.

Turns out one of their techs tried to fix the problem by pulling a good drive from one of the other boxes but wasn't the one mirroring the bad drive. This then caused issues in the raid for the good box which he tried to rebuild by pulling the a drive from the mirroring box and ended up breaking all the configs. The worse part is that he thought he had the right tools to fix everything at home and instead of going to get them, he loaded my servers up and took them home.

So i show up, realize i have to start from scratch, set up a couple makeshift boxes that likely wouldn't survive a month, then i connected an old NetWare server. I enabled SMB on the two new servers and started transferring files from the NetWare server. Next thing i know, someone came in and started rebooting all the routers. I looked and jokingly said a reboot is not a fix.

Well, this went on for about two hours with about half a dozen people working on it, making phone calls and claiming they were under some DOS attack. My file transfer was finished, i disconnected the NetWare server, and it all magically stopped. I had misconfigured the SMB and created a packet storm that their routers and modems gladly repeated and multiplied to the point it almost melted their network.

My real servers finally showed back up so i loaded them up, built new ones and had a t3 ran to a commercial building near the house that became their new home. There was a lot of finger pointing and talk about compensation but it got dropped when i reminded them that the only reason i had access of that kind was because they failed to fulfill a contract obligations and then screwed the pooch trying to recover.

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One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener

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