Yes, it was a USB flash drive with a firmware update.

I work on a telescope whose Siemens PLC is so old that it has a PROM in a 40 pin DIP package for firmware updates. Not that we've touched the firmware in 20 years. After all, it works. And it ought to work for another 20 years, as long as we replace the dried-out aluminum electrolytic capacitors regularly.

I have no degree, but in 35 years I've never had to be selected from a pool of candidates. What's it like to have to compete for a job?

I worked my way through college at the school, building exotic computer systems for grad student research projects. I noticed one day that I was learning a lot more in the job than in the classes.

Now, 30 year later, and after 20 years in industry, I work at the same university, building electronics for telescopes. I suppose I could have gotten further with a degree, but not much further. At my performance reviews, I ask my boss to please not promote me to management.

There is some room left in the suitcase. They could have fit more battery packs in there - especially if they are Li-ion so as to not weigh a ton. Also, they could have provided some folding solar panels (it's not clear form the article if they are included or not).

What are you talking about? Tetris is not violent. Mindless, yes.

Because playing Solitaire on my phone is the sum total of my gaming experience these days.

Story: I walked into the Detroit airport a couple years ago while wearing the Video Coat. The nice TSA people marked my entire family's boarding passes SSSS. They inspected us thoroughly, including the eight 5 AH Chinese LiPo battery packs used to power the coat. These are the no-protection-board version with the factory connectors that let you plug two batteries together like BIG 9V batteries. They will happily put out 100 amps.

Had we been 'the type', we could have started four fires in the cabin that day.

Ancient? My oldest cell phone is from 1985. Ten pounds of aluminum, lead-acid battery and first-generation circuitry.

I never got service for it, but I did mod one of its brothers to be the uplink transmitter for my unlicensed radio station fifteen years ago.

I am in a similar situation, but only 12 years. The people above me are getting near retirement age, but lots of folks stick around until their seventies around here. I have a side business and work part-time, to keep the interest level up and reduce unreasonable demands on my time. And do volunteer work with high school kids, doing robotics. That's fun.

This article is so right! He has found a way to express something that's been bugging me for a long time. I love his comparison of a policeman to a song writer.

The other thing about copyright is that it's not the creative people who make money forever off of their own work, it's the corporations that manufacture the plastic discs who make the money forever off of the songwriters' work.

I have a real account, and I manage a couple groups. One (a local bike ride) receives a steady stream of requests for new members to join the group. Half of these are fake Chinese or Indian accounts - it's obvious from their profiles. The rest are real local folks. I have no idea how that maps into the total number of fake IDs.

We only use one receiver at a time, so it's not a problem. A poster written by one of our grad students that gives an idea of the telescope's capabilities is here.

The temperature scale on the graphs (temperature = signal strength) gives you an idea of the absurdly high sensitivity of the system. Some of those graphs are in milliKelvin!

The beam size (it's a Gaussian beam, so it's fuzzy) is about 20-50 arc seconds, narrower at higher frequency. Basic pointing accuracy is about 5 arc seconds, but we improve that with pointing observations that measure the Gaussian beam dropoff on the sides of a bright object, so we can optimize pointing to within an arc second or two. More black magic.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson got his interest in astronomy after going to a kid's camp in Pennsylvania, and seeing stars for the first time in his Bronx life. Get out of town now and then!

Thanks! We aim to please.

It should be. We work halfway between radio and light. The signal passes through Teflon lenses, is mixed by a superconducting mixer diode in a receiver cooled to 4K with a helium refrigerator, down-converted to an intermediate frequency range of 4-8 GHz, then into a spectrometer. Many types of black magic involved.