Unless the glass is leaded, that's not likely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_protection#Shielding_design

From the article:
thunderstorms unleash sprays of X-rays and even intense bursts of gamma rays

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/radiation3.htm:
Beta particles can be stopped or reduced by a layer of clothing or a substance like aluminum .... Gamma rays often accompany alpha and beta particles. Unlike alpha and beta particles, they are extremely penetrating. In fact, several inches of lead or even a few feet of concrete are required to stop gamma rays. ... X-rays ... aren't quite as penetrating as gamma rays, and just a few millimeters of lead can stop them

On top of that, the aluminum body of an airplane has *lots* of holes in it (windows, control avionics, etc).

Well I thought your joke was funny. No mod points though.

Kindof like cable tv.

billions and billions of FPGAs have been sold, over the last 30 years, for just about every computing application one could name

Yes, BUT they have not all been sold as part of a standard board design (eg ATX, ...) for use in part of a standard system (desktop, laptop) with a set of standard IO (USB, ethernet, etc), running a specific instruction set (x86, etc). And I guarantee you that they have not all been able to run the same bit file, which is the analogous part of the system to the software that the discussion is about.

And aren't most computers set up to not boot from the cd drive as a default?

See I figured the hard drive wasn't wiped; they just didn't take the live cd out of the drive.

Thats what I was thinking. But then I decided it would be impressive enough to risk it... since I was browsing on my desktop machine.

Yup, whups... I wanted to read the French language version to see if I could follow what the article was saying. Got a few lines in then I saw the sidebar. D'oh.

Well, I'm going to argue that both you and the AC are missing the point. I'm not suggesting that if someone doesn't like something about where they live that they should just move. Far from it, so try to be a little less sensitive to perceived insult. What I talking about is a person who has for whatever reason found themselves in an unsympathetic conflict with the government and all other avenues of recourse have failed. In that situation the difference between local government and and the government of a country is that they at least have one further option available to them.

You could still argue that you have that option available at the national level, but if you take that option then you are forced to opt out of the whole system.

Now, since we can easily assume that there are people that will find themselves in these types of situations... the argument then comes back around to the point: that we should push governmental functions down as locally as they can reasonably go, in order to preserve that last-ditch feedback option.

By the way, thanks for responding from a non AC account. If we are going to argue politics its always better to know who you are yelling at.

I've had a very similar response when trying to talk to my Congresscritter. Any "I think this is a bad idea because" letters are responded to with form letters that basically say "Thank you for your concern and by the way this is an awesome idea." Frustrating.

If you compare 1911, when the current size of the House of Representatives was set (at 435 members total), and the present day, the citizen-to-congresscritter ratio has more than tripled. In 1911 the national ratio was about 244k people / representative; as of 2010 it was more like 709k people / rep. (Yes, this is an average over the whole country, which actually hides some interesting big state/small state disparities).

• Sources:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Law_62-5
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

Even in an imperfect world I think its difficult to argue that moving between small towns is easier when it comes to "houses [and] friends and neighbors and jobs" than moving between counties or states or countries. Which was the point I was making. Maybe I'm asking to much of an AC.

Well their secondary recourse, in a town of 185 people, is to leave. This kind of voting with your feet is why pushing governmental functions down to the lowest (read: most local) level is a good thing. The feedback loop is tightest there. If the city government in a small city is out of touch and not listening, the final stage in the feedback loop is for the residents to up and leave for the next town over. The larger the area covered by that government, the more difficult it is to do that.

Depends. If it's one of the modified Nestors it will probably retrieve what it was sent to get in the warehouse and then walk back out.

%s/[sS][^ ]*[uU][^ ]*[sS][^ ]*[eE]/SUSE/g

The first I read about it, it felt like a false flag operation. I know, I know, item 1 on a list of "How to sound like a paranoid".