And what if a person willing to give you a blowjob isn't immediately nearby? A HAM operator can help find one for you and give them directions.

I'm not a HAM enthusiast, but I know my fair share, and rest assured that availability of long-range communications is ALWAYS helpful.

Even if everyone in all emergency services has the same band of 700mhz radios and can talk to each other (unlikely, since they'll all be from different lowest-bidder manufacturers), it's often impractical due to the sheer volume of personnel. Having people who know how to communicate quickly and efficiently is important. Having people at the disaster site where shit's going down is important. Having people who can maintain equipment in addition to using it is important.

Keep a couple of HAM sets and someone who has a clue about them at your emergency center, and you can get field reports from places your officers can't go. You can talk to each other if and when your official encrypted channels are overloaded. You can get messages out to not only other departments, but other continents. You can coordinate with the general populace (at least to some extent) because just about everyone's got someone less than a mile away who has a HAM radio.

Plus, you've got some people who can build and maintain their own radios. Not many first-responder personnel are going to be very useful if they drop their radio into a puddle, but more than a few advanced HAMsters can probably rig something up with baling twine and bubblegum to keep the lines open to some extent (exaggeration, of course, but they've probably got enough spare parts to whip you up an extra radio, or keep a half dozen radios running).

I don't see anything claiming that this is a new technology. Only that the technology has developed to the point where its utility is not limited to prototyping, and it's becoming viable for full-on manufacturing.

My commuter bike is configured this way. It has nothing to do with racing, and everything to do with efficiency.

Still, for a "cruiser" bike, you simply make the stem shorter. It's not like you need molds for every possible shape. Measure the rider, and feed the measurements into the computer, and they can come pick up their custom-made bike in an hour, made to their exact specifications.

My only real concern is wearability. The kevlar belt will do OK, no doubt, but what about the crank and other moving parts? What happens when they wear out? Or do you just grind the whole bike (except the wheels) back to powder and make a new one (in which case, awesome recyclability, no pun intended).

Perhaps he meant a striped, horse-like animal, and he has a lisp, you insensitive clod.

Don't the codes get associated with some sort of account somewhere? Could Microsoft not simply look for accounts with some arbitrarily reasonable amount of points on them, then query the purchasing/issuing database to see which of those accounts got most of their credit in short order in 160-point increments then drain those accounts?

Or just simply look for any issuance of points using these promo codes to any accounts, and make sure that credit is only given for ONE promo code per account, and remove all other credits but the first one issued to each account?

It's probably non-trivial, but would cost them far less than, say, a million bucks.

Either that or they just allow the hackers their little victory and consider it a lesson in predictability in promotional codes. After all, Microsoft really hasn't "lost" $1.2 million in cash. Take the department that is running that promo and tell them they lost $1.2M in next years' budget.

The iPhone 3g is three years old. Time to get back on the upgrade treadmill, consumers, new shinies await! Or put up with the fact that your phone will continue doing what it does until it dies, but won't be getting anything new unless you buy a new one. Did your phone work last week? Does it do less today than it did then?

My Blackberry 8300 is less than 3 years old, and the last OS upgrade was issued about 3 months after I got it. RIM has pretty much abandoned the 8300 series for the entire time I've owned it, and I don't expect any more software upgrades for it. It still works fine (as do most iPhone 3g units). How many Android phones will be able to go to Gingerbread? How many Nokia phones get continuous upgrades for years after they get dropped from service?

The point is, cell phones are now considered disposable, even for the utterly ridiculous amounts of money they cost. The 3g came out three years ago and was replaced a year later with the 3gs. Most people get their phones with a 2-year contract. If you can't stand the sweat, get off the treadmill.

I'm not saying it's right, but it's not uniquely Apple. It's part of owning a smartphone. They get obsolete quickly.

They ask people to turn off their electronic devices.

Sorry, did you have an equally affordable and practical solution you posted in white-on-white text that the rest of us missed?

New consumer electronics comes out every couple of years. Protecting the multi-million-dollar aircraft from your shiny new $200 iBauble would cost the aviation industry millions or maybe even billions of dollars a year that you'll see added to your ticket cost.

4 options, you choose:

1. Your airline ticket prices increase by a factor of ten, and all aircraft and ground equipment are retrofitted with new gear every time a frequency is given up to general use by our congresscritters. Eventually we'll run completely out of desirable spectrum and this will be impossible, but in the meantime we can keep moving aviation, GPS, and infrastructure services out of the way of consumer electronics for a while, at increasing cost and decreasing utility.

2. The FCC does its job and stops giving out so much spectrum for use when the use of the spectrum could possibly interfere with existing systems. Of course, that means WiMax, Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, EDGE, and GSM would not have come to pass and we'd be back on Analog TV and Analog cellular towers with precious few channels available. So their job might not be what we really want them to do after all.

3. The FCC bakes the cost of upgrades to existing systems into the licensing cost of the spectrum that's being released, so if you get WiMax you have to pay any nearby frequency-holders to vacate their territory. This is basically financially equivalent to #2, because no one is going to want the WiMax frequencies if it means they have to orbit billions of dollars worth of satellites to replace the current flock of GPS birds.

4. When a new technology is introduced that is incompatible with existing technologies only under specific circumstances, the users of the new technology are required not to use their tech in a way that interferes with the old stuff. As in, turn off your radio when on the plane. Cheap, easy, effective, expeditious, and practical.

Is it 100%? No, it isn't. But it's what we got for now, and as long as people follow the rules they can have their spectrum when it's safe to do so. So you're pretty safe from anything but short-term accidental and deliberate interference.

As to deliberate interference, any time you use Radio Frequency (and I fail to see why this is such a hard thing for people to understand), it's subject to interference. Find the frequency, transmit 1 megawatt of noise over that frequency, "game over, man!". If you want to fuck with a plane from the ground, send out a strong signal in the aviation band covering the whole thing. The information is public knowledge. There's no way to protect from it.

That's why wireless systems are NEVER used as the only way a plane works, and when they are implemented they tend to have first wireless then non-wireless backups, and if the backups to the backups to the backups fail, the pilot has clear procedures to follow, even if he's flying blind with no electrics or electronics at all (that's why many systems work on vacuum/pressure fed by the plane moving, if the plane stops moving then losing track of where you are is your smallest worry - because wherever you are, you're not going anywhere else)

Don't get me wrong, I love Canonical. I use Mint, which is one of the "respins" of Ubuntu. Canonical has contributed a lot to the Linux world, and I value those contributions greatly.

Ubuntu doesn't like Gnome 3 Shell, so they want to write their own Shell over the underlying Gnome 3 infrastructure. That does not mean that the Gnome team's goals are not equally worthy or without merit. Having Canonical "buy out" the Gnome team because they want their own shell would be a great loss to the choice that makes the Linux community so vibrant (and, of course, occasionally confusing to the uninitiated).

Ubuntu has the resources to just do the things they want to their own shell, while leaving Gnome Shell alone to pursue its own (possibly incompatible) goals. They're both based on Gnome 3 anyway, so I bet a lot of the features are going to turn out to be portable between the two once any hurt feelings pass and the two project teams start looking at each others' work.

Canonical contributes a lot back, and they do great work. That doesn't mean the rest of the upstream community should be FORCED into accepting their changes. That's not how OSS works.

Reality check: Every emissions law that's come out has held each car to the standard for the year in which it was built, along with an allowance for wear-and-tear. I've owned older cars in three states where emission controls came in, and never had to do a blessed thing to any of my cars except one that needed a slight tune-up (that ended up saving me gasoline). So let's stop the humaniform constructions out of wheat chaff, please?

Replacing the instrumentation on an aircraft is not a trivial matter. In small planes, it can be tens of thousands of dollars. In a commercial plane, I'm thinking hundreds of thousands.

If you think airfare is expensive now, think about what it would cost if a government mandate came down to change out all the electronics in every plane every 5 years when a new consumer technology comes out that might interfere with it. It would be a massive investment, then when the next gewgaw comes out that uses a possibly-interfering system, they'd have to go through it all over again.

WiMax might be a problem with GPS, so, what, you expect the aviation industry to build out a new navigation system? No. It's only a problem if the transmission is inside or very near the plane (or at very high power), because it is not orthogonal to GPS frequencies and might interfere. So carriers have to tell people they can't use WiMax on a plane, the government needs to recall the frequencies it sold near the GPS band, or new GPS birds need to be orbited. Which one is easiest?

Spectrum is precious, everyone wants some, and we all gotta share it. That means we can't afford to completely stop all wireless transmissions just because one industry (aviation) needs clear comms. So aviation has to adapt to an ever-changing and ever-narrowing amount of available wireless spectrum. In the meantime, since the communications landscape shifts constantly, they have to do their best to control interference.

Even your "single-engine hobbyist-killers" have zero dependence on high tech hardware to fly a plane safely. If you're flying VFR (clear view, etc), then a map and your eyeballs are all you really need. Well, those and the map-reading skills you had to demonstrate to a certified FAA instructor within the last two years or you wouldn't be flying.

Instrument conditions might get a bit dicey, but you've got a map of the area and know what general area you're in when you lose all the fancy gizmos and gewgaws, so you start dead-reckoning terrain avoidance, fire up the DME or VOR gear, figure out precisely where you are, and set course for somewhere with fewer things sticking into the sky. If all of that is dead, you'll always have a compass/DG, airspeed indicator, and altimeter. Climb up to well above any local obstructions, and head in the general direction of somewhere the weather isn't so bad.

But, yeah, the real problem is that of congestion. Fortunately, there are always backup plans on top of backup plans, and the chances of two aircraft attempting to occupy the same airspace are very slim, even if all communications died simultaneously to all aircraft along with every aircraft's internal electronic navigation systems, even in Instrument conditions. Obviously it would impact air travel pretty badly, and a lot of people would be staying on the ground or flying to airports they didn't really want to go to, but it's very unlikely it'd kill anyone.

Right, but the problem is that when most airplanes that are flying today were designed (and in many cases even built) when we were all using analog cell phones and WiFi didn't exist.

So, while I admire your vision, it's hard to design hardware that accommodates for things that don't yet exist.

GPS receivers break, their batteries die, they are subject to interference. I use them all the time, but I also have a paper map in the trunk.

The difference between the spoken directions (lowest tech) and the GPS is that if the GPS breaks I have no idea where I'm going from there, and probably can't find my way back because I've been focusing on a GPS screen and not viewable landmarks. In your example, if I've driven five sees and I haven't encountered a barn, I can backtrack about three sees and look more carefully for a barn. And if the barn is torn down, chances are I can try the two or three roads at the second see and start looking for the next landmark.

The problem is, you can only print food that fits in CUPS.

(snare drum)

Right, you'll note that I said it was a ridiculous thing to say. But it was an exaggerated claim based on verified observations on Gliese 581g.

Instead, the original AC was attempting to relate the quote made about Gliese 581g (a planet that had been observed, the observations verified, and remains the most likely current candidate for a life-supporting exoplanet) to an observational error that led to KOI 326.01 being an interesting candidate for a couple of weeks until the error was discovered.

Allow me to re-quote the original post I was responding to:

The problem with that assertion is that no scientist ever made the claim about KOI 326.01, so the fail on KOI 326.01 wasn't as "epic" as the original AC post claimed.

That was what I was originally stating, then other ACs pulled out stories that show a scientist making that claim.

The problem is, the claim was made about Gliese 581g, not KOI 326.01. Gliese 581g is still a viable candidate for exoplanetary life, and the observations were well-verified about Gliese 581g before that statement was uttered. It's still an unfounded assumption (for example, someone else might observe another planet too near by, or discover some other attribute of the star that pulls it out of the candidates list), but one based on clear verified observations from more than one institution.

The brouhaha about KOI 326.01 is that someone crossreferenced the observation against an inaccurate stellar catalog and it made an interesting line in a spreadsheet. It made the news, then someone noticed the error in the catalog and corrected it, and the spreadsheet line became uninteresting again. No one ever stated that KOI 326.01 was a life-bearing planet, only that it was an interesting candidate (and when the verification process began, the error was discovered).