"Join our open (your wallet) beta and help shape the future of Glass."

Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber.

This is true, but even at half the cost it still takes a *lot* of capital.

I am pretty sure all they do for a Secret clearance is check your credit, criminal record, and citizenship. If nothing comes up you get a rubber stamp. It only gets complicated if they dig up Iranian relatives, or some other red flag.

That's how it was when I got mine many years ago - a cursory background check and a half hour interview with the DISCO guy, and when I left the company and came back, it was still within the two-year window so they just reinstated it without any fuss. Secret clearances are a dime a dozen and practically a necessity for a lot of civilian contracting work. TS/CSI is a whole other ballgame, but even then they're sometimes granted without a polygraph.

In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

I know this is is meant as a jokey comment, but it's worth noting that VS2015 has native Git support as well so Github etc. works without any plugins.

VS 2013 (including Community) has Git support out of the box and works just fine with GitHub as well.

Taxing consumers as opposed to commercial vehicles is a terrible idea; it would have the effect of subsidizing heavy vehicular traffic. If we're going to subsidize freight, we should invest in rail infrastructure.

Consumers will subsidize commercial traffic no matter what - either directly by higher fuel taxes, or indirectly through higher prices for goods. Agree 100% on expanding our rail options though.

The thing to do in that case is rather preversely set up your own website with the information on then cite that.

I had thought of that then, and I'm sure plenty of people do just that. It just wasn't a big enough deal for me to go to the effort.

Unfortunately the internet is FULL of nutters who think they know stuff but don't. Sadly the nuttiness makes them all the louder.

Big time, and the guy that decided to go full-on edit war with me was one of those. It really reinforced my understanding that Wikipedia shouldn't be relied on as an authoritative source of information in itself, but rather a jumping-off point to evaluate the given references. I've often had spelling/grammatical corrections reverted by people that clearly failed English 101. [shrug]

I'm not saying you're one of those. In fact I'm prefectly prepared to take your word for it that you're not. The problem is wikipedia is inundated with those people and it's really hard to tell the difference.

I appreciate the vote of confidence, but like I said, it's just not worth my time to worry about it. I do think about it every time Jimmy comes begging for money though.

I knew I couldn't be the only one.

Count me in as a charter member of the "Weird Kids Club" as well. It's sad that more kids didn't then and don't now have more of a passion for learning just for its own sake.

Of course, many people who bitch about Wikipedia and how it doesn't work complain that their edits were undone, often because they added information without a reliable source for verification.

The issue I've run into is that sometimes there simply isn't a "reliable source" other than people that are intimately familiar with the topic at hand because the written information is under an NDA or otherwise inaccessible. In my particular case, it dealt with the monorail system at Disney World - I worked there for years, was a trainer on the system, and know a fair bit about the internals of the trains and control/signalling system, as does any other driver with any experience. However, Disney and Bombardier are pretty strict about controlling the availability of any official detailed printed/electronic documentation, so in the end I ended up just giving up and letting the incorrect information that was in the article and the half-assed "citations" stay there because the only authoritative citations were in documentation that was unavailable to the public, and I got to the point where I just didn't care anymore whether Jimmy presented bogus info while claiming it was accurate.

Big time. When a lot of the spam you get is from compromised machines, a valid DKIM signature means absolutely nothing. I have both SPF and DKIM implemented on my mail server, and I honestly can't say it's made much of a difference except I almost never get bounces from outgoing mail.

Wow. Looks like he was just like us, driving our cars in ignorant dreams ofsafety, while we are carrying that gasoline. And some times, awful things happen.

He's a frigging *astronaut* for crying out loud. Bolden flew on the damned thing four times and commanded two missions. Yet even I knew the RCC panels weren't six inches thick back in 1981 when I studied the shuttle program for a school project. If a 13-year old kid can find this out with a minimum of effort and no Internet, what's his excuse? At any time he could have walked over to one of the OMFs and held an RCC panel in his own hands. A more apt automotive analogy would be to compare Bolden's knowledge of his vehicle to that of a race car driver. I challenge you to show me such a driver that doesn't know his car intimately, inside and out.

The shedding foam was seen as a low mass substance that would bounce off the shuttle, especially given that the differential speeds between it and the still accelerating rocket were not as large as if it was not moving at all.

During the last launch of Atlantis four months prior to Columbia's last flight, a piece of shed bipod foam put a three-inch deep dent into one of the SRB attach rings, which are half an inch thick and made of steel, so there was documented evidence that shed foam could cause substantial damage prior to Columbia's flight. And yes, this was brought to management's attention as something to be concerned about.

And while it's quite easy to sit back and declare the shuttle designers assholes because no one in their right mind would ever design a leading edge tile so thin - do you know the physical aspects of creating those ceramic tiles? The aspects of attaching them to the vehicle? Or do you figure that they purposely designed them so thin so as to create a failure mode? That my friend, would merit criminal prosecution.

I'm not criticizing the designers. I'm criticizing the management that decided it was safe to fly in the face of documented issues that suggested otherwise without even looking into them.

Columbia's demise was based on something that most folks figured would not ever happen

I think a more accurate statement would be that foam shedding and damage to the orbiter improperly became a normal and accepted consequence of flight prior to both the Challenger and Columbia accidents, just like the O-ring erosion and failure-to-seal issues were known to be a problem as far back as 1977 but weren't considered a big enough deal by management to halt the program until the new joints could be implemented. In both cases, concerns with the possibility of the failure modes eventually observed were brought to management and dismissed.

A couple of years after the accident, Charlie Bolden said, "I spent fourteen years in the space program flying, thinking that I had this huge mass that was about five or six inches thick on the leading edge of the wing. And, to find after Columbia that it was fractions of an inch thick, and that it wasn't as strong as the Fiberglas on your Corvette, that was an eye-opener, and I think for all of us ... the best minds that I know of, in and outside of NASA, never envisioned that as a failure mode."

Really? Was there really no one in the entire organization involved with safety that knew how the damned thing was built?

They were testing a commercial craft, no different conceptually from the guys Boeing hires to give an aircraft fresh off the assembly line a quick spin around the sky.

Conceptually perhaps, but the devil is in the details. Kerosene is a *much* safer fuel to work with than what SS2 was using, and there are a whole bunch of other problems that can come into play when you're 60 miles up, having gotten there by flying almost 3,000 mph. It's not a very commonly explored flight envelope.

The red bull space dive thing just had a guy in a spacesuit.

You're right that we're not talking about a Mach 25+ reentry, but Baumgartner and Eustace jumped from less than half the altitude the Virgin craft will be reaching.

In fairness, I would say the guys who are flying these things know damned well what the risk is, and would fight tooth and nail for the opportunity to do it.

To me, it'd be a hell of a lot better to be able to say I died advancing the state of aeronautical science (whether for profit or not) rather than just fading away in a nursing home somewhere. At least something useful would be learned, and I'd feel that my death brought others some benefit.