If you had a run of the mill GPS system, and you drove your car very, very, far North, eventually you'd lose signal.

What I imagine is going on here, is that there is a ring of base stations watching the GPS satellites around each pole. If you know the base stations haven't moved w.r.t. the pole, then you can calculate where the center of spin is, thus where the pole is.

My mom, also a grandmother, still uses an OS9 machine next to but not networked into her OS X laptop.

I've been stockpiling parts so I should be able to keep it running for at least 20 more years. (B.t.w. I have 33 year old arcade machines that are still running fine)

Sometimes there's no reason to upgrade.

You are correct. The problem is that people don't know what they want. But perhaps, if they tried, the networks would find that "Box of Puppies" and "Pictures of Cats with Funny Captions" are their highest rated programs.

1. 1) Find a friend in Lawrence in line of sight.
2. 2) Get some really good, gold plated Pringles cans.
3. 3) Get the highest powered WiFi rig you can.
4. 4) Surf away.

With any battery technology, it's almost never the "Memory Effect", but simple overcharging. If your laptop batteries are always hot just sitting there when the laptop is plugged into the mains, they won't last as long as ones that are properly charged and left alone until they are needed for discharge. With cheap cordless drills and other tools, simple putting a timer on the charger will greatly increase the number of cycles you can get out of the batteries.

If Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd just find the next big thing, and stop using NAND flash. Memristors anyone?

Of course, if anyone else tried this, the new tech would be non-viable, but Steve would use his force of will to make the new tech work at the price he wanted to pay.

We a company is in trouble it needs to cut costs and sell assets. You can sell off your crap, but nobody wants to pay much money for crap, so you'd go under anyway. The only thing that's going to make enough money to keep you afloat, is to sell your "seed corn". So you sell your most valuable assets, keep the crap and hope that someone left can spin that crap into gold.

Yes, 99 times out of 100, you are going under anyway, but if every other way has 100% chance of failure, it's time to throw the Hail Mary pass and hope for the best.

The largest employers forbid employees from posting "official" reviews. The largest software vendors forbid *anyone* from posting performance reviews.

Other than that, great idea!

Can they even do this? Don't affiliates have multi-year contracts, with exclusive territory agreements ? Who would agree to be a network affiliate if they could just pull the plug from you at any time?

The insolvability of the "halting problem" is only for arbitrary programs with arbitrary input. Certain defined classes of problems with defined inputs are very solvable.

But it's not doable to automatically ensure the specs are correct. i.e. If you have correct specifications for an adult, those might not be appropriate for an child or infant.

True, but man, how cool could it have been if he had agreed? He, and his family were already in danger, even if he didn't cooperate with the feds. They were going to set him up with a shop with everything he needed. He could have modded cars for the CIA, and become "Q". If I were him, the first mod would be to put machine guns in my own car.

Yes, but you forgot:

You are a large bank, the failure of which would cripple the economy. You get a bailout and bonuses for your C level.

Good question, but unencrypted data caches better. If you and your neighbors all want to watch the same show, a torrent-type protocol that sends a bit of the show to each, then your computers trade amongst themselves, is much more efficient that sending a specific stream to each machine.