Sure. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of supporting something that is critical, you can either argue that you are right, and how life is unfair. Or, you can plan for failure, and not have to tell everyone that was counting on your product/whatever that everything is going to be down until does the right thing. It may not be good customer service, but you must understand that the world and most of the businesses out there don't give a shit if you sink or swim. Go ahead and file a suit against them in court if you are so obligated, but your take away should more than just hoping that some government body (FTC) makes everything all better years down the road.

Not that I don't have some sympathy for you, but you are presenting a false dichotomy. Any time you install a new firmware you are rolling the dice. If your product is out of warranty (also meaning you've used it for long enough that it must have been working well enough, or you bought it used/cheap/out of warranty) then you are entirely on your own. The companies have no further responsibility to you. If better reliability/longevity was needed, you should have purchased spares in advance, or scheduled hardware refreshes in a timely manor to keep your critical bits on hardware that you can get support for. Think of this as a learning experience and welcome to the reality of planning for the unexpected.

I'm using T-Mobiles pay as you go, 1000 minutes for talk or texts for $100 that are good for 1 year. I'm currently using it for my Nexus 4, but you can take the SIM out and load it into a computer without issue (to answer the Ask /. posters question).

Yeah, i also thought dry dock. The U shaped building would work well for it, but the position of the U shape building doesn't lend itself well to transporting large vessels in and out of the area. Though there is a railway just south of there.

I think he was neither trolling or uninformed. The connection speed continues to go up overtime, and if he has 25 Mbit/s, you can download a 2GB movie in just under 11 minutes. Many of the shows I watch are just a couple hundred MB so even 500 MB shows will come down in under 3 minutes. Wait 3 minutes or so and you get a ~40 minute show that looks pretty damn good... better quality than what sat/cable is delivering over all.

I think I'm able to duplicate the micro-stuttering in counter strike global offensive. When I'm running BOINC (lowest priority, CPU only) occationally the game will seem to have a very brief, but noticable, halt... and go back to running smooth. Turned off BOINC and it went back to being only smooth. Might be an issue with the process scheduler... or perhaps like the articles suggest, the video card drivers. Either way, I'm all for better drivers :)

Thank you for the clarification. I completely misremembered the year of the conference.

That would have been an amazing(ly terrifying) meeting between world leaders. Truman and Stalins exchange at the Potsdam conference might have gone quite quite differently. Or perhaps it was that conference that made Truman want to go to such lengths to put a nuke on the moon to show American might? Brinksmanship is such a strange game.

Off topic, but your comment took me back. In 1998, me and 2 others decided to do something similar to what you did. We skipped out on school and drove to the school where my girlfriend (now wife) was at, with the intention of getting her out of school for lunch. I wrote up a note and went into the main office and presented it to them, saying I was her brother and had a message for her. They took the note, so I left and went back to the car. They gave her the message without reading it. When the bell rang, she came out and off we all went to lunch. If they would have read the note, they would have busted us as it basically detailed out where we were parked and our intentions.

Where was the rest of the world? Genocide should never happen, and we all shoulder some of the blame for the lack of action by every government on the planet.

Still right, but you are correct as well. And not even just education. I could use this at work. Say I'm working on trying to figure out why reset isn't working on this VM I'm running that has kernel panic'd. It could take a glance at a few key bits and go out and scour the internet for solutions while I go validate all of the mundane bits are correct (or perhaps it has even better knowledge than the internet if you pay for license fee). It is basically Microsoft Bob of the future, that could assist / complement the user in any specific task that it has a knowledge domain on. There are so many uses that it is silly. But first, they need to build it. I'm just suggesting some of the first uses will be to cheat, oh, and the military, but definitely to cheat.

As soon as something like this robot is able to be made, the miniaturized stealth version will no doubt follow. The device would just need a moment of line of sight on the test and could deliver the answers to you, perhaps in morse code skin taps. I suspect there are quite a few people who would love to be able to breeze into an engineering degree, as just one example.

Thanks for sharing this. I wish they retained pictures, but it still brought back memories.

When I read the article, it reminded me of the story behind the Baldurs Gate characters Minsc and Boo. Apparently, Minsc's character game from an actual pencil & paper DnD game where he was a ranger who would keep a satchel full of rats with him. The purpose of the rats were to be uses as crude trap detectors, take one out of the bag and direct it to run down some hall, usually with a toss in the right direction. Unfortunately during one of these events, a trap exploded and loosed something that smashed into Minsc head with critical damage. Some time later, after Minsc recovered, his intelligence was significantly lowered and he lost most of his memory, to the point he went from a ranger to a barbarian. He found a lone critter still in his old satchel, and thought he was a long lost friend, Boo the gigantic miniature space hamster.

I wish the Army great successes in this small animal trap detecting program!

In 1998, I wrote a tic-tac-toe game that you and a friend could play together, using two separate computers, via... dare I say it!? Why via TCP socket wizardry! ...and the like, all done in what little of C++ I knew! I promise you it is still in its completed beta form! Even still, it has been very well tested, in the tens of times, or more... works like a charm! I'm practically giving it away for the low low price of $998.42!! ACT NOW!!!