I don't know what barges think of 'blue water navy' work; but that's the sort of thing I had in mind: skip classy, skip seriously intimidating looking, stick a bunch of standardized modules together into a big floating airfield, with the aim of providing a lot of flight deck and very, very, deep stores of fuel and munitions for the 'yeah, we want another strike going out every half hour or so until further notice' style of air support/pounding that seems to crop up.

We've probably outsourced worse( at least assuming that any more modernized systems, ECM, radar, etc. are stripped from the hulk first); but yeah, I'm guessing that the breakers offering the best rates don't exactly have security clearances, in addition to their atrocious environmental record, nonexistent occupational safety, and so on.

I don't actually know, and so would be interested to, is there anything considered 'sensitive' about something as old as a (presumably modernized here and there) Forrestal class? I assume that, for economic as well as security reasons, you'd rip out all the modern electronics, CIWS, radar, air-traffic-control systems, etc.; but is the remainder of the ship itself still considered a bit touchy, or old news?

On the plus side, space construction probably doesn't demand a whole lot of really heroic fastener work(but the gloves make 'finger tight' pretty clumsy if you are outside). In absence of gravity, all sorts of comparatively feeble joints become acceptable, so long as you don't damage things trying to put them together("Yeah, I um, stripped the mounting hole for the habitat module...") and the assembly keeps things from floating away.

If anything, I'd imagine that space tools are more likely to emphasize being able to set maximum torque, to keep people from screwing up delicate, lightweight, functionally irreplaceable, parts, rather than emphasizing the sort of power you want when fighting with a rusted assembly or something binding under stress.

I'd be the first to make snide comments about some of the 3d printing hype (some of it, the sort that fails to answer "and we wouldn't do this with machine tools why exactly?", there are a number of genuinely impressive applications, albeit mostly involve additional finishing steps or the really expensive printers); but 'earth orbit' is one of those places where I can imagine being willing to wait for printing rather than ordering from harbor freight and waiting for shipping.

A problem better solved by standardizing fasteners, of course; but if somebody has already opened that can of worms for you, and you need an oddball tool in a space and shipping constrained environment, I can think of worse fates than using a plastic one.

I suspect that a ~60 year old ship is probably a horrible mess in a number of respects, and might well not be the best starting point for the job; but given what we actually send aircraft carriers out to do at present(and to a substantial degree, have since WWII), it would be interesting to know if there's any room for a variant carrier design that emphasizes sheer capacity per unit cost, for all our aerial bombardment of stuff that can't really do much about it needs.

I understand the navy's enthusiasm for aircraft carriers that might not immediately become the involuntary flagships of the submarine navy upon contact with actual opposition; but they sure are expensive for situations where we are just beating on people with minimal retaliatory capabilities.

Isn't 'outage includes other gaming-related servers' ambiguous at best(an attacker hitting XBL and PSN wouldn't need to be a rocket surgeon to add a few other high profile gaming related services to the list, unlike an attacker hitting a single service using some tailored vulnerability) and actively evidence in favor of 'not really DDoS, just all the legitimate paying customers having a lot of new consoles and games and extra free time right now' at worst?

If the problem is under-provisioning, the expected symptoms would be broad-based DDoS-like outages among all popular gaming related infrastructure. If the problem is DDoS attacks, the expected symptoms would be comparatively dramatic havoc on targeted systems, no disruption elsewhere, with the number of targeted systems limited by the attacker's resources(and by how close to failure those target systems were running under holiday load).

That's crazy talk. We'll probably never master the time-machine technology required to go back a couple of decades and obtain samples of such systems for study!

There's probably a substantial amount of decent scrap metal to be had; but a ship of that age(and presumably designed with a particular eye to avoiding things like 'catching fire just because our job is to be covered in jet fuel and munitions near a war zone') is probably one hell of a party in terms of asbestos, lead, PCBs, and who knows what else.

There might be some additional cost because, unlike a lower-profile commercial contract, it will be at least somewhat harder to just beach it on some especially unscenic chunk of Chittagong or Alang and then shrug in innocent ignorance as impoverished locals with hand tools attempt to break the ship before it breaks them. There is a reason why much of the industry is located in places with effectively nonexistent environmental controls and expendable workforces; but it would certainly be embarrassing, and might be illegal for one reason or another, for a particularly iconic ex-military vessel to make an appearance in such a place(based on what happened when the French tried it with the Clemenceau a few years back I would certainly be nervous about trying it).

What do you think inspired Locke to bother writing a manifesto in favor of something else? Had it already been what he wanted, why go to the trouble?

We are obviously going back and forth on a joke here(though there have been a few cases over the years of some poor sucker in a coastal city accidentally roaming onto a cruise ship's $10/min cellular-to-satellite tower and getting a bit of sticker shock, though not often enough to suggest anything other than occasional incompetence); but at least on CDMA(in the broad sense of 'what Verizon and Sprint do', not necessarily the one particular generation that was actually called that) the carrier can initiate a PRL push, silently, at their discretion. Sometimes it's just an update, since towers and signal landscape changes over time, sometimes it's them assisting the feds in moving you over to a stingray...

There may have to be rules; but I am less than convinced as to why those 'rules' include getting to use deauth attacks against other people's Part 15 devices with your own just because their presence annoys you.

They can have whatever rules they want about who connects to their network and what they do on it; but 'there must be rules' is a pretty thin justification for tearing down the usual rules of precedence for part 15 devices and the ISM band. It's also a recipe for setting off a nice little arms race, which is about the last thing you want happening on a slice of spectrum that only remains useful if the devices on it manage to cooperate a bit.

They aren't exactly advertized in the glossy consumer stuff section; but there are cellular providers that cater to embedded sensors, distributed system control, and that sort of thing, who will sell data-only, SMS-only, or data/SMS SIMs designed to be used by assorted sensors and traffic lights and things that need to swap bits but can't justify dedicated hardlines. Getting reasonable prices at quantity 1 might be tricky, though.

The trouble with voice mail is that it painstakingly offers almost all the vices of the other options and few of the virtues. All of the inaccessibility of voice (yeah, you could cut and paste part of a VM into your reply, with some effort; but that would be highly unusual...) without any of the conversational or interactive qualities. All of the one-side's-rambling-monologue of email; but without any of the easy access, search, categorization, exchange of information where formatting or spelling count (Who doesn't love resorting to NATO phonetic alphabet just to get a serial number across a phone line?).

Then include the fact that most systems for retrieving them are so awful that somebody using an email client 25 years ago would assume that you were fucking with them, and it's just icing on the cake.

Hey, at least it won't be a dirty deed done dirt cheap, since it requires a malicious thunderbolt device to carry out...

Sounds like somebody was cargo-culting it on that design decision: systems that are intent on using cryptographic lockdown to resist tampering usually don't store the blessed key in rewriteable memory, for reasons made obvious here. Depending on the hardware, it gets some sort of more aggressively write-once/locked/burned in at the factory and read only/whatever storage, with the data to be cryptographically verified going in the rewritable part. I suppose it still functions as a sort of checksum; but not really a security measure.