I was answering why they don't just invalidate the patents and copy a modern CPU, and the answer is that the patents aren't the reason they're hard to copy. Intel (and others) don't patent their most critical secrets.

I completely agree they have the technology to build older designs, which is just fine. They can then decide whether the investment to upgrade is worth it to them or not.

Plus, they don't have to compete outside of Russia and other ITAR countries.

They only have to be more trustworthy than what can be imported, and "good enough" for the job at hand.

Except that a modern CPU is too difficult to manufacture. Copying the transistors in a CAD program is the easy part, building it with a usable yield is the hard part.

The chance is the same AFR of the rest of the product, but yes, it's very small.

Your worst case is that you cycle your SSD to 100% of its capability (which basically no user does anyway) inside a freezer, then put it on your dashboard as you park your black-on-black sports car in death valley for a 6 month hiking trip.

If you're not doing all 3 of those things simultaneously I wouldn't worry.

one hole per package of NAND will be sufficient

I kept wondering what geologic processes could produce such an even change in elevation.

It (along with eastern Colorado and much of the other great plains states/provinces) is an old sea bed, the floor of the central inland waterway in the mid/late Cretaceous. Flat from millions of years of sediments, tilted slightly from being pushed up as the continent drifts westward. (Dramatically so at the Rockies). The foothills of the Colorado Rockies do not "end just short of the border" at least not anywhere near I-70; it's pretty much flat east of Limon.

Florida probably is flatter, but the trees hide it. Kansas is mostly grassland (well, where it's not farms), so you have longer sight lines.

From June 2013, Job Networking Site LinkedIn Filled With Secret NSA Program Names.

Telenet was a dial-up access packet-switched network (think X.25) back before internet access was a common thing, similar to rival company Tymnet. I spent many, many hours on Telenet back in the day, logged into BIX.

You probably meant telnet, the *nix app which has been around even longer. When internet access became publicly available, I'd telnet into BIX (while it lasted, sigh).

Is a passing comet.

fail to register all the related internet domains. Like, for instance carlyfiorna.org?

Bonus: Demon Sheep!

I guess it's time we forbid anyone under 25 to drive a car,

Car rental companies do exactly that.

Just because you were lucky enough to have hyperdeveloped frontal lobes at age 10 doesn't mean that most, or even on average, people do. Apparently you haven't quite reached the stage of not overgeneralizing from personal anecdote.

Heck, if IFR (I Follow Roads) is good enough for me, it should be good enough for anyone, right?

(One thing that struck me about several of the old Soviet Aeroflot planes I saw -- and flew on -- in Russia was the bomber-like downward looking windows in the cockpit. I don't know if that reflected the aircraft's original bomber roots or the fact that sometimes they did follow roads. My flight to Krasnoyarsk was diverted because of fog, for example. What, no autoland?)

Over and above all that, there are plenty of other components which relate to Air Traffic Control system, such as various navaids (VORs and such, although they're slowly losing favor to GPS), ATIS and D-ATIS info updates, ACARS messaging, METAR info, etc. Again, these may not be under the control of the current new system, but they should certainly be considered in any design for the future.

First, it has to get the data -- which covers everything from radar skin-paints if the aircraft transponder isn't operating, to unpacking the data that that transponder is sending (which could include anything from a simple 4-digit number to altitude, airspeed, heading, etc, etc.). Oh, and it has to raise appropriate alerts if that 4-digit number happens to be one of several special codes (indicating anything from voice-radio outage to a hijacking). There are plenty of other sources these days of location data too, (aircraft position/speed info relayed via satellite, for example) I don't know how many are integrated into this new system.

It has to present subsets of that data to particular controllers' displays, not every controller sees everything, even in a given range. That would be crazy-making. And controllers have to be able to hand off flights from one to another, so there's the whole UI, authentication, confirmation, etc, etc, there.

Naturally everything has to be recorded and logged, and queryable.

It has to project flight paths, and then analyze all that for possible intersections and raise appropriate warnings.

It also needs to be aware of airspace limitations -- which are frequently updated -- so that information can be displayed to controllers too. So there's another UI, to input those changes, along with the authorization, authentication, etc for that. Ditto with severe weather -- so it needs input from weather radars, etc.

It has to be able to cope with sudden changes to the system, like if an airport or ATC center suddenly drops out for some reason. (Weather, power failure, earthquake, terrorist, whatever.)

The distributed nodes in the system (airports and flight control centers) have to be able to communicate with each other with minimal latency and despite node failures, cable cuts, microwave tower outages, etc, etc.

The finished system has to be deployed across hundreds (thousands?) of flight centers and airports big and small (basically, almost anyplace with a tower) across the country in a way that it all works with the in-place systems everywhere else. There has to be room in those airports and flight control centers (most flight control centers are not in airports, BTW, there's no need for them to be. The controllers aren't looking out the windows. Airport ground control (the guys controlling aircraft taxiing) and approach/departure control is.)

No, this is not just a souped-up iPhone track-your-flight app. It's something responsible for the lives of millions of air travellers (not to mention air cargo flights) a year.

All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

Sure it does. (Not that one small pilot project solves the problem, I mean if the tech is scaled up.) It's carbon-neutral just like biofuels are, it does not add any net CO2 to the atmosphere: it only puts in what it took out to make the fuel in the first place. (I suppose your could even use it to remove CO2, to get us back to 350ppm via carbon sequestration -- make up a bunch of "blue crude" and then stick it underground, running an oil well in reverse.) The problem with greenhouse gas emissions is fossil carbon, which puts in carbon that was captured millions of years ago.