Mr. Elm:

That's a good point about the rifling. It appears that the Defcon fellows are using flare launchers, which, anecdotally, are described as smoothbore.

I dunno why flare launchers aren't rifled. Maybe the need for accuracy in shooting a flare is low: if it goes UP, instead of sideways, it's probably considered a success. The energy expended on making it spin could arguably be better spent on making it fly.

At least Slashdot has the journalistic ethics to post the follow-up. Good for them. I note that Network World is doing the same.

Yes, I said "journalistic" in the same sentence as "Slashdot." It's important.

They will simply drop you as a client if you take them to court.

That's really interesting, thanks. The main dictionary (oed.com) is $295/year. I didn't know they had a concise one for free.

And it really is concise. One (really good) definition. Not 37 links, like the Google dictionary.

Not that there's anything wrong with 37 links. But sometimes I just want to want to know the definition of the word.

I thought the same thing. Nowhere in the summary does it say that the patient is deceased.

May I suggest a clarification?

The slicing the brain of the famous amnesic patient H.M. WHO IS FRICKIN' DEAD into giant histological sections...

Who rated this a troll? It's funny.

The link doesn't work. On the other hand, there's a very nice 404 page. It's funny, friendly, and attempts to be informative.

Good error handling is something many of us don't always do well.

Water needs? A river runs through downtown.

Plus, as the owner of a house with a leaky roof and a lawn that needs mowing, I say FUCK the plants.

A couple of years ago Burlington, VT received 25.7 inches (0.65 m) of snow in 24 hours. I don't know what the density of snow is (I imagine it varies wildly), but that seems like a lot of weight.

OK, maybe the warm air can support that... but if that were the case, then on days when there wasn't 89 grillion kg of snow on top, there would be some pretty huge upward forces on the tent-pegs.

OK, well, then, there are vents, to let our some of the hot air. But then you waste all that energy heating air that you're venting.

But maybe it all works out somehow.

Wait! I retract my earlier assertion.

According to this article (cited elsewhere in this thread by acb) about French President Mitterand, PM Thatcher successfully pressured the French to reveal the "codes to make the Exocets deaf and blind" after the Sheffield was sunk.

Very interesting.

Perhaps you're referring to the French-made Exocet missiles, launched from the Argentine Super Etendard planes? The 20 dead sailors on HMS Sheffield, sunk by an Exocet, would disagree.

I dunno about other places. But a pretty good chunk of downtown Charlottesville, Virginia is covered by free municipal wifi, and it works OK. Not everywhere, and no, you can't "seamlessly roam from one hotspot to another," as they say.

But so what? The signal is reasonably reliable where I've tried it, on and near the downtown pedestrian mall, and the throughput is significantly better than that provided by the coffee shop or the library, even with the trees in full radiation-absorptive leafy-mode.

Maybe "municipal wireless" means something more ambitious, like everybody who lives downtown gets a big honking signal even in their basement, and I don't think that's what they're trying to do here. But it sure is useful to be able to assume that, no matter where you get your latte, or slice, or dumpling, you'll be able to get some work done.

That doesn't sound "dead" to me.

I got the same results. That is: asking for asdrfkjgshklghrfgserg.com got me the stupid Comcast "Maybe you're looking for douchebags in Singapore" page.

That's a nice thought, and I agree. But after you get through the 18 layers of phone menus... who are you going to talk to? The billing clerk? The tech support person? I guarantee you that their response will be: "Please unplug your cable modem and wait sixty seconds..."

"Caller is ranting about broken DNS functionality" is NOT on their script.

And anyway it's (888) COMCAST (not 800-). I have it memorized from all the service outages we get around here.