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...

Brown was shot because he escalated the situation to a "high risk arrest" by going for the cop's gun. Period.

We have no evidence that Brown was trying to take Wilson's gun, only the word of a cop who's been caught lying before. Cops know that "he was going for my gun" are magic words to justify themselves when they commit murders.

And of course it's irrevelvant whether Brown tried to get control of Wilson's gun earlier in the confrontation. Brown was not trying to do so when he was murdered, he was (according to the majority of witness testimony) attempting to surender.

FM is now an analog/digital mix. They broadcast the analog channel with two digital channels piggybacked on the signal. They don't call it digital, they call it "High Def".

And if they're too broke to pay the fees, they must have trouble selling ads. KSHE has no problem, but they're probably the most popular station in St Louis.

I certainly agree that copyright lengths are way too long, and that the extreme lengths hinder creative expression. I ran across it with Random Scribblings; I had to change Dork Side of the Moon, reducing the lyrics of the two songs to "fair use" snippets, since I can find no way to contact Roger Waters for usage permission. That album is four decades old and should not be under copyright.

You are right, copyright is supposed to encourage creators so their work will belong to everyone after the copyright lapses. How is anyone supposed to get Hendrix or Cocker to perform again?

It does add challenges to creativity.

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.