We've explored more of this rock than any other. That's the "mostly".

Finding the lost airliner isn't a matter of lack of exploration. That is, we can't recheck an entire ocean in a short period to see if the airliner is there now. I believe that part of the ocean was already mapped, so it has already been "explored".

Your airplane argument would be like saying you haven't explored your back yard, if someone tossed a beer can over the fence yesterday, and you didn't know about it.

BTW, I tossed a beer can over your fence yesterday, you should go clean it up, your yard is a mess.

Dude, it's from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I picked it on purpose, just to show that I wasn't totally serious. Damn, you'd think an obvious landmark from an extremely popular science fiction movie would be a hint to some people.

I'm not saying that it's an alien spacecraft. What I'm saying is, we wouldn't necessarily know if we saw one. Hell, people find all kinds of "lost" things in their own back yards. In the last year, someone found a viking burial site. Someone else literally found buried gold. Would you know if there was an ancient spacecraft buried 20 feet under your house?

I wasn't even trying to propose that alien spacecraft do have rock shielding. What I'm saying is there's a lot we *don't* know. Short of seeing a spacecraft that looks like a spacecraft as we'd expect it, we could easily overlook it.

I did say it was poorly constructed statistics. :) I know I'm not immortal, but it looks good on paper.

Everywhere is relative. There are an estimated 5 trillion habitable planets in the known universe. We've mostly explored one. On our closest neighbors, we've done roughly the equivalent of checking your back yard and saying "There are no whales". Well, unless you happen to have whales in your yard, then we'll say "... no elephants". :)

If there is/was life on other planets, it is very likely not to be in our solar system. Even if there was an species that achieved space travel, and spent millions of years settling on millions of planets, it's *still* not very likely they'd be found on one in our solar system.

Even if we found one, would we know what we're looking at? Since rock seems to be pretty abundant in the tiny speck of space that we've explored, a sand and rock covered hull of a spacecraft would be reasonable. That would help protect from micro-meteors and other hazards. If one crashed on a neighboring planet even 10,000 years ago, would just look like rock. Heck, if one crashed on Earth, it would still look like a rock.

Is this space craft remains, or a natural formation?

No, I don't believe it's a crashed spaceship. It's just a rock. But since we don't exactly do thorough core samples on every large rock on the planet (and under the surface), we wouldn't know if it was.

Careful, that's my argument for immorality. :)

A person can die in just a second. I've been alive for over 1.3 billion seconds.

So far, it's 0 in 1.3 billion. With my own (poorly constructed) personal statistics, the chances of dying are very very slim.

Plane crashes? 0 in 1.3 billion.
Shootings? 0 in 1.3 billion.
Lethal virus? 0 in 1.3 billion
Extraterrestrial object impact? 0 in 1.3 billion
Potentially lethal natural disaster? 1 in 654 million.

Then there are car accidents have been 1 in 218 million.

I'd expect I'm probably safe for the next 1.3 billion seconds. Unless, an asteroid carrying a lethal virus hits an airplane I'm flying in, which then crashes into a highway during an earthquake.

Hey, it could happen. I'll worry more about what I'm having for dinner.

The same fears started when people first started with saying that AIs could someday become sentient. Why wouldn't they want to kill us? Why would they? The same with aliens coming to us wanting to help or exterminate us. We can thing they'll act any way we can imagine, and with as many possible outcomes mentioned, one might be right.

To the best of my knowledge, no program has become self aware. And no martians have seen our probes as a hostile invasion. It makes for (sometimes) good fiction though.

They wanted bragging rights to be the early adopters. I was interested enough to say "I'll get them when the price is about $50 to $100."

There's one up for bidding on eBay, currently at $105.50. I didn't put my bid in, because that's beyond what I'm willing to pay for a toy that I'll stop using in a few days. I'll check back in a year, and see what's selling at $50.

2 dr coupe, 4 dr sedan, 2 dr convertible, 4 dr standard sportwagon, 4 dr custom sportwagon?

What percentage of the total mass has already rusted off?

So close, but instead of a poster, it's a 140 character scribble on the bathroom wall of the Internet, and childish clips of kids kicking each other in their nuts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4jrMwvZ2A

Much like a creative decision making meeting at SyFy, any stupid idea will be made.

Shark Nebula!

So I'm not the only one who read that as the basis for a bad made-for-SyFy movie.

Plucky protagonist: Oh no, the Starivore is coming to eat our sun!

Glasses wearing scientist: Yes Plucky, and there's nothing we can do about it!

Ribbon laden general: We'll nuke it!

Plucky protagonist: But the nuclear detonation would only make it stronger.

Glasses wearing scientist: You have a point there Plucky, I'm glad you figured that out before we made a terrible mistake.

Ribbon laden general: Too late, the missiles have already launched, there's nothing we can do.

Glasses wearing scientist: There's only one thing we can do, stop it with a black hole!

[all somewhat technical people viewing it]: shit, I should have known better than to watch more SyFy channel crap.

Shit, I really shouldn't have said anything. Now they'll really make that movie. Right after Sharkgle.

I thought that was in the in-game trolls. :)

Ya, I doubt it would really cause too many cancellations, but it's still within the realm of possibilities. I've seen people cancel service over a couple hours of downtime, for things that cost pennies a day. Like one hour down, on a $25/yr subscription to a porn site.

On the network/systems part, I really meant to say it as the department, not as the individual. It's not unheard of to call in contractors, especially where it was an ongoing thing. Not all network and systems people are salary either. Some don't have any. I have had contract gigs to try to figure out why a network was misbehaving. Even when it turns out to be the upstream provider, they still have to pay me for showing up.

That's you and me. I have something somewhat legitimate in there. I'm also sure you're aware that domain registrar information is rarely changed in a timely fashion, even though they're sending out the yearly reminders to make sure your information is right.

The whole registrar proxy thing is easy money for them. As I recall, they have verbage on the page that strongly recommends using it, implying it's for the safety of your domain.

I've frequently seen that the registration itself is handled by an accounting department, not by the IT department. When I was looking at their pages, it looked like they don't have an in-house IT department. It's probably a contracted web designer who maintains the page, and someone in-house (like accounting) manages the domain. By managed, I mean "pays the bill when it comes up for renewal".

Since it's frequently managed someone who will never check it, it's actually better to let the proxy service handle the contacts. They will (hopefully) update their billing info if there is a change, so the service knows who to send contacts to.

When you blocked McDonalds by flooding all the highways with a 12" deep layer of molasses, it would probably be considered equally damaging.

There is a discernible monetary loss. How much was lost in revenue where customers could not pay for services? How much was lost from cancellation of services because of the outage? How much was spent for network and systems administrators to work on it, beyond their normal workload?

And then ... How much was lost by other companies impacted by degraded network capacity due to the network traffic?

I'm sure those numbers were easily in the millions. Those won't be the all inclusive questions either. I'm afraid to even ponder how big the final figure will become. It could involve seemingly unrelated companies, who lost sales because their VoIP traffic was on one of the over-utilized circuits.