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Comment Re:Charge for support (Score 4, Interesting) 635

During a grand canyon in 2002 I was chatting with a NPS ranger during a rest and he mentioned that a helicopter evacuation cost $3,500. He said the biggest problem were guys in their twenties who thought they could hike from the south rim to the river and back up in 1 day in July with just a Nalgene bottle of water.

Comment Re:no offense, but what a windows mentality (Score 2, Interesting) 300

infrastructures.org looks interesting, but then I see they mention things like 'NetSaint' which was renamed to be Nagios about 7 years ago, and references to "LISA '98".

Some of this information looks old. Am I right? These days, shouldn't we be thinking more about virtualization and cloud infrastructure?

That said, they do touch upon many good ideas. It seems that many mid-sized shops do follow some similar ideas.

Submission + - Atlantis blasts off on final mission (theregister.co.uk) 1

shuz writes: Space shuttle Atlantis lifted off today on its STS-132 mission to the International Space Station — the final flight for the venerable vehicle.

The mission involves three spacewalks over 12 days, during which the team will replace six batteries on the port truss which store energy from solar panels on that truss, bolt on a spare space-to-ground Ku-band antenna and attach a new tool platform to Canada's Dextre robotic arm.

Comment Re:Car hotspot? (Score 1) 135

I'm on a long drive. The passenger in my car is bored and wants to browse the Internet. There are kids in the back who are bored with their books and want to play on pbskids.org . I'm driving, my wife has a laptop and wants to check the Traffic on Google Maps. We want to stream Pandora.com through our car stereo.

Yes, there are other options for some of these issues but a Mobile Hotspot seems better and cheaper then many of the alternatives.

I'm not sure why Slashdot has an article on this. Mobile 3G Hotspots for cars have been around for a couple years now, but they seem really expensive. Crutchfeld.com had one for about $300.

Comment Re:US is one of the worlds largest exporters (Score 1) 555

That doesn't change the fact that we remain a nation of wasteful asses...

A couple shirts doesn't mean much, in the grand scheme of things - but if 350 million American made a similar decision each and every day, our economy would begin to turn around.

I'm not disputing that. In fact, I think we agree.

I was disputing the parent post's believe that the US doesn't "make anything itself". This is a pessimistic and uneducated belief.

I pointed out that the US *does* make many things, and we still export many, many goods.

Comment US is one of the worlds largest exporters (Score 2, Informative) 555

The rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

The United States still makes many things, and is still one of the worlds largest exporters, with over $1 Trillion in exports in 2009.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres10_e/pr598_e.htm

It appears that cars accounted for 11% of those exports:

http://www.trademap.org/tradestaz/Country_SelProductCountry_TS.aspx

Comment Potty brain... (Score 1) 288

Yes, sometimes I'm immature. But it's fun to find Easter eggs like this:

guest@xkcd:/$ go left
You cannot go left.
guest@xkcd:/$ go right
You cannot go right.
guest@xkcd:/$ go forward
You cannot go forward.

guest@xkcd:/$ kill

Terminator deployed to 1984

guest@xkcd:/$ fuck
I have a headache.
guest@xkcd:/$ help fuck
That would be cheating!

Comment Re:Dang Air Force cutbacks. (Score 1) 77

Here's an article that describes another reason for the cuts. There does seem to be alot of back and forth regarding this system.

http://www.insidegnss.com/node/1806

Although the Federal Register notice also indicates that a decision has not been made on the need for a GPS backup, the announcement apparently brings to a close a seemingly interminable process of preserving and upgrading the terrestrial radionavigation system to provide an enhanced Loran (eLoran) capability that could serve as a multimodal backup to failures or interference to the Global Positioning System.

That process spanned several years, two administrations, and the expenditure of $160 million over the last 10 years to partially modernize a network of Loran stations that now will be phased out. It also flies in the face of an independent assessment team’s unanimous recommendation to establish eLoran as a GPS backup, as well as the efforts of navigation counterparts in other nations, notably the United Kingdom, to implement eLoran.

Comment Re:Dang Air Force cutbacks. (Score 5, Informative) 77

Hey, this administration dismantled LORAN-C, the backup system in case of GPS satellite spoofing or jamming.....

President Obama is influential, but he isn't capable of time travel. President Bush scheduled the dismantling, President Obama continued that recommendation. Both the Coast Guard and the DHS said they didn't need LORAN-C, so why maintain it? It smells like pork.

This dismantling was already scheduled by the previous administration, according to the FA.


The Department of Homeland Security last year started a painful upgrade to LORAN-C, adding modern electronics and solid-state transmitters, despite the fact that in 2008 President George W. Bush signed a law that scheduled the system's dissolution.

http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/Loran/default.htm

The DHS and Coast Guard both said they didn't need LORAN-C. From http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/Loran/default.htm :

The Homeland Security Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2010 allowed for termination of the LORAN-C signal on January 4, 2010, after certification from the Commandant of the Coast Guard that it was not needed for maritime navigation and from the Secretary of DHS that it is not needed as a backup for GPS.

Comment Re:All this cyberwar bullshit (Score 1) 149

I would say a portscan followed by attempts to login to various services with public interfaces without proper credentials not meant to be public could be considered an attack...

Is this an intentional cyberwarfare, or is a botnet simply doing what it's programed to do? In many of these cases, I doubt that the human controller behind the botnet cares about most of this activity. Your target isn't juicy enough, yet.

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