Why does almost everyone seem to assume that once the ship is launched the inhabitants won't be maintaining, repairing and improving it along the way? I've never understood that.

No, but just because it won't bankrupt him doesn't mean that he wants the annoyance of buying, setting up and learning a new (and more expensive) system that may well not be as reliable as the old one. My dad bought one of the first consumer-level Lowrance fish finders on the market. He used it until he couldn't fish any more, even though there were "better" models on the market. Why buy a new one when that one did exactly what he wanted exactly the way he was used to it?

You don't support end users, do you?

OpenOffice/LibreOffice may have only 80 percent of the features of MS office, but since neither I nor anyone that I have worked with over the last decade use more than perhaps 15 percent of those features that's not really much of an issue to me. To be truthful, MS Office 4.3 was overkill for probably 90 percent of end users. I can't foresee ever creating a spreadsheet doing anything more complex than pull numbers out of a SQL database and make a pivot table with them, and the free versions do that just fine. Sure, there will be edge-case users who do stupidly complex things with it (which generally would be much more appropriately done with some other tool), and for them buy a full MS Office license. For the rest of your enterprise, why bother?

The problem is that reliability has always been considered as paramount in these devices, for very good reasons, and inserting a security layer in the stack increase the likelihood of problems and increases their complexity. There are satellite phones out there which have been in almost continuous use for 15 years, good luck flashing that firmware to handle encryption or to obfuscate that hard-coded password. For most satellite communications users I don't foresee the situation changing any time soon. They guy running a gold dredge in the upper Amazon isn't going to want to cough up for a new phone when his current one has been working fine for the last decade, nor is the tribal chief in New Guinea or the crab boat captain in the the Bering Straight. What they have works, and they don't give a shit whether the phone can be hacked as long as it works when they really need it. The commodities speculator in his Lear jet might be concerned, let him pay for the system upgrades, but leave the rest of the system backwards compatible for those people who need reliability overall.

A better measure is to pick a few specific items that you personally consume on a regular basis and track those. When we lived in Peru we watched the price of rice, tea, a specific brand of tennis shoes that Rosa liked, bus fare, and a quarter of 'pollo a la brasa' (roast chicken) to track the actual value of the Inti over time.

Then I misunderstood your previous post, which I took to mean that there wasn't enough to bother with. It would be interesting to me to see an estimate of how much it would cost to make an exhaust manifold of thermocouple material, and what the estimated output would be. With hybrid vehicles like the Prius, which just uses the IC engine to charge the batteries that actually propel it, it might well be worth it.

There's a lot of energy available from an IC engine. If you doubt me let your car run for anything more than two minutes and then touch the exhaust manifold. Bumped one with my arm when I was in high school and it took twelve years for the scar to fade.

Actually I'm in Seattle rather than California, grew up in redneckland in northern Michigan. Those things you call 'Palmetto bugs'? Those are a species of tropical cockroach. I remember stomping on one, grinding my shoe to make sure it was dead, picking up my foot, and watching it run away. Vile things.

Lived in the sweltering armpit that is Florida for a decade one year. Never again will I step out of the airport at Miami. Haven't been to Texas in two decades, but nothing that I hear from anyone living in the area makes me think that it has gotten any cooler, any less humid, or that mountains have suddenly appeared in the state. And I really don't care if there is some tiny corner of either of the Carolinas that has managed to acquire a population with an average IQ higher than the ambient room temperature, you're still in a state only slightly less backward than Louisiana or Pakistan.

New year's eve 2004 was the first time that Cassini imaged Iapetus. At least that was how I read the sentence.

Texas/Florida - You have rednecks and six inch long cockroaches that fly. Hot and humid and depressingly flat. No.

North Carolina - Hot/humid alternates with cold/humid, in an area overrun with rednecks and completely lacking in decent food (except barbeque). No.

Montana - Constant wind, two meters of snow, more rednecks, jello is considered a salad. No.

Detroit - All of the above disadvantages (except the roaches don't fly), plus you're in Detroit. No fucking way in hell No.

Many of his suckers, I mean customers, are US citizens/residents and the transactions were initiated from their US-located computers. AC left out Fraud.

My mother was a legal secretary for 13 years, I've worked with cops in several jobs over the years, several of my in-laws are/were teachers. IOW, no hard data but plenty of personal experience.

Why not? I certainly wished death and dismemberment on them then, when I was the victim. Its fuckheads like them that join the Marines and commit atrocities, then get out and become abusive cops and abusive spouses/parents.