From Wikipedia again:

"...it happened in 2000 once the U.S. military developed a new system that provides the ability to deny GPS (and other navigation services) to hostile forces in a specific area of crisis without affecting the rest of the world or its own military systems."

Perhaps the US is using such a system actively in the Ukraine region.

It is called selective availability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability#Selective_availability My undergraduate thesis involved how to couple intertial senors using a Kalman filter to compensate for SA in GPS signals. Two years after my project concluded, the US disabled SA in GPS. I doubt that this recent "outage" was related to similar SA in GLONASS. Rather, perhaps it was indeed an encrypted transmission, or was based on a second independent synchronization signal only available to military assets used to put the scrambled transmissions back in the right order.

Don't you mean qubit optimistic?

Since you can pretty much hit a landmine by walking into a random patch of Iraqi desert and throwing a rock, I don't find it surprising that any land mine sensing divining rod would have at least some random chance of success. I think that past research has shown that any tool that is picking arbitrary points on a grid will find positive results for "hidden" items (explosive or not) with a frequency of occurrence that matches the normal distribution. I encourage you to read The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow for a better description than I can give.

I seem to remember in the promotional materials for the NES game Zanac (by FCI) that the game was supposed to get dynamically harder the better you played. When I was playing, I specifically remember this being the case, and that I enjoyed the game more as a result. I used to be able to play straight through to the 10th (out of 13) levels without dying once, and then I would die multiple times in a row. As if sensing my desparation the game would scale back the number of baddies it was throwing at me, and then I could regain my footing, collect some powerups and move on. Then the game would throw more and more at me until I got to the unholy nightmare 13th level.

Time to go dust this game off on the Wii...

Well, the Microsoft Tag concept should be used for SOMETHING, so why not this?

Can I get this Windows 9 you speak of? I'd love to test if my HP Laserjet 4M will work with it.

So you mean less people percentage wise and population wise were watching the moon landing than the Jacko funeral? So sad...

This is not unique to Microsoft products. Databases have been doing this for a long time. Oracle Database has options for RAW devices and disk access, where redundancy is handled in the application layer by throwing more disks at the problem. You can also stack your layers of redundancy by using Oracle automated storage management to have multiple logical disks while at the same time using an array controller to provide a level of RAID redundancy at the physical layer.

And a point about JBOD being useful for Exchange. In most Exchange environments I have worked with, replication happens at the appication layer, with huge portions of the data store being replicated amongst members of the Exchange Cluster, each with their own copy of the data. While expensive RAID/physical redundancy is a good idea, it is not critical as exact copies of the data store are available elsewhere in the cluster, and mailboxes can be failed over to those members.

And for the people that want a full RDBMS or SQL Server under the hood of Exchange - this is primarily a performance concern. Exchange access to data stores has such a unique profile that ca be modeled to show specific performance profiles that would benefit from a customized data access layer, overall Exchange performance would be hampered by the inclusion of an RDBMS that was designed to respond to a multitude of performance profiles. When you have the luxury of understanding how your application accesses data, it is best to choose (or develop) the data storage subsystem that will reap you the best performance. Here is where I believe Microsoft has the right approach.

<JAY>
I am the Command Line Interface Terrorism Master!!!
</JAY>

Any reason you want to go down the (multi)path of OCFS for a 3-node Oracle RAC? Why not just use RAW shared disks? You aren't going to see the difference in a virualization environment anyhow - your disk bottleneck will be the shared access in the Virtual disk controller. OCFS is really only useful when using real HBA's for FibreChannel or iSCSI.

And don't forget to select "Enterprise Edition" when doing your Oracle install. Standard has a 2-node limit.

<sarcasm>

Isn't the Japanese space elevator supposed to fix this problem?

</sarcasm>

Unless the asteroid in question is small enough that it falls into the "OMFG HOW DID WE MISS THAT?!?! WE'RE DOOMED!!!" category. I can have a small asteroid knocking on our doorstep (a few hundred thousand kilometers, astronomically speaking) and still not be able to see it with the vast majority of instrumentation in our arsenal today.

Obviously to document anything related to Cost of Living Adjustments? Important in today's economy, no?

Or are you aware of a different type of cola?