Being that small won't pose a hazard. I can't find a good link to the development of anti-aircraft radar before world war II. But the development team got a message during the first field test from the field engineers: 'It tracked seagulls' or something like that, and it took them a while, trying to figure out what the field engineer meant, it being a top secret project and they thought the FE was being cryptic. No he was being completely open. The nearest link I could find to that story is: http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Lee_Davenport

On another note, I'm not sure why the US would bother shooting a sea to air missile at the drone. Five inch flak shells are cheaper. I think that's one of the standard gun armaments the Navy carries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%22/54_caliber_Mark_45_gun

All the Navy would have to claim is they were test firing the gun, and the drone just got in the way. Radar tracked shells are fairly accurate after the first one has been fired, and they would probably only need two of them, most likely they'd only need one. Much cheaper than expending a missile, and it would probably just hit the budget as: Ordinance expended during training. Just like a 5.56mm round fired out of a rifle.

I had to reread the sentence in the summary, probably because I was just reading up on the Enterprise recently. But the first time I read the entry I thought it meant the longest of any warship, as in the length of the hull. According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_longest_ships and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercarrier (look at the first picture's caption) the USS Enterprise is still the longest warship in US history (and anyone else's).

So who knows maybe that's what they meant by the longest of any warship after putting in the —

If they could Apple should buy a majority share in Microsoft. Then close down the operating system division, killing support for it. Keep the good products, like Office and Visual Studio. Merge the Xbox division into the AppleTV division, and then spin off or close the rest of Microsoft.

While immediately it looks like a bad move because they're sacking the company. Killing the operating system division would leave Apple's competitors in the PC market like Dell and HP out to dry. We've seen from the past that not many people want Linux, which is a shame. And this effectively leaves OSX as the only viable OS in the market. Apple would just have to make sure they have enough parts on hand to build up their production capacity to meet the demand of the PC manufacturers that no-longer have an operating system. With Apple being the only large computer manufacturer around at this time their stock would rise again after the hit of sacking Microsoft.

This would also kill most of the beige box component manufacturing as well, since most custom PCs run windows. And those customers would have to go looking for a PC eventually and the only real game in town would be the small time manufacturers using Linux, or Apple.

If they also make Office and Visual Studio OSX only products that will start moving corporate customers to their Macs, and iPads. BSD is already a server class operating system, and OSX is pretty darn close to it so they could move back into servers at this time, hell they'll have a monopoly on PCs, and Windows Server 20XX wouldn't be on the market, and the current server products wouldn't be supported.

But this move would probably be seen as a monopolistic move and hopefully killed by the SEC. And Microsoft Market Cap is 264 billion and there's no way for Apple to get a majority share in it. But that's a move I wouldn't put past Apple. Actually I wouldn't put it past any board of directors if they could pull it off. They'd dump their Microsoft stock first of course, its only insider trading if you get caught. A few bribes... campaign contributions, will get them past the SEC.

The price on a console game is usually set by the console manufacturers. So the launch of all games is usually the ~$60 (depending on country). As the game gets older it'll start to drop in price. Microsoft and Sony set the launch price to be the same, and they also set the licensing costs to be about the same. I don't know the normal price of licensing for the console but I think its something like $10 per disc sold, because they sell the consoles at a loss and make up their profit on this licensing. And when you use the rule of thumb that the price of a product doubles every time it changes hands then this $10 is a fair amount of the cost of a game, since it has to change hands at least once. The publishers probably sell the game to Walmart and Gamestop at $30 and they sell at $60, and with the publishers giving a third to Microsoft and Sony they aren't taking as much in as you think. The third also matches pretty closely to what Microsoft and Sony take for digital revenue on their consoles, so the $10 is probably pretty close.

Nintendo makes a profit on the hardware so their licensing isn't so extreme and the games for the Wii are usually cheaper. You'll sometimes see games for higher prices then the $60 launch price, but these are usually games with extras: special edition, controller in the box, etc.

An easier way for Sony to do it, is that they use their patching pipeline. A PS3 patch includes a complete copy of the executables (selfs). If people play the old games (unpatched) then they can't play online. If they want to play online then they have to use the new keys. If the PS3 firmware sees that the old key is being used it doesn't allow people to play online or acquire trophies.

This way people can play the old games (unpatched), the online community is 'safe' (for an unspecified value of safe) from cheaters. Sony has already had to sign the selfs from the publishes. They should be able to just resign them and issue a new patch.

I've had the same problem with ADSL in Vancouver. My ISP is Teksavvy (Who're Great) but they resell Telus (Who suck). For three years now I've been unhappy with my 3/1 line. It started out I was able to get 2.5 / 384. But the SN ratio sucked. I complained, Telus tweeked the profile. I kept having my ADSL drop, I complained, Telus blamed my modem. I got a new modem. I kept getting dropped, I complained, Telus blamed that my wiring was wrong. I replaced the wiring from the demark, replaced it with Cat-4 cable, put the filter right at the DMark, filtered the entire house, no improvement. I complained Telus said their was DC on my line. I switched modems back to the original, no improvement. I got myself a new outdoor filter, no improvement. I complained, they said it'd cost $200 an hour for them to send a tech to look at it. My ADSL got worse, went down to 1.5/256 (Which was not good true, all the speed tests I could find were saying 900 down and maybe 105 up). Started the process of switching to Cable, got that in and started to switch my services across, (But it has no static IP address, want it for at least DNS). ADSL completely died, I complained, Telus said their was no problem on their end, must be my end, closed the ticket. Called back on a Monday, hit the roof, told Teksavvy to yell at Telus, they did. Found that the connection on the outside of the remote box was corroded, and fell apart and was in several pieces on the ground. ADSL is now at 3/1, very good SN. But it took three years of Telus saying everything was good on their end, it must be my end, and for the ADSL to completely fail before they would even look at their end and fix the problem. I'm keeping both cable and adsl active, since occasionally one or the other will go down (At least once a week right now, mostly is the cable, but its 5x faster then the ADSL)

With my experience with Canada ADSL I'll have to say if this study is correct then the rest of the world must be terrible, no better then a 300 baud modem to AOL. But I just don't see the complaints coming out of Europe and Asia. Also I use to work for a telecom that produced IPDSLAMS (Not where I worked but another division) and they were telling everyone how they were happy to be rolling out 58 mbps ADSL to Japan, that was 6-7 years ago. I have 3 mbps ADSL now and 15 mbps cable (When everyone is asleep and hopefully my house is the only place with power). There's no way that North America is better then the rest of the world.