This!

Did exactly the same. Was a KDE user since before 1.0. I think it was KDE Beta 2 where I started. KDE 4.0 changed things for me. Why put up with all the worst aspects of a OSX like UI without the easy hardware configuration. May as well run OSX. SO now all my machines are Macs. I dont think OSX is as good as KDE 3.5 on Linux but its UI is only about as crappy as KDE4.X but I get to plug bits of hardware in without thinking too much about it. A real shame.

Im not a pilot but I would rather hope that when an auto-pilot disengages, it would leave things as they are rather than releasing the thrust!! You cant just let a plane stall because the auto pilot disengages. At the altitude these planes fly at, there isnt much leeway between stall speed and "bits of plane falling off" speed so you REALLY want to know what speed you are travelling at relative to the air around you and dont want that changing without a very good reason.

Given there were storms in the area I guess airspeed would have been jumping all over the place as well as altitude. If the computers couldnt fly it, Im pretty sure the pilots couldnt either because even in clear blue sky you cant tell your air speed from looking out the window.

My understanding is that the pitot tubes icing up is a very bad thing and if you cant get down to warmer air to de-ice them, youre in trouble.

Furthermore, I dont think anyone knows for sure if the messages received from the plane are the cause of the problem or a result of a completely different problem.

I hope they find those black boxes though and they are still in a fit state to clarify what happened to this plane.

Trouble is, for you to determine it is a recurring problem, then it will have to have failed at least twice. Personally I like to try and avoid the second time.

For those of us who have been doing this for years and years, we find that Unix boxes rarely fail for everyone at once unless you are doing the one application per VM cost FAIL. It is usually not acceptale to take down finance because the system is not working for HR. Problems that affect the entire machine are usually easy enough to track down and work around, if not fix.

They refused to fix my 3GS.

I had only the bottom sensor tripped and this was due to having a long call AFTER getting out of a jacuzzi and having a rather sweaty head. Still, it at least gave me the motivation for taking my iphone apart and scratching away at metal bits inside it until it started working again.

This is the one issue that means my next phone will be Android.

Many of my friends don't do anything except change ISP or sometimes place of work. They then send out a mail to people they think might be interested. Some of these friends they perhaps communicate with once a year or so and some of them don't always read all their mails.

Some people have several e-mail addresses and sometimes prefer messages to go to one address and sometimes to the other.

The single point of failure in your system is relying on people caring about what they do half the time.

A Facebook message requires only that a person change their own target e-mail address. Stupid, maybe but simple and effective.

Can't see the issue myself.

In one small way it is. You don't have to manage changes in your friends e-mail addresses if you use Facebook. They do it themselves.

Might do but it wouldn't mean the same thing. "One" used like this is an indefinite pronoun and therefore is similar to the plural "you" or "people in general".

That will be ten dollars please.

Excellent, though somewhat ridiculous, observation. However, it leaves me wondering how many times you reviewed your own post, in order to ensure you weren't making an arse of yourself, only to fail regardless.

If he really did say planes fly through desert sand and used this an argument for the safety of volcanic ash, h's a total idiot and anything else he may have said, or dribbled, can be safely ignored.

Nobody sad anything about banks not using good hardware. Most large multinational organisation have software and data thats been around for at least fifteen years.

I don't think you really understand what Y2K meant.

Even with years of effort, the place I was at on the day still had perl programs rolling the date to 00 and very nearly screwed up large financial portfolios.