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Why look for a destroyed death machine, just why? Surely there must be far more interesting and intellectually challenging stuff to search, like the lost civilisation of Atlantis supposedly an ice age civilisation wiped out by major global warming at the end of the last ice age. At least the water will be shallower on a couple of hundred metres or though there will be many metres of mud to deal with and the scattering from the tidal surf zone sure wont help matters much. Much more cross discipline and fun and a lot more people could play and discover.

A free market is a market where you take what you want for free, literally and literal definition. So the freest market is living as a nomad in the wild as stone age man, watch out for the real predators because running around completely free means not being able to rely on anyone else when it comes to tackling that pride of lions or that pack of wolves or tiny, tiny critters that infect you body and that you would not be able to survive with out any outside cooperative assistance. Freedom can not be shared, as sharing logically places limits on freedom of actions.

The problem is M$ is not offering the options customers want, either OSX or preferably Android. Offering options is pretty pointless if the options you offer and not the ones the customers want regardless of how many options you offer.

When M$ were being dicks with ribbons and windows 8, they completely ignored the idea, that hey, pissing off customers in one market segment will likely negatively impact those customer choices in other market segments. So how many people pissed off by ribbons and touch feely desktops choose to punish M$ by choosing any phone, absolutely phone other than an M$ one and for how many years will those customers hold a grudge. Seriously arrogantly pissing of customers can get them to hold a grudge not just a several years but the rest of their lives, you play you pay and the Ballmer legacy will hang around for a long time to come.

Because buying at Walmart, buying cheap is rarely ever buying smart. Crappy products, shit wages and conditions for fellow members of your community, closing down of better local businesses often with better products. So yeah buying at Walmart is like 'investing' in lottery tickets and hoping for something better no matter how often it fails.

The real question is, do the Australian and New Zealand governments have a choice. The US is positioning US marines in Australia, fully armed and munitioned (so called firing range practice), as a measure against China, around 7500 km away. Now seriously so far away from China and like only a couple of thousand against the whole Chinese army. Hmm, to me it sounds like more the number you would need to take over and occupy the Australian government parliament should they disobey. For how long did the US government punish New Zealand when the New Zealand government banned US military ships from entering if they would not declare whether or not they had nuclear weapons on board, for how many decades did this go on.

You seriously think Australia politicians want to sign the Trans Pacific Partnership and abandon their constitution to US corporate dictates and as a consequence lose any chance of ever being elected again but if they are corrupt enough they will and the consequences for US Australia relations will be awful.

Point the finger at Australia and New Zealand is like blaming the hostage for being kidnapped. The problem here is lazy, ignorant, stupid Americans who let their government run riot across the rest of the globe. You seriously, I mean seriously, think that those are the real choices of the Australian and New Zealand governments or just the same choices any other hostage would make.

There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.

"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"

"Well," he'd begin.

"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."

You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.

His family has requested that donations be made in his memory to one of the following charities

Everychild Foundation http://everychildfoundation.or...
P.O. Box 1808
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Foundation http://www.copdfoundation.org/
20 F Street NW, Suite 200-A
Washington, D.C. 20001

Beit T’Shuvah Treatment Center http://www.beittshuvah.org/tre...
8831 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Bay-Nimoy Early Childhood Center at Temple Israel of Hollywood http://www.tiohnurseryschool.o...
7300 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Source: http://www.startrek.com/articl...

How it was initially deployed is known only to its makers, but Stuxnet was designed to enter an isolated facility on a USB drive. Once on the LAN it would propagate to other computers, and potentially to other networks via an infected laptop, which is how it ended upon the Internet.

You can use your imagination as to how they got the USB into the target facility. It might have been as simple as dropping the USB stick in the parking lot of a vendor, but given the resources needed to create the worm itself you can't rule out some kind of black bag job or human asset.

I really don't see that as a the most vulnerable point. Not by a long shot. Tapping a digital fiber link wouldn't be like US submarines tapping Soviet analog telephone cables. The data on the link can be encrypted and authenticated at either end such that it's not really practical to modify or impersonate without the kind of assets in the organization that would make an inside job a lot simpler.

The real problem is human factors. Air-gapping sensitive systems is a sound idea in principle but in practice it often fails because it's too cumbersome for users who then undermine the system. And Stuxnet showed that it's possible for a sufficiently advanced opponent to target systems of the far side of an air gap.

So the problem is with the notion that separate parallel systems separated from the outside world are a "simple" solution. They're a potential solution, but if you want to have confidence in that solution there's a lot of work analyzing and policing the behavior of the people who use, maintain, and produce the equipment.

Meh... fuck it. Just give me the huge-ass launch canon reigning boulders down across planet earth. That'd be cool.

Every technology initially attracts attention for how it can be abused. With pagers it was drug dealers; with the internet it was child pr0n; with drones it's terrorists/pervy neighbors/drug traffickers/whatever. With bitcoin, it's black markets.

So I'd caution against being close-minded up front. (It's not as if you're contributing anything novel to the conversation by doing so... somebody parrots this talking point on every bitcoin thread.) We have yet to see how bitcoin will play out in the real world. Personally, while I don't think it's a great investment vehicle and it's a dubious means of wealth storage, it does look useful for wealth transfer.

With Credit Cards, you have a few central banks skimming a huge amount of profit from the bulk of commercial activity, basically inflating costs for all of society. With cash, the government (at taxpayer expense) has to continually print more while exchanging/destroying old notes and simultaneously fighting off counterfeiters. Maybe bitcoin can reduce these overhead costs to society while simultaneously making it easy to conduct a long-distance economic transaction.

Wow, way to not link to a study, but rather a Smithsonian blog talking about a Wordpress blog talking about a study. You clearly love your primary sources!

FYI, the study is just one of many. The study itself cites others, including:

20,000 birds/yr (Sovacool, 2012)
10,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2001 and Manville, 2005)
20,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2005)
440,000 (Manville, 2009)
573,000 (Smallwood, 2013).

The latter two include lattice towers, which are largely being decommissioned as unsafe to birds.

But hey, having varied numbers clearly means that if you can find a blog linking to another blog linking to a study that shows high numbers (among many different studies), then clearly the GP is "plain wrong", right?

And yes, even if we go with your choice study's mean of 234,012 annual bird deaths, that's still orders of magnitude less than many other types of human activities.

I have serious fears that we're facing an unduly high risk of a major wind spill here. :(

Hmmm. While your explanation is unquestionably true, I don't think you quite understood what the poster was asking. His question is, I think, about the sharp shadows behind ridges on the surface, not the shadow of the vehicle itself.

I think his problem is an implicit assumption that if you drew a line from the center of the sun through the spacecraft, it would intersect the surface at a right angle. In that case you wouldn't expect cracks on the surface to display in such relief. However I believe that assumption is faulty, and that the rays of the sun intersect the surface at a considerable angle.

This is not unlike seeing the shadow of a plane you are riding in on the surface of the Earth. Unless you are in the tropics, that shadow won't be directly beneath you. It will be off to one side. It will also be distorted as it is spread out across the non-perpendicular surface, but you won't necessarily notice that because of foreshortening.

When it comes to major corporations. The CEO is there as an ideas person, there are a range of managers to manage the company. Sure American egoistic pseudo celebrity worship tries to create the illusion that it is all the CEO who is to be credited with everything but the reality is, beyond new ideas, revision of existing ones, setting actual directions for the company, the CEO role is no where near a large as claimed. Of course one without ideas and the ability to set new courses to follow is pretty much useless and just occupying a space whilst trying to take credit for every one else's efforts. A good CEO only really needs to be there a few days of every week, needs to effectively delegate and should be spending more time thinking about the future of the company than wastefully spending time bureaucratically micro-managing it (because that is actually all they are good at). Spending a lot of time making sure they have very little to do is part of their function, the more than do as a manager, the less they do as the Chief Executive Officer and that is a straight up fact.