Well the vatican is looking into possibility of alien life. The batting average of the the Vatican is 0 for 1000's. They have been wrong on every possible astronomical observation for at least the last 500+ years. Why should we even care about this? The late Carl Sagan has vastly more competent in this than the Vatican (who I think still thinks the Earth is flat).

This idea has little or nothing to do with religion other it would make people with closed minds think that it may be possible. Rather than saying if the Pope doesn't think they exist why should I? In this day and age people (or at least average mentality) should be thinking for themselves rather than having some outdated religion thinking for them.

The rift valley (where the event might occur) has been a hot bed for years with volcanic activity.
This is nothing new. A perspective that could come into play is the saudi arabia may move and the oil under it may either be lost and or relocated into a new area (under a mountain range?) This would hurt the Muslims badly as they are depending on OIL and if that is gone nobody will care too much about the area. What might prove interesting if the area in Africa breaks off will it head north to India or go south to somewhere in the indian Ocean.

Seems like the 2012 people were off a few years.

Wait you are bringing truth to the discussion stop the presses ??

This goes back a ways (20+ years) but back then it was not uncommon for a head hunter to gather a pile of resumes and send them to the client. They would do so and not even ask if they could submit your resume. To cut to the chase I found out about it and called the head hunter and fired him on the spot. Another headhunter lined up an interview for me on the West coast without asking me. He called me up and told me that I had an interview set up and I was to be there like 5 days from today. I asked the head hunter OK when do I get the airline ticket and the hotel reservations. He told me that I was on my own. I told him he was fired. A few weeks later another head hunter asked if he could submit my resume to the same west coast company and I said *ONLY* if they would pay expenses. He submitted my resume and they sent me the ticket and a hotel reservation #. I went out there (side story deleted) and found out it was for a "top Secret" government installation. It was in the middle of the *** **** desert. After the interview I got the offer and told them I wasn't interested in working in that type of environment. I said if they had disclosed the basic information that I probably would not have went there for the interview. They told me that they had informed the head hunter and he did not tell me. I fired the head hunter immediately.

Not sure if I want any satellite talking to my underwear!

Well the government's spending $12,000 on a toilet set reflects them up the astronauts' a**. Maybe we can get them to power the next nuclear site that runs out of uranium?

I was an applications programmer from the late 60's to the middle 70's when I moved on to a life of Systems Programming.

I have been there trying to debug mish mosh programs like the ones talked about in the article. They are NOT fun to debug in fact they were my worst nightmare. I was a typical programmer and I was called in in the middle of the night to try and fix these "bastards". Even with decent comments trying to figure out how you got there is often not easy. The dump you have is a point in time failure and just trying to figure out where in the program it failed is at times iffy. After complaining for years about "sphegetti" code management decided that structured programming was the way to go. Nice but it took too much time and deadlines went out the window. Then they came up with another name (long time forgotten) and it was semi workable and reasonably easy to code. We started to implement it and I will admit it was reasonably easy to debug and much more it was easy to figure out how you got there with a minimum of fuss. About that time I left programming for the wonderful world of systems and never looked back.

When I coded I used the philosophy of minimum branching and lots of comments. When somebody had to debug my code it was easily done and I got a few thanks along the way.

One time I coded up a fix for an IBM part of the OS and it took 1/50th the amount of time to run as the IBM version. I sent in the source for my fix and it was completely ignored and as of today 40 years later the program (or variation of it) is still running on the latest Z/os systems IBM is offering.

Well lets see now how many white collar types have actually gone to jail (outside of club fed)?
That is why people do it as if they get caught there is no real danger that they would actually go to a real jail.

I know it is hard to decide how much time each white criminal should do. I do not have answers just put them in a regular jail and it would scare the heck out of any potential felons.

If the OS is so poor to prevent people from reading "privileged" information that is the flaw to begin with. The operating systems I am familiar with allow anyone to read "common information" If the information is private it will only allow a very small subset to do so and you must jump through hoops to get there(and be authorized to jump through those hoops). The operating system (combined with hardware) should isolate information so much that it is essentially impossible to look at and of course alter any privileged information that does not belong to the user. Any OS that would allow this is not secure by any stretch of imagination.

This is interesting as I had a email conversation with an IBM person (mid level type) and he bragged that IBM got so many patents that it showed how great IBM was and how they did such new work. I sort of passed on the bragging but about a month later I saw a story about how IBM got a patent on prioritizing people in a line. I jumped on the story and asked him if IBM was so great how could they justify counting this type of patent as "great work". He shrunk back to his email and said something to effect it was a numbers game.
I asked him politely if he really could stand on the record as being an achievement if this was typical of other patents.
Shortly there after the IBM patent was withdrawn.

My memory is shaky on this so take the numbers with a grain of salt. One year IBM was given over 600 patents. Now I am sure most were valid but the one they withdrew can't have been the only "small" patent sort of taints (at least in my mind) the rest of the good patents.

IBM does do a lot of good work but I came away with a feeling that IBM may be in it more for the numbers than new and usable ideas.

Well you are partially right (about the family). The issue comes down to how does a family get justice?
They cannot make the person their slave they cannot expect to get millions (even from insurance companies). So what is left? Put in Jail? well that only hurts the person and the state has to pay for his/her incarceration.

There is just no way to pay somebody back for death (being lawful) so I do not see a good answer here. Any money gotten in a lawsuit will be limited to the insurance policy limits *AND* with some states this makes an incentive not to get full insurance. Get the minimal amount. Going after people to get more money is essentially useless unless the person is a multimillionaire and does not have his/her money locked up (legally?) in untouchable trusts or other such instruments.

It could be a sales gimmick. But ity could be that the PC's are loaded with some malware.
Myself I would erase the drive and load what ever the government OS they want and I would probably reflash the smarts.

Of course I would have the thoroughly checked out again.

Well that is starting to become true these days as well for PC's. I am hearing reasonable people talking about water to cool down PC's so the more things change the more the its constant.

Although I do remember one company up in St Paul that built a lake to get their cooling water from and they only thing the lake did was attract geese:)

Well, in my opinion there are two issues here. The first is that they are using windows (any flavor) . That says it all on a security scale 5 being hack proof and 1 being wide open windows scores a 1.5 (I am being generous people).
The second issue is there is apparently no security train for the operators of the station.

I hope we have enough capacity to recover all the oil that potentially is going to be coming up from beneath the sea.