The Internet has needed a standardized reliable UDP protocol for many years. There have been many attempts, but hopefully this one will stick.

There's still a glidepath indicated by visually by the PAPI at a 2.85 degree slope for 28L at SFO.

My Bad: 3.8NM is just about 2 minutes at Vref, not 3 -- using 130kts as a placeholder (ie 2NM/min). Point still holds.

Yes, they were below the glidepath, and yes they blew the approach and had to go around: but this is hardly seconds from disaster or even a close thing. 600' at a normal approach speed is not "close" to the ground and 3.8 NM is more than 3 minutes at Vref which is certainly adequate time to respond.

These kinds of things happen and the only reason we're even hearing about this one is that it happened at SFO 28L.

I expected a little less sensationalism and a lot more intelligence from slashdot.

This is written like a troll, but is actually the most sensible thing that's ever been written about IPV6

Sure -- open up: http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf

Go to page 23:

So every time you go through a tollbooth, ask yourself "why isn't this truck paying 9600 times more toll than me?" The answer: you are subsidizing that truck.

Actually, you're incorrect in your thinking. They were required to put GPS in it for E911 to work and the device will not function until the GPS location is verified. As the owner of a microcell I can tell you that GPS reception is the biggest #$@!@# pain in the ass for the thing in general. I have a metal roof at home and the microcell will only activate for me if I hang the device in the skylight.

You're right, because no passengers should be allowed to talk on the phone either....

seriously: my wife teaches high schoolers, she made a comment about The Matrix and got a whole room of stares in response. 1999 was 12 years ago...

Seriously. It is difficult to express in words just how inefficient XMPP is as a protocol -- and this will be even worse! Sure, it's not a big deal on the client side, but real-world XMPP servers spend a substantial amount of time just parsing XML stanzas...and this would be a worst-case for them. Wow.

it's been a long and storied run

Yes, for long-running servers, GC performance can still be a very big issue with Java (and all GC languages). For short- or medium-lived apps (the kind that you're more thinking about -- since you talk about VM and library load time) GC performance is less of an issue.