Other posters have already observed some of the obvious flaws in this scheme.

Satellites fail, for the most part, when their rechargeable batteries quit and/or their consumable manoeuvring fuel runs out. These are among the heavier components aboard many satellites, so our hypothetical 'repair and resupply' launch is already going to be costly and heavy before you add all that unique and highly flexible hypothetical manipulator hardware. From any sort of rational economic standpoint, if you're going to launch a heavy, expensive satellite, you might as well launch a replacement (with all-new hardware, up-to-date electronics, incorporating the lessons learned from the previous iteration, etc.) instead of trying to fix or cannibalize the dodgy one in orbit.

Trying to service multiple satellites with one launch of our Swiss-Army-knife repair droid gets even worse, because manoeuvring between orbits tends to be very costly in terms of fuel (prohibitively so if a significant change in inclination is contemplated) and therefore weight.

And how user-serviceable are most satellites? Anything that's already in space now (or that is likely to be launched in the next decade) hasn't been designed to be repaired, modified, or scavenged after launch. Are we really solving the 'space junk' problem if our repair droid is inadvertently leaving behind a cloud of dropped screws and broken hardware? One satellite is easy to track and avoid. A haze of screws and plastic chips is not--and will still put a hole right through the ISS.

The folks at DARPA are sometimes crazy, but they're not usually idiots. Presumably they've been able to come up with the same objections as Slashdotters, and they probably realized them faster than we did. So what's really going on?

1) A stripped-down version of this tool could be used to attach de-orbiting or manoeuvring thrusters to disabled satellites that happened to be occupying (or threatening) particularly high-value orbital real estate. The ISS has to be periodically repositioned to avoid the occasional bit of space junk. Further up, there's a limited amount of space in geostationary orbit, and a malfunctioning satellite could be trouble as either a source of physical or radio clutter. If the program fails to produce its rather pie-in-the-sky 'dream' goal, it could still develop this useful sideline.

2) The military would love to have the capability to selectively damage, disable, and/or capture 'enemy' space hardware. This program would complete nearly all the steps required to develop such a capability, but under the shiny, happy patina of putative civilian applications.

So the answer to the Ask Slashdot question should be: "Just refer to the emergency evacuation plan you drafted years ago, and have regularly updated in the meantime."

And if that isn't the answer, why the hell not?

The point, I think, is not to conceal the existence or location of these facilities (which can, after all, be readily established using a telephone book), but rather to more-thoroughly protect the privacy of the individuals visiting or making use of them. As Google has acknowledged that their face- and number-plate-blurring algorithm is only about 99% effective, the Swiss solution is to insist on specific exclusion of these particularly-privacy-sensitive locations. (It was deemed that "Oops, we're sorry that the battered woman in the window of the shelter was part of the 1% our algorithm missed" wasn't a sufficiently robust response.)

I use Street View for when I want to know what the View is from the Street. Another poster has mentioned shopping for real estate, but that's far from the only use. I use it for the utterly prosaic purpose of identifying landmarks and storefronts when I'm planning a vacation or shopping trip to an unfamiliar destination. The top of a building just doesn't look like the side of a building.

The grandparent poster has done the calculation correctly, if it is assumed that the cracker knows that there is exactly one uppercase character.

We're all agreed that if there is a 6-letter all-lower-case password, there are 26^6 possible passwords (26 possible character choices in each of six positions), right? For five lower case letters and one upper case letter, we draw five lower case letters (26^5 possibilities) and one upper case letter (26^1 possibilities, because it can't be a lower case letter), and we have 6 choices as to where in the password we place the upper case letter: 26^5 * 26^1 * 6 = 26^6 * 6 possible passwords.

Alternatively, consider our six-letter all-lower-case password and its 26^6 possibilities. We have a dictionary that starts aaaaaa, aaaaab, aaaaac and ends with zzzzzz. If we add exactly one (no more, no fewer) capital letter, then each entry in our original dictionary is replaced by six new passwords, one with a single capital letter in each position: Aaaaaa, aAaaaa, aaAaaa, aaaAaa, aaaaAa, aaaaaA, then Aaaaab, aAaaab, aaAaab, aaaAab, aaaaAb, aaaaaB, and so forth--again giving us 26^6 * 6 possible passwords.

That said, it would be unusual for our hypothetical cracker to have access to that sort of specific information about a password. Why would he know that there was exactly one upper case letter? Far more likely would be some sort of rudimentary password screen that required our password to contain a mix of capital and lower case letters--that is, at least one upper case, and at least one lower case. In that more-likely scenario, the parent's calculation is closer to the mark. Each of six positions could have any one of 52 values (26 upper- and 26 lower-case letters), giving 52^6 possibilities, from which we subtract 2*26^6 options, representing the forbidden all-lower-case and all-caps passwords, leaving 52^6-2*26^6 possible choices.

That's a good question.

One hundred dollars buys two or three hours of time from a professional tutor or teaching assistant.

Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?

My favorite among these may be Calais, Maine. On a road trip a couple of decades ago, talking to a local at a tourist information booth:

"So, if we take Route 1 to Calais..."

"Ca-LAY? Where's...oh, you mean CALLOUS!"

"I suppose I do..."

Montpelier, Virginia gets a similar treatment.

I'm pretty sure that failure to properly signal turns and lane changes is actually illegal in more states than using a cell phone or texting while driving. So this must the be some newfangled we'll-fine-you-heavily-and-raise-your-insurance-rates kind of "nobody gives a shit".

Source?

In any case, the best possible world would be one where "most states are discouraging driving". Build liveable, walkable communities, with proper mixed-use development, green spaces, multi-use trails for pedestrians and bicycles, and good connections to public transit.

If the only way for a teen to buy groceries is by driving ten miles to a big-box Wal-Mart as the sole occupant of a seven-passenger SUV, then something is fundamentally broken.

Whereas it's easy to find a previous revision now, particularly if you didn't save the specific version that you're looking for under a separate filename? Come now. Search for changes by date and time. Search for changes that add or remove specific phrases. Display overall document length as a function of time. Zoomable, scrollable display of changes over time, with annotated marks at each 'save' point.

The twentieth century called; they want their storage technology back. Hard drives don't have to spin anymore. Portable devices are all operating off batteries (or backed up by batteries) anyway, so power outages aren't the bogeyman they once were. Worst case scenario a memory cache is flushed to disk every five or ten minutes and we're no worse off than the current 'autosave'.

True, but not really a problem. Use the 'save' button to insert an annotation in the editing history instead of creating or fixing a file.

Dude, get a grip. In your ranting, it looks like you've lost track of what you're arguing about.

You seem to be operating under the impression that, when faced with two bad choices (in this case, the status quo versus the grotesquely-misnamed Fair Tax), it's never possible to have a reasonable discussion about which is worse without also endorsing one of the choices.

Your reasoning continues to be nonsensical.

Incidentally, I'm not from the United States; I neither live there nor hold U.S. citizenship. I don't know where you're from either, but I assume their principal export is asshattery.

Ah, of course. Being opposed to a proposal to punch more holes in the hull means that I'm "going to support the sinking of the ship". What bizarre logic you employ.

The parent poster's point, which you seem to be entirely missing, is that the so-called, deceptively-named 'Fair Tax' would make the situation significantly worse.

There is a significant difference between "This particular proposal for change is bad" - which is what was actually said - and "The current situation is good" -- which is what you're imagining you heard.

I don't know what's more disappointing--that you put Martin Niemöller up next to Ayn Rand and pretended that those quotes pulled out of context belong side by side, or that someone with mod points didn't know better than to tag your post as 'Insightful'.

Rand's philosophy embraced selfishness as its highest ideal.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, though--that strategy means that he would be choosing to fund his own preferred charities at the expense of other people funding the government services (from which he would still benefit...).