Whoever can patent firing a gun at your own skull first, wins. The trick is to show prior art, so hurry before you opponent gets it done.

* "I might" / "It might"

I might actually be trivial with practice, which is also (as you pointed out) not surprising. None of this is very surprising.

I'm guessing if you wanted to add a visiting vehicle's thrust, you'd first have to re-calculate the center of mass given the attached vehicle, and then calculate how much thrust -- and in what direction -- from that vehicle will produce what angles of rotation around which axes.

Not that I could do it all, but I think I might be close, and I can imagine the calculations that go into it and I am, frankly, not at all surprised even in an imaginary sense.

Soooooo to make sure this is always the case, Linus should obviously be reaching out to code obfuscators. Obviously legible, robust code is not at issue -- shorter, smaller code using more geeky twists and obfuscations is the best possible fucking idea for any huge, gigantic-ass code base.

I mean, I can understand getting pissed about new features being added. But obviously the point of a release candidate is to slowly compress and obfuscate the code into smaller and smaller renditions until it's humanly unreadable because, hell, fuck, god damn, that's how progress works in open-source land. Smaller = better.

Oh I dunno, maybe I'm talking out of my ass, here. For all we know, Linus' bottom line is that the same OS works on both smartphones and desktops.

It must have been easy to be Saint-like, knowing there were legions of essentially incarcerated Asians being forced to manufacture your products on the cheap.

I can see why your church authority, whoever the fuck that is, Partially Beautified and Nearly Canonized Steve Jobs so that he would be referred to as (at the very least) "Saint-like" by millions of hipster trash looking after his Departure from this Realm.

He was an ANGEL! *sob*

That's not really what I meant, though. what I meant was,

Worker: "F1. Index. A, B, C, Oh, here we are... C for Coffee Break."

Help file: "Oh, having coffee break trouble. So, either they're letting you have a coffee break or not. If they are, then everything's fine and you aren't even hitting F1 and coming here, so no.

"If they aren't, that's why you're here. So, if you will, also please see the index for the entry 'Employee Relations'."

Worker: "Employee? Oh, come on. D, E... Employee Relations."

Help file: "What's really important to ask you right now is whether or not things are going swell with your coworkers. You're either getting along, or you aren't. If you are, then why not try a coffee break and go have a chat with them and liven things up a bit? Go check out 'C' for Coffee Break."

Worker: "The hell? I was just there. Oh, there's more. Click Click..."

Help file: "If you aren't getting along, maybe you should look at the help file under the entry 'Getting Back'."

Worker: "Getting back? You mean like communications or correspondence? No, that would've been under C. Let's see... E, F, G... 'Getting back'."

Help file: "See M."

Worker: "OH COME ON. H I J K... 'M' is probably nice big section, too. Have to make me do everything on my own. Probably have to wade through oodles of macros, and menus, and manual controls, and ... here we are, M. Oh. It's the first thing on the list: majorly fuck everybody up by sabotaging the mainframe computer. Click... click... oh, the computer shut down! Oh, so did Bob's! And, oh look that HR bitch in her own little soundproof office is throwing her monitor at the bulletproof glass. This is great!"

Adequately sapient help files also do the trick. Especially if we're talking about the Big Red Button, I don't think we want a Wizard who has to leave the series of choose-your-own-adventure style questioning open that eventually leads to "Yes, Show Me The Big Red Button, Wizard."

---

Wizard: "Please choose your needs from the following:"
a) monitor network traffic
b) shut down network traffic
c) notify administration
d) OTHER

Wizard: "OTHER. Please help me figure out what you mean:"
a) take me back to the other menu, I mean the previous menu
b) I'm having trouble with my monitor
c) delete the hard drives. fuck them all!
d) this still isn't helping me, wizard!

Wizard: "So, delete the hard drives and fuck everybody, is it?"
a) I'm sure, wizard.
b) No, that was a typo. And, you're insane.
c) Get the paperclip in here, he's the voice of reason.

Wizard: "I'm WARNING YOU! Proceed?"
a) Yes, give me the fucking button, I'll click it right away.
b) NO

Wizard: "Glad I could help you!"

---

I think it would be better if the situation was in a help file.

"Let's see... F1 ... mm-hmm, help window. Index or contents? Let's see... contents looks really boring. Index, then. Okay... alphabetical... okay... scrolling... scrolling, yes, A, B, C, oh, I see you there everything about credit cards... D, E, F... G, H I J, oh, wow, look, something that's actually about the keyboard controls, imagine that... L... hmm... oh here we are, M for MAJORLY FUCKED UP AND IRREVERSIBLE DELETION OF ALL THE SHIT THOSE FUCKERS THINK IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY COFFEE BREAK. Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what the boss told me was going wrong with my app. Let's see... it says, if I want delete everything just close the app, run it with administrative privileges from the command line and use the argument forward-slash bee why ee. Gotcha!"

I would say that John Whiteside Parsons, the real Father of Rocketry, is a safer example, BUT ...

It's obvious that you can't put every tool in the hands of every consumer. This is a subset of the fact that a certain level of technical control isn't fitting or wise for every user.

All the same, I believe the best app offers the most power to the user, even if that takes awhile longer to code in.

The best app offers the most controls no matter what. And "no matter what" does qualify you to place them behind some "advanced options" control, or inside a plain text (or, why not, hexadecimal) config file, or in a registry entry, or wherever you need to hide it to feel that it's safe from "everybody but not everybody-everybody".

If it's freeware, consider charging for the added feature, and even requiring the customer send in a handwritten form with their tax ID and other business credentials, and signing their agreement to a series of legal disclaimers. Then you'll have their alleged good-will in writing, too, and protect yourself from damages.

Or, make it an undocumented command-line option. Then you could tie the user to having to settle with whatever they set this thing to for that session, and they couldn't just variably change it mid-session. And, if they want to know how to get to the solution, they can ask the company and the company can tell that customer how to get it done.

Is it a Windows app? If you have any pangs of guilt, I believe an "allow advanced features" checkbox that forces the operating system to validate their administrative credentials (even if it's not necessary for the purposes of the app's interaction with the operating system) is a decent enough way to go.

If by equilibrium you mean a higher state of entropy, then yes.

You are, however, sadly mistaken in your assumption that having passed a critical mass of orbiting objects means they will suddenly start rapidly falling out of the sky.

On the contrary, what will happen now is the present objects will become more and more likely to have collisions as more and more collisions occur, in a cascade effect.

Eventually there will be a more or less impenetrable field of small debris flying around, and no opportunity to use that orbit for anything purposeful.

Even if we imagine that a roughly homogenous cloud of junk will deflect its own particles out of orbit, consider that only half of all collisions between objects moving at *almost* the same relative speed are probably going to cause the deceleration of both objects. Those are all collisions between two objects along roughly opposite vectors.

Past the point of collisions being orthogonal (and how many collisions are going to be exactly orthogonal, ie the set of planes orthogonal to a given plane versus all other planes that can be made to intersect that plane) we find collisions where one object bumps into the other object in roughly the same direction. One of the objects is going to be accelerated and deflect, even though the other object is going to slow down. The likelihood of them both having precisely the same trajectory and sharing a similar point in space as their velocities balance out is very unlikely, as well.

Yes, there's conservation of energy, but all you're pointing out is that across time -- approaching a very long era of time that, aside from some people who enter hibernation or travel into the future, is no doubt very significant in terms of human events -- "eventually" the debris will fall out of orbit.

This isn't a solution to the problem. Yes, in the cosmic scheme of things, on astronomical scales of time, eventually the stew will stop boiling and will simmer down, and all of the particles in orbit will fall to the atmosphere.

In terms of the future of humanity, however, the situation is clear: we've passed the critical mass of the junk cloud and now it is on rails toward a higher state of entropy.

Our options are either let it sit there and more or less give up on safe space travel outside of certain orbits on a scale of thousands of years, or do something about bringing debris down on purpose.

At any rate, I seriously doubt you took time to think about the consequences of having fewer *operational* satellites in the sky, but more satellites of a tiny and purely junky existence.

"All you can eat" doesn't mean "all you can sell". Buffets, typically, aren't carry-out without adding additional charges.

"Unlimited service" doesn't mean "all you can eat". It means you won't be capped as long as you follow the TOS. I am fairly sure that somewhere along the line, this guy must have put pen to paper that his service was for home use, not for business use, or else the company wouldn't also have a business package.

I'm sure there was probably some agreement, as well, that he would secure his connection from unauthorized use. That's not unusual, these days. A contract can stipulate that the general public can't have access to your bandwidth. If you're operating a business, you're opening your paid share of the bandwidth to the general public.

There's so much wrong with what the guy did. The only interesting thing about all of this is the amount he was able to siphon before he was stopped. That's the only real valuable information, here: how much can the average person get away with? 30,000 x average suggests to me that the monitoring either was relaxed for the moment or is in general very relaxed. Which means that, potentially, 100 or 1000 x the average might still be gotten away with. That's valuable information!

The guy's situation though doesn't even begin to beg debate. I like the "all you can eat buffet" analogy. It's not a license to sit at a window and open your own restaurant to the sidewalk outside using your window seat.

Is he gonna hurt somebody?

I have to agree. Common sense suggests that using two different placement surfaces will tend to strongly skew results toward two different patterns. Another commenter noted that watercress are sensitive to phtalates found in some plastics. Think there might be any in the plastic surface?

We should also see which is more efficient: 5 * 9th-graders or 9 * 5th-graders!!!

I think you're right. It's just logistically a huge hell-hole to get into trying to sue people in all of these different countries in their national versions of civil court, when he could just sue the few companies that play catalyst to his calumny.