Back in 2012 or 2013 I was really annoyed when Verizon started blocking access to my favourite IRC servers, and they never did give me a satisfactory answer for why they were doing it. So I switched to Sprint. Within the past few months Sprint also started blocking IRC and it didn't make sense until I read the linked FBI announcement just now.

"Before the researchers report was released, the cellular carrier for the affected vehicles blocked access to one specific port (TCP 6667) for the private IP addresses used to communicate with vehicles"

6667, the default IRC port. Those carriers seem to have blocked port 6667 completely.

Why would the per hour cost of the drone be higher than even a minimum wage worker?
The drone can work more than one shift.
The drone doesn't take vacations.
The drone doesn't waste time chatting with co-workers.

The drone is out there.
The drone can't be bargained with.
The drone can't be reasoned with.
The drone doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.
And the drone absolutely will not stop, ever, until the parcel is delivered!

Last summer I fell over and my right seatstay cracked where it hit the curb, with my not insubstantial mass driving the impact. The seatstay did not shatter, and the frame was perfectly repairable and was not tossed. The shop cut out and replaced about 200mm of seatstay with a hand-formed section shaped into the correct curve and charged me 300 USD. Much more expensive than a repair of a steel frame, but certainly not impractical. I can't comment on the relative cost of a repair to an aluminium or titanium frame. I appreciate that it's more difficult to recycle a totaled CF frame (or body panel) than an aluminium or steel one, but a crack or gouge does not typically damage a frame beyond repair.

An interesting endeavour, if somewhat foolhardy. I vaguely recall that "standard practice" back in the day was to put the V-12 on an industrial bandsaw and (sob) saw it in half to make a relatively lightweight 6 cylinder race car engine. I definitely recall seeing one such bandsaw with the two engine halves nearby. On a brighter note, I recently visited a facility in Florida and sat in a shop with what looked like 50+ Allisons, Merlins, and possibly other assorted V-12 engines lined up on the shelves, so at least someone is preserving and refurbishing them.

I'll admit it. About 10-15 years ago I did the same thing from a QA domain to the corporate domain, thinking that the domain arg was a qualifier for net send. The intended recipient got my message requesting assistance, along with about 150 other people. Sadly, the only person who contacted me was a marketroid who rang me up and asked what he could do to help. I'm no longer quite so quick to stereotype people.

...when I was a kid in the 60's-70's the largest telescope in the world boasted a 0.5 meter mirror...

I presume that you meant 5 meters (the 200 inch Hale at Mt. Palomar)?

Or how a bucket of these might taste! They live in brine, are from the sea... Imagine these on french fries and potato chips!

Why were Futurama, Fry and anchovies the first things that immediately came to my mind when reading this?

Why were Futurama, Leela and Poppers(TM) the first things that immediately came to my mind when reading this? Better not try them -- Lrrr might be hanging around this star system.

Actually, his quote in the article claims "...territory - at the very least around my rover and, potentially, along its point of travel". He does not appear to be claiming that he owns the entire moon.

9km, eh? I used to laugh at people who made a big deal out of a 3.0 quake. Then one night there was a lowly 2.8 quake about 300m from my house (might have been directly under it, depending on the location quality). The depth according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network was 0km. It was certainly nothing like the M5-M6 quakes I've experienced, but it woke me from a deep sleep and got my immediate attention. I can't imagine how it would feel to be directly above an M6.5 or M7.

For all anyone knows, the M3.4 quake in Basel might have relieved stress that would otherwise have accumulated and flattened the town with an M6 20-30 years from now.

No "random" data that you get from the net should be trusted. I throw old 16-sided gaming dice to generate a transparent X-Y grid, which is then set over the top of my cat's litter box. The positions of the cat turds are normalized against a reference litter box and fed into a fancy matrix algorithm, the output of which is SHA4 hashed and truncated to make the WPA2 key.

...Sacred hidden text

Left-Shift, Left-Alt, Right-Shift and Right-Alt, F10, insert diskette, remove diskette?

You've got be kidding about running four guest vms on your laptop unless you are talking about running them one at a time

I always run one, and sometimes 3-4 VMs on my year-old Thinkpad, using VMWare Server. Most often my official work VM, but other times an Ubuntu-based Asterisk PBX and a couple of W2K3 VMs running a sophisticated Unified Communications telecom app. A couple of times I've run an OpenFiler SAN feeding two W2K3 servers via iSCSI. I can't remember whether I've set them up with Windows clustering or whether that was on a couple of physical servers. This is all for functional testing, not high-throughput load testing.