Integrating televisions with other technologies never seems to work out. TV with VCR combo... TV with DVD combo... TV with Fire Stick Combo... Just buy the TV you want and fork out the $40 for the Fire Stick.

At last, we finally have undeniable proof that Donald J. Trump is a deep cover Russian agent sent here decades ago to hand the U.S. over to Russia! And to think, they called us all delusional, hysterical crackpots, with zero critical thinking skills, all throwing childish temper tantrums because our candidate lost a close election. The fools! Vindication is now ours!

If this technology shows promise in spreading the Good News and making more disciples of Jesus Christ, then we will use it. Just like the printing press, radio, and internet before it. if it's just a distraction or poor use of resources, as I suspect it is, we'll just go with what works.

After watching a video of this engine fire, I kept looking for some kind of variable geometry component and didn't see it. It turns out there isn't one. The thrust pattern itself changes shape as a function of altitude to achieve the extra efficiency. This promotional video from Rocketdyne shows how it works.

You rang?

Not thin enough,

Just posting this as a curiosity, but one of our Sunday School teachers at Church came along something interesting while preparing for a lesson. He somehow got sidetracked into some of the lesser known Jewish teachings (can't remember the Hebrew name for these,) and found this theory about Adam and Eve. The theory said that God took not a rib from Adam to create Eve, but rather Adam's penis bone. This explains not only the lack of a baculum in humans but also the reason the scrotum has a ridge of tissue in the middle to symbolize the scar Adam incurred from its removal. It at least made for a light-hearted start to Sunday School that morning.

And if there was, they'd still want the $50 to download the part file so you could print it yourself. Heck, I ran across a book on amazon the other day that was $25 for hardcover or $25 for kindle.

Totally concur with others pointing out Amazon offers redundancy if you choose to use it.

We had webservers, database (master/slave,) and other services split across usa-east and usa-west.

When usa-east started showing problems, we:
*) Took the usa-east webservers out of round robin DNS (ttl 1hr)
*) Verified the slave (in usa-west) was up to date, shut down the master (usa-east,) and converted the slave to master.
*) Updated all webservers to point to the new master.
*) Cranked up new usa-west webservers / updated round robin DNS

I believe Amazon offers mechanisms to do this automatically or we could just always write our own failover scripts, but this is the tradeoff me made. We were willing to trade some service degradation by switching over manually in exchange for avoiding the pitfalls of false-positive detection. Very much an application specific tradeoff, not for everyone, but it worked for what we are doing.

The key was to avoid putting all eggs in the usa-east basket and splitting up across usa-west, even though we incur additional bandwidth fees, ie master/slave replication transfer is full fee between regions.

We were never concerned about cascading failures effecting multiple availability zones in a give region nor did it matter for us - our redundancy requirement was geographical diversity, not partitions within a datacenter. We were thinking natural disaster, but the architecture covered us in this case as well.

The coolest thing to me is just how quickly we were able to shuffle around these resources to avoid a problem area - a couple of hours. There's no way we could have done it so quickly with what we had before - a combination of our own colocated servers and VPS.

He couldn't be more dead-on regarding the Japanese. When I worked for a telecom vendor, we had a major project to adapt our software and hardware for NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph.)

Two things I remember most:

*) The call we got about our 'defective' hardware. Turns out our own specifications called for 4 mounting screws to be included for a given circuit pack. We shipped 5. The call, after much cultural posturing, boiled down to "You mean you think our installers are imcompetent? You think so little of us?"

*) We had another circuit pack that had a severe overheating problem - when it hit this failure mode the heatsinks* would drop off into the bottom of the shelf. One of our executives told them "This is by design. It shortens the time to total failure, which reduces the overall fire risk." He was fired the next day.

[*the card had 3 DSPs, each with a heatsink that wasn't physically mounted, but stuck on with some kind of conductive glue.]

Ok, it allows third-party downloadable apps (their own app store?,) but "media-server functions have been omitted."

Can I pull media from my linux fileserver or not?

If the omitted functions just means it doesn't have local storage, then fine. I'm just hoping they don't cripple or disallow apps that can remotely fetch media.

If I could get that plus Netflix on a ~$100 box, I'd be all over it.

I had a professor in college, along with several colleagues and students, working on a formal proof for nuclear power plant control software. They had been been working for 5 years and, at the time, were about 10% complete.

Obviously, at that rate, the time to complete the formal proof is probably longer than the lifetime of the particular control system they were targeting.

Hopefully Formal Methods have come a long way since I last studied them 10 years ago. In any case, congratulations to this team of researchers at NICTA.

That's an interesting theory, except Bolden did not serve in the Air Force - he's a Marine.

The IMDB page lists him as 'rumored' as well.