I use slides like this every once in a while, and they are, when used correctly, very effective. The point of a "spaghetti diagram" is to illustrate the complexity of a situation, not to explain it.

Participants should see a slide like this and think "Good Lord, that's complicated!" when a speaker wants
to drive home a point like "with better standards, we can simplify this a bit," or "this is far more complex than a simple slide can possibly convey, please be aware that I'm deliberately simplifying."

It helps the audience appreciate the depth of a situation without requiring that they understand every nuance - something I find useful when dealing with executives or nontechnical folks, and something I'd guess that the military often needs to do with the media - or us, for that matter.

Anyone else notice that this looks quite a bit like the prototypical "Alien Face" as described here:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=496

*Sigh*

I learned to program on a Sinclair ZX81 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zx81), which weighed about a pound and could run on 9VDC (though the only battery-powered versions were homebrew). It's amazing that we've come this far...

Did anyone else love that the icon for discontinued products on XCore's site is a rotary phone?

I think that Woz's point about software glitches is a good one, but it may be just a red herring in this case. Toyota's got quality problems up the wazoo, both software and hardware (defective wazoos to be recalled later this quarter). IMHO (and the NSHO of many pundits lately) is that a focus on speed and growth, rather than planning and quality, is at the root of the problem. Sounds very much like the state of many corporate IT shops.

Check these out:
http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/direct/view/.f0eb3fd
http://www.edmunds.com/toyota/sienna/2004/discussion.html

Personally, I'm stocking up on Melange so I can fold space.

Thanks daenris, for correcting my assumption here. Looking at some other posts since my first, others have their hands on the (very real) file now, too.

Assuming, of course, that the file and the original postings are real. It wouldn't take much to fake a raft of "sightings" of this executable just to get people googling the highly unique executable name. Pretty clever, actually.

Done and done. If I had any more mod points, I'd use 'em. Thanks.

Not saying I agree or disagree with either poster here, but I felt I had to correct the first statement made by the poster above. Among other times, the cold war went hot in Afghanistan when the cia armed the so-called Mujahideen to fight the Soviet army. And that turned out so well for everyone.

...or maybe they shuold keep those metal detectors - just in case.

Indeed. That's exactly how we control it... Tough security on the network and at least a cursory password to lock the device. (It's not just the BSD server that's accessible, though, unless your network has some extremely stringent IP blocking.)

That same blood-thinning action makes regular aspirin takers susceptible to bleeding out after injury, stroke (hemorrhagic), or surgery. Which is why it's important to tell your doctor/nurse/emt ALL of the meds you're taking.

On the bright side, the fact that the BlackBerry is inside the firewall makes it good for simple administration via http or ssh. I've used it on the train in a pinch... Since many of our devices also run the RSA soft SecureID and have PINs taped to their cases, they're already pretty dangerous, so the added risk is fairly minimal.