"Then you do this "battery swap" and get a *used* battery pack that's been god knows where. "

This is what ISO documentation standards are for.

"How many of you made a working drone at 17?"

We were making fly by wire RC planes as pre-teens in the 80s.

If it can do the 4 basic operations of arithmetic without using much of any power, you could have a simple solar calculator that pretty much never ever needs batteries and can run in some of the lowest light conditions possible if you just gave it a few caps to charge.

On exactly what the detector is capable of detecting. If they're looking, at any point, for radio waves, then I'd start there. Do the radio waves correspond to the absorption (and therefore emission) band for any molecule or chemical bond that is likely to arise in the ice?

This is so basic that I'm thinking that if this was remotely plausible, they'd have already thought of it. This is too junior to miss. Ergo, the detector isn't looking for radio waves (which seems the most likely, given it's a particle detector, not a radio telescope), or nothing obvious exists at that frequency (which is only a meaningful answer if, indeed, it is a radio telescope).

So, the question is, what precisely does the detector actually detect?

Perhaps you idiots should make yourselves aware of the dangers of the products which you buy before you whine about them doing things THEY DO BY RAW FUCKING NATURE.

Go back to school and learn about fucking lithium chemistry.

So the system responded that it was an already claimed serial number and not an invalid serial number? Who the fuck would do that?

Let's say someone put in a claim.

Well what is to stop them from trying consecutive serial numbers to see if they can get even more?

If we don't preprogram them in advance, then how will kids learn "Math class is tough!"?

There was a survivor from the plane who described a loud bang before the plane crashed.

or your bank got made outside the identified batch of serials.

signed, ISO-compliant QA tech

These are past warranty, and in some cases the pack is nearly a decade old.

Zero reason for a recall that I see and I am pretty strict when it comes to lithium batteries.

Selecting office software is not a political statement

That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.

It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)

Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.

Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is savage reality.

And man-vs-savage-reality is a pretty nice conflict to be involved in, compared to man-vs-man.

Yes great to mention the linking aspect, that was key to the whole thing being really useful.

This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

How do they measure this? Did all the pirates magically agree to put Google Analytics on their web pages and share reporting with Muso? Or, in accordance with The Pirate Code (?!) do all pirate pages request the browser load http://muso.com/arr-trackme-1x... and (again, in accordance with The Pirate Code, I guess) the visitors configure their browsers to whitelist and load it? I am skeptical of any third parties who claim they "track" pirate site visits.