'SES and Lockheed Martin explored ways to attempt to bring the functioning [AMC-14] satellite into its correct orbital position, and subsequently began attempting to move the satellite into geosynchronous orbit by means of a lunar flyby (as done a decade earlier with HGS-1). In April 2008, it was announced that this had been abandoned after it was discovered that Boeing held a patent on the trajectory that would be required. At the time, a lawsuit was ongoing between SES and Boeing, and Boeing refused to allow the trajectory to be used unless SES dropped its case.' In. credible. http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down_AMC_14_Lunar_Flyby_Salvage_Attempt_999.html notes 'Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal "trite", as basic physics has been rebranded as a "process", and that the patent wouldn't stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as "the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters"', but still -- who'd want to go up in court against Boeing?

ouch

brilliant thread of epic "OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE" stories

will have to run this by our resident Pythonistas in work as a good set of guidelines

ie. TinEye and other "images like this one" search engines. nice explanation

a nifty gdb hack; essentially dup()s a couple of files in /tmp in place of fd 1 and 2, then uses the bashism "detach" to nohup the running process