Sony should say screw you to North Korea and release the entire movie for free on the internet. Make sure everybody has a chance to see it. Of course they won't because they still have to monetize it somehow, but it would be something to say "we're not going to give in".

The hosts file doesn't scale. It's only useful for LAN traffic and has a last ditch hack anymore. Especially since if a site is being attacked by a media cartel, they're probably going to have to switch servers a few times.

Yes, and look what took over after Saddam Hussein was gone. What did Bush leave Obama? Anarchy, controlled by armed gangs. Now the strongest force is the Islamic State.

von Clausowitz that the purpose of war is not to destroy the enemy, it's to accomplish policy. (However you spell it.)

Bush is like that guy in Atlas Shrugged who couldn't watch a pot of soup without letting it boil over.

Nothing in that article says that Cuba measures its infant mortality differently than the WHO standard, or even mentions Cuba.

So the fact remains that the Cuban infant mortality rate is lower than the U.S., by any standard measurement.

The main reason for that is the lack of access to health care, and health care doesn't do much good without access to nutrition, housing and basic living standards, which the poor don't have in the U.S. That's why we have so many premature infants. True, it's not just Cuba's health care system, it's also their nutrition programs. I concede that the poor in the U.S. have worse nutrition too, which contributes to their higher infant mortality.

Every honest doctor who follows international health statistics knows this, in contrast to guys like Scott Atlas who cherry-picks his statistics and publishes them in the National Review.

Let me know when you find something in a peer-reviewed journal that says Cuba's infant mortality statistics use definitions that distort them to make them better. I'm not holding my breath. There was an exchange of letters about this in Science, and the anti-Castro people couldn't come up with anything, so I don't think you will.

Thanks, I did not know that. But to be clear, this does not create junction points... this is the "official" method that I reference. I don't want people cutting-and-pasting Users :)

I'm thinking (hoping?) that normal disk caching would take care of stuff like that. Honestly, I'd just use the supported method unless your SSD was very, very tiny. I use the junction point method because I wipe out the C: drive from time to time to avoid Windows cruft. Every so often I apply Windows updates and re-baseline.

In addition, American doctors toured the Cuban health care system and published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine. Cuba has one of the best medical schools in Latin America. The Swedes helped them set it up. As a result they have a major modern biotechnology industry that discovered and manufactures some vaccines that are used worldwide.

This will of course fail if the site you are trying to visit is virtually hosted. Even if you know the IP, you have to tell the proxy/load balancer what site you are trying to load.

It's not really 404 hijacking, it's DNS resolution failure hijacking. If you get a 404, then you at least got to the site. Anyway, DNS hijacking is why I don't use my ISP's DNS.

This is really not a good approach to using public key crypto. The private key shouldn't be on the servers, it should be on the client. I know it's a pain to handle per-file backups and especially deltas when everything is encrypted, but that's the tradeoff for proper security. In fact there's really no need for expensive public key crypto here at all. Just have the client use a cheapish symmetric key (AES256 perhaps) and send only encrypted data to the servers. There's no need at all for the servers to ever have the data in the clear.

You could punch a hole to turn a double-density floppy into a high density floppy, at least with the 3.5" floppies. It worked the few times I tried it but the need for antics like that faded pretty quickly as technology marched on.

At the risk of being unable to read any of the tapes you made with the old misaligned head. It's saying something when the horribly brain damaged 1541 disk drive for the C=64 was considered a major step up from the other options.

As long as there are cowards, there will be people selling insurance.

As long as some entities have a higher capacity to absorb temporary setbacks than others, they can trade on this ability like any other good. But I suppose that doesn't make as good a soundbite.

I'd love to be able to publish these statistics for our organization, (I'd estimate we have close to a quarter million drives in the field) but there is a big hurdle in the way: legal liability. If I was to say something negative about Western-Sea-Tachi drives, their lawyers might call our lawyers, and we could easily spend a million in court fees.

The thing I think would be interesting is that we have a completely arbitrary mix of drives, based on drive availability over the last 6 years or so. We also have a mix of different service companies who replace the drives in our workstations. Our contract is such that we don't control the brands, or even the sizes, as long as they meet or exceed our specs. As a service organization, they're responsible for picking the cheapest option for themselves. If our spec says "40 GB minimum", and they can't get anything smaller than 500GB, they'll buy those. If 1TB drives are cheaper than 500GB drives, they'll buy those. And if we're paying them $X/machine/year for service, they can do the reliability decisions on their own, so if they think some premium drives will last two years longer than stock drives, they might be able to avoid an extra service call on each machine if they spend $Y extra per drive. I expect these service organizations all have their preferred drives, but that's not data they're likely to share with their competitors on the service-contract circuit.

I don't take pictures for "posterity", or for people who outlive me. I take pictures for me, and my family, for now. While I only have thousands of total pictures, (not 10,000 per month) I can still find the pictures I want on my hard drives. So when I die, if some future grandchild wants to trawl through those terabytes in the vain hopes of finding a good picture of a great-great-grandparent they never met, why should I care? What difference would that make to me, today, in how I choose to save or discard photos?