Unlike the shit I flush into the same system?

Pretty sure that article was a hoax.

For about three years? With the program itself being hidden at remote locations, out of public view, during a war. With every American, every journalist, who accidentally stumbled onto the program being easily convinced to keep the secret "from those sneaky Krauts."

And a program which was for the country, for the common defence, doing something that they believed in. (Either out of loyalty to the US, fear of Nazis, or just because they were giant nerds playing with nuclear fire.) And since then, many of those scientists changed their loyalties and joined the anti-nuclear movement. (And pretty much everything that could leak, in the 60 years since then, has leaked.)

A moon landing hoax would have been the opposite. It would betray their own people, betray their friends at NASA, betray their own beliefs and morality, and they didn't get to go to the moon. For what? Why keep that secret for decade after decade after decade...?

They still had to build the giant rocket and land something on the moon in order for the telemetry to work. So they had all the complexity of building Saturn V and the Apollo stack but in addition they had to seamlessly pull off the greatest hoax in history with the greatest concentration of pedantic nerd geniuses in the world watching.

Apollo succeeded in spite of its failures. The Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 explosion. Apollo 12's repeated lightning strikes and then the astronauts destroying their only video camera, etc etc. All with thousands of experts watching over them. Going back to the various cluster-fucks during Mercury and Gemini when they were trying to learn EVAs and later docking; but they could keep trying until they got it right. And once it was done, it was done. It didn't matter if new people came in and went through the archives, didn't matter if people looked at the hardware. There was nothing to hide.

A giant conspiracy to fake the moon landings had to get everything right the first time, with a skeleton crew, and it was not only vulnerable to a single major leak or screw-up at the time, it has continued to be vulnerable for 50 years. The hoaxers can never stop the cover-up.

For example, the LRO imaged the Apollo landing sites, showing tracks and vehicles. Was that faked? A brand new cover-up during the LRO program, adding a whole new conspiracy they had to seamlessly pull of under the noses of the LRO science team, and then keep secret forever.

And each layer of cover-up adds more things to go wrong, more people able to leak now or in the future. With every single person involved, every astronaut and technician, knowing that they are sitting on the greatest secret in history. It just needs one person, diagnosed with terminal cancer, conscience, or greed, to say, "Fuck it..."

You can buy LED strips (and fancier kits) to stick behind your TV/monitor to create a coloured glow on the wall around your screen which extends the edges of the images to create a greater immersion.

Given that screen-size is the limiting factor in these VR headsets, are any of the manufacturers including this kind of ultra-simple peripheral lighting within the headset? To reduce the blinker effect from the limited FOV.

TV/monitor kits can only use the regular image and extrapolate the edge effects. But with a VR kit, the content developers themselves would be able to program peripheral lighting in addition to the monitor image. So an object could appear in your peripheral vision before it reaches the edge of the actual screen. Similarly, small and large objects would show differences in the peripheral lighting even though both have the same size on the screen. Both effects increasing the immersion. (And, of course, in horror games, the devs would use it to just fuck with you.)

IMO, with a peripheral lighting system, a screen with a mere 90 FOV would be plenty for full immersion. It's rare that you pivot your eyes beyond 45 without turning your head. You flick your eyes across, then turn your head to re-centre your vision. And when you do that, your eyes don't have long enough to focus on the object (to extract detail) before your head movement has caught up, so under normal circumstances you still shouldn't notice the extremely low resolution of the peripheral lighting.

[Disclaimer: I ain't even got a Nintendo Virtual Boy, so maybe modern VR devices all do this, but I can't find any reference to it online except a single 5 year old forum post.]

Directly in front of each display, so it's in line with the eyes. Bring up any image of the front of the device and they're right fucking there.

Such as the linked article.

Someone certainly is.

It's the Cowboy Neal option.

You haven't seen my diet.

ads != doubleclick.

There are ways for sites to include advertising without surrendering their site to third-party-hosted malware. Many ways which aren't even blocked by adblockers by default. It's a bit more work for them than just using doubleclick/etc, but it's worth it.

So you're really saying that all the stupid/lazy sites will die off or retire behind paywalls. Surely that's "mission fucking accomplished."

(I'm constantly amazed that newspaper and TV-network sites mindless use doubleclick/etc for their websites, even though they have large advertising/marketing departments for their non-web products. You are already paying for an ad department! You already have a network of advertisers! You already have their actual ad-content on file! Why are you giving money to another company to do what you already do yourself and have done for over half a century?)

But the stuff that is needed one day is worth all the pain of keeping the rest. The problem is not knowing.

The videos are so you have something to cut together for their funeral video.

The newspapers are so the great grandkids have something for their 3rd grade social studies project.

Neither did video tape.

No. Digital content needs to be worked. Digital archives are a certain path to unreadable formats, corrupted files, failed electronics, etc. It's different with archiving paper/film/etc, where constant handling reduces lifespan and data decays in a "human friendly" way. USBs, harddrives, DVDs, all shitty archive material unless they are being constantly used (and thus checked) and copied and themselves backed up.

Even with a archive folder(s) on an active drive, every few years you need to check that the formats are still readable, and that the player/editor software still works on your current system and/or that newer player/editors play the older files. And periodically convert the data to newer formats (by all means keep the old to avoid lossy conversion to short lifespan formats.) And it all gets backed up with your normal backup regime, which itself is a system that gets periodically updated because it's in regular use.

Ionisation of the upper atmosphere creates a cloud of relativistically accelerated electrons which the Earth's magnetic field causes to flow (or rather, to slam) back into the ground. That creates a RF pulse so sharp that it creates a voltage potential across any electronics or electrical devices, no matter how well protected against surges. It is sharp enough to create a voltage potential across a Faraday cage, removing the cage's protective effect. (And if you've seen Faraday cages resist lightning, you'll get an idea how fast this pulse is. It makes lightning look slow.)

The second component is slower, and apparently more like lightning. So at distance, a simple surge protector is enough. Closer, a Faraday cage will do the job. The third component is more like a geomagnetic storm, long wave RF that overloads long antennas (such as power lines). Pulling the plug is enough to protect you. Hell, your normal breakers or fuses should also suffice. The risk there is the destruction of the power grid over a large area.

Rad-hardened electronics will shorten the distance that you are vulnerable. But mostly it's just about putting bulk mass between you and the EMP. And your basement isn't enough, due to the metal lines running from above (power/plumbing/strapping/etc). So basically that means the answer is bunkers.

It's always bunkers.

There are three components to a nuclear EMP. One affects electronics and can punch though a Faraday cage, one affects electronics but can be stopped by a Faraday cage, and one which affects power lines and a Faraday cage for individual devices is overkill. The range of each component is an order of magnitude greater than the previous.

A geomagnetic storm (from a Carrington Event scale CME) only produces the third component. It won't affect your harddrive unless it's plugged into a wall-socket and you're really, really unlucky.