Comment Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Score 3, Insightful) 1365
The future world she envisioned felt so much like an obvious extrapolation from the world of today. It affected me for awhile afterwards; just kept thinking about it...
The future world she envisioned felt so much like an obvious extrapolation from the world of today. It affected me for awhile afterwards; just kept thinking about it...
You are unfortunately right. My father had a really nasty bout of shingles that laid him low last fall. I didn't see him for a couple of weeks during the worst of it, but he took a photo of what his shoulder looked like with the lesions and the discoloration caused by the silver-based topical medication prescribed by his doctor. I don't think a zombie ever looked as bad as that.
It laid him low, and he hasn't ever quite recovered. Chicken pox was nothing compared to this.
From Krebs' article:
Comcast also is offering free subscriptions to Norton Security Suite for up to 7 computers per customer — including Mac versions of the Symantec suite.
At least most bots have the decency to let you use your own computer. Norton (and in my experience, McAfee) security suites are much less inclined to leave enough free resources for that to be possible.
There's a good history of Buran over at Astronautix. First the article about the craft itself, another (with a lot of overlap) about the project, then a short piece about the Buran Analogue. A very good write-up with several good photos (sad ones at the end) over at Aerospaceweb.
If you've got some time to kill, you can find a Buran mock-up sitting at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Google Earth. Also the final resting place of the Buran that flew and the Energia reusable launch vehicle, but it's a little hard to locate.
I've had much reduced hardware failure since moving to only respected brand (mostly antec) PS + high quality power conditioning.
It's funny how varied people's experiences can be on certain brands. The most failed component I've ever seen (by a huge margin) is Antec PSUs. My company used Antec cases with their 350W SmartPower PSUs for years and I'd say that about 30 out of 40 went bad over the course of three years. At home, I burned through four Antec supplies in three different computers. The ones replaced on RMA then also burned out. I have never replaced a PSU of another brand once I moved away from Antec. Same story at work, PSUs of different brands used to replace the Antec supplies never failed.
If it hadn't happened to me personally, I would never have believed it. I love my Antec cases but I'll never buy another PSU from them.
It's not as if there's no alternative if this happens. Pop in your live CD/DVD of a Linux distro, most people would be back online. Your data on the FAT32/NTFS filesystems can be read from within the Linux environment. Maybe your proprietary programs aren't there to access some of the data, but that's not blocking your communications. Those still forced to use dialup with their internal Winmodems, yes, their communications would be impacted. I suspect there are more people still forced to use dialup than we'd want in these "modern times".
Given how fast the geeks would get broadband-connected friends and family back online, I think you should be more concerned about the big ISPs being controlled. That's much more universal than just controlling ~85-90% of the PCs running a particular operating system.
I'm much more of a hardware (chip) guy than I'll ever be a software guy. I'd like to ask (honestly), how can Flash remain such a security nightmare? After all this time, all of the preceding versions of flash, how can vulnerabilities continue to be found in light of more scrutiny by the developers (code audits, bounds checkers, etc.)? I realize no complex piece of software is bug-free, but Flash (and of course, Acrobat Reader) have continuous vulnerability discoveries... must it be so forevermore?
I'm pretty sure the hosting company I had a few years ago (aka "kiddie hosting") had that many customers on the server that I was on. Does that count?
Twenty years from now, your USB thumb drives and CD-R's may have their data physically intact, but only museums will have equipment that can read them.
Nah... according to my wife, I'll almost certainly still have hardware "archived" that can read those formats. She's of course delighted that I feel the need to save humanity from a potential digital Armageddon... she didn't want to park the car in the garage, anyway.
I've known employees who have dropped them in the toilet and they still functioned afterwards
Oh well. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!
I received this in an email, and I think it sums up how I feel about the Christmas rush perfectly.
Twas the Night Nefore Christmas
(By Rev. Jon Prain)
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the town
Not a sign of Baby Jesus was anywhere to be found.
The people were all busy with Christmas time chores -
Like decorating, and baking, and shopping in stores.
Public outcry quickly followed since Microsoft had little if anything to do with the development of RSS. Dave Winer, the self-described inventor of RSS, lashed out via his blog claiming, "presumably they're eventually going to charge us to use it."
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.