Public relations. You have to get the nuclear fuel to orbit somehow. What if the rocket blows up and scatters it everywhere? What if it makes orbit but is inoperable, and falls out of the sky? What if the Mars mission fails en route, and the ship comes back on return orbit and whacks into the Earth? What if terrorists take control via the Internet and use it as a weapon? It doesn't matter if the scientists and engineers say it can be done safely. Who trusts them, anyway? Think of the children!
Remember, large fractions of people still believe that cell phones cause cancer and vaccines cause autism.
Then I found out the hotel has internet connected TVs, so I plugged my *nix laptop into one of their jacks, got DHCP, and did a (ze)nmap scan to find all the other TVs. Picked one at random, grabbed its MAC address, and spoofed it on my network card. Wallah! Free access.
Meanwhile, the guy in the other room is getting charged per kilobyte for use of the internet-connected TV. Good plan. For an encore, how about breaking into another room and raiding the mini-bar, too?
I worked at Motorola in the late '80s in the Cellular Infrastructure Group. Moto's cellular switch was Z80 based, but it was a helluva hack. The thing had six Z-80s arranged in three nodes, each with an active processor and a hot standby. We had a custom MMU that extended the address space to 24 bits and could be mapped in 4096-byte blocks. Of the 16MB address space, 4MB was shared and simultaneously accessible by the active and standby processors.
It was mostly programmed in assembly, but we did have a "high level" language called MPL (Motorola Programming Language) which was little more than a big macro set around the assembly. It was very naive, had no optimization, generated crap code, and was buggy as hell. I always called it a pessimizing compiler. There was a newer, less buggy version available but we didn't use it. We had too many hacks and work-arounds that depended on the buggy behavior in the original.
All the code was, of course, linked into a single monolithic executable and loaded from tape. It took about 20-30 minutes to load the program. The processor board had a serial debugger terminal which could be used to poke changes directly into running memory. Each memory page had some space reserved for patches. I sometimes had to patch live customer machines by entering an assembly routine byte-by-byte into memory via the serial terminal and finally patching a CALL instruction into the appropriate address in main executable memory. And hoping really hard that I hadn't made any typos.
Later in its life peripheral boards were being built that were 68000 and PowerPC based and much more powerful than the main Z80 boards. The Z80 software was so crufty by then that the peripherals had hardware hacks to work around weird software behavior just because it was too damned hard to change the software.
Ah, memories...
Specifically for Banned Books Week I'd recommend Fahrenheit 451, just because of the subject matter. In general I'd recommend 1984 due to its continued relevance. Probably Brave New World too, but it's been so long since I've read it I really don't know if it still holds up.
A Clockwork Orange is a good story and a fascinating linguistic study. I love both the book and the movie, but I don't see it being nearly as socially relevant as the others. Recommended, but lower priority.
His Dark Materials is a toughie. The first book was absolutely fabulous, the second was pretty good, and the last was weird. Recommended with that caveat. The series usually gets placed in the juvenile section because the protagonist is a kid, but I don't consider them kids books. The subject matter (especially in the third book) gets to be hard to follow. (Not that I'd want to keep it away from kids, just that I don't think it would hold their interest. If they read it and like it, more power to them!)
I've never read The Handmaid's Tale, so I can't comment on it.
(Side note: I live in the US, but happened to be in Oxford when I finished reading His Dark Materials. If I'd realized at the time that Philip Pullman was living there I'd have beaten down his door and demanded to know just why he ended it like he did!)
I don't like CFLs at all. They're fine right at the beginning, but after a while they get slow to start (starting very dim, and brightening to full over the course of several minutes) and the max brightness is reduced over time. This may be due to the orientation of the fixtures, the temperature, or a dozen other environmental variables that CFLs seem sensitive to that incandescent aren't. I also haven't noticed their lifespan being any longer than incandescents, though I wasn't keeping records so it's admittedly subjective.
I started trying out LED bulbs a few years ago. I specifically wanted long-life bulbs for the ceiling fan that's 14 feet off the floor and a royal pain in the ass to change. I installed three of the standard "long life" incandescent appliance bulbs that I use, and one LED with an equivalent lumen rating. The quality and intensity of the light was the same in the LEDs and the incandescents. Time passed. The quality and intensity were still the same. More time passed. The incandescents burned out. That fixture is now all LED and still going strong a couple years later, even the original test bulb.
I'm slowly replacing other bulbs in the house as they fail with LEDs. They look great. I have no idea what the effective lifespan is because I have yet to have one fail.
I can't think of a single profession which doesn't seem to have a "problem." Makes one wonder.
It tells me that the definitions are too broad to be useful. Oh, crap, I said "broad". Now I'm guilty too!
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
