Well, I wouldn't say that it means absolutely nothing... to me it meant it was a fantastic day to take my boys on a four mile hike through some beautiful mountains. Black Friday may possibly have meant that there were fewer people on the trails, but that difference, if extant, was probably the difference between seeing 10 people instead of 11 on the trip.

Does it worry anyone else that this satellite shares a name with a unit of ionizing radiation?

I mean, sure, probably the sat was named after WIlhelm just like the unit, but this is definitely a case where absorbing just one roentgen would almost certainly be fatal.

Assuming that the cure/infestation could spread, then sure, it's a serious threat, and I wouldn't want to take it lightly. Even a single zombie should be taken seriously (/wave Clairvius). But if you take the worst case scenario that a few million cancer patients suddenly become infectious zombies, then yes, it's a serious threat, a huge disaster, and the premise for an interesting sci-fi story.

On the other hand, if you take the best case scenario of a non-transferable zombification resulting as a side effect from a preventative measure, then you're likely to have a handful of the world's poor, remote, and those with a religious or cultural bias against modern medicine all engulfed in a sea of billions of the walking dead. That's converting your story/movie from a sci-fi horror disaster movie into a post-apocalyptic survival movie.

A subtle distinction between this and the whatever-it-was in the I Am Legend movie is that the drug in the movie was a preventative measure, while this is a curative measure. It's important because preventative measures need to be applied to everyone who might ever get cancer (which would be everyone, unless it's possible to predict cancer, which would be its own major breakthrough), while curative measures are applied to those who already have cancer.

From a societal standpoint, if everyone who has cancer suddenly turns into brains-craving zombies, that's a relatively small fraction of the population and it's a threat that can be dealt with. If, on the other hand, everyone who doesn't want to get cancer turns into a zombie, that's pretty much it for the human race.

From a personal standpoint, a 1E-9% chance of turning into a zombie and being detonated by a crack government anti-zombie squad is fairly easily offset by an alternative of near-certain death by cancer. It's at least a little bit harder to swallow if, like most of the US, your chances of getting cancer and dying of it are more like 25%.

Either that, or it's an ADD-less app that isn't easily distracted.

Or maybe it *does* add, but it adds less.

Ya know, that was my first thought too. I'm right now going through the heaviest effects I expect to see from Irene (which is to say, occasional moderate winds), but my generator is fueled up and tested. Not because of "irene", or even "hurricane season", but because it always is, in preparation for whatever happens.

Hurricanes are interesting beasts, as they're a disaster you can know about days before they hit. So many other types give much less warning. Makes me happy to be living in a time where there are weather satellites.

Another thing that I would love to see is this: take the time that the yellow lasts, and multiply it by the speed limit to get a distance. Then put a marker on the road that distance back from the end of the intersection. That way, if you're going the speed limit and you've passed that mark when the light turns yellow, you know you can just keep going. And if you haven't passed the mark, you know you need to stop. There are too many places where topography and different sized and timed street lights make it hard to judge if you should stop or go.

here's my idea for a solution to this: Make a home movie. Play it on the TV. Sue the TV manufacturer for violating your copyright to your home movie by creating and distributing a derivative work. Profit.

You never know. The anti-nuke crowd doesn't seem to be up in arms about americium smoke detectors in everyone's house, and that suffers from the triple threat of 1) being a radioactive isotope, 2) being about as un-natural and man-made as it's possible to be, and 3) reeking of nationalism.

Apparently radium watch hands have largely been replaced by tritium, which is both radioactive and actually used in thermonuclear bombs.

So if there is a big hoopla about this, I think it will come from anti-nuke environmental activists being funded by big oil... which, in its own way, could be kinda fun to watch, and frighteningly reminiscent of so many games of Illuminati

I'm right with you there, that's kind of what I was interested in as well. I could definitely imaging a pirate feeling more justified in downloading a game they expected to be crappy.

But it really is a shame, they have the piracy data (or at least their estimation of it), and the sales data is reasonably freely available, all they need to do is see if sales or piracy has a tighter correlation to reviews, and it could be fascinating.

I prefer my beer to be good. I don't really give a flying crap who made it, how they made it, where they made it, or how much of it they made. The only exception being that I might care how much was made in a particularly good homebrew batch, as I could eventually drink all there is and not have anymore. Honestly, I've had good (and horrible) beer in all of those categories. (even the last category: Some beer it's best to keep away from me. Others, it's horrible of you to keep away from me, so hand it over now!)

That's my first thought exactly. Because fundamentally, a panel van with "Free Candy" spray painted on the side is a social engineering attack, and it would be very useful to teach children to recognize it as such.

And if they fail to recognize that sort of Social Engineering, those lockpicking skills may be coming in handy real soon now.

They won't even let you change the battery, changing the secret is right out. :)

Taking the data offline and securing it physically is just a prudent way to secure it. To me, that still falls under #2, trusting them to keep it secure while #3, making it remain available. RSA did, I assume, a reasonable job at keeping the data available, but failed to keep it secure.

But I would have to say you're exactly right on what security should be expected. There is some data that not only can, but really should be secured by taking it completely offline. Hopefully things like this will make people think a moment more not only about who they're trusting, but what they're trusting them to do.

From my understanding, the RSA breach basically broke into the database that ties serial numbers to the internal "secret" that's used to generate OTP's. So go back to before the breach, and assume you're an RSA customer. To be their customer, you have to trust them. You can trust them to:

1. 1) securely wipe their copy of the database once they've delivered your tokens to you
2. 2) keep their database secure against attackers
3. 3) provide you with a copy of the database after you lose yours.

Note that options 1 and 3 are mutually exclusive. Now, it would be nice to be able to choose your level of risk tolerance yourself and decide on #1 vs #2 + #3, but there are a reasonable number of customers who actively dislike being forced to make choices. And there would be a whole lot of customers who would be really mad if, after losing their database, were told by RSA "Sorry, all of your tokens are now useless keyrings. No choice but to replace them all"

To me it's like the evolution of passwords. In the beginning, if you forgot your password, your admin could tell you what it was. Then passwords got hashed, and your admin couldn't tell you what it was, but could reset it for you, and security was enhanced. Then passwords were used as encryption keys, and now your admin couldn't tell you what it was or reset it. If you forgot it, your data was gone. Once again, a security enhancement, but now a greater danger of data loss through forgetfulness.