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.

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.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

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.

You mean it drops off too high and downrange to boost back to the launch point and too low to achieve most of one orbit before boosting back to the launch point. Right?

Uber also turned it off once they read the news and instead gave everyone free rides out of the city, paying the drivers out of their corporate reserve.

From what information the police have released since then, it looks like you're right on the mark. The guy is a violent nutjob that also happens to be an Iranian Muslem; and he has lived in Australia for almost 20 years now. I doubt he has much connection with Islamic State beyond their chat boards.

It's really the same mechanism. In one case the high energy rays impart enough energy to charge or drain a gate, and in another high energy rays impart enough energy to break a DNA bond. The parent was talking about being continually hit with enough high energy rays to instantly crash a normal computer, which is well above the amount you need to kill a person.

It also sucks that every astronaut we send up there dies in like 3 days from radiation poisoning from the apparent containment-core levels of radiation the ISS flies in...

After the patch my box started complaining endlessly that it was not genuine windows, but when I went to activate Windows page it said I was already activated and just told me all of the great benefits of having genuine Windows and that I should install MS Defender.

It non-activated dialog box wanted me to install some application to double activate it or something? I've had a tough time figuring out exactly what's up with it. The links all point to genuine microsoft.com websites, so it doesn't appear to be malware, but I'll be damned if it's not acting like malware.

Well said sir.