Yes, I believe you missed the part where the disease he has causes the muscles in his body to stop working. It's a fairly safe bet the muscles that work his lungs or digestive system... or pretty much any other part of his body... will stop working before this heart fails. Someone with this disease is "lucky" to make it to twenty.

There are still a lot of people that use dialup - 30 million, by one study I found (heck, my parents were still dialing into AOL until this year), and it's still a recognized symbol of "going online". That sound won't be going away for quite a while.

"You can't expect everyone to have working technical knowledge in cryptographic systems and anonymity."

At this stage of the game, why would they have to have that knowledge? PGP was almost point-and-click easy ten years ago. With all the captchas and logins and general interface fluffery folks have to deal with these days online, how much more troublesome would it be to incorporate a key generator into the process of creating a new account somewhere?

Localized problem? Maybe now, long after the fact, but at the time...

"Four hundred times more radioactive material was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The fallout was detected over all of Europe except for the Iberian Peninsula"

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

And as for the worst disaster ever...

"The suck-and-salvage technique was developed in desperation across the Arabian Gulf following a spill of mammoth proportions -- 700 million gallons -- that has until now gone unreported, as Saudi Arabia is a closed society, and its oil company, Saudi Aramco, remains owned by the House of Saud. But in 1993 and into '94, with four leaking tankers and two gushing wells, the royal family had an environmental disaster nearly sixty-five times the size of Exxon Valdez on its hands..."

-- http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-supertankers-051310

Which doesn't mean this isn't the worst disaster the Western Hemisphere has seen, which is very likely will be by the time it's done.

I came here to suggest LogMeIn. I can't get Back To My Mac to work from behind my router, but LogMeIn works like a charm.

Earlier this year, i was using an old greyscale Palm PIlot I borrowed from work as a reader. I got through several Cory Doctorow books on it, as well as several other books. I think I broke the down button on the thing, in fact.

Now, I have an iPod Touch, with four different book and pdf readers on it... and I haven't really read anything on it yet. Too busy with the videos and the email and the games and stuff. The Palm was really useless to me for anything except book reading. There's something to be aid for specialized devices, after all.

I've got about $10 in overdue fines - a fair amount from when I stupidly let my kids check out books on my card - so they won't let me back to check more stuff out until I pay some of that off.

The people you DON'T follow make it interesting, too. Thanks to my mindless personal ramblings on Twitter that other people found, I have learned about, among other things:

o Where to buy a good digeridoo
o Modern-day old-school radio plays being performed in Britain
o The benefits of acupuncture over chiropracters

I have also won a $25 Amazon gift card thanks to Twitter, and gotten a free cell phone upgrade (from my provider's support contact) as well!

I used to have the same complaints about Facebook that others have about Twitter. Just like any other service on the Internet, Twitter is what you make of it.

For a month or so, I did this as a temp job. My job consisted of manually logging into a server every two hours and manually running a command to gather log files, and then another to send those files to a second server. I honestly have no idea what kind of system I was logging into, I just know that I was told they were unable to automate the process, so there needed to be a warm body to run the commands. For that, I got to sit in a windowless basement data closet with no access to TV, radio, or open Internet. At least it was a paycheck, and I got to catch up on some reading, writing, and sleep.

I'd take a bus to work in a heartbeat. I'd much rather someone else drive, but the nearest bus stop to where I live is already halfway to work. It's only about 12 miles to work driving, so by that point, I might as well drive the rest of the way.

Worse casting? Rose McGowan will be Sonja - http://www.wildaboutmovies.com/movies/RedSonjaTrailer2009-RedSonjaMovie2009-RoseMcGowan.php