After watching the Japanese "Fafner" TV animation, I was quite intrigued by the whole "assimilation" idea. Tried to watch the Star Trek version of it - and was largely disappointed.

The "Q" are one hell of a plothole - but still pretty much the only "true" aliens in the Start Trek.

That's just another way of saying "more of the same".

I can understand why the entertainment industry is so obsessed with the canons: to not dilute value of the original.

But I still can't grasp the why the fans are so obsessed with the "more of the same"?

P.S. I like how Japanese animes often parody and make fun of themselves. I like how they sometimes shuffle the roles and characters. Occasionally the shenanigans are way too transparent and shallow - but sometimes very brilliant and deeps ideas come out of it.

"it's so weird-looking; it's up in the air in terms of what it is. It is unbelievably fragile, and... it looks like it has wet tissue paper floating behind it. And it has a weird snout — it looks like a cartoon dog snout."

Sounds an awful lot like someone I saw walking out of the women's restroom at WalMart once.

The official danish position is that there is no oil at all in the newly claimed area.

The realist (Oilfield geologist here) is that the East Greenland coast and near-shore area are a considerably more approachable prospect. There are reasonable analogue oil fields up on the Haltenbank (mid-Norwegian Atlantic coast), which is a very interesting sign for the working oilman.

Going "round the corner" into the Arctic Ocean is less attractive than the East Greenland region.

HOH OHO ( real address )

Hydrogen (I) oxide and hydrogen (I) superoxide? That doesn't sound a very stable mix.

Don't share.

But to get buried down into that oil window ... you need several kilometres of sedimentation. Which is going to take several million years more.

The youngest hydrocarbon provinces that I've heard of (and I do work in the game) are Miocene to Oligocene in age. 5 to 15 million years in broad terms. Most of the reserves I've worked on are Eocene (55 million years) to Jurassic (140 million years) in age, which is probably not far off a global average. The oldest fields I've worked on were Late Cambrian, about 510 million years.

As always, the reality of the science is considerably more complex than outsiders appreciate.

Sony, through their lawyer David Boies (of SCO infamy)

would have destroyed that possibility.

I hope my friends who work for Sony have got their pensions secure, before the whole thing folds.

There was a hilarious comment on the news a couple of days ago accusing Sony of acting in an "un-American manner" over this matter. But, DOH!, they're a fucking Japanese company. Durrrrr!

I don't know about you, but I don't need to travel a route more than a couple of times before I know it ; and for working out alternatives, I've got these things called "eyes" and "memory" for "reading" things called "road signs" which are cunningly positioned to direct people how to get from point 'A' (here) to point 'B' (somewhere else). I don't see any need to slavishly follow the directions of some application on my phone, or an appliance on my dashboard.

If I'm in a strange city - say I'm there for one day, for work, or 3 days as part of a vacation, then frankly it is easier to use a taxi than to fuck around hiring a car.

It's a solution in search of a problem. And I bet the problem it's solving is "how to expose adverts to users".

Still.

Dismantling the centralized institutions one by one - DNS, IANA/RIRs, hosting providers - whatever Maelstrom is capable of - is a step in the right direction.

If sufficient number of decentralized alternatives appears, one can try to nest them like a russian dolls. More layers of the nested services - higher the privacy (at the potential cost of reliability).

That coming on the heels of the decentralized web solution coming from BitTorrent, Inc.

Pretty exciting times.

There is a balance between going back to paper and double-entry books versus putting the whole thing so close to the Internet that a single compromised box can make it easy for an attacker to slurp everything down. There are also tools to help separate data, but yet allow people to do their daily jobs.

VDIs come to mind. If one can serve up apps from different desktops, a user can have an external Web browser, internal Web browser, E-mail, the internal finance application, with appropriate separation between all of them.

On a different level is putting assets behind Citrix or RDP. The user can manipulate them, but doesn't have access to fetch the files. This helps limit potential damage, the worst thing being RATs, next would be screenshot snappers/keyloggers, but again, the signature of a RAT should be detected by the network IDS/IPS, especially if that network doesn't allow access to the external Internet other than through an application.

So, there is a balance between unfettered Internet access and a complete airgap, with security maintained. As an extreme, there is always moving back to a text terminal emulator and using SSH or even a 3270 emulator as opposed to going all the way back to paper and pencil.

Oops, I forgot.. pointing out that Microsoft does things for logical business reasons gets one down-modded around here. I repent. Microsoft just did it to screw you, *personally.* All the new beta features have been directed to whichever platform you don't use, as a way to screw you for being you.

Actually, suicide is typically not talked about in Western media because they're trying not to encourage copycats. That's why, with very few exceptions (Robin Williams, other famous people) you typically won't find anything in the paper. I know Microsoft has had at least one jumper from the Lincoln Square office in Bellevue, other tech companies probably have too. Funny thing, anywhere you treat people as sub-human for long enough, strange psychological things happen and they start to lose the will to live.

But, by and large, I agree with the lack of coverage in the media. People who may be borderline suicidal can be triggered by reading about other peoples' suicides, no need for the media to perpetuate the problem with in-depth coverage and how-to guides.