The guillotine was originally adopted by the French as an evolved and humane method for taking a human life and, considering what we've seen with alternative methods this past century, I have to agree: It's fast, relatively painless (quite possibly completely painless when one considers the shock reaction of the body,) somewhat messy, but has great symbolic and even theatrical value. Granted, the upper classes world-wide hate this device with a fearful passion, but that is actually part of its value.

The internet was designed to be amazingly robust, able to successfully get a message through a nuked-out infrastructure -- point A to point Z via any number of non-predetermined intermediate points. It was not designed to be secure because such security wasn't deemed necessary to the completion of the mission of getting a message to point Z from point A regardless the damage inbetween the two points.

What security it does have has been bolted on after-the-fact much like bolting a wind spoiler onto a Volkswagen Beetle. and with pretty much the same comical effect. "Secure" internet will require some serious redesign at the various hardware and sofware levels before it can be secure.

An interesting question is whether or not it can be both very robust and very secure at the same time?

My point being that the warnings about the above were made loud and clear in the mid-1990s when the internet was "discovered" by the citizenry and the commercial interests and yet everyone yelled "Full speed ahead!" and so here we are.

Glad to see someone else made the connection between this location and the Yellowstone hotspot. In terms of geologic time, this entire area is really "hot" and prone to large events of various types. Having a concentrated earthquake swarm in this area is worrying, especially since I live in Boise....

I was living in Portland during the whole Mt. St. Helens cycle in the late '70s/early '80s and the only adult nightmares I've ever had involve geologic events: It's hard to fully appreciate such things until you've experienced them.

for their business model to function...and they won't break it.

Flash and Silverlight, Adobe and Microsoft, again -- and again and again. Is it the year of the Linux Desktop yet?

The male version would be a cock ring: "Honey, would you get that?"

...clothing in general. Spoons are good too. Is this not Fark?

Interesting intellectual execise for these folks, but Occam's Razor suggests the sled/water bucket/rows of slaves on ropes behind whips is far more likely.

So, where is the freedom? Where is the choice? I can choose between Corporate Person A or Corporate Person B but not a Citizen Cooperative (government)? I thought these Corporate Person types loved Freedom and Choice. These Corporate Personages are crooks who lie like the politicians they buy -- and their products generally suck.

You, sir, are a world-class wag. Cheers!

Yes, a good point about the exploits-as-we-type attribute of Microsoft's blackbox software.

Historically, IE earned the name "Internet Exploder" because during its early days, it would not only crash, but crash and take the file system down with it, requiring a complete reinstall/rebuild of the system. I was slow moving from the Atari ST world onto PCs for my home system and when I did, the new PC came with Windows '95 with Internet Explorer built in to the OS. In the first thirty days of owning this system, IE crashed and trashed three times, after which I went down to Powell's Books in Portland and bought a copy of SAM's Slackware Linux -- and never looked back.

Never could decide which one I liked better: Internet Exploder or Internet Exploiter.

Microsoft should still be considering changing the name: As one posters here suggests, sometimes the stink will just not wash off.

Provide a common forum without restrictions by having a two-tiered forum: Serious Discussion and Peanut Gallery. How sites impliment this is optional, but it does allow for both the serious and the silly, the thinkers and the trolls. Requires quality supervision and moderation, yet here is the rub -- sites which either don't want to moderate their forums or do a really crappy job of it (Slashdot, this mirror is for you) are the ones that have the most trouble with trolling.

Samsung has had 1TB drives since December of last year for msata form factor. Not sure when the 7mm cased 1TB drives were born, but they're available too. Pricing isn't too scary either.

would be better than math if one is looking for a bridge from language to programming. Absent symbolic logic, math -- especially algebra -- is a good introduction to the concept of computer programming because of its logic component (application of the algebraic hierarchy is a simple logic system.)

For kids, Lewis Carroll's symbolic logic is both fun and useful.