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Games

The Murky Origins of Zork's Name 70

mjn writes "Computational media researcher Nick Montfort traces the murky origins of Zork's name. It's well known that the word was used in MIT hacker jargon around that time, but how did it get there? Candidates are the term 'zorch' from late 1950s DIY electronics slang, the use of the term as a placeholder in some early 1970s textbooks, the typo a QWERTY user would get if he typed 'work' on an AZERTY keyboard, and several uses in obscure sci-fi. No solid answers so far, though, as there are problems with many of the possible explanations that would have made MIT hackers unlikely to have run across them at the right time."

Comment The Sad Reality (Score 1) 144

In this region Fairpoint is often the only choice for highspeed internet. If there is another option, it's Comcast who was forging rst packets, and blocking connections willy nilly. I was unable to use a VPN to my office, because Comcast deemed it bad traffic. Beyond that, if you try to use your 800 Billion free hours of AOL or other dialup, often times the phone lines are original copper from the early 1900s and won't even support 56k dialup.

Comment Re:This is a scam (Score 1) 409

Have you ever research cord blood cells? No, its obvious you have not, your entire statement is one piece of information after another. 1.) No stem cells are not easily obtained from adult blood, they can be harvested from bone marrow. This is not an easy process, and certainly one you would rather do without if you have some sort of major disease where you need stem cells. 2.) Very low chance? Its better than no chance. I don't have the percentages here, but its a higher chance than bone marrow and any other ideas out there. 3.) There is no guarantee, but they are working. There aren't many cases of failure that I have read about in my research 4.) So far, though mainly because it hasn't been tried in humans they have regenerated organs in pigs. 5.) Ummm ok and there could be unicorns walking around soon too. 6.) You call it emotional blackmail, others call it providing a service that they are more than willing to pay for. and as for your its ok if done with tax money statements, that is just stupid. Whos money doesn't change the validity of the science. One last point there are many blood cord banks that will take a cord and store it for free, if you are willing to donate it for public use. No one knows the upper limit of storage because the technique hasn't been around for very long, but there are some indications it could be much longer than 10 years. One peer-reviewed article I read made a claim the cells could still be viable 50 years.

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