He's into the "free as in vodka" part of it, I'm sure.

Not really, the Internet is like a series of tubes. Like a Habitrail.

Which, ironically, you can buy at Amazon during a DDoS attack!

Low emissions, safety features, and amenities of the new cars.

My large employer has public IPs to the desktop. According to ARIN, my desktop is in a block of over 500,000 addresses owned by the company.

I'll have you know we're using *over 20* addresses on my local /24!

What shortage?

...but only if your current cheap cables don't allow you to feel the purple taste of your sound.

If I had a pound for every time someone misused pound as a unit, I'd be rich!

I'll post about it after I finish streaming "Ow, my balls!" on my iPhone...

The new GM, same as the old GM.

So busy coming up with the car of tomorrow, they never have a car to sell today.

Maybe GM needs to stop dreaming up laser-enhanced windshields and build... say ... a Camry .

Although it gets to be a real bitch at 64-bits!

I'e been reading about all these neat projects about microcontrollers in the last few years and in the last month, I've gotten my new AVR dev board up and running, a fun first project on the breadboard, and I'm re-aquainting myself with C. What great fun it is to be back to programming "on the hardware" so-to-speak. I'm rediscovering just how really fast 4MHz can be. The day job/career has evolved more and more towards the business side of things and just no longer feels fascinating or even interesting in many ways. And when it is time to get into code, I'm not really learning new, clever, interesting ways to accomplish something, I'm learning yet another arbitrary framework or library - which I have to in order to keep up in the job market.

I also noticed that in the late 90's the answers to my typical "get to know you" questions when interviewing job candidates changed from "I've always been interested in electronics/computers/technology/science growing up" to "My high school counselor said there are good jobs in computers, so I took some classes ".

I've also noticed that people in the workforce are reluctant to apply themselves to learning office suites. Back in the DOS/Word Perfect days, people would take classes at night school to "learn computers" because it was becoming evident that they would need these skills in their jobs soon. Now I see that since most people haev computers with Windows at home, they all think they "know computers" but cannot find a file twice, can't map a network drive, and constantly go to a local expert rather than look in Help in their application.

Exactly my point, our "accomplishments" don't mean anything in the grand scale that those, like Hawking, should understand so well. Our accomplishments only mean something to ourselves. And if we're gone - either by natural means or by our own hand - there won't be anyone to know or care about it. People talk as if we have some impact on the universe and that our absence will be equally impactful - we don't even qualify as a blip.

No, I'm not going to shoot myself in the head, I'm living my life now the best I can. I *do* have an impact in my local social and family circle. But really, not much beyond that. Extrapolated out, we do have an impact on our own existence and our extended human family, but not much beyond that.

Then I suggest they use their great minds to solve the causes of self-destruction hear-and-now rather than try to solve the symptoms in some pie-in-the-sky far-off maybe-we'll-beat-the-odds future space utopia.

We don't even have a good *proposal* for long-term space survival (bio-environment, radiation protection, etc), let alone the ability to actually do it. It's pathetic that we sent some guys up to the moon in a relative tin-can and think that we're "space travelers" - some people have been mixing up their science fiction with their science. Just read up on how much lead, water, or voltage it takes to shield from inter-planetary radiation - that's going to be problem #1. The Apollo astronauts saw sparkles in their vision due to the radiation - even when their eyes were closed. And we're going to live how long out there? Then we're going to build a totally sustainable environment on a planet somewhere?

It looks to me like we need to solve the problems we have here now, first. But are we too entrenched in our social/economical/religious hang-ups to come out of it? If so, maybe we don't qualify for inter-planetary colonization - hence my original post regarding things turning out pretty much as they have.

And I thought guys like this were supposed to be *smart* and understand the scope and scale of things universal. Why exactly, does the universe need or want us to survive? If the universe doesn't need us, why do *we* need us? Our likely eventual nuclear destruction won't even register as background noise. You know, if the LHC creates a black hole and sucks in the Earth and 7 billion people into in in a minute, I'm OK with that - really. Nobody will be around *not* to be OK with it.

So let's say that we do colonize space and/or other worlds. Why do these guys think that the "colonists" won't end up just like us in due time? Because they'll all be peaceful, collective "space hippies"? Puhhhleeze. How odd that incredibly intelligent people who study nature on the grandest of scales refuse to acklowledge nature's most basic laws such as supply-and-demand of limited resources which create greed, jealousy, crime, class separation, etc.

1) And you think the electrics will go out "almost immediately" why? Can you provide any basis for your statement? I believe Mythbusters tested this an found that the electric windows will operate submerged for over an hour. Electricity would much rather travel through wires than water. Fresh water is a rather poor conductor by comparison. OK, salt water will conduct much better than fresh water so don't crash into the Dead Sea.

2) The newer car may be more airtight, lengthening the time for someone to gather their wits after impact and take some good breaths of air before they...

3) ..break out a window and get virtually sucked out of the car along with the air or at least allow the car to fill so they can simply swim out. Newer cars have much thinner glass than older cars. Plus, auto glass is designed to be very strong against impacts from the outside but trades that for weakness in the other direction. Go to a junk yard sometime and wrap your knuckles solidly against the inside of a windshield and watch it crack easily. You won't be able to do that from the outside - maybe even with a rock.

Try putting the bad drive in the fridge for about 15 minutes. Sometimes it's a thermal expansion problem on the board or in a chip and you can get a few working minutes with the drive to copy files off. If that doesn't work, try the freezer. If that doesn't work, try some gentle heat with a hair dryer. If none of that works, you're back to the board swap or a professional recovery service. If the fridge/freezer thing works, using a USB interface on the drive will buy you some more up time, as you don't waste "cool" time while the machine boots up before you start pulling files off.

As a very non-jumpy person who lived only about 4 miles from the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge 6.7 earthquake, I spent a month jumping at any sudden deep sound - a truck driving by or loud bassy music, for example. We slept in the living room for that month because another big one could strike and nobody wanted to be in the back of the house in the dark again. And we got frequent aftershocks that, even if they weren't strong shakers, set off the same sounds in the house as the big one.

So I can certainly understand a New Yorker's gut response to a sight like this. I don't know if I'd go home upon the sight, but I'd certainly start mentally prepping a plan to evacuate the building and consider where I'd go if something did happen. Maybe a good time to take a 15-minute break outside the building.