Watching and listening to the lunar landing sends shivers down my spine. For all our cool tech these days, nothing compares to that moment, and I can't help but wonder if our generation will have such a defining moment. Right now the world seems too obsessed with "safe" and "profit", and appears to have lost the vision and drive to push our boundaries.

I wish we would have some leaders who would follow in the footsteps of "we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard."

It all depends on what level of protection you're going for. Protecting against a direct strike on your house would be excessively expensive for most people, if at all feasible (lightning nerds feel free to explain the massive EM fields and their air-ground-wiring interactions etc).

When we renovated our place (including fresh wiring throughout) I opted for an "industrial strength" surge protector mounted on the DIN rail in the main switch board. Back when I was doing the calculations for it, it should allow for an air-to-ground strike as close as a block away, and an air-to-supply-line strike twice(?) as far away. A strike like that would blow/exhaust the SPD, but also absorb the spike enough that my UPS doesn't fry, and the UPS in turn smooth out the remaining parts of the spike.

Things not behind the UPS are largely left to fend for themselves, except a few things like the TV which is on a power-board with a built-in surge protector (heaven knows how much help that would be, I don't even know if the label can be trusted).

Anyway, as I was saying, depending on the desired level of protection, it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. I only spent ~$350 or so extra to have the SPD installed. The electrician thought I was mad for going to such length in a residential place though...

Either we'd grab the laptops, or the NAS (which the laptops back up onto) on the way out. And if we weren't home, then we'd still have a not-horribly-old backup over at the parental units' place.

Win7:
        C:\> shutdown
        Usage: shutdown [/i | /l | /s | r | /g | /a | /p | /h | /e] [/f] ...50 odd lines cut
        C:\>

MacOS X:
        # shutdown
        shutdown: NOT super-user
        # sudo shutdown
        usage: shutdown [-] [-h [-u] [-n] | -r [-n] | -s | -k] time [warning-message ...]
        #

Linux:
        # shutdown
        shutdown: you must be root to do that!
        Usage: shutdown [-akrhPHfFnc] [-t sec] time [warning message] ...10+ lines cut
        #

Win98:
        C:\> shutdown
        'shutdown' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
        operable program or batch file.
        C:\>

FreeBSD:
        # shutdown /sbin/shutdown: Permission denied.
        # sudo shutdown
        usage: shutdown [-] [-h | -p | -r | -k] [-o [-n]] time [warning-message ...]
        #

Given the above, I hereby declare the parent wrong. :)
Also, don't ask about Win98. Please.

Nah, it typically gets put onto ATM links for the back-haul. It only breaks out onto the PSTN if the destination is a land line.

So they just "invented" a CGI script that essentially does:

#!/bin/sh
FILE="/path/to/sample.jpg"
XPIRE="110130"
NOW="$(date +%y%m%d)"
[ "$NOW" -gte "$XPIRE" ] && { echo "HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"; echo ""; exit 0 }

echo "HTTP/1.0 200 OK"
echo "Content-Type: image/jpeg"
echo ""
cat "$FILE"
exit 0

only with more junk and requiring a plugin on the client side? Genius!

Note: This was totally dry-coded off the top of my head. Bugs and standards compliance failures likely. The whole idea didn't seem to warrant a proper implementation in the first place.

Oh come on! You've been having weird creatures attempt to break in through the attic window, and you then go and open the front door without even checking through a window on that side of the house?! That is not particularly smart.

(Alright, I made the same mistake too, and it took me a while to realize I could push the piano across to block the attic window... awesome game though!)

Simple as that. That's of course assuming you could get the people to agree to it in the first place.

You can do long hours for a short period in order to get a particular feature out the door (but will have to give everyone plenty of time to recover afterward). Doing long hours on an open-ended schedule is just a burn-out disaster in the making. Of course, if all the developers quit, the company expenditure is reduced...

No you don't! You throw it to who!

Urgent Mission.