You have obviously never listened to Pink Floyd after smoking marijuana.

[quote]I think their goal is unrealistic[/quote] You misspelled "retarded".

My kingdom for a mod point

Funny you should mention Alton Brown, as much as I love him, at first I thought this would be the last article I'd expect to hear about him in. But then I thought about it, and you're quite right. He has done for "food science" what Sagan did for astronomy, and what Bill Nye did for basic science with kids. He shows that it's not all just magic... there is science behind it. And not just any science, but fun, TASTY science.

Yes, I think you're quite right. Alton Brown is definitely one of my science heros.

No matter how many times I read that title, it continues to look like Ted Rape, and I don't want to know what life-lessons you've learned from inappropriately touching plush bears.

nt

Hmmm.... k. Seems there's an Asian-American in the armor of OpenSSH

Do you think that $500 will be the only reward to the company? Or, do you think that maybe the company that finally takes them up on the offer and recovers the filename will reap greater rewards as a direct result?

Right now on Slashdot, we've got nerds and computer experts referring to this challenge as proof that it isn't possible. Sure, Slashdot isn't the absolute epitome of computer expertise, but dammit, we've got some smart guys here. Now, if company XYZ were to take this challenge and complete it as requested, then not only would they get their measly $500, but they would also (I'm sure) get a nice frontpage article on Slashdot along the lines of "XYZ Victorious in Great Zero Challenge!"... and there would be a nice memorable flamewar about how long we've been able to do this. And next time a nerd needs their zeroed-out hard-drive recovering, they are going to Google "Great Zero Challenge" and then click the XYZ link in the article. This is not only a chance to win $500, but it's a chance to be "those guys that finally confirmed the zeroed-out recovery myth".

Alton Brown, is that you?

Seems that everyone has their own story. 4 pages of posts so far! Guess I'll throw in my two-pennorth It was 2003, and I was taking a basic IT course in which Linux surprisingly made an appearance. Back in the late 90s I had heard of this mythical creature called Linux (which I had only read about, and thus pronounced it Lie-nucks), and how amazing it was that you could customize anything you wanted. Unfortunately, I never had a computer to try it on back then, so when I finally had a computer, and an install CD, I was on my way. I'll never forget the trepidation with which I put the CD in that drive. The calm confidence as I found that a lot of my GUI knowledge in Windows transitioned very well, and that my programming experience treated me well on the command line. Before long, I had a working file and print server through Samba. That server has gone through a lot of iterations over the years. But, even after moving residence 4 times with the server, it has still maintained a 99.8% uptime from that very day. It now runs an apache web server, my personal email server, a proxy so I can browse the web from work, and a few other things. Also, I've run Linux as a desktop on and off for a number of years. First was Gentoo, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, now I'm onto Kubuntu, and I'll probably stay here. Kubuntu 9.04 is everything an OS should be.