Blogger shows that cosmic rays are a real problem

Hanji writes: We have discussed the potential effects of and protections against cosmic ray radiation here before, but for the average computer user, it's an obscure threat that doesn't affect them in any real way. Well here's a blog post that describes a strange segfault and, after extensive debugging, traces it down to a single bit flip, probably caused by a stray a cosmic ray. Lots of helpful descriptions of Linux debugging techniques in this one, and a pretty clear demonstration that this can be a real problem. I know I'm never buying a desktop without ECC RAM ever again!