Journal Journal: 9-11 Survivor: Social Commentary or Horrid Affront? 1
Did Garage Games see this one coming?
Did Garage Games see this one coming?
Everyone has different numbers on the exact quantity of casualties. More at Google News, if you care to search.
People are dead. c.f. The Lessons of Lebanon, are these scary parallels or what?
Great. I just finished speaking with a friend of mine, and I'm now convinced that there's a good chance I'll die tonight. I live close to D.C., and Saddam's just fucked up enough that he might try to hit it with something big.
I have no bomb shelter into which to retreat. My car isn't reliable enough to take somewhere safer. And the crux of it all is that I'm just too much of a coward to run away. If I run away, and I'm wrong, I look foolish. I can't have that. Hell, I walked by three of my coworkers on my way up here to write this, and, while I was prepared to ask one of them for a hug or a comforting word, I gave up when I saw all three. I'm too much of a coward to show myself vulnerable in front of more than one person.
If I knew for sure that the world was ending, I'd want to spend my time with Mandie, my girlfriend. But I'm too much of a coward to go over there on a schoolnight and demand that she spend the night with me because I'm concerned the sky will fall. I'd look like a little boy asking for a nightlight. I'd look like a fool.
So, basically, any hope I had of enjoying this day, if it is to be my last day on earth, has been dashed by my fear of what will happen if it is not, and tomorrow comes. That seems like a pretty good way to convince yourself that you need a personality transplant, doncha think?
Oh well. Perhaps I can head Saddam off at the pass. I'll stop by Burger King on my way home; hopefully, the cholesterol will kill me before the Middle Eastern dictator will.
I don't know how people who lived through the cold war managed it. I would be frozen to the spot, forever afraid to move.
--J
I'm curious to see how long this takes to propogate to levels where it will be fixed:
http://slashdot.org/~|<amikaze/. Befriend him, and check out your "friends" list. Odd!
Jouster
(Update 20030418: Most people have their friends show up on their "friends" list, not their "fans" list. At least in the short term, that is. Doh!)
It's always neat when Slashdot can fundamentally change your understanding of a concept. Case in point: Cawley's Law and its correlaries. I forwarded these links to my CS-prof boss... I'm curious what he'll have to say on the subject.
Jouster
The folks over at HardCoreWare.net have finally lost it. They built a PC that's well over twenty times quieter than their comparison PC (40 dB versus 65). And it's no sluggard, either: P4 2.80 GHz, 7200 RPM hard drive and--get this!--an overclocked to the max GeForce4 Ti 4200! The only fans in the entire system are in the PSU.
Or, check out the Redhat-annotated version of this story:
Microsoft has released the long-awaited Windows XP Service Pack 1 [kind of like a minor version number increment]. Check out the Main Download Page [the page that doesn't exist on Redhat's site that actually brings together disparate information on a given update], the distressingly-long List of Fixes [the ChangeLog for the kernel and any other RPM's you're updating, that you need to go to individual maintainers' pages to get], or just automagically get the patch from Windows Update [up2date on a DAMN good day].
Microsoft has released the long-awaited Windows XP Service Pack 1. Check out the Main Download Page, the distressingly-long List of Fixes, or get it all via Windows Update.
An article over at MSNBC talks about the steps the U.S. Government is requesting be taken by ISPs, particularly broadband ISPs, to protect their customers from malicious hackers, worms, and virii (and in turn prevent DDoS and other attacks against government targets). It gets most interesting, however, when it starts discussing rules being formulated on exactly how far the government can go in engaging in electronic warfare against military targets.
I'm very interested to hear how far-reaching the powers that
MSNBC is reporting on Toshiba's new Windows-oriented, USB 2.0-enabled iPod lookalike. With a 5GB hard drive, the $405 GIGABEAT MEG50JS [warning: in Japanese] will be showing up on Japanese shelves today. (Also catch the MacWorld article.)
Dr. Mike Adams, Professor of Genetics at Eastern Connecticut State University, has compiled a disturbing report on the effects of final exams on the families of college students. With finals coming around for many of us, it might be wise to keep your loved ones in the dark.
I was speaking with a friend last night, and we got to discussing Java. I pointed out that Java's object oriented structure is a big leap from procedural languages. He's an old-line programmer from the C and Fortran days, and he said something that surprised me. He said that back when he was in school, they could see the OOP ship on the horizon--they didn't know what it would look like, but they knew it was coming. He asked me what I saw coming down the pipe, but nothing came to mind. So my question is: what's on the horizon now? Is it something we're using now, or something truly blue-sky?
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton