In some cases, the problem is not in the drive but in the on-board controller circuitry. If you're desperate, and you have a 100% identical drive, you can swap the controller boards and that will often work.

My first job in "the industry" was in a PC repair shop in 1991. Back in those days, we had a huge crop of bad Seagate 40MB (yes, that's "mega" children) hard drives. The usual problem was that the spindle had frozen up, and if we took the circuit board off and gently tapped the spindle, you could often (about 75% of the time) get the drive to start spinning again long enough to get your data off.

Hard drives have gotten a lot more reliable and a lot smaller since then. I don't know whether this would be a wise thing to do with a modern hard drive.

I've long argued that authenticating identity "online" is a government function, just as it is a government function to issue me a birth certificate or a driver's license or a passport. A government-run single sign on (or, better, a network of single-sign-on's depending on where your citizenship lies) could be prohibited by law from collating information, and sites that used it could be forbidden from using it for sharing of data. Similarly, sites that wanted to use it could be legally prohibited from abusive practices, sharing your information, etc.

The reality is that privacy is OVER -- and it's been over for a long time. Unless you've bought a tin-foil hat, you're in many dozens (if not hundreds) of databases, many of which share information. The problem? You don't know it, and you have no access to this wealth of information. So let's drag as much of our critical information as possible under government control, where there's at least SOME accountability. Millions of details ... like how to preserve some sort of anonymity if there's an overarching SSO -- but the economic benefits of establishing one would be huge.

Finally, let it be noted that the situation with sso now is analogous to the situation with "information services" back in the 1980's. We could have built an awesome shared information service (a la France's Minitel), but the companies in the space (AOL, CompuServer, BIX, Genie, etc.) were all trying to beat the others by locking you into their product. The free market is not the solution to every problem.

I find it so funny that RIM is now "beleaguered", and it's all due to the outrageous success of Apple whom we were assured would die no more than 10 years ago..

Preach it.

I recently turned 40, and I work with a number of people in their twenties. I consistently finish project faster than they do ... however, this is often obscured by the fact that I give longer (and more accurate) estimates for projects. I've learned a new programming language every year for the past 10 years or so (this year was Haskell; my brain is still blown) and my employer highly values my skills and experience. I have another friend who works as a "project troubleshooter". He is brought in, as a contractor, to save projects that aren't getting completed or whose performance is so bad that they're unusable. He primarily does coding, not management, and makes about $500,000 a year as a consultant in his late 50's.

The other thing I'd observe is that most of the newer graduates never REALLY learned the fundamentals. They think of memory in "gigabytes", not "megabytes", and they tend to have slept through basic ideas like evaluating algorithms. (I recently had to explain to a computer science major from an Ivy League school with a rep for computer science the significance of "big O" and why an algorithm with O(n!) was a bad idea. He was a smart kid, but apparently that concept was just never hammered home.) Likewise for memory management -- all most recent graduates know about memory management is that the garbage collector does it. Likewise, for them machine language is hopefully obscure, and if they were ever confronted with a selector panel their brains would freeze up.

Don't count us old farts out yet. There are advantages to having first learned programming on a computer whose memory was only 5Kb, with a 1 Megahertz processor. (A Vic 20.)

While we're at it, perhaps you could provide one example of a case where Christians have "lynched" a gay person? There have been a few, limited physical altercations, but at the end of the day I'm not aware of any lynchings -- of gay people, or scientists, or anybody else.
 

The problem is that "scientists" (I use the term advisedly) don't confine themselves to telling people what science says, nor do they confine themselves to condemning individual Christians that attack them. Instead, they attack Christianity itself. This has been going on for about 200 years.

I could say much the same about gay rights' advocates. I am sick unto death of hearing them trot out the same old tired dozen or so examples (all drawn from the Old Testament, with no appreciation for the different kinds of revelation that Christians believe in) of how the Bible says X, Y, & Z. What really frustrates me? It's quite evident that in almost every case, they've never read it.

Highly recommend you take a gander at "Surprised by Hope" by N.T. Wright. Your notion of the doctrines of the afterlife is ... ahem ... not exactly Biblical. Not that there aren't a lot of people who believe this in the church, but, in a word, they're wrong.

And leave the theology to the theologians?

The notion of Young Earth Creationism wasn't popular in the early church, and in fact the Six Ages of the World theory is just another wacky idea from the supreme Wackadoodle of Western Christianity, Augustine. In contrast, listen to what Origen (3rd century) said:

We answered to the best of our ability this objection to God's "commanding this first, second, and third thing to be created," when we quoted the words, "He said, and it was done; He commanded, and all things stood fast;" remarking that the immediate Creator, and, as it were, very Maker of the world was the Word, the Son of God; while the Father of the Word, by commanding His own Son--the Word--to create the world, is primarily Creator. And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day, and of the firmament upon the second, and of the gathering together of the waters that are under the heaven into their several reservoirs on the third (the earth thus causing to sprout forth those (fruits) which are under the control of nature alone, and of the (great) lights and stars upon the fourth, and of aquatic animals upon the fifth, and of land animals and man upon the sixth, we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world, and quoted the words: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens."

I'm minded of a legendary, possibly apocryphal quote from Karl Barth (pronounced "bart") when he was confronted by a woman who couldn't believe in a talking snake in Genesis 3. "It is not so very important whether the snake spoke. It is much more important what the snake said." Most serious theologians think that the purpose of Genesis 1-11 was not to give literal history, but to setup the basic propositions that:

• God created the world and it was "very good."
• Man screwed it up.
• The son of man, through the church, will restore it to its original goodness.

You don't have to agree with this; but I wish that those opposed to Christianity (neo-atheists, gay rights activists, and the like) would stop telling the church that we are not permitted to interpret our own sacred texts in ways that we have used for thousands of years.

(Note: I have a Ph.D. in "Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity: Textual and Historical Studies" from the University of Virginia -- basically, New Testament as I focused it -- so feel qualified to speak with some authority on this subject.)

Personally, I think that Apple, Google, et. al. should be required to maintain some sort of interoperability between their media platforms, or at least open them enough that others can compete. If I buy a movie on iTunes, I should be able to play it on an Android machine (there's no real technical obstacle.) Same for books, music, etc.

This is clear monopolistic behavior, and should be crushed like a bug.

are we in the middle of a Perl renaissance?

I hope not. I have to maintain a large body of Perl code at work, and it's a nightmare.

I was shopping for a car last night, and while reading stickers was struck that the Honda Pilot actually has more domestic parts than the Dodge Durango, and not by a little bit. I knew that this was at least potentially true, but was really struck when I saw it on the label.

I don't really care who owns the company, because they're just fat cats (and can starve for all I care.) I care who actually gets the middle class jobs involved in auto manufacturing.

It's not a "magical notion". Fiber in fruit keeps fructose in the gut, where it is digested by gut flora and turned into tasty flatulence. I happen to know this because my daughter is fructose intolerant.

I recently watched Ken Burns' Prohibition documentary, and was struck again and again by how many people were overweight despite the image of Americans back then as skinny.

Errr... that should have been "Carbon dioxide emissions." I'm smoking a cigarette, so I guess I have carbon monoxide on my brain.