Well, presumably the botnet outputs data to an address, right? Like let's say everything it collected was sent to a particular IP adadress. The "uninstaller" could have just been, say, something that edits the hosts file and just blocks the IP at that level. It doesn't risk harming the computers (it only adds one address that will fail to connect) and it completely cripples the botnet.

Spend days in the rain, barely sleeping on a boat.

Spend a seasick few hours being ferried accross the channel in constant fear or a torpedo blowing the entire ship out of the water with nothing you can do about it.

Get into a tiny rolling vessel and find out that you are at the front.

Get tossed around as the landingcraft slowly makes its way to the coast, while the bombartment stops and you know every german on the coast has plenty of time to get into position.

Get machine gunned as the ramp comes down.

Get reborn.

War sucks, this scene has been done a lot if games and for some reason you are always in the landing craft that isn't machine gunned. Magically, you are one of the handful of survivors of the first wave at Omaha. Funny that.

I hate writing cheques (and hate being given them even more), so I don't. I have several bills set up to be paid automatically, but some others I pay manually through online banking. I click "Bills" - "Electricity", type "32.42" and hit "Pay". (The first time I had to choose the appropriate electricity company from the list and put in my electricity account number.)

I've sent 4 important letters this year:
- An insurance claim,
- a complaint to the insurance company... but I faxed this
- a complaint to their parent company
- a complaint to Lloyd's of London
- a form with my bank details on so they could (finally) settle the claim
Three political letters
- one to my MP (member of Parliament)
- one to my London Assembly member
- one to the local council
And one to my sister, when she left her credit card at my house.

Operation Flashpoint was another good one. I'd say it's still number one on my games "experiences" list to this day..

And post-rock. Lots of Mogwai, Godspeed, Explosions, Sparrowes, etc.

And of course no-one really wants to say this: "No model can predict the future, because the data from the past does not necessarily follow in the future."

We have all sorts of very nice models built by very bright people who will try to convince anyone that their model can tell you how to trade, or what to invest in, or what this market or that market can do. There are several problems with this: Not only can a model not accurately predict future events, especially major, "abnormal" future events, but the model can't even take into account enough data to accurately model the past! You find that you overlooked a data point, that something was correlated that you think was not correlated; you find that things become correlated that were never correlated before.

Models have their place, but directing the overall flow of interest rates and investment and market direction is not that place. How many times do we have to have every single model proved absolutely and totally wrong by freak events before we say enough?