Events

From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. From this week's news: If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of...

...or, my thought about the controversy surrounding the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty: whether or not agents of the United States could have found (or, indeed, did find) Osama bin Laden without using torture does not matter one bit. Torture is wrong; no outcome that requires torture is worth the moral cost. But even if one were to accept the clearly false proposition that Osama bin Laden was the most powerful and dangerous criminal in the world, and even if one were to accept the flatly immoral...

Redondo Beach, Calif., resident Andrew Toth has build a mock-up of a 1970s-era jumbo: The new cabin - about 60 feet long, stretching from the airplane's nose to the front of the wing - is an almost exact replication of a 1970s and '80s vintage 747. In addition to first class, Toth installed 26 powder blue seats in what was called Clipper Class - a premium economy class section with extra legroom. Much of his plane is a former Japan Airlines 747 he rescued from storage space for retired airplanes in the...

Microsoft has suffered some unfortunate outages this week, first affecting SQL databases on Monday, and then yesterday storage: On Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS traffic due to an expired SSL certificate. This did not impact HTTP traffic. We have executed repair steps to update SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and have recovered to over 99% availability across all sub-regions. We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage...

Security guru Bruce Schneier examines Papal election security: Probably the biggest risk is complacency. What might seem beautiful in its tradition and ritual during the first ballot could easily become cumbersome and annoying after the twentieth ballot, and there will be a temptation to cut corners to save time. If the Cardinals do that, the election process becomes more vulnerable. A 1996 change in the process lets the cardinals go back and forth from the chapel to their dorm rooms, instead of being...

Why does Amazon charge 30% less for some CDs ("includes free mp3 version of this album!) than for just the mp3s? Case in point, a back-catalog Dixie Chicks album, $9.99 for just the mp3s but $6.99 for the mp3s plus CD. My only hypothesis is that they want to get rid of the physical inventory, and they're willing to take a loss to do so. Any other guesses out there? (Yes, Dixie Chicks. I didn't know I liked them until Pandora sent them my way. In the last three months I've bought about a dozen albums...

This guy, who shared his Oscar ballot with Hollywood Reporter: Best Cinematography “I liked Life of Pi, but I’m suspect of any nominee that used a lot of CGI, since you can manipulate the photography so much. Lincoln was way too milky for me; I have that problem with almost everything Janusz Kaminski does. The Anna Karenina cinematography was totally unimpressive. Django Unchained was Robert Richardson, and he, in general, does far too much top-lighting for me. I’m voting for Skyfall because I want...

For the first time in about 5 years—since 2008, I believe—I have no travel scheduled. It's an odd feeling, but one I'll soon rectify. Just not sure where or when to go yet. Meanwhile, Chuck Thompson, author of Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern manifesto for Southern secession, bemoans the homogeneity of every small city and its brewpub: Whenever some self-appointed hometown convention and visitors’ bureau rep (and sometimes it’s an actual CVB rep) takes you to that cool little place in the downtown...

Over the past two days, Microsoft Azure had two outages they're still investigating. The first, from 18:26 CST through 20:00 CST Monday (0026 to 0200 UTC Tuesday), and the second, from 13:50 to 15:27 CST (1950-2127 UTC) yesterday, affected SQL Database and related services in the Azure datacenter outside Washington, D.C. I noticed the Monday evening outage as it happened, because when a database goes down, a number of applications start sending me emails. A couple of people had minor inconveniences, but...

After only 147 years, the state of Mississippi has finally ratified the 13th Amendment: On Dec. 6, 1865, the amendment received the three-fourths' vote it needed when Georgia became the 27th state to ratify it. States that rejected the measure included Delaware, Kentucky, New Jersey and Mississippi. In the months and years that followed, states continued to ratify the amendment, including those that had initially rejected it. New Jersey ratified the amendment in 1866, Delaware in 1901 and Kentucky in...