Talking about wanting to go back to the Moon makes me all nostalgic for that optimism that continued epic deep space expansion was just within our grasp, where nerds believed that the time just after the end of the Apollo program was just holding a deep breath before diving back in with Gerry O'Neill's High Frontier.

"Perhaps some are too young to remember The X-Files"

"he came up with a TNG story that he wanted to tell, and only then did he put the sex scenes in"

psst! it was at yale in the sixties, not the seventies!

@inannamute: Possibly. This is how a lot of network traffic travelled back in the day. UUCP ([en.wikipedia.org] was the original underlying architecture for "netnews", or USENET ([en.wikipedia.org]

@Trai_Dep: No worries. I had a knee-jerk reaction and calmed my bruised knee by blathering a lot. :)

Boston Fantastic Film Festival, culminating in the Boston Sci Fi Movie Marathon ("Boston's other Marathon") is in February. [bostonsci-fi.com]

@wingbatwu: ... sure. But you can do it without taking down the entire electrical grid (which takes down, say, wall street). I've got a huge reply elsewhere in the thread with info on how to do it. Nobody's taking down the electrical grid just to block the internet. Particularly when most of the core…

@wingbatwu: The blackout in 2003 only blocked partial user access to the Internet. The underlying Internet continued to operate. Even ordinary telephone service pretty much stayed up (complete with people lining up 10 deep for payphones), and dialup access to ISPs worked - if you could get to your email provider,…

@ThePopesHat: Yes! Check out [www.cablemap.info] for a map of the major undersea cables, and look up an article from the late 1990's by Neal Stephenson in Wired magazine for an awesome look at how the cables are laid.

@wingbatwu: Yes, but your Internet network connection sites are generally covered by N+1 redundant on-site generators with battery backup for long enough to get the generators up to speed. Usually backed with oil delivery contracts to keep the generators humming.

Speaking as someone who used to run the underlying network for several of the largest web sites in the world, I object to terming it "corruption" of routers. The routers are still functioning as configured — the configuration has changed to stop advertising routes, but assuming it's intentional, this isn't…

yay strange horizons!

So, like yesterday's post about the menage a whale, but with the low-tech realdoll instead of the female whale. kinda.

Wow.

Excellent mad crazy engineering idea. It's like a bigger-yet-shorter version of the later implementation of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel. [idlewords.com]

@zslane: True. Girl Genius is awesome, but Phil Foglio has been a dead-tree comics artist since the 1980's, at least.

Bah. I much prefer the musical to the book. The book lost me partway through - it just seemed to go off into the weeds.

@TVs_Frank: We'll eventually discover that Cheetos encourage neuron growth.

OMSI is so full of awesome.