According to this article, executives travelling to China are advised to buy a separate mobile phone to be used only in China. This is to avoid spying and to work around corporate espionage.

The timing of the article is to create media noise for the upcoming (?) US-China trade war. Howeeeeeever, that’s not the most interesting part of that article. This is:

Mark Bregman, chief technology officer at security firm Symantec said he left his MacBook Pro behind in the US and took his MacBook Air whenever he flew to China. Bregman said he only ever used the Air in China and re-imaged the machine every time he returned home.

Interesting? Very much so: the CTO of one of the biggest providers of anti-virus/security products for Windows doesn’t even use Windows himself! He uses an Apple MacBook. That tells you something, doesn’t it?

The barber of Sevilla, as reformulated by Russell, as reformulated by Wikipedia:

Suppose there is a town with just one male barber; and that every man in the town keeps himself clean-shaven: some by shaving themselves, some by attending the barber. It seems reasonable to imagine that the barber obeys the following rule: He shaves all and only those men in town who do not shave themselves.

Under this scenario, we can ask the following question: Does the barber shave himself?

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Zenburn v2.5 is released!

Changes: support for coloring Ignore-groups (thanks to John Gabriele). The Ignore-group coloring is toggleable, see the file for details.

Grab it from vim.sf.net or from the official Zenburn page.

In practice, the Vim help files will change from this (click pictures to show them bigger):

to this:

Suppose that a huge space rock is detected, and it’s heading for collision with Earth! Humankind is given a warning 19 hours in advance.

After that, bang. Massive destruction. Everyone dies. End of the world, Game Over.

The question is: what would you do? Is there anything to do?

Would you panic? Would you just kick back and watch the fireworks? Something completely different?

To answer, reply with a comment.

Behold the Jackie Chan’s SUPERCOLOR Ping Pong Master, as presented by my friend and old colleague Mr. Elpuri.

Continued from part 1…

(Note: Asteroids which move about close enough to Earth to potentially impact it are also known as NEOs, or “Near-Earth Objects”)

If an asteroid larger than a certain threshold hits the Earth, not much will be normal anymore. It will take tens to hundreds of years to recover from such an impact.

What can we do? How could we protect ourselves?
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Swine flu, nuclear war, changing climate, VEI-8 level eruption of a supervolcano and LHC-generated mini black holes are not the only things which threaten the existence of humanity.

An interesting paper by Mr. Jason G. Matheny, called “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction” (last draft) notes that there is so far no analysis done of the cost-effectiveness of reducing human extinction risks. He provides a method of analyzing the cost-effectiveness of protecting against a mass-scale catastrophic event, using as an example case the threat of an asteroid impact.
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My friend came to me about a great new idea he had. I shall paraphrase our discussion:

-”Yo. Why is reality so hard?”, he asked.
-”I’ve no idea. Why is reality so hard?”, I replied.
-”It’s because there’s too many things to keep track of. I have a solution: micro-feng shui.”
-”Micro-feng shui? But isn’t micro less?”
-”Everything micro is good. For example: microchips. Very good.”
-”OK, so how does it work?”
-”Step 1: reduce spatial complexity. From now on, view the world as a planar space and ignore all height differences. That’s 30% less complexity. Then, step 2: happiness.”

Considering what’s published nowadays in various self-help books, packaging this idea into a 400-page book would probably reach New York Times bestseller list very fast. Not to mention the creation of some sort of a pseudo-religious movement, enabling my friend to be showered in non-Zimbabwean paper currency.

The server was updated, hopefully everything works now. This is also a kind of test post, so please ignore it…

Gianfranco writes:

I send you an adaption of the zenburn colour scheme for SciTE v. 1.78. To install it on a Windows machine, just copy the *.properties files into the SciTE installation folder.

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