Slashdot Mirror

In the comments of the OTHER article on the same site about this same subject (i guess its an earlier interview with the author) someone clearly and intelligently outlines the details of the injuries to the bodies, and explains the causes in context. Turns out, dying of falling off a cliff, combined with extreme cold exposure, can make you look pretty gnarly. http://failuremag.com/feature/... look for a post by user 'Dee' as I decline to repost the entire comment here.

faliure magazine
failure comics
heart failure society of america
heart failure online
heart failure

How dare Google list these at the top of the first page!

http://www.failuremag.com/science_content.html interesting...

It's not really that difficult. Althought the mechanisms used by David Hahn are probably closed off, the information is still out there. He almost succeeded in building a bomb using nothing more than Smoke Detectors and a few other sources.

Read this and this

Do we even know what happens when a dirty bomb goes off? Yes, I know it's a normal explosive device laced with nuclear material, but what does that mean in terms of harmfulness?

It depends on the size of the bomb. Really, you have the bomb explosion that causes the damage and the exposure to radiation likely makes the place the bomb exploded uninhabitable or at least undesirable. An explosion like the one in oklahoma city could probably carry the material a few city blocks at least.

Some links:

Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76873,00.html



BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2037769.stm

Overall, the number of casualties might not be that large but the psychological and economic impact could be huge.

If one if these went off in lower Manhattan, it could cost billions between lost business and people not wanting to go back to NYC.

I read the article before it was posted here on Slashdot, and the book Nuclear Terrorism. I have no doubt that terrorists could create a dirty bomb and if they had the resources and the time come up with a conventional nuclear weapon.

After all, if a teenage American boy could make a nuclear reactor in his backyard what makes you think terrorists can't make a nuclear weapon?

This kind of "insight" can be applied to almost every company, and it's about as good as Colin Fry's cold reading

Looking for previous Malone predictions I found this gem where he predicts the death of Apple. I quote from the full article:

"No, I think that if Jobs proved anything, it's that the core body of Macolytes is pretty inviolable. It would be very damn hard to lose them. The question is: Can he do much more than he's done right now? He's up against 300 companies. No matter how clever he is, the combined creativity and brainpower of 300 companies ultimately will defeat him. He didn't believe that the first time around. I think he knows that now. That's why I think he's positioned Apple for the big exit. I suspect he's shopping the place around. I hear rumors to that effect but I couldn't confirm them. If he was smart he'd do the same thing as NeXT. Remember, NeXT almost died, he managed to go sideways with it, establish it with a certain amount of prestige but not a lot of long-term potential, and sold it to Apple. He ended up being a hero, but he came within weeks of being a goat. If he can sell Apple and make a ton of money, then he becomes the savior."

The German term "Schadenfreude" has seen a lot of play in recent months. It means, "Taking joy in the suffering of others", and it perfectly encapsulates the spirit of not only the "eCompanyNow" article but of many of the new websites that have popped up to celebrate the downfall of the dotcom economy.

The eCompanyNow article was something of a cute encyclopedia of some of the greatest excesses witnessed in the midst of the tech bubble. I enjoyed reading it, and laughed out loud at seeing so many portraits of hubris and foolishness in so compact a setting. But it makes for ironic reading, considering the origins of the magazine itself.

eCompanyNow was a rag brought into existence by Time, Inc. for the express purpose of soaking up a fair share of the funnymoney dotcom advertising dollars being generated by the mania itself. But the timing was less than opportune, since they came to market in May of 2000, as the bubble had already begun its rapid deflation. The dotcom advertising budgets that had led magazines like "FastCompany" and "Business 2.0" to swell to the size of phone books were suddenly gone, and as a result, the new economy magazines have all found themselves in a perpetual state of whithering, many looking anoxeric compared to their 1999 selves.

Not all new media rags were guilty of contributing to the bubble. Some were actually attempting to do a public service by reporting on the bubble as a genuine problem that was undermining both the common sense of the investing public, and the morality as well.

"Red Herring" was somewhat lonely as tech rags go, as they constantly decried the ever-inflating bubble in 1999, even at the risk of alienating the dotcoms that were advertising in their magazine.

Consider this prescient story from October of 1999, called "Internet bubble popping American business ethics?". I admired Redherring enormously for continually bringing the bubble to the attention of their readership in the midst of the madness, when so many other tech/stock rags didn't have the stomach or brains to do the same. It takes guts to tell your readers that they are delusional and your advertisers that they are doomed, but Redherring did as much when the mania really got overwhelming.

Now, "f-ckedcompany","downside.com" ,"NetSlaves" and "failure magazine" have all become the order of the day, each basically engaging in the time-honored tradition of "kicking them while their down". It is to be expected.

But one has to wonder, how long can the gleeful celebration of the death of stupid dotcoms last? Like vultures surviving off of the carcasses of dead and dying animals in the midst of a sudden drought, after a while, you've picked the bones clean, and there is nothing left to eat.

Kicking the recently humbled dotcom stars I guess is to be expected, but it will itself become tiresome. And then what will fuel the existence of those sites that were created solely for the Schadenfreude? Will they fail and be mocked by a 2nd generation version of themselves? Or simply forgotten? (I suspect they'll be the last to die before a new phase begins.)

And what will become of "eCompanyNow"? Soon they have have no more companies to mock, and no more advertisers to subsidize the mockery. Consolidation is already whittling the new media magazines down to a precious few, and I believe I've heard rumors that "eCompanyNow" will be merged with "Business2.0" and renamed "Business2.0". I hardly care what happens to either, given the fact that both are predicated in their very names on the myth we now have watched vanished before our eyes. There is no "Business2.0" model- that was the lie that we were being sold in the midst of the mania. There is no "eCompanyNow" model to embrace. We're back where we started, looking to the "Fortune" and "Forbes" magazines that preexisted the latest bubble and the "RedHerrings" that decried it for wisdom about what is coming.

FIN.

The Myth of the Borg

First, the Borg isn't a consipracy. The Borg assimilate, taking enough of the assimilated to further their goals. That's hardly the same thing. Even if it weren't, it's an analogy. Any analogy can be taken too far.

...who do not follow any secret "editorial agenda"...

Oh, of course. You don't need a conspiracy to bend the media to your ends, you only need money. A few key editors making judgements based on potential advertising revenue to damage the perception, and probably the reality, of responsible journalism. For example, were an esteemed organization like the New York Times to suggest that an op-ed writer change their opinions from "Microsoft is a monopolist" to "Microsoft is innovative", one might reasonably assume that ones faith in the independence of the New York Times would be greatly weakened.

Oh wait, that already happened: Steve Wozniak Interview at Failure Magazine.

--j