For a space telescope, I was thinking you'd have something sealing the mirror section to maintain a fixed pressure. That would avoid the vaccuum problem, though wouldn't give you as clear an image as one totally open to space, but the difference could probably be made marginal. The weight argument is complicated by the fact that glass distorts under high acceleration, which makes it very complicated to put large mirrors into space. The larger the mirror, the harder it is to protect it against the effects of launch and the better a liquid mirror becomes. Of course, this then begs an important question: How do you get a protective layer into the telescope that is perfectly planar (you want zero refraction and near-zero absorption) that doesn't distort under high G? A mirror has one surface to protect, this would have two. A mirror is also considerably more rigid.
Liquid mirrors are ingenious and have many benefits over solid mirrors. It's hard to get a solid mirror into space without it sagging, whereas a mirror shaped by inertia or magnetic fields isn't going to care. Porting solid mirrors up the side of a volcano is also much harder than sending up a few tanker trucks. In principle, this means you can get far larger mirrors into key sites. It may also impact optical interferometry, as it would be easier to build large arrays - though you'd need to watch for magnetic fields from nearby telescopes interfering.
If it's NASCAR-style, then it'll appeal to some folks but it just won't have the kind of hold that other racing leagues get. Formula 1 gets serious money, and world-class rally racing is just that - world-wide, with an audience few sports can compete with. These two are descendants of the old European city-to-city races, where racers where gentlemen first. NASCAR is descended from bootlegger contests where winning was more important than how.
Rocket racing really needs to take the same road as the old-style European racing leagues, perhaps even taking that kind of idealistic "it's not the winning that counts" attitude even further. Anyone can make a fast rocket, but does it have style? Is it fast out of brute-force or because the design is the coolest hack ever? Award points for place, yes, but also for style. Why encourage crap designs and crap driving?
I'd add one other thing, though. Orion is too heavy for the rocket it'll be on. Uhhh, wait a minute, you first design a lander that has what you absolutely have to have, and THEN build a rocket that can carry it, surely? It'd be insane to design the rocket first and THEN eliminate components that make Orion's missions worth carrying out or which potentially place crew at unnecessary risk.
In terms of budget, NASA is trying to do an enormous amount of work on a budget that a roadside diner might be expected to operate with. Space-hardened, radiation-hardened, high-G-tolerant components are not cheap, and as Scaled Composites demonstrated not that long ago, rocket motors are temperamental and even small errors or flaws can cause nasty failures. (Going maybe 10 or so years back, an experimental VTOL lander collapsed and exploded during a test run due to a single hose not being connected. It'd be possible to have backup systems and/or failsafes that prevented such things being a problem, but you're talking extra money and extra weight.)
In general, artists get paid well below other professions (and well below what they contracted for). Work is intermittent (Jon Pertwee used to say actors spend 95% of their time unemployed). And, let's be blunt, American state pensions might possibly feed a squirrel, but nothing much bigger. I do not believe they should be paid unreasonably large sums, but neither do I believe they should be paid unreasonably small sums. (Unlike the music and film industries, I think artists would be happier and better-able to do their jobs with good food and sensible living conditions. Also unlike the music and film industries, I don't think you can substitute those with sex and drugs and get the same results. All you are likely to get are dead artists.)
Realistic or not, I like your thoughts and ideas a lot. We live in a world where destructive thinking is more popular than constructive, but I urge that you don't let that stop you thinking about the ways society can be better. At worst, it is a great outlet for what bubbles through the innermost parts of your mind. At best - well, once every hardly ever, a really good idea gets heard by someone who decides to make it happen, or at least borrows the key ideas. It's too rare to be motivated by it, but it's often enough to make it important that good thinkers don't stop saying what they think.
I think you are correct, and I think that that is part of why the reoffense rate is high, but also why over 1% of the population is now in prison. My suggestion may be a dead-end, but the current system is undead and terminal. Holy water and garlic may also be helpful.
You are absolutely correct, which means that if such a system were to ever be implemented - at least, ethically - it would need to be thoroughly monitored and outright prohibited from imposing restrictions that could not be imposed in prison under identical circumstances, and limited further from imposing constraints that were mentally damaging, with limited exceptions for when that really is the only option. You'd also need staff who regarded their work in the same light as the truly dedicated and most ethical of doctors, with the view of doing least harm (Hippocratic Oath) and greatest good. Finding one in the psych field that would be able to do that under these sorts of conditions would be hard going, finding a thousand or so per State would be an interesting challenge.
Of course, this creates an interesting question. Clearly, I'm needing to add more and more constraints on the system to ensure that it meets even the same lousy standards as the existing one. By the time there are enough constraints to ensure that it would be a solution that could be used in good conscience and would actually be beneficial to the prisoners as individuals and to society as a whole, with absolutely no risk of Clockwork Orange-style abuses, will the constraints contradict each other? In other words, is this solution real or an illusion, something where each piece technically works but the combined product never can?
Reification is the process of taking something abstract and making it more concrete. It's a useful concept to use, when talking about implementations versus specifications. Ok, can we specify a level of reification at which something can sensibly be called an implementation? If the answer is yes, then it doesn't matter if you can reify the concept further.ed
Now, what can we say about the abstract? Well, there are (a) generalizations, and (b) there are specifics missing, without which the specification cannot be converted into a narrow set of possible implementations. Abstract data types, for example, say nothing about the language they would be written in, how they are to be implemented, or even what the actual programmatic interface will be.
Let's say we narrow some things down. We've defined implementable data types, we've defined the primary programming language and (if need be) dialect, we've defined a style (eg: procedural vs. functional vs. OO vs. 5th Generation), we've defined at least one target architecture (be that a specific JVM or a specific piece of hardware), we've defined the exposed API and we've defined some means of testing compliance to these requirements in a computable, programmatic fashion.
You now have something you can white-box test. That's close, but I don't think it goes quite far enough. Let's add one more requirement: A sufficiently large range of externally-used functions, internal APIs, data types and invariants are also defined such as to produce a high level of confidence through testing that what has been written is indeed what was designed.
THEN you have something that's as solid as, say, a car. You can always add extras to a car, so that is still "abstract" in some sense, but it's solid enough. You can test the controls within the car, and perform basic observations on things like whether the engine is running, to establish that it is indeed a car and not a pile of scrap. I would argue that software could be considered "implemented enough" once it had reached the same level of solidness and reality as a model of car from the manufacturer.
Admittedly, it IS in Chicago, so I cannot vouch for the humans getting back out again, but if worked as described by the researchers involved, the system is capable of resolving down to individual neural connections.
No, their base system was the base system at that time, which was either SP1 or SP2. Other commentators have claimed to see evidence of both of these, so I'm going to argue that possibly both of those were involved. That still doesn't answer the problem of auditing tools. It also doesn't answer why, after the security disasters of prior years, the original XP wasn't so kitted out with security that you'd need the NSA to break in.
Find me SARA and TARA - or comparable tools - for Windows, and then I'll be able to actually tell you what has happened to Windows base install over the past four years. Without auditing tools, how am I supposed to know? Telepathy? The base install for Windows has gone from XP to XP-SP1 to XP-SP2 in those years - it's not the same program - but I cannot tell you if any meaningful security holes are fixed without the software tools to do so, and to hell with buying something like N-Circle - it's good, but it's more than I'm willing to pay for a one-shot security eval in order to reply to a Slashdot poster.
The odds are near-certain that he is ill to some degree, and fairly high that he's ill enough to have had some sort of split with reality. Clearly not completely, if he's wanting to sue Denny's, but nonetheless significant. I've always thought that it would make more sense to split prison sentences into a penal phase actually in a prison, and a mental phase where the person is in a suitable facility that has comparable security and restrictions (ie: not a "soft option") but is primarily concerned with treating mental conditions.
The primary idea would be that you would then dispense entirely with the insanity plea, regard ALL who are convicted as needing some mental health care, and split the time accordingly. This means that all who actually do need treatment get it, and those who don't get a thorough health check, so nobody would lose. This would also eliminate the usual problem of the prosecution and the defense hiring mental health "experts" that look for what they want to see, and the whole problem of 'criminal insanity'. Such a concept would have no meaning, if all insanity gets treated and no insanity is punished. You'd have to be extremely careful to keep it to genuine help rather than control, but I don't see that as an impossibility.
The secondary aspect is that if some people get the mental health checks first, you might reduce prison violence and prison ganglands. If these attitudes can be attacked effectively, it has to be outside an environment they think they can rule. There is something macho to those guys about being in prison, it's even a medal of honor to some. I don't think they'd get quite that machismo kick out of being in a padded room with doctors who are going to utterly ignore their ravings.
Of course, this means you would need to build highly secure mental homes capable of handling three or four million people, have sufficient medical facilities in each to test and treat as necessary, and sufficient experts in the field to actually handle the volume of work. I'm not sure what 9.4T MRI scanners cost these days, but you really need to get to that resolution to diagnose anything other than the most coarse-grained of stuff. Nor do I know how much the highest resolution CAT, PET, fMRI and EEG systems cost. However, I don't imagine the full works for every major population center would cost more than a few tens of trillions of dollars in total. A hundred trillion at the outside. Not sure the return would come close to that, which is a pain, but it might finally kill the Wild West attitude towards justice that is found in so many countries, and that would be a Good Thing at almost any price.
The biggest drawback to this speculation is that quite possibly I'm the only one on the planet who thinks along these lines.
The fact that another Slashdot reader queried my insistence Windows 7 should have better host and network security is proof that there is still rampant ignorance on the subject. The fact that the time-to-pwn has not fallen over the past four years despite "security fixes" and security engines that inconvenience users and break applications is proof that the security methods employed by Microsoft are a failure. The fact that there is virtually nothing mainstream in the Windows world that compares with even the pittance of auditing offered by SARA and TARA is proof that there is no desire to fix this.
Assuming you have a multithreaded or otherwise parallel program, you would probably start with a profiler for parallel programs. DAKOTA and KOJAK are two open source profilers for just that sort of work. If the program isn't truly parallel, it won't run in parallel, whatever you do.
True QoS, not just RSVP (which almost nobody uses and which doesn't scale)
Why do I care?
Because true QoS means that your available bandwidth is shared better between applications, so your Quake session, bittorrent downloads and Internet Phone can coexist. It means you can actually use the machine, rather than wait for other network activity to cease.
True pre-emptible support (you need this for better multimedia)
The Windows kernel is already preemptible since at least Windows 2000. What exactly are the deficiencies in the current Microsoft implementation, and how is multimedia usage impaired?
It is no more pre-emptible than Linux is when you have the Big Kernel Lock enabled. You will frequently see the machine lock when an application is hogging a resource (usually the network). That is a BIG no-no when doing anything with multimedia or gaming. Lock-ups, however temporary, are a Bad Thing.
True host security using mandatory access controls and role-based security models (B3 or better, on the Orange Book scale)
How would this enhance gaming, multimedia, or scientific use?
You even need to ask, given all of the hotfixes and patches out there for security holes? Yeesh. It also eliminates the need for the Vista-style security engine or the XP-style close-everything-see-what-breaks service packs. This means your games, multimedia packages, etc, are more likely to work, and more likely to work well, with far fewer workarounds needed by corporations, which in turn means the software can be used NOW rather than a decade from now.
True network security (Microsoft has more programmers than the OpenBSD team, so can audit more code more thoroughly)
What are the current deficiencies in Windows network security?
Tha's easy. It doesn't have one. That's why you had all those security vulnerabilities due to JPEG images, and why Windows boxes are notoriously hard to secure against even rudimentary Skript Kiddie attacks.
True logging filesystem (journaling doesn't cut it any more with data centers)
How would this enhance gaming or multimedia use?
More even disk response times, which is a necessity for both gaming and multimedia. Full transaction-based systems are less prone to corruption, which means installing things like games is safer. More efficient use of disk bandwidth, as you don't have to actually carry out transactions in order, which means better throughput. I mean, a lot of this stuff is pretty basic.
True object-oriented desktop (associations by file extension? CP/M called and wants its ideas back)
Can you propose something better than file extensions that won't break compatibility with every other operating system? Would the average user notice anything different than the current implementation of "hide extension"?
An OO desktop can always do the same things as a hide-the-extension desktop, so you break nothing. (Christ, this is so obvious.) However, an OO desktop can put any script behind any method, and can have any number of methods, whereas an extension-based system is limited to one for most files and two for executables. An average user would notice that things got a damn sight easier. Files would be opened by the application they wanted, rather than the default for that extension. This means that documents created by different applications would (gasp!) work!!! Yaaaaaaaaaaay! It would mean that they could print files without opening them. It would mean they could create workflows that - well - just worked. Put data into one application here, get the results out of some other application there. All done.
True high-performance networking (where's Microsoft's WEB100? you seen much VNIC or RNIC support either?)
True clustering (sorry, recompiling MPICH and calling it Windows Cluster Ed
Most machines have Flash chips, OpenBIOS is an OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275-1994) open source alternative with Forth interpreter built in, FreeBIOS will let you bootstrap an OS kernel like Linux (some forms of Windows are also doable), and even Intel's Tiano (used as the basis for many modern BIOSes) is under the BSD license. The range of supported chips, given the three different systems available to you, is vastly superior to the range you can install any commercial BIOS on. Support for industry standards is also vastly superior to many commercial offerings. I say let the commercial BIOSes rot in the cesspit of their own making, and use the technologies that are already available to you.
Oh well. The world will either end with the Mayan calendar, the 32-bit datestamp or the 1950-2050 Y2K windowing fix long before 2099. (And if it fails to end on the third attempt, it can be placed in indefinite confinement under California's three strikes rule.)
You do realize that zoos can't afford to hire painters, decorators or advertising companies, don't you? The real reason there aren't any signs in the snakes section is that nobody has figured out how to get them to hold the brush.
Slashdot Mirror
For a space telescope, I was thinking you'd have something sealing the mirror section to maintain a fixed pressure. That would avoid the vaccuum problem, though wouldn't give you as clear an image as one totally open to space, but the difference could probably be made marginal. The weight argument is complicated by the fact that glass distorts under high acceleration, which makes it very complicated to put large mirrors into space. The larger the mirror, the harder it is to protect it against the effects of launch and the better a liquid mirror becomes. Of course, this then begs an important question: How do you get a protective layer into the telescope that is perfectly planar (you want zero refraction and near-zero absorption) that doesn't distort under high G? A mirror has one surface to protect, this would have two. A mirror is also considerably more rigid.
Damn. I thought someone had found a neat new extension to Word, called "and", that bypassed your security.
...you'd be hard-pressed to find a person weighing 20,000 lbs. Except near a McDonalds, then all bets are off.
Liquid mirrors are ingenious and have many benefits over solid mirrors. It's hard to get a solid mirror into space without it sagging, whereas a mirror shaped by inertia or magnetic fields isn't going to care. Porting solid mirrors up the side of a volcano is also much harder than sending up a few tanker trucks. In principle, this means you can get far larger mirrors into key sites. It may also impact optical interferometry, as it would be easier to build large arrays - though you'd need to watch for magnetic fields from nearby telescopes interfering.
Rocket racing really needs to take the same road as the old-style European racing leagues, perhaps even taking that kind of idealistic "it's not the winning that counts" attitude even further. Anyone can make a fast rocket, but does it have style? Is it fast out of brute-force or because the design is the coolest hack ever? Award points for place, yes, but also for style. Why encourage crap designs and crap driving?
In terms of budget, NASA is trying to do an enormous amount of work on a budget that a roadside diner might be expected to operate with. Space-hardened, radiation-hardened, high-G-tolerant components are not cheap, and as Scaled Composites demonstrated not that long ago, rocket motors are temperamental and even small errors or flaws can cause nasty failures. (Going maybe 10 or so years back, an experimental VTOL lander collapsed and exploded during a test run due to a single hose not being connected. It'd be possible to have backup systems and/or failsafes that prevented such things being a problem, but you're talking extra money and extra weight.)
In general, artists get paid well below other professions (and well below what they contracted for). Work is intermittent (Jon Pertwee used to say actors spend 95% of their time unemployed). And, let's be blunt, American state pensions might possibly feed a squirrel, but nothing much bigger. I do not believe they should be paid unreasonably large sums, but neither do I believe they should be paid unreasonably small sums. (Unlike the music and film industries, I think artists would be happier and better-able to do their jobs with good food and sensible living conditions. Also unlike the music and film industries, I don't think you can substitute those with sex and drugs and get the same results. All you are likely to get are dead artists.)
Realistic or not, I like your thoughts and ideas a lot. We live in a world where destructive thinking is more popular than constructive, but I urge that you don't let that stop you thinking about the ways society can be better. At worst, it is a great outlet for what bubbles through the innermost parts of your mind. At best - well, once every hardly ever, a really good idea gets heard by someone who decides to make it happen, or at least borrows the key ideas. It's too rare to be motivated by it, but it's often enough to make it important that good thinkers don't stop saying what they think.
I think you are correct, and I think that that is part of why the reoffense rate is high, but also why over 1% of the population is now in prison. My suggestion may be a dead-end, but the current system is undead and terminal. Holy water and garlic may also be helpful.
Of course, this creates an interesting question. Clearly, I'm needing to add more and more constraints on the system to ensure that it meets even the same lousy standards as the existing one. By the time there are enough constraints to ensure that it would be a solution that could be used in good conscience and would actually be beneficial to the prisoners as individuals and to society as a whole, with absolutely no risk of Clockwork Orange-style abuses, will the constraints contradict each other? In other words, is this solution real or an illusion, something where each piece technically works but the combined product never can?
Now, what can we say about the abstract? Well, there are (a) generalizations, and (b) there are specifics missing, without which the specification cannot be converted into a narrow set of possible implementations. Abstract data types, for example, say nothing about the language they would be written in, how they are to be implemented, or even what the actual programmatic interface will be.
Let's say we narrow some things down. We've defined implementable data types, we've defined the primary programming language and (if need be) dialect, we've defined a style (eg: procedural vs. functional vs. OO vs. 5th Generation), we've defined at least one target architecture (be that a specific JVM or a specific piece of hardware), we've defined the exposed API and we've defined some means of testing compliance to these requirements in a computable, programmatic fashion.
You now have something you can white-box test. That's close, but I don't think it goes quite far enough. Let's add one more requirement: A sufficiently large range of externally-used functions, internal APIs, data types and invariants are also defined such as to produce a high level of confidence through testing that what has been written is indeed what was designed.
THEN you have something that's as solid as, say, a car. You can always add extras to a car, so that is still "abstract" in some sense, but it's solid enough. You can test the controls within the car, and perform basic observations on things like whether the engine is running, to establish that it is indeed a car and not a pile of scrap. I would argue that software could be considered "implemented enough" once it had reached the same level of solidness and reality as a model of car from the manufacturer.
Admittedly, it IS in Chicago, so I cannot vouch for the humans getting back out again, but if worked as described by the researchers involved, the system is capable of resolving down to individual neural connections.
No, their base system was the base system at that time, which was either SP1 or SP2. Other commentators have claimed to see evidence of both of these, so I'm going to argue that possibly both of those were involved. That still doesn't answer the problem of auditing tools. It also doesn't answer why, after the security disasters of prior years, the original XP wasn't so kitted out with security that you'd need the NSA to break in.
Find me SARA and TARA - or comparable tools - for Windows, and then I'll be able to actually tell you what has happened to Windows base install over the past four years. Without auditing tools, how am I supposed to know? Telepathy? The base install for Windows has gone from XP to XP-SP1 to XP-SP2 in those years - it's not the same program - but I cannot tell you if any meaningful security holes are fixed without the software tools to do so, and to hell with buying something like N-Circle - it's good, but it's more than I'm willing to pay for a one-shot security eval in order to reply to a Slashdot poster.
The primary idea would be that you would then dispense entirely with the insanity plea, regard ALL who are convicted as needing some mental health care, and split the time accordingly. This means that all who actually do need treatment get it, and those who don't get a thorough health check, so nobody would lose. This would also eliminate the usual problem of the prosecution and the defense hiring mental health "experts" that look for what they want to see, and the whole problem of 'criminal insanity'. Such a concept would have no meaning, if all insanity gets treated and no insanity is punished. You'd have to be extremely careful to keep it to genuine help rather than control, but I don't see that as an impossibility.
The secondary aspect is that if some people get the mental health checks first, you might reduce prison violence and prison ganglands. If these attitudes can be attacked effectively, it has to be outside an environment they think they can rule. There is something macho to those guys about being in prison, it's even a medal of honor to some. I don't think they'd get quite that machismo kick out of being in a padded room with doctors who are going to utterly ignore their ravings.
Of course, this means you would need to build highly secure mental homes capable of handling three or four million people, have sufficient medical facilities in each to test and treat as necessary, and sufficient experts in the field to actually handle the volume of work. I'm not sure what 9.4T MRI scanners cost these days, but you really need to get to that resolution to diagnose anything other than the most coarse-grained of stuff. Nor do I know how much the highest resolution CAT, PET, fMRI and EEG systems cost. However, I don't imagine the full works for every major population center would cost more than a few tens of trillions of dollars in total. A hundred trillion at the outside. Not sure the return would come close to that, which is a pain, but it might finally kill the Wild West attitude towards justice that is found in so many countries, and that would be a Good Thing at almost any price.
The biggest drawback to this speculation is that quite possibly I'm the only one on the planet who thinks along these lines.
The fact that another Slashdot reader queried my insistence Windows 7 should have better host and network security is proof that there is still rampant ignorance on the subject. The fact that the time-to-pwn has not fallen over the past four years despite "security fixes" and security engines that inconvenience users and break applications is proof that the security methods employed by Microsoft are a failure. The fact that there is virtually nothing mainstream in the Windows world that compares with even the pittance of auditing offered by SARA and TARA is proof that there is no desire to fix this.
Assuming you have a multithreaded or otherwise parallel program, you would probably start with a profiler for parallel programs. DAKOTA and KOJAK are two open source profilers for just that sort of work. If the program isn't truly parallel, it won't run in parallel, whatever you do.
Damn, you're right. That must explain why the Martians blew up the other landers, then. Wrong frequency.
Why do I care?
Because true QoS means that your available bandwidth is shared better between applications, so your Quake session, bittorrent downloads and Internet Phone can coexist. It means you can actually use the machine, rather than wait for other network activity to cease.
The Windows kernel is already preemptible since at least Windows 2000. What exactly are the deficiencies in the current Microsoft implementation, and how is multimedia usage impaired?
It is no more pre-emptible than Linux is when you have the Big Kernel Lock enabled. You will frequently see the machine lock when an application is hogging a resource (usually the network). That is a BIG no-no when doing anything with multimedia or gaming. Lock-ups, however temporary, are a Bad Thing.
How would this enhance gaming, multimedia, or scientific use?
You even need to ask, given all of the hotfixes and patches out there for security holes? Yeesh. It also eliminates the need for the Vista-style security engine or the XP-style close-everything-see-what-breaks service packs. This means your games, multimedia packages, etc, are more likely to work, and more likely to work well, with far fewer workarounds needed by corporations, which in turn means the software can be used NOW rather than a decade from now.
What are the current deficiencies in Windows network security?
Tha's easy. It doesn't have one. That's why you had all those security vulnerabilities due to JPEG images, and why Windows boxes are notoriously hard to secure against even rudimentary Skript Kiddie attacks.
How would this enhance gaming or multimedia use?
More even disk response times, which is a necessity for both gaming and multimedia. Full transaction-based systems are less prone to corruption, which means installing things like games is safer. More efficient use of disk bandwidth, as you don't have to actually carry out transactions in order, which means better throughput. I mean, a lot of this stuff is pretty basic.
Can you propose something better than file extensions that won't break compatibility with every other operating system? Would the average user notice anything different than the current implementation of "hide extension"?
An OO desktop can always do the same things as a hide-the-extension desktop, so you break nothing. (Christ, this is so obvious.) However, an OO desktop can put any script behind any method, and can have any number of methods, whereas an extension-based system is limited to one for most files and two for executables. An average user would notice that things got a damn sight easier. Files would be opened by the application they wanted, rather than the default for that extension. This means that documents created by different applications would (gasp!) work!!! Yaaaaaaaaaaay! It would mean that they could print files without opening them. It would mean they could create workflows that - well - just worked. Put data into one application here, get the results out of some other application there. All done.
Most machines have Flash chips, OpenBIOS is an OpenFirmware (IEEE 1275-1994) open source alternative with Forth interpreter built in, FreeBIOS will let you bootstrap an OS kernel like Linux (some forms of Windows are also doable), and even Intel's Tiano (used as the basis for many modern BIOSes) is under the BSD license. The range of supported chips, given the three different systems available to you, is vastly superior to the range you can install any commercial BIOS on. Support for industry standards is also vastly superior to many commercial offerings. I say let the commercial BIOSes rot in the cesspit of their own making, and use the technologies that are already available to you.
How are you expecting to Martians to communicate with it, if it doesn't have Bluetooth support, eh? Hadn't thought of that, had you?
Oh well. The world will either end with the Mayan calendar, the 32-bit datestamp or the 1950-2050 Y2K windowing fix long before 2099. (And if it fails to end on the third attempt, it can be placed in indefinite confinement under California's three strikes rule.)
Given the speed of ultra-low-power handhelds, we could be seeing the first release of Duke Nukem Takes Forever.
You do realize that zoos can't afford to hire painters, decorators or advertising companies, don't you? The real reason there aren't any signs in the snakes section is that nobody has figured out how to get them to hold the brush.
Only if we can also relocate Redmond to somewhere on the Greenland ice sheet.