Because it's a complex game. It's sort of like playing 10 bingo cards at the same time. You need a way to mark what spots on each card have been drawn. To do that, you scratch off the spaces to mark them. If you have to scratch off the entire game board, then you have no way to mark the spaces on your cards (since lottery tickets are designed so that you don't need anything but your scratching device to play).
plagiarized? Usually when you plagiarize something you don't mention the source. See that mention of "Wired" at the bottom below the pictures/above the comments?
"Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests," he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. "Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious," he says. "Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers.
If you read my post, you will see that I said I could understand the game itself being proprietary. But the removable media is going to be for things like photos, application data, etc. I absolutely expect that to be on standard removable media formats. Wii uses a standard SD card. Xbox 360 has now dumped memory cards and uses standard USB thumb drives. That's great because those are standard media formats. I don't have to buy extra memory specifically for those devices. When I decided I needed to copy a savegame off of my Wii for the very first time, I didn't have to go to the store and buy a Wii Memory Card. I simply went to my little box of spare flash memory and grabbed an SD card. Likewise with my cameras (I have both a DSLR and a P&S) I need to have an extra memory card handy in case one of them runs out of space. Since they both use the same cards (SDHC) I don't need to keep an extra card for each one. I simply have 1 extra card in case one of them fills up. When devices use their own proprietary media formats, it makes this type of stuff a lot less convenient to deal with.
Also, every portable console EVER has had proprietary storage - why should this one be different?
For the game media? Sure, I'll accept proprietary, But the secondary slot is for non-game data....like, say, photos taken with the camera, and other data from applications. If you are going to have those stored to built in, non-removable memory, we don't like that but we'd understand. But if you are going to be good enough to put it on removable media, then use something that's already standard. For crying out loud, we've got SD, mini SD, and micro SD. All have become standard and are used in tons of devices, we can all read them in our computer's existing card reader, and they cover a nice range of sizes for whatever size device you might want to squeeze it into. Don't want to go with SD. Well, OK, we've already got our proprietary Sony memory stick format, which come in full size and the smaller pro duo size, and our existing card readers will handle it. But even their own proprietary format isn't proprietary for them, so they've got to come out with something else brand new?
Yeah, well despite all of their past media format defeats, they just won on BluRay so now they are more convinced than ever. They're like the person that's been pumping $100 worth of quarters into the slot machine all day and just got a $10 payoff...they're on a roll now. So they double down by playing 2 slot machines at once, so they can double their "winnings".
Wow. TWO proprietary card slots? The game media I can understand, and even though it's proprietary I'd understand the secondary slot being Sony Memory Stick (I'd hate it, but it's sony, so I'd understand). But we're not even talking proprietary as in Sony Memory Stick, but as in an entirely new media format. Way to go, Sony.
Oh, and they don't see how 3D translates to portable gaming? Well, I'm not surprised. They didn't see how motion control translated to console video gaming either, and laughed about how useless it was for 3 years before their "hey, hey, look at me....we can do it too, and in the lamest way possible" release of Move. I wouldn't be surprised if 2 years down the line they are suddenly all over 3D portable gaming and end up implementing it on the NGP by shipping new games with a pair of red/blue glasses.
I'm still confused as to why cars don't already come with some kind of radar/sonar device that would tell you when another vehicle or object is sitting in your blind spot while belting down the freeway.
Actually, the BMW 7 has exactly that. It's just one of those new technologies that is going to take a number of years to filter down to all vehicles.
First of all, Warfarin is pretty fucking safe. If I take an extra 5mg pill once a week, nothing happens. Out of all the thinners, it's not exactly aspirin mild, but it's not horrendously dangerous.
I agree. I've been on it for 25 years without incident. The most I've ever taken extra was 2.5mg, but I have forgotten to take my 10mg dose 2 days in a row, and had no problems as a result. Perhaps other people react differently, but from my experience, I have a hard time thinking of it as risky or dangerous.
I don't know how much security may have increased, but a month ago I took my first train trip ever, and from my point of view the security was pretty transparent. I bought my ticket at amtrak.com, printed out the receipt with barcode, went to the station, scanned the barcode on a computer, got my printed ticket, and waited in the lobby with everyone else. When the train rolled up, I got aboard the train. As I stepped on, one of the employees was there to greet me, and that was the very first person I interacted with. That interaction lasted 1/4 of a second and I was on the train without him even looking at my ticket. His main purpose there seemed to be to help old people get the baggage up the steps.
Once on the train, we departed and it was 5 minutes before someone even came around to look at my ticket. If I had wanted to do anything, I could have easily put anything in the luggage area with noone even taking note. I probably could have even hid out in the bathroom, wandered up to the snack area, etc, and completely avoided anyone seeing my ticket before getting off at the next stop (unless the employees were counting the number of people that got on, counting how many tickets they saw from new passengers, and then comparing notes with each other). Security on the Chicago Metra trains was even more lax, in that tickets are bought anonymously with cash, not for any specific train (I think a ticket is good for 1 year), nobody watches you board, and the conductor simply punched your ticket while the train was in motion, sometimes more than 1 stop after you boarded.
Is that a security problem? Well, yes and no. It's a security problem in that anybody could have easily done something malicious. It's not a REAL problem from the fact that all the security in the world would be power against anyone who wants to do damage. With a plane, your attack vectors are 1) get something on board the plane, 2) get access to the restricted area outside and on the runway, or 3) collide with the plane mid air, either in another plane or using a missile. The first two can be reasonably secured, and the third is a quite difficult attack vector to exploit. With a train, the attack vector is easy and limitless. Simply walk up to anywhere on the thousands of miles of unsecured track and plant your bomb and wait for the train. It's impossible to protect. You don't even need to buy a ticket or set foot on a train in order to attack with even the most primitive explosives.
Apparently that's not the case for every grayed-out addon. The 2 that Norton installs are greyed out, but your Run as Administrator trick doesn't help. I can disable them (don't even need to be admin to do that), but not uninstall them.
Still, probably a useful thing to remember for future reference, so thanks anyway.
Replacing the home button with multitouch gestures? So using the device will now require you to use both hands? Great! That should be fun when the people driving around me need to not only divert their attention to controlling their iphone/ipod touch, but now must take BOTH hands off the wheel to operate it.
Does this update fix the wireless battery drain issue that popped up in the 4.0 release? On both my ipod touch 2G and my wife's ipod touch 3g, we used to be able to leave wireless on all the time. We could let the thing sit in sleep mode for 2 or 3 weeks, turn it back on, and the battery would still be charged. Now if you don't explicitly turn off wireless when the device is sleeping, the battery will be completely dead in 24-48 hours. There are a ton of people with this problem, but (as usual) apples refuses to acknowledge any problem exists. Until they fix this, I have little interest in whatever other features they might add to ios.
Never, thanks to an education system that ensures that 99.9% of the population don't even understand what plutocratic oligarchic means
I always love posts like this...people who get all high and mighty because some people are too stupid to know the meaning of a word which has absolutely no bearing on their everyday life. I'm a college graduate (graduated from a major university with a 4.0 GPA), and I'll admit that I don't even know what the definitions of plutocracy or oligarchy are. I'm sure I learned them in middle school or high school, and in the 20 years since then, I've probably read them a mere handful of times, though I think I've never found the need to use them. I know how to look them up in a dictionary when I see them and need to understand what I'm reading. I just did so and said "oh yeah, ok, that's right", but I can guarantee you that in 2 weeks I'll have forgotten what it means (ok, so since I participated in this discussion, it'll stick in my head a bit more and I'll probably remember for 6 or 8 weeks).
You know what? Between all the crap I have to remember for my job, for my hobbies, all the stuff I've had to learn when I had my child and over the last 6 months (and everything else I'll learn about children over the next 18 years), all the laws I have to remember, everything I need to know for financial and tax purposes, all the stuff I need to know about automobiles, stuff I had to learn about choosing new carpet or a new kitchen appliances, about electrical repair, about plumbing, taking care of my swimming pool, maintaining my yard equipment, taking care of my garden, and a billion other things......remembering the definition of a couple of words I'll most likely never use really isn't something I give a shit about. I suspect the next time the words will be important to me is when my daughter is learning about them in middle/high school. So I guess that makes me stupid, and probably nothing but one of the sheep, or whatever else makes you feel good about yourself. Whatever. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The IP header is enough to know who converses with whom.
Again, not with virtual hosting (which is in widespread use), it isn't.
Packet fragmentation isn't that big a deal when everything goes through a single connection.
It makes it tricky...enough so to make it hard to track on an automated basis, for every single user on their system, for every single connection they make, day after day, month after month, just in case at some unknown time in the future, the data from one of those random customers might possibly be useful. And you seemed to ignore the most important fact I pointed out, about connection reuse. It makes it pretty much impossible to reverse engineer which of the many virtual hosts may have been visited.
Hardly anyone uses nameservers outside their ISPs control, let alone encrypts their DNS traffc.
Well, hey....if you want to run your meth lab on your front porch, I guess I can't stop you. I was just thinking that, if perhaps you are smart enough to know what evidence you need to destroy and the proper way to destroy it, then I guess I'd presume your smart enough to take some other basic precautions.
They're probably only storing the unencrypted header information
What unencrypted headers? With SSL, the only thing unencrypted is the IP packet header and (I think) the TCP packet header. That includes source and destination IP (not domain name), but the destination IP isn't all that useful because of the widespread implementation of virtual hosting, where multiple websites share an IP address and are distinguished by the HTTP Host header (which is in the encrypted part for HTTPS).
Unencrypted headers also contain information about length, but that is difficult to make use of for a few reasons. Packet fragmentation can make this quite tricky to track, but not impossible. However, the more difficult obstacles are the facts that 1) a HTTPS communication can span more than 1 fully assembled TCP/IP packet (ie: not even accounting for fragmentation), and 2) starting with the HTTP 1.1 standard, connection reuse became the norm, meaning that multiple requests all come through on the same connection, making it pretty much impossible to tell anything about the data by looking at the encrypted packet. A request for 1 big file download would look the same as 50 smaller requests to load a single web page with all of it's embedded components (CSS, images, javascript files, etc)
Ask the Palin email guy how trying to destroy his data turned out. He would've had a slap on the wrist for the email hijacking, but it was obstruction of justice that got him the time he's doing now.
Yeah, but I have a feeling that murder is just a little bit more serious than email hijacking, and carries a punishment slightly worse than a slap on the wrist. If you are found guilty of murder, then the obstruction of justice charge is probably pretty minor on top of that conviction. On the other hand, if the evidence on your hard drive ended up being the key evidence against you, then you'd likely be much better off taking the obstruction of justice conviction if it gets you off the murder conviction.
It doesn't matter if you wreck your drive. Your internet history is recorded and retained for 2+ years at your ISP in accordance with the SAFETY Act of 2009.
Too bad the the SAFETY Act of 2009 didn't give your ISP a way to decrypt SSL connections.
"M" is the roman numeral for "1,000". In financial contexts, "MM" means "1,000,000" (1,000 x 1,000)
Uhhh...it would seem to me that, if we are going the roman numeral route, MM means 2000 and not 1000x1000. The year is currently MMX. Does that make it year 10,000,000?
That brings up a better question. Why are states able to require licenses to drive on public roads? If my taxes pay for them, shouldn't I be able to use them freely?
That argument is only slightly more compelling than "my taxes pay for that F-16, so why do I have to join the military and become a trained fighter pilot to fly one?"
So you're claiming that the first decade only had 9 years?
Who cares? The history of dates is so jumbled I think it's silly to be so anal about something like that. Are you sure that the first year started on Jan 1? Not every year has the same number of days. We have leap years, but we haven't always had them. We skipped several dates during the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. There were several irregular variations in the calendar, and these variations were different from nation to nation. In short, calculating dates that far back is so complex, it's almost deserving of its own branch of mathematics. The way I look at it, if we find it convenient enough to just say some years are 366 days long (rather than say every year is 365.25xxxx days long), then I don't see why it's such a sin to say the first decade was 9 years long if it makes every following decade more sensibly numbered.
Then you're giving it more credit then I would. I didn't find it the slightest bit interesting. As I read it, I was thinking how unrealistic it was, until I got to the section about the FCC not approving the internet because it's beta software, etc. At that point I said 'this is stupid", read a couple more paragraphs, got to the first mention of Microsoft Bob, and promptly closed the page. The level of absurdity in the article is so high, it sounds like it was FUD written by Comcast to rally people against net neutrality.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's a complex game. It's sort of like playing 10 bingo cards at the same time. You need a way to mark what spots on each card have been drawn. To do that, you scratch off the spaces to mark them. If you have to scratch off the entire game board, then you have no way to mark the spaces on your cards (since lottery tickets are designed so that you don't need anything but your scratching device to play).
plagiarized? Usually when you plagiarize something you don't mention the source. See that mention of "Wired" at the bottom below the pictures/above the comments?
RTFA
"Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests," he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. "Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious," he says. "Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers.
If you read my post, you will see that I said I could understand the game itself being proprietary. But the removable media is going to be for things like photos, application data, etc. I absolutely expect that to be on standard removable media formats. Wii uses a standard SD card. Xbox 360 has now dumped memory cards and uses standard USB thumb drives. That's great because those are standard media formats. I don't have to buy extra memory specifically for those devices. When I decided I needed to copy a savegame off of my Wii for the very first time, I didn't have to go to the store and buy a Wii Memory Card. I simply went to my little box of spare flash memory and grabbed an SD card. Likewise with my cameras (I have both a DSLR and a P&S) I need to have an extra memory card handy in case one of them runs out of space. Since they both use the same cards (SDHC) I don't need to keep an extra card for each one. I simply have 1 extra card in case one of them fills up. When devices use their own proprietary media formats, it makes this type of stuff a lot less convenient to deal with.
Also, every portable console EVER has had proprietary storage - why should this one be different?
For the game media? Sure, I'll accept proprietary, But the secondary slot is for non-game data....like, say, photos taken with the camera, and other data from applications. If you are going to have those stored to built in, non-removable memory, we don't like that but we'd understand. But if you are going to be good enough to put it on removable media, then use something that's already standard. For crying out loud, we've got SD, mini SD, and micro SD. All have become standard and are used in tons of devices, we can all read them in our computer's existing card reader, and they cover a nice range of sizes for whatever size device you might want to squeeze it into. Don't want to go with SD. Well, OK, we've already got our proprietary Sony memory stick format, which come in full size and the smaller pro duo size, and our existing card readers will handle it. But even their own proprietary format isn't proprietary for them, so they've got to come out with something else brand new?
Yeah, well despite all of their past media format defeats, they just won on BluRay so now they are more convinced than ever. They're like the person that's been pumping $100 worth of quarters into the slot machine all day and just got a $10 payoff...they're on a roll now. So they double down by playing 2 slot machines at once, so they can double their "winnings".
Wow. TWO proprietary card slots? The game media I can understand, and even though it's proprietary I'd understand the secondary slot being Sony Memory Stick (I'd hate it, but it's sony, so I'd understand). But we're not even talking proprietary as in Sony Memory Stick, but as in an entirely new media format. Way to go, Sony.
Oh, and they don't see how 3D translates to portable gaming? Well, I'm not surprised. They didn't see how motion control translated to console video gaming either, and laughed about how useless it was for 3 years before their "hey, hey, look at me....we can do it too, and in the lamest way possible" release of Move. I wouldn't be surprised if 2 years down the line they are suddenly all over 3D portable gaming and end up implementing it on the NGP by shipping new games with a pair of red/blue glasses.
I'm still confused as to why cars don't already come with some kind of radar/sonar device that would tell you when another vehicle or object is sitting in your blind spot while belting down the freeway.
Actually, the BMW 7 has exactly that. It's just one of those new technologies that is going to take a number of years to filter down to all vehicles.
First of all, Warfarin is pretty fucking safe. If I take an extra 5mg pill once a week, nothing happens. Out of all the thinners, it's not exactly aspirin mild, but it's not horrendously dangerous.
I agree. I've been on it for 25 years without incident. The most I've ever taken extra was 2.5mg, but I have forgotten to take my 10mg dose 2 days in a row, and had no problems as a result. Perhaps other people react differently, but from my experience, I have a hard time thinking of it as risky or dangerous.
I don't know how much security may have increased, but a month ago I took my first train trip ever, and from my point of view the security was pretty transparent. I bought my ticket at amtrak.com, printed out the receipt with barcode, went to the station, scanned the barcode on a computer, got my printed ticket, and waited in the lobby with everyone else. When the train rolled up, I got aboard the train. As I stepped on, one of the employees was there to greet me, and that was the very first person I interacted with. That interaction lasted 1/4 of a second and I was on the train without him even looking at my ticket. His main purpose there seemed to be to help old people get the baggage up the steps.
Once on the train, we departed and it was 5 minutes before someone even came around to look at my ticket. If I had wanted to do anything, I could have easily put anything in the luggage area with noone even taking note. I probably could have even hid out in the bathroom, wandered up to the snack area, etc, and completely avoided anyone seeing my ticket before getting off at the next stop (unless the employees were counting the number of people that got on, counting how many tickets they saw from new passengers, and then comparing notes with each other). Security on the Chicago Metra trains was even more lax, in that tickets are bought anonymously with cash, not for any specific train (I think a ticket is good for 1 year), nobody watches you board, and the conductor simply punched your ticket while the train was in motion, sometimes more than 1 stop after you boarded.
Is that a security problem? Well, yes and no. It's a security problem in that anybody could have easily done something malicious. It's not a REAL problem from the fact that all the security in the world would be power against anyone who wants to do damage. With a plane, your attack vectors are 1) get something on board the plane, 2) get access to the restricted area outside and on the runway, or 3) collide with the plane mid air, either in another plane or using a missile. The first two can be reasonably secured, and the third is a quite difficult attack vector to exploit. With a train, the attack vector is easy and limitless. Simply walk up to anywhere on the thousands of miles of unsecured track and plant your bomb and wait for the train. It's impossible to protect. You don't even need to buy a ticket or set foot on a train in order to attack with even the most primitive explosives.
Apparently that's not the case for every grayed-out addon. The 2 that Norton installs are greyed out, but your Run as Administrator trick doesn't help. I can disable them (don't even need to be admin to do that), but not uninstall them.
Still, probably a useful thing to remember for future reference, so thanks anyway.
Replacing the home button with multitouch gestures? So using the device will now require you to use both hands? Great! That should be fun when the people driving around me need to not only divert their attention to controlling their iphone/ipod touch, but now must take BOTH hands off the wheel to operate it.
Does this update fix the wireless battery drain issue that popped up in the 4.0 release? On both my ipod touch 2G and my wife's ipod touch 3g, we used to be able to leave wireless on all the time. We could let the thing sit in sleep mode for 2 or 3 weeks, turn it back on, and the battery would still be charged. Now if you don't explicitly turn off wireless when the device is sleeping, the battery will be completely dead in 24-48 hours. There are a ton of people with this problem, but (as usual) apples refuses to acknowledge any problem exists. Until they fix this, I have little interest in whatever other features they might add to ios.
and although my intention was never to troll
Here you are doing it again.
Never, thanks to an education system that ensures that 99.9% of the population don't even understand what plutocratic oligarchic means
I always love posts like this...people who get all high and mighty because some people are too stupid to know the meaning of a word which has absolutely no bearing on their everyday life. I'm a college graduate (graduated from a major university with a 4.0 GPA), and I'll admit that I don't even know what the definitions of plutocracy or oligarchy are. I'm sure I learned them in middle school or high school, and in the 20 years since then, I've probably read them a mere handful of times, though I think I've never found the need to use them. I know how to look them up in a dictionary when I see them and need to understand what I'm reading. I just did so and said "oh yeah, ok, that's right", but I can guarantee you that in 2 weeks I'll have forgotten what it means (ok, so since I participated in this discussion, it'll stick in my head a bit more and I'll probably remember for 6 or 8 weeks).
You know what? Between all the crap I have to remember for my job, for my hobbies, all the stuff I've had to learn when I had my child and over the last 6 months (and everything else I'll learn about children over the next 18 years), all the laws I have to remember, everything I need to know for financial and tax purposes, all the stuff I need to know about automobiles, stuff I had to learn about choosing new carpet or a new kitchen appliances, about electrical repair, about plumbing, taking care of my swimming pool, maintaining my yard equipment, taking care of my garden, and a billion other things......remembering the definition of a couple of words I'll most likely never use really isn't something I give a shit about. I suspect the next time the words will be important to me is when my daughter is learning about them in middle/high school. So I guess that makes me stupid, and probably nothing but one of the sheep, or whatever else makes you feel good about yourself. Whatever. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The IP header is enough to know who converses with whom.
Again, not with virtual hosting (which is in widespread use), it isn't.
Packet fragmentation isn't that big a deal when everything goes through a single connection.
It makes it tricky...enough so to make it hard to track on an automated basis, for every single user on their system, for every single connection they make, day after day, month after month, just in case at some unknown time in the future, the data from one of those random customers might possibly be useful. And you seemed to ignore the most important fact I pointed out, about connection reuse. It makes it pretty much impossible to reverse engineer which of the many virtual hosts may have been visited.
Hardly anyone uses nameservers outside their ISPs control, let alone encrypts their DNS traffc.
Well, hey....if you want to run your meth lab on your front porch, I guess I can't stop you. I was just thinking that, if perhaps you are smart enough to know what evidence you need to destroy and the proper way to destroy it, then I guess I'd presume your smart enough to take some other basic precautions.
They're probably only storing the unencrypted header information
What unencrypted headers? With SSL, the only thing unencrypted is the IP packet header and (I think) the TCP packet header. That includes source and destination IP (not domain name), but the destination IP isn't all that useful because of the widespread implementation of virtual hosting, where multiple websites share an IP address and are distinguished by the HTTP Host header (which is in the encrypted part for HTTPS).
Unencrypted headers also contain information about length, but that is difficult to make use of for a few reasons. Packet fragmentation can make this quite tricky to track, but not impossible. However, the more difficult obstacles are the facts that
1) a HTTPS communication can span more than 1 fully assembled TCP/IP packet (ie: not even accounting for fragmentation), and
2) starting with the HTTP 1.1 standard, connection reuse became the norm, meaning that multiple requests all come through on the same connection, making it pretty much impossible to tell anything about the data by looking at the encrypted packet. A request for 1 big file download would look the same as 50 smaller requests to load a single web page with all of it's embedded components (CSS, images, javascript files, etc)
Ask the Palin email guy how trying to destroy his data turned out. He would've had a slap on the wrist for the email hijacking, but it was obstruction of justice that got him the time he's doing now.
Yeah, but I have a feeling that murder is just a little bit more serious than email hijacking, and carries a punishment slightly worse than a slap on the wrist. If you are found guilty of murder, then the obstruction of justice charge is probably pretty minor on top of that conviction. On the other hand, if the evidence on your hard drive ended up being the key evidence against you, then you'd likely be much better off taking the obstruction of justice conviction if it gets you off the murder conviction.
It doesn't matter if you wreck your drive. Your internet history is recorded and retained for 2+ years at your ISP in accordance with the SAFETY Act of 2009.
Too bad the the SAFETY Act of 2009 didn't give your ISP a way to decrypt SSL connections.
"M" is the roman numeral for "1,000". In financial contexts, "MM" means "1,000,000" (1,000 x 1,000)
Uhhh...it would seem to me that, if we are going the roman numeral route, MM means 2000 and not 1000x1000. The year is currently MMX. Does that make it year 10,000,000?
That brings up a better question. Why are states able to require licenses to drive on public roads? If my taxes pay for them, shouldn't I be able to use them freely?
That argument is only slightly more compelling than "my taxes pay for that F-16, so why do I have to join the military and become a trained fighter pilot to fly one?"
It's not a sin at all, it's just plain wrong.
"A decade is a period of ten years is a decade"
OK, so how long is a year?
If only you were warned.
And if only you had read his post
So you're claiming that the first decade only had 9 years?
Who cares? The history of dates is so jumbled I think it's silly to be so anal about something like that. Are you sure that the first year started on Jan 1? Not every year has the same number of days. We have leap years, but we haven't always had them. We skipped several dates during the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. There were several irregular variations in the calendar, and these variations were different from nation to nation. In short, calculating dates that far back is so complex, it's almost deserving of its own branch of mathematics. The way I look at it, if we find it convenient enough to just say some years are 366 days long (rather than say every year is 365.25xxxx days long), then I don't see why it's such a sin to say the first decade was 9 years long if it makes every following decade more sensibly numbered.
Ok, its an interesting read
Then you're giving it more credit then I would. I didn't find it the slightest bit interesting. As I read it, I was thinking how unrealistic it was, until I got to the section about the FCC not approving the internet because it's beta software, etc. At that point I said 'this is stupid", read a couple more paragraphs, got to the first mention of Microsoft Bob, and promptly closed the page. The level of absurdity in the article is so high, it sounds like it was FUD written by Comcast to rally people against net neutrality.
CAT scanners too:
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2009/October/14/Hospital-Error.aspx