There's no such thing as perfect security. The only thing I would have to do is get to a terminal (or multiple terminals) and intercept the information from the operators as they are looking for it. It's slow but it sure works. If each operator does about 100 queries per day and I have access to 10 machines that's easily 1000 records a day or 5000 records in a week which is quite a breach (and very useful as well).
Then there are those hacking attempts. Only one has to get through (preferably between 2 and 4 am local time - your staff is kinda drowsy, nobody can be contacted very quickly) and everything you worked for is screwed in a few minutes. And that is IF somebody notices. The fact that you never had a breach is because you never noticed a breach. All the auditing is not going to do you any good if there is no log file. Even if somebody eventually works it out you'll have to find the responsible person. Good luck if he is (or appears to be) in China.
Depends on your computer etc. sometimes you can't just install 1GB of memory, these days you need two or even three chips in order for it to work. Then you got those machines (most laptops, netbooks, mini and micro form factor desktops) that only have 2 slots so any upgrade requires a full new set of modules, most of the time you have to get somebody to put it in for $50 and then there are those people that would actually like to use their computer and having 1GB eaten by their OS is a huge waste of resources especially if it doesn't give them anything but some fancy buttons.
Yes there are. They have been in the news. There have been instances in the UK and France since 2006, there are many schools and educational institutions as well as companies that have made the switch. I know in the Netherlands and Belgium government agencies have been looking into it and if I'm correct a lot of the ex-Soviet countries that are now part of the EU (Hungary, Poland,...) and the Scandinavians have less advertised but nonetheless important conversions.
Gartner is a sock puppet for Microsoft and everybody in the industry knows that (they made the analysis that Windows XP before SP1 was safer than Linux by comparing it to Red Hat Linux 5.3 (not RHEL, the original 5.3))
So far I haven't had any with flash drives. I think the corruption starts way after the deprecation date (5 years) when the stick is too small to be useful or long lost. CD's and DVD's corrupt after about 1-5 years depending on the brand and storage location (moisture, heat). Hard drives corrupt as soon as you drop them hard enough, otherwise they work well for 10 years (if they're not spinning).
Apparently slightly more effort than you put in writing books. The book is from 1999, what do you expect, that you still have hot sales? This is not LOTR. Next to that, the book is $52 on Amazon and it has barely 190 pages, at least 10 being a listing of patents. For a book on compression written 10 years ago? Most of the information (what I saw from the Google Books preview) can be found through Wikipedia and hundreds if not thousands of other (free and paid) books on the same subject and some of the information might even have been obsoleted by better algorithms (you describe JPEG and MPEG). While I do agree that programmers might have to learn the basics and these old systems are in principal similar although less advanced you could've at least gotten a newer revision of it in those 10 years?
I use it regularly. No problems so far. As long as your flash drive doesn't corrupt it should be fine. If your flash drive does corrupt part of the data you'll lose it but that's true of all encrypted media. The question is: if something corrupts anyway on an unencrypted drive would you trust the rest of the data?
At some point it's better to just rewrite the thing from the ground up. Especially once you start moving platforms (if your code is architecture specific enough like a kernel) or definitely when you start moving between languages (when you start integrating somebody else C code in what used to be another one's Perl script).
Wrong. EVERYBODY can make a citizens arrest (that's why it's called CITIZEN'S arrest) and use certain force to detain a person UNTIL a law enforcement officer arrives if they have a strong reason (and to cover their behinds, 3rd party witnesses) to believe a felony was committed. They have the right but also the obligation to notify law enforcement (police) immediately. They do not have the right to detain you indefinitely, to hold you against your will for a long period of time without notifying law enforcement or to use excessive force (more force than necessary like tasers or guns). If you are being held against your will and nobody gets notified of your situation or some 'manager' comes talk to you, then you are being kidnapped.
Because you can only run so many apps at a time. I have a few 8-cores laying around (16 cores if you can make full use of SMT) and at no normal desktop use can you get more than 2 at full speed. Mail hardly uses any CPU so you don't need a full core for that. Web might be able to use a full core once in a while, media players might use up to 2 cores sometimes if you play full HD content.
There are apps (that we use) that could use more than one core at a time but they don't because they are single threaded but I believe certain loops can be threaded (if the overhead doesn't become too large). I think that's what this technology will do: unroll the loops on compile time and see whether you can run them on more than one CPU.
How much work: a lot. MRI (if that's what they're using) maintenance is expensive and intensive. Simply keeping up with all the stuff that needs to be around for cooling the systems is a lot of work not to mention the safety procedures. Just about any medical procedure they will perform for this requires a lot of work and is dangerous for the individual it's being performed on. A simple xray can kill somebody if something goes wrong (ask Edison). MRI machines have a lot of magnetic force so a simple pen can become a deadly projectile.
Brains change: There is actually not very much known (yet) about brain plasticity. I know for instance that brain activity changes locations if for example a certain location was damaged due to head trauma (as small as a mild concussion), stroke or epilepsy.
They probably cleared out some more resources from somebody's spare budget. It doesn't cost that much to keep a few people around to play around with it and take some pictures, it's cheaper than sending another one (probably 10 to 100 times cheaper) and leave that one to rot.
For this little problem, they should just tell it to rock back and forth a few times. I figure it's kinda like off-road driving, you give gas until something gives (and hope it's not your vehicle that gives). If they really want/need to kill it, I would say, go full throttle and go as far as you can go while taking pictures. It would give a lot of new information for just being reckless for a bit. Now they've been there for a few years and have only gone as far as what would take us a short walk
MATLAB won't transition to anything. It's the only player in the market and is about as bad as Microsoft as far as licensing goes. Since they switched to activation for their licensing I have been looking for competitors. I've even had to crack some of their systems in order for it to keep working (some with an official crack, others with a not-so-legal crack). The Mathworks knows they have all educational institutions and a lot of engineering labs by the balls and can twist them however they want.
Octave is good but is not a real competitor because it isn't fully compatible (which would mean they would need to break stuff in order to emulate the backwards-compatibility of MATLAB) and it doesn't have all the necessary toolboxes scientists like to use.
People read these books to explore the human condition and take a hard look at where society fails the individual.
I think that banning said books (and you can pull this through to video games or movies in our time) is telling more about the human conditioning and where society fails in the current stream of time (the current generation) than what those books will tell us about where the human condition or society failed in the past.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good idea to go back and look at what happened back then. But banning things because of their offensive or realistic nature DESCRIBING certain issues is no better than letting the things happen that were already done in real life or things that keep on happening (like the game on Fallujah, those wars are still ongoing, murder and rape is still a daily issue and the tables on racism seem to have turned (or as one comedian described it: I like being white, I can go back in history to any time period without a problem but I would hate to go forward in time and be white)).
Now why something is critical as wifi has to exist with stupid consumer shit is the real crux of the issue...
Well, WiFi IS consumer shit. 2.4GHz is simply the band that the government has given consumer to use (and fill) without any licenses or other papers. All you have to make sure is to keep within the allocated frequencies and not exceed a certain power (somewhere around 100mW or 250mW). Several solutions do exist:
- I have seen radio-based wireless equipment (professional) that has directional antenna's and uses a different frequency. We use it in a MAN to connect one building that would be too expensive or even impossible (authorities don't like to give permission to break open major streets) to connect using fiber. Our company probably paid for a license but recently they have come out with a solution in the (free) 60GHz band. The problem is that all of this equipment is non-compatible with each other while 802.11a/b/g/n is at least (somewhat) compatible.
- You can use optical wireless (laser) but it's kind of a problem if you don't have a line of sight between the transceivers.
- You can just wire everything. That's what I will do in my new house, just replace the phone wires with 2 Cat6 cables. I only use WiFi for convenience, not for high-speed, low-latency, fixed location stuff (like security camera's, desktop computers and internet access)
- Get a license and use different bands. You can rig up an ethernet cable (10Mbps, non-duplex) over an FM transmitter with the correct conversion hardware. This would be a hassle for most consumers though. If you do use different bands without license you might get into trouble.
I have been noticing issues as well. All day going to slashdot.org has sent me to the RSS feed (strangely without any advertisements - which is good) but I have a hard time getting to the actual front page.
This is a living memory only for a few old people, the young people and probably even all of the ruling class has heard about it but it's part of history rather not remembered just like the templar knights and the inquisition.
My grandfather remembers it since he was arrested and sent to Bergen-Belsen, escaped, betrayed and sent to Buchenwald because he was in the resistance (sabotage) but he's 89 years old. He was also in the Belgian Congo and as he described it: shot blacks with spears off a bridge with a machine gun while being dropped by parachute to extract a "diddling" priest, the only white man in the village while there was an unusual amount of "mulatto" children. I had a friend that has lived it because of his religion (even went through the Death March) but he died last year.
What I think is the main problem is 1) education: the gritty details are not being revealed to children because they believe they are too shocking while a lot of the media around it is romanticized or only described from one side (the winners side or what the soldiers had to go through to win) 2) shame: the survivors are to this day (with exceptions) ashamed to talk about it, the people or nations that went along with the nazi's (Germany, the Netherlands, the Catholic Church, Switzerland) are ashamed/afraid to admit wrongdoing. 3) Hitlers empire and the power he exerted over people is a wet dream for many politicians and rulers, if you analyze the political standpoints (without taking into account the blind hatred for minorities) you'll notice that politicians have been trying to do the same thing in a different way over and over again. What he promised was good jobs for everybody and to get rid of whomever seems to be the boogeyman for the current problems in exchange for their basic rights and freedoms all wrapped in a thin veil of hope for the children and pride in their own country.
Because sometimes these blogs put difficult stuff in a plain language and express an opinion about it (and others may comment on the stupidity of it) and some legal types (read: RIAA, patent lawyers,...) don't like that.
Wouldn't it be great if judges would include 'expert' advice from Slashdot or tech columnists when ruling on certain cases. Absurdities like the DMCA, most software patents and the RIAA cases would hardly be ruled favorably for.
Unless they actually use a licensed forensic expert. If they use whomever they have been using before, this probably would become a mistrial very quickly (and hopefully some reprimands or even jail time for the plaintiffs).
The Russians used a classic move they learned from history: scorched earth. They did it with Napoleon and they did it with Hitler. The shape of Russia also helps a lot with that technique.
In short: As the Russians go back, they burn down every usable thing. As they go back the front gets wider making it more difficult for the invaders to attack, the invading troops don't have any local supplies so need to ship everything in which takes a long time. By the time they get to Moscow, the winter has started and since both the French and the Germans were planning on a quick summer invasion, they now have to deal with the harsh winter without any supplies. As a result many soldiers freeze to death, equipment malfunctions and eventually they have to give up.
Try construction. I'm talking about old-school architectural engineers here. I recently saw somebody do it with a fairly simple formula to give an approximation on something. The younger engineer had to find and unwrap his scientific TI calculator and then was figuring out typing in the correct syntax of the formula when the old guy was already done doing it on paper. He kept a sheet (one can be found here: http://www.sosmath.com/tables/trigtable/trigtable.html) in the back of his notepad. The old guys on the project meeting were then reminiscing for a while about the good ol' days and how those papers are cheap to replace and can be used in any construction environment.
Funny to say but there are notepads still being sold (I forgot where, I should've picked it up when I saw it) with a trig table printed in the back. My wife is doing Six Sigma and with her training she got a neat little pocket book that has all sorts of conversion tables, trig tables, translations, formulas and standards in it so apparently people still use good-ol paperback to make quick calculations on the go without having to find a calculator.
Exactly. The way we configured it is by having the medical machines (one running Linux, 2 on Windows) behind a small router and first of all have no default gateway (so it doesn't know where to route to to get outside the lan) and the first set of firewall rules deny all packets that are not in the other LAN's IP range (both source and destination). The router can only be reconfigured when you have physical access to it (serial port) and I always unplug the cable before leaving. Then each machine is set up to deny all outgoing traffic except for specific hosts (like printers, PACS etc.), the machine has no default gateway but there is 1 route set up to reach the other IP range.
How 'bout you try running on Vista and then being told that the faster version of Vista is coming out today. You'll be willing to pay your ISP to get you more bandwidth just so you can begin installing it faster.
286 without math co-processor - Install Vista trig function lookup tables - You would be surprised that they are still being used (both in paper and in code) film - you mean like 35mm? There are filters in most semi-advanced photo programs that will emulate this. typewriters - http://www.instructables.com/id/Typewriter-Computer-Keyboard/ horse dung smell in the streets - Go live in NYC, open the window and take a deep whif Morse code - Well, everything is still binary these days so technically it's similar to really fast morse code. the black plague - Swine flu?
What 'handedness' is earth? I think that because of the vast amount of life on our planet, the handedness would be (statistically speaking) about the same in both directions. According to the article, the handedness gets inherited from parents but it doesn't make clear whether or not it is the same for all life forms.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such thing as perfect security. The only thing I would have to do is get to a terminal (or multiple terminals) and intercept the information from the operators as they are looking for it. It's slow but it sure works. If each operator does about 100 queries per day and I have access to 10 machines that's easily 1000 records a day or 5000 records in a week which is quite a breach (and very useful as well).
Then there are those hacking attempts. Only one has to get through (preferably between 2 and 4 am local time - your staff is kinda drowsy, nobody can be contacted very quickly) and everything you worked for is screwed in a few minutes. And that is IF somebody notices. The fact that you never had a breach is because you never noticed a breach. All the auditing is not going to do you any good if there is no log file. Even if somebody eventually works it out you'll have to find the responsible person. Good luck if he is (or appears to be) in China.
Depends on your computer etc. sometimes you can't just install 1GB of memory, these days you need two or even three chips in order for it to work. Then you got those machines (most laptops, netbooks, mini and micro form factor desktops) that only have 2 slots so any upgrade requires a full new set of modules, most of the time you have to get somebody to put it in for $50 and then there are those people that would actually like to use their computer and having 1GB eaten by their OS is a huge waste of resources especially if it doesn't give them anything but some fancy buttons.
Yes there are. They have been in the news. There have been instances in the UK and France since 2006, there are many schools and educational institutions as well as companies that have made the switch. I know in the Netherlands and Belgium government agencies have been looking into it and if I'm correct a lot of the ex-Soviet countries that are now part of the EU (Hungary, Poland, ...) and the Scandinavians have less advertised but nonetheless important conversions.
Gartner is a sock puppet for Microsoft and everybody in the industry knows that (they made the analysis that Windows XP before SP1 was safer than Linux by comparing it to Red Hat Linux 5.3 (not RHEL, the original 5.3))
So far I haven't had any with flash drives. I think the corruption starts way after the deprecation date (5 years) when the stick is too small to be useful or long lost. CD's and DVD's corrupt after about 1-5 years depending on the brand and storage location (moisture, heat). Hard drives corrupt as soon as you drop them hard enough, otherwise they work well for 10 years (if they're not spinning).
Apparently slightly more effort than you put in writing books. The book is from 1999, what do you expect, that you still have hot sales? This is not LOTR. Next to that, the book is $52 on Amazon and it has barely 190 pages, at least 10 being a listing of patents. For a book on compression written 10 years ago? Most of the information (what I saw from the Google Books preview) can be found through Wikipedia and hundreds if not thousands of other (free and paid) books on the same subject and some of the information might even have been obsoleted by better algorithms (you describe JPEG and MPEG). While I do agree that programmers might have to learn the basics and these old systems are in principal similar although less advanced you could've at least gotten a newer revision of it in those 10 years?
I use it regularly. No problems so far. As long as your flash drive doesn't corrupt it should be fine. If your flash drive does corrupt part of the data you'll lose it but that's true of all encrypted media. The question is: if something corrupts anyway on an unencrypted drive would you trust the rest of the data?
At some point it's better to just rewrite the thing from the ground up. Especially once you start moving platforms (if your code is architecture specific enough like a kernel) or definitely when you start moving between languages (when you start integrating somebody else C code in what used to be another one's Perl script).
Wrong. EVERYBODY can make a citizens arrest (that's why it's called CITIZEN'S arrest) and use certain force to detain a person UNTIL a law enforcement officer arrives if they have a strong reason (and to cover their behinds, 3rd party witnesses) to believe a felony was committed. They have the right but also the obligation to notify law enforcement (police) immediately. They do not have the right to detain you indefinitely, to hold you against your will for a long period of time without notifying law enforcement or to use excessive force (more force than necessary like tasers or guns). If you are being held against your will and nobody gets notified of your situation or some 'manager' comes talk to you, then you are being kidnapped.
The correct wording as on one of my keychain cards (for both law enforcement officers & security personnel):
My legal rights are protected. If it is your INTENTION to question, detain or arrest me, please allow me to call an attorney immediately.
That works in most cases. Usually they go: well, that's not really necessary now is it.
Because you can only run so many apps at a time. I have a few 8-cores laying around (16 cores if you can make full use of SMT) and at no normal desktop use can you get more than 2 at full speed. Mail hardly uses any CPU so you don't need a full core for that. Web might be able to use a full core once in a while, media players might use up to 2 cores sometimes if you play full HD content.
There are apps (that we use) that could use more than one core at a time but they don't because they are single threaded but I believe certain loops can be threaded (if the overhead doesn't become too large). I think that's what this technology will do: unroll the loops on compile time and see whether you can run them on more than one CPU.
How much work: a lot. MRI (if that's what they're using) maintenance is expensive and intensive. Simply keeping up with all the stuff that needs to be around for cooling the systems is a lot of work not to mention the safety procedures. Just about any medical procedure they will perform for this requires a lot of work and is dangerous for the individual it's being performed on. A simple xray can kill somebody if something goes wrong (ask Edison). MRI machines have a lot of magnetic force so a simple pen can become a deadly projectile.
Brains change: There is actually not very much known (yet) about brain plasticity. I know for instance that brain activity changes locations if for example a certain location was damaged due to head trauma (as small as a mild concussion), stroke or epilepsy.
They probably cleared out some more resources from somebody's spare budget. It doesn't cost that much to keep a few people around to play around with it and take some pictures, it's cheaper than sending another one (probably 10 to 100 times cheaper) and leave that one to rot.
For this little problem, they should just tell it to rock back and forth a few times. I figure it's kinda like off-road driving, you give gas until something gives (and hope it's not your vehicle that gives). If they really want/need to kill it, I would say, go full throttle and go as far as you can go while taking pictures. It would give a lot of new information for just being reckless for a bit. Now they've been there for a few years and have only gone as far as what would take us a short walk
MATLAB won't transition to anything. It's the only player in the market and is about as bad as Microsoft as far as licensing goes. Since they switched to activation for their licensing I have been looking for competitors. I've even had to crack some of their systems in order for it to keep working (some with an official crack, others with a not-so-legal crack). The Mathworks knows they have all educational institutions and a lot of engineering labs by the balls and can twist them however they want.
Octave is good but is not a real competitor because it isn't fully compatible (which would mean they would need to break stuff in order to emulate the backwards-compatibility of MATLAB) and it doesn't have all the necessary toolboxes scientists like to use.
People read these books to explore the human condition and take a hard look at where society fails the individual.
I think that banning said books (and you can pull this through to video games or movies in our time) is telling more about the human conditioning and where society fails in the current stream of time (the current generation) than what those books will tell us about where the human condition or society failed in the past.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good idea to go back and look at what happened back then. But banning things because of their offensive or realistic nature DESCRIBING certain issues is no better than letting the things happen that were already done in real life or things that keep on happening (like the game on Fallujah, those wars are still ongoing, murder and rape is still a daily issue and the tables on racism seem to have turned (or as one comedian described it: I like being white, I can go back in history to any time period without a problem but I would hate to go forward in time and be white)).
Now why something is critical as wifi has to exist with stupid consumer shit is the real crux of the issue ...
Well, WiFi IS consumer shit. 2.4GHz is simply the band that the government has given consumer to use (and fill) without any licenses or other papers. All you have to make sure is to keep within the allocated frequencies and not exceed a certain power (somewhere around 100mW or 250mW). Several solutions do exist:
- I have seen radio-based wireless equipment (professional) that has directional antenna's and uses a different frequency. We use it in a MAN to connect one building that would be too expensive or even impossible (authorities don't like to give permission to break open major streets) to connect using fiber. Our company probably paid for a license but recently they have come out with a solution in the (free) 60GHz band. The problem is that all of this equipment is non-compatible with each other while 802.11a/b/g/n is at least (somewhat) compatible.
- You can use optical wireless (laser) but it's kind of a problem if you don't have a line of sight between the transceivers.
- You can just wire everything. That's what I will do in my new house, just replace the phone wires with 2 Cat6 cables. I only use WiFi for convenience, not for high-speed, low-latency, fixed location stuff (like security camera's, desktop computers and internet access)
- Get a license and use different bands. You can rig up an ethernet cable (10Mbps, non-duplex) over an FM transmitter with the correct conversion hardware. This would be a hassle for most consumers though. If you do use different bands without license you might get into trouble.
I have been noticing issues as well. All day going to slashdot.org has sent me to the RSS feed (strangely without any advertisements - which is good) but I have a hard time getting to the actual front page.
This is a living memory only for a few old people, the young people and probably even all of the ruling class has heard about it but it's part of history rather not remembered just like the templar knights and the inquisition.
My grandfather remembers it since he was arrested and sent to Bergen-Belsen, escaped, betrayed and sent to Buchenwald because he was in the resistance (sabotage) but he's 89 years old. He was also in the Belgian Congo and as he described it: shot blacks with spears off a bridge with a machine gun while being dropped by parachute to extract a "diddling" priest, the only white man in the village while there was an unusual amount of "mulatto" children. I had a friend that has lived it because of his religion (even went through the Death March) but he died last year.
What I think is the main problem is 1) education: the gritty details are not being revealed to children because they believe they are too shocking while a lot of the media around it is romanticized or only described from one side (the winners side or what the soldiers had to go through to win) 2) shame: the survivors are to this day (with exceptions) ashamed to talk about it, the people or nations that went along with the nazi's (Germany, the Netherlands, the Catholic Church, Switzerland) are ashamed/afraid to admit wrongdoing. 3) Hitlers empire and the power he exerted over people is a wet dream for many politicians and rulers, if you analyze the political standpoints (without taking into account the blind hatred for minorities) you'll notice that politicians have been trying to do the same thing in a different way over and over again. What he promised was good jobs for everybody and to get rid of whomever seems to be the boogeyman for the current problems in exchange for their basic rights and freedoms all wrapped in a thin veil of hope for the children and pride in their own country.
Because sometimes these blogs put difficult stuff in a plain language and express an opinion about it (and others may comment on the stupidity of it) and some legal types (read: RIAA, patent lawyers, ...) don't like that.
Wouldn't it be great if judges would include 'expert' advice from Slashdot or tech columnists when ruling on certain cases. Absurdities like the DMCA, most software patents and the RIAA cases would hardly be ruled favorably for.
Unless they actually use a licensed forensic expert. If they use whomever they have been using before, this probably would become a mistrial very quickly (and hopefully some reprimands or even jail time for the plaintiffs).
The Russians used a classic move they learned from history: scorched earth. They did it with Napoleon and they did it with Hitler. The shape of Russia also helps a lot with that technique.
In short: As the Russians go back, they burn down every usable thing. As they go back the front gets wider making it more difficult for the invaders to attack, the invading troops don't have any local supplies so need to ship everything in which takes a long time. By the time they get to Moscow, the winter has started and since both the French and the Germans were planning on a quick summer invasion, they now have to deal with the harsh winter without any supplies. As a result many soldiers freeze to death, equipment malfunctions and eventually they have to give up.
Try construction. I'm talking about old-school architectural engineers here. I recently saw somebody do it with a fairly simple formula to give an approximation on something. The younger engineer had to find and unwrap his scientific TI calculator and then was figuring out typing in the correct syntax of the formula when the old guy was already done doing it on paper. He kept a sheet (one can be found here: http://www.sosmath.com/tables/trigtable/trigtable.html) in the back of his notepad. The old guys on the project meeting were then reminiscing for a while about the good ol' days and how those papers are cheap to replace and can be used in any construction environment.
Funny to say but there are notepads still being sold (I forgot where, I should've picked it up when I saw it) with a trig table printed in the back. My wife is doing Six Sigma and with her training she got a neat little pocket book that has all sorts of conversion tables, trig tables, translations, formulas and standards in it so apparently people still use good-ol paperback to make quick calculations on the go without having to find a calculator.
Exactly. The way we configured it is by having the medical machines (one running Linux, 2 on Windows) behind a small router and first of all have no default gateway (so it doesn't know where to route to to get outside the lan) and the first set of firewall rules deny all packets that are not in the other LAN's IP range (both source and destination). The router can only be reconfigured when you have physical access to it (serial port) and I always unplug the cable before leaving. Then each machine is set up to deny all outgoing traffic except for specific hosts (like printers, PACS etc.), the machine has no default gateway but there is 1 route set up to reach the other IP range.
How 'bout you try running on Vista and then being told that the faster version of Vista is coming out today. You'll be willing to pay your ISP to get you more bandwidth just so you can begin installing it faster.
Emulating old stuff:
286 without math co-processor - Install Vista
trig function lookup tables - You would be surprised that they are still being used (both in paper and in code)
film - you mean like 35mm? There are filters in most semi-advanced photo programs that will emulate this.
typewriters - http://www.instructables.com/id/Typewriter-Computer-Keyboard/
horse dung smell in the streets - Go live in NYC, open the window and take a deep whif
Morse code - Well, everything is still binary these days so technically it's similar to really fast morse code.
the black plague - Swine flu?
What 'handedness' is earth? I think that because of the vast amount of life on our planet, the handedness would be (statistically speaking) about the same in both directions. According to the article, the handedness gets inherited from parents but it doesn't make clear whether or not it is the same for all life forms.