arik.org » Reading http://arik.org So You've Found Me Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:16:38 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 From the "It Couldn’t Happen To Nicer People" Department: http://arik.org/2002/06/from-the-it-couldnt-happen-to-nicer-people-department/ http://arik.org/2002/06/from-the-it-couldnt-happen-to-nicer-people-department/#comments Thu, 27 Jun 2002 20:12:00 +0000 ahess247 http://arik.org/from-the-it-couldnt-happen-to-nicer-people-department/ Word comes from Slashdot that that terrible, horrible excuse for a software firm Gator is on the business end of a lawsuit filed by several publishing companies that describes Gator’s advertising disease-ware as “a parasite that free rides on the hard work and investment” of the publishers” according to this Washington Post story.

I for one won’t be sad to see Gator fade into the historical footnote it deserves to be. I once was fooled into installing it and was creeped out by the little eyes that would occasionally pop up in the lower right corner of my screen. Even after deleting all the elements of the Gator software I could find, it wouldn’t let go, and remained somewhere in some secret Windows NT start-up menu where I couldn’t reach, reminding me that it was there every time I started up. I finally deleted everything on the machine and installed Windows 2000. So far I have managed to remain blessedly Gator-free, and intend to stay that way.

]]> http://arik.org/2002/06/from-the-it-couldnt-happen-to-nicer-people-department/feed/ 0 A Close Shave http://arik.org/2002/06/a-close-shave/ http://arik.org/2002/06/a-close-shave/#comments Thu, 20 Jun 2002 21:15:00 +0000 ahess247 http://arik.org/a-close-shave/ It helps to keep things in perspective. On June 14, the Earth apparently came within only 75,000 miles of a catastrophic collision with a peice of space rock the size of a soccer field. The BBC has the details. If 75,000 miles seems like a long way consider this: The Moon is more than three times that far away: 240,000 miles. Had this bit of rock actually hit the planet, the result would have been something like what happened in Siberia in 1908, when an asteroid of similar size flattened 2,000 square miles of forest land. Scarier yet is the fact that astronmers only detected in three days after it had passed us by.

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