When Jobs announced all the new iTunes and iPods, I took a gamble on looking over the employee discount page to see if the new hardware was ready to go. Instead I saw that the iPad was no longer grayed out. Yes! My patience paid off and I don’t buy into Opportunity Cost with it when my MacBook does over 80 percent of the same thing. Some people will go to great lengths rationalizing, however, it’s their spending money. I will use the difference in savings toward accessories (Ghost Shield which is awesome on my iPhone 4, case) and content.
Besides The Nation and Scientific American, I need to see if Mental Floss exists in an iPad savvy format. This weekend, they posted a report on how close the human race came to extinction through nuclear war. Personally, I’d say seven is a conservative estimate. You probably thought this publication specialized in useless crap such as the details of Airplane!
The Suez Canal situation used to be covered in my high school history books, stating how close the world came to war. Hopefully, the revisionism movement hasn’t removed it. The other two at the end I did remember hearing about through the news, computer science class in the mid Eighties and first-hand accounts from residents of Grand Forks, ND. I need to get in touch with this Air Force veteran I knew at Apple. He could possibly tell me the declassified details on what happened at his post.
One good side effect would be the computer glitches providing fodder for the hit movie War Games, implausible and stupid as it was. Believe me, it used to set my father, the systems analyst before IT’s ascension, off for 10 minutes on back doors having a limited number of attempts before they’re shut down; the number Matthew Broderick is dialing with his modem would stop accepting calls after several incorrect passwords.
Maybe we’ll finally discover how many times Reagan brought us to the edge since he did enough saber rattling at the Soviet Union. He only came to the table with Gorbachev because he didn’t like the new guy getting all the good press and he needed something to distract the country from his arms-for-hostages scandal.
The Bushes and Clinton will be important too. North Korea and Pakistan joined the club so I’m confident they had their scares.
They don’t say that those are the only seven incidents. Just that they’re seven incidents. 😉
OK, probably the only seven we’ll get to know about for a while.