I think people would be a lot less confused if you said this first. Say "Don't salt bcrypt, bcrypt salts for you" and you'll have to explain yourself less.

Yes please to OpenID. It kills me that an idea I was so excited about (single login) is being coopted by a site I hate so very much (Facebook), just because they are a behemoth. Offering both is great, but when I clicked through and saw only Facebook as an option, I immediately bounced.

Does anyone have a link to further information on the muscle repair stuff she cited? The part about how after 25, your brain might just give muscles up for lost?

That's brilliant! It's such a simple feature, but such a huge step in UI magic.

I always hated those needless extra steps in screenshotting. And then two months later your Desktop is full of things you forgot to delete and you had to figure out why you had ever needed a screenshot of top in the first place...

But no one wants to live in Disneyland. A manufactured experience can be nice for a while - it certainly achieves a level of perfection that other experiences cannot. But in the end, a walled garden only extends as far as the walls. And there's a whole world out there that's messy and dangerous and not as polished, but also more exciting, more fulfilling, more real.

Thanks for finding the weirdly cynical lining to that cloud. You gave me a good laugh.

I've actually taken to installing Windows on a separate hard drive, and disconnecting my primary drive before I even begin the installation, because I've had Windows screw so many things up.

Here's a better set of steps:

1. Use ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html) to copy a complete image of your hard drive onto another drive with lots of space. Let it work for a long time and it will probably get all the data off. If it doesn't you can try the freezer trick, but don't be too hopeful.

2. Unplug the busted hard drive and set it aside. You can perform all the subsequent recovery steps on the image you just copied, which is better than stressing an already-dying drive.

3. Mount the hard drive image (http://tcdb.grinnell.edu/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Help.Ddrescue).

4. Use testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) to try to recreate the partition table.

4.5 Alternatively, you can use parted with the rescue command, but that works better if you know exactly what your partition table was.

5. If that fails, use photorec (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) to pull off all the files it can find. It should be able to get most of your documents, photos, etc, but it might not find everything, and they will be missing file names and folder structure. Remind yourself that this is better than nothing.

Oh! I forgot to mention:

1.5 If the hard drive is so badly failed that you cannot even get ddrescue running, try again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. I cannot explain why a hard drive would come back to life, but I have seen it happen a number of times. I have seen a hard drive that was clicking and irrecoverable for two solid weeks suddenly show up just fine one day in the device list. It mounted and everything, and we promptly pulled all the data off. I'm not much of an optimist, but when it comes to failed hard drives, I've seen miracles occur.

ddrescue is a godsend. I actually had my backup drive bite the dust on me. All my live data was fine, but my backup drive ate it. ddrescue saved the day.

I agree with pretty much everyone here, though, in saying that "restore it from backup" is the right answer, and the fact that the parent-linked article doesn't mention it anywhere makes it worthy of ridicule. Fortunately, the second commenter on the article injects a bit of sanity into the situation.

Yeah, I just noticed that as well. CNN's World page has "He married a video game character," but not a mention of this. Things like this make it hard to feel bad about the looming death of Old Media.

I think that's part of the reason it's so important that things like this become public. I think every American of voting age should have to watch this video, because this is the reality of war and we need to come to terms with what we're inflicting. People need to realize that there are real people dying horrific, needless deaths, because war is always horrific and no amount of euphemisms changes that fact. If we are going to support a war, we should be forced to reckon with the real face of it, and accept that some of the blood is on our hands. It's easy to pretend otherwise when you've always lived with an ocean between you and the conflicts.