Preparing For The Zombie Uprising
From the Courier Post, a Philadelphia newspaper.
WOODSTOWN – A retired Vineland police officer faces more charges in connection with nearly 260 guns and 500,000 rounds of ammunition found a four-acre site he owned.
This is right out of the Zombie Survival Guide. Create a compound full of weaponry with enough land in fertile soil to sustain yourself and family. Unfortunately he picked a poor location. If this were a class IV outbreak, this compound should withstand up to a class II outbreak and maybe a class III, the masses would seek out such a facility right away. This is also in the middle of Southern NJ. While there aren’t too many people in the direct area, millions live within a few miles. This presents two problems. 1 the people uninfected will be seeking safety from the waves of ghouls. The second, this is in the middle of the megalopolis. There would be tens of millions of people just waiting to be infected all within a few days walk away. If he were to make the wrong move, he could have a million long line of zombies waiting to make his flesh dinner. I applaud him for his preperation, but he has made some crucial mistakes. First, don’t let your compound be discovered. Second, don’t get into any legal trouble.
I hate to make light of this, but the headline is too good to pass up.
“Man Shoots Himself in the Face” CLICK HERE for story.
There is little more to the story not already in the headline. They didn’t get any other facts besides the what, and leave the rest to the imagination. I know its sad that I found the headline funny, but I do hope he fully recovers (the injury was not life threatening according to the article) and learned his lesson about gun safety or gets the help he needs.
Road Naming Fail
This caused some confusion when asking for directions recently…
Since we share a first and last name
I have google news do a search for news with “Pat McDermott” and email daily results. Most of the time, its pretty boring, but I finally got something slightly interesting.
In July of 2005 a man by the name of Patrick Kim McDermott went missing. This made the news for much of that month as he was the boyfriend of Olivia Newton John. People claimed to see him in Mexico and Europe, but the story that stuck most was the one where he went overboard on a fishing trip. I followed the story for the obvious narcissistic reasons. Since the official report was so vague, and there were sightings of him after the boating accident, conspiracy theories were easy to find. His story has not been an insignificant driver of traffic to my site, particularly traffic from Australia.
Here is a clipping of the first Article I’ve found on him in quite some time.
The US Coast Guard investigation also determined that McDermott could have survived in the ocean for 14 hours, opening the possibility he could have been rescued if the crew of the vessel realised he was missing sooner.
It can be found at http://www.news.com.au
The obsoletion of cable.
Netflix has had the instant watch over the internet for quite some time now, but this ability has been somewhat on the back end. Smarter users would simply hook their computers to the TV, but this was hardly how I would have my parents go about watching tv. Now that powerful network ready hardware is finding itself connected to more and more TVs, Netflix has seen the light and decided to create ways to use these machines to watch the online content. Tivo’s, blue ray players, devices purposely built for Netflix and Xbox 360’s will have access to the plethora of content available by the end of the year. This is exactly what the cable companies have feared all along.
Why would I pay 40 dollars a month or more to have access to channels when I can simply watch the same content on some combination of Netflix’s online archive of movies and TV shows for 18 or so dollars a month. I would have instant access to an array of content that no current cable based video on demand service comes close to in content. Granted this would limit me to tv shows that have been released to DVD, but I would still be able to watch newer episodes for many tv shows elsewhere on the internet like Hulu.com. I would expect the HD content available on these services and sites to increase in availability. Granted the quality of the video will be lower than what would be available on a cable channel, or a blue ray dvd, but this is hardly a drawback when compared to the advantages, and since I would have a real Netflix account I could just borrow the blue ray if it really mattered.
The biggest drawback to this is strain on your internet connection. Which brings me to my earlier theory. Why would a cable company provide a service that theoretically obsoletes their main money maker? So, they are attempting to implement ways to make such an option impossible or prohibitively expensive through limits on the bandwidth. Now, I have little problem with a company acting in its own best interest. When there is competition in a free market, this is often not a problem for consumers. A companies best interest is usually to sell the best product available at the lowest price. When there isn’t competition, or is minimal competition, this doesn’t work. In such cases regulation, or public ownership is unfortunately necessary (this is true of nearly all highly geographically dependent services)
When I move out of college housing which provides free cable, I believe that I will exercise this option. For live TV events, mainly football games, I will simply employ an antenna. With digital broadcasts, a decent antenna should allow for the same quality I currently enjoy on cable. This option will only remain available with inexpensive high speed access to the internet with inexpensive cost per byte transmitted. This doesn’t have to be the current standard of a flat fee for unlimited byte transmission, it just has to be inexpensive even at a large quantity of transmission.
