Category: Weird

We expend bunches of keystrokes detailing how to recover from disaster, everything from sweeping spyware from your system to how to get your data back from the digital graveyard, but equally important is how to avoid potentially catastrophic scenarios in the first place. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or in in the world of PCs, hours of frustration.

On the flip side, maybe you have a masochistic desire to destroy your system. What better way to force your hand at upgrading then to render your current rig all but unusable? We don’t condone killing hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars of hardware, but hey, it’s your stuff at stake, and how you choose to use (or abuse) it is up to you.

Either way, follow along as we show you the 10 worst things you can do to your PC and how to avoid them.

Skylifter is an Australian start-up company that hopes to use enormous blimps to move pieces of equipment to places not easily accessible by roads:

Heavy-transport helicopters, such as the Mil Mi-26 or Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane, address some of these difficulties, but their payloads are limited to 20 and nine tonnes, respectively, and the huge rotors create a powerful downdraft that makes handling that payload rather tricky. So people have long been looking for other ways round the problem. Now, Skylifter, an Australian aeronautical firm, thinks it has found the perfect solution.

The company is developing a piloted dirigible capable of carrying loads of up to 150 tonnes over distances as great as 2,000km (1,240 miles) at a speed of 45 knots (83kph). This would permit the craft to transport not just hefty components, but entire buildings, to remote areas. The company envisages modules ranging from rural hospitals and disaster-relief centres to luxury airborne cruise ships.

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It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing.

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The number of times you’ve been caught out and about without a bar of gold is set to be a distant memory—at least for Florida and Las Vegas residents, who’ll see hundreds of these ATMs installed next year.

The Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi was the first place to install cash machines that hand out 10-gram bars of 24-carat gold in exchange for money, but in true American fashion similar machines will be situated on each side of the coast from next year.