Episode description

TOPIC: The Opacity of the Stack

In this depressing holiday episode, Dan and Merlin talk about how tenuous our modern infrastructures feel. How great it is when everything in the stack "just works"; how increasingly seldom all the pieces work; and how frustrating it can be to figure out exactly what's broken.

Links for this episode:

• Spider-Woman Gets Her First Costume Change in Decades
  
• Spider-Woman Rocks A Great New Look, Courtesy Of Kris Anka
  
• Amazon.com: LEGO Star Wars 75055 Imperial Star Destroyer Building Toy: Toys & Games
  
• Amazon.com: LEGO Star Wars 75055 Imperial Star Destroyer Building Toy: Toys & Games
  
• Dinosaurology (Ologies): Jack Fawcett, Various: 9780763667399: Amazon.com: Books
  
• All Things Considered for December 22, 2014 : NPR
  
• We Ask A Scholar: How Does Ridley Scott's 'Exodus' Compare With The Bible's? : NPR
  NPR's Robert Siegel asks Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, for his thoughts on the film. Alter has translated most of the Hebrew Bible, including the five books of Moses, and he's a leading secular scholar of Scripture.
• Exodus: Gods and Kings | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX - YouTube
  
• What's at stake in the legal battle over Comcast's home WiFi hotspots - GeekWire
  
• Stuxnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Stuxnet is a computer worm that was discovered in June 2010. It was designed to attack industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs).
• Clarke's three laws - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
• UPS will ship 34 million packages today | The Verge
  
• Merlin Mann on Twitter: "USPS delivery tracking appears to have exactly three states: 1. We never heard of it 2. We got no idea where it is 3. We assume you got it"
  

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