Roadrunner Twice

I've been reading a bunch of entertaining piffle on JWZ's site (which parties like it's 1996, even when the content is more current), and it's reminded me: I liked Netscape 2 and Netscape 3. They both struck a delicate and brilliant balance between doing their job and getting the fuck out of your way, and making you feel like you were doing something awesome. Until Firefox 0.8 or so, those were the only browsers I ever used that were fun.

EDIT: Also from a link off JWZ's place: Something genuinely horrifying on at least three, probably more like five or six, different levels. (19 meg PDF file, so click with care.) The word "Sandia" may ring a bell for you; I haven't thought about it for years now. But these teams of researchers... they had to come up with proposals for markers that would continue to deter humans for 10,000 years.

History isn't that long, yet. We've had culture for maybe six thou. And these guys had to come up with... well:

The nature of the design-criteria problem imposed a number of constraints on the work of the Markers Panel. The Futures panel input suggested that societies quite different from our own may be controlling and inhabiting the area of the WIPP. The markers must be developed to communicate with people whose culture may not be directly descended from our own. This possible cultural change is in addition to the changes in language that normally occur over time, even when societies are in continuous contact... the markers must be able to convey complex information, not just about wastes hidden from view, but also about the hazards of radioactivity as a function of time.

It's totally fascinating. And it actually reminds me a lot of stuff from various fantasy and/or horror novels:

Level I: ... "Something manmade is here,"
Level II: ... "Something manmade is here and it is dangerous," ...