September 20, 2008

The September 20 show repeatedly connects technical judgment with human honesty. Dr. Dave says the only way he learned what others did not know was to do the difficult trench work they avoided, while still warning ordinary users not to sleepwalk through their own technology. The Sarah Palin email breach becomes a major 2008 security case study in password recovery, public personal information and social engineering rather than technical brilliance. A cartridge refiller earns Dr. Dave's respect by admitting that some products cannot be rebuilt well, and Dr. Dave and Evil Steve calculate that a cheap solution is not cheap once a customer counts time, effort, cleanup and failure. Elsewhere, a genealogy caller tries to rescue family photographs from a Windows 95-era CD, the brothers describe how quickly their original show archive was updated and acknowledge that the blog links are too subtle, and early Large Hadron Collider breakdowns become evidence that failures are part of attempting science that has never been done before.

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