Megan Garber of The Atlantic: "While doing repair work on the Shchyolkovsky Highway outside of Moscow, a construction team severed a cable. And it turned out, unfortunately, to be the cable -- the one linking Moscow's Mission Control to the nation's extraterrestrial vehicles and workers."

  • Prufrock451

    “sorry!”

    • Jerril

       My highschool, lo those many years ago, was the recipient of a grant to get us hooked up with internet access as a pilot project. Each student got an email account, space to host our own websites (which in those days were written by hand, none of this facebook malarky you young’ns get away with), so forth.

      Went great until one day we had some renovations done, and the contractor opened up a wall only to find these funny blue wires that he had no idea what they were for. So he cut them.

      T_T

  • Mark_Frauenfelder

    You win!

  • metacalifragilistic

    Weinberg’s second law in action.

  • TWX

    That makes me feel better about having to deal with the idiot landscapers who yanked the fiber between some buildings while working on the baseball field…

  • http://twitter.com/MrAaronSwainEsq Aaron Swain

    And this is our ride into space?

    • awjt

      Tri… Dva… … ………………………..

  • allium

    Never fear! Mighty Putin will gather up the purest silica sand from the beaches of Primorsky Krai, mold them into fiber-optic cables with the heat of his ever-fecund loins, encase them in shimmering muscovite insulation, and splice them with the grace and care of a babushka knitting her granddaughter a shawl. Then he’ll go beat up an eagle or something.

  • http://www.eff.org/ deaduncledave

    Redundancy, mother flocker! DO YOU SPEAK IT!

  • Bob Winston

    In Soviet Russia, the cables cut you off!

    • acerplatanoides

       came for this, leaving happy

  • franko

    i’m pretty sure “DOH!” works in all languages now.

    • TheMadLibrarian

      Da!

    • Thomas Shaddack

      Д’ог!

  • atteSmythe

    Every accomplished world traveler knows to always carry a small length of fiber optic cable. If you ever find yourself lost in the wilderness, or stranded on a desert island, all you have to do is bury the cable in the ground. About half an hour later, some guy in a backhoe will be along to dig it up, and you can hitch a ride with him back to civilization.

    • Florian Bösch

      Don’t forget your towel.

  • http://www.facebook.com/xiphias Ian Osmond

    I remember a similar thing happening in Armenia last year . . . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/06/georgian-woman-armenia-internet-_n_845834.html

    “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” — John Gilmore.  Unfortunately, apparently, there are places in the world that just don’ t have enough Internet to route around damage at all. . . 

  • we_the_people324

    In soviet russia, cable cuts you.

    • Ben Burger

       Har…