Ten years ago, this week:
- Half-Life 2 was released, over a year behind schedule. Delays had been blamed on the theft of source code from Valve’s network during a hack attack, leading to many in the community asking “don’t they have backups?”
- Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75, after a short illness and coma, while functionally confined to his compound by the Israeli army. He’d won the Nobel Peace Prize ten years earlier.
- NASA’s experimental X-43A scramjet reached a speed of 7,000 mph, almost ten times the speed of sound. News coverage at the time talked about the possibility of flying to the other side of the world in about 4 hours, but scramjet technology is still a long way from being stable or safe enough for mainstream use.
What do you remember from a decade ago?