Instead of a movie about a wealthy kid making absurd amounts of money by selling snake oil. I love that the MSM became so enamored with facebook that Time magazine named facebook kid "person of the year"
The "person of the year" is simply the one judged to have had the most influence on the world in that year; it doesn't mean the influence has to be positive.
Which only further supports the assertion that facebook boy was the wrong choice for person of the year. The person of the year should be someone who influenced some important event - there are several things of significance that have happened as a result of wikileaks and Julian Assange. Yet not a single event of any importance came out of facebook boy and his product that would not have occurred anyways.
Instead of a movie about a wealthy kid making absurd amounts of money by selling snake oil. I love that the MSM became so enamored with facebook that Time magazine named facebook kid "person of the year" in spite of the fact that Julian Assange had 10 times the number of votes.
When we keep cutting (or allowing to stagnate) the funding for science and engineering research, this is exactly what we get. We can't expect good science to be done with no financial backing. Scientists who love their work will indeed work for embarrassingly little money, but eventually they do need to pay the bills to keep the lights on in the lab to keep the work moving.
Fringe may have the best soundtrack of any show since... well, I honestly can't think of a show that has chosen its music as well as Fringe. I particularly enjoy the tendency to select music from musicians known for their own mental issues (Thelonious Monk is a great example here) when focusing on Dr. Bishop.
Shows generally end up cut when their viewer numbers - as represented by Nielsen ratings - go down, right? As I understand though, a DVR recording of a show counts towards the Nielsen ratings, as there is still a tuner watching the show.
Being as there aren't likely many fans of Fringe who don't own a DVR, it seems unlikely that the viewer numbers will suffer much. We may find that even fewer of the fans are watching it the night it airs, but that shouldn't be a big deal.
It would be a crying fucking shame, however, if it was canceled. If it went, I might not even bother watching Bones or House anymore, just out of anger towards losing Fringe.
The sad thing is that is the most liberal act that Obama has seen ushered through since taking office.
comprehensive healthcare reform
While comprehensive bills are generally long, bills do not become comprehensive just because they are long. And this long bill was anything but comprehensive. Shit, in reality it was anything but reform, as well.
While we're at it, there wasn't all that much healthcare involved in it, either...
banking system overhaul
You're stretching the meaning of overhaul significantly here...
but those issues alone are pretty substantial and quite different from anything that Bush was willing to do
Are you joking? The health care bill was written by republicans, for republicans. They only opposed it because they knew they wouldn't get credit for it. Anything that was the slightest bit liberal was thrown out in very early revisions, and all that remained were parts that were written by conservatives under the false promise of "bipartisanship" and "cooperation". If the republican congress in 2006 had taken up the same issue they would have written the same bill and Bush would have happily signed it as a new "contract with America" or some such stupid shit.
Really, all you need to know about the lack of distinction between the current and most previous POTUS lies in that bill. If Obama ever intended to pass any health care reform (which is now very much an open question) he sure didn't do shit to hold his ground. Instead he passed a bill written by the other guys. He might as well have signed the Washington DC yellow pages into law, it would have been just as useful.
that Obama was going to change the world and usher in a utopia to please every libertarian and liberal alike?
I don't think anyone expected that to happen, either immediately or... ever. But nonetheless we were promised "change", which we have not received.
there has clearly been a concerted effort to engage conservative and liberal proposals
If by that you mean there has been an effort to discard all the liberal proposals in the name of "bipartisanship"; then sure.
Did we suddenly forget that the previous president stopped engaging other nations
It appears that the countries we intentionally isolate remain intentionally isolated at this time as well.
ordered people to be tortured
And yet we are still torturing people...
invaded sovereign nations
And yet we are still occupying those sovereign nations...
passed absolutely NO domestic bills to address any looming problems (healthcare? They had the House/Senate/White House)
We sure as fuck did not solve the health care problem. We instead granted more power to the insurance companies who have been fucking over millions (and millions more) every year in this country.
Guantanamo
Remains open, with no viable plan to close it. Hell, Obama just signed into law a bill with a poison pill in it that pretty well makes it impossible for him to close it, ever.
lying about weapons of mass destruction
The WMD rhetoric was just an extension of the "war on terror" rhetoric, which is still an active part of this administrations foreign policy.
an anti-science agenda actively trying to discredit science findings
You don't stop an anti-science agenda by retaining the same science funding levels that were present when the anti-science agenda was dogma. We are gradually being overtaken in science research by other countries and we won't regain our previous position if we keep cutting budgets.
commuting the sentences administration members who committed crimes
Yeah, now we are instead refusing to investigate war crimes allegations against the previous administration. That really shows 'em!
Ordering the NSA to wiretap US civilians
Which has changed since in what important way?
did everyone suddenly get amnesia and forget what the fuck happened during the last 8 years of the Bush administration!?
Have you not noticed that the vast majority of that is still happening?
Yes, the Obama administration has continued some of the Bush era prcatices
It is exceedingly easy to find Bush era practices that the Obama administration has willingly embraced and extended. It is nearly impossible to find any that they have ended or significantly altered.
But there is no fucking way you can objectively sit there and tell me he is anywhere NEAR the level of fuckup the previous president was
Well, I will give you that Obama hasn't made many of his own mistakes yet - he has instead opted to continue making the same mistakes that his predecessor made. Whether that makes him more or less of a "fuckup" - by willingly choosing to extend failed policies - is a separate issue.
Really, the Obama Administration has been just a continuation of the Bush Administration. Every time they have had a choice, they have chosen to keep the status quo and to continue to favor large business. This is no exception. The only change we got is in the last name of the POTUS.
Could do a lot for education or health care in our country (as in the US). Instead we favor handing it to a defensive contractor with almost zero accountability. Yep, this makes perfect sense. I can see how this will help our national budget problems.
We can't exactly send women home on maternity leave from Mars when accidents happen.
In a way that raises an interesting question that I don't know we have a way to know the answer to ahead of time - is natural human reproduction even possible on Mars? The female reproductive cycle is influence by the Moon, which is about 15 times larger in diameter than the larger Martian moon. The larger Martian mon also has an especially fast orbit in comparison to our Moon, which could also have an effect.
And of course, who knows what the 9 month journey would do to the ability to reproduce as well...
That isn't really a valid comparison. In spite of what some people (particularly south of the Mason-Dixon line) might claim, the extreme north is habitable. It has breathable air, usable water supply, and available food. Mars has none of those.
I think all the hubbub about humans not being able to cope with the isolation, stress etc, is bogus
The extreme north is not isolated, either. Significant populations have thrived up there. However the isolation of space travel is a different matter - particularly when you talk about one-way space travel.
however it all depends how you define "proper".
It is more than just "proper". If you colonize Mars and end up raising kids with IQs that are barely above drool-cup level because you didn't stimulate them while they were in the crucial development phase, then your colony will inevitably collapse.
Keep in mind the kid may not need to go "outside", so no need for a suit. Kids can move through airlocks, and don't participate in EVA.
True, but how long will it take to establish a reasonably-sized built up colony? Sure an adult can suffer through full days in a 5x5 cubicle but it would generally be considered inhumane to do the same to a child. Kids need space to move about, they need stimulation, etc.
And besides, what if there is an emergency that requires moving the child from one building to another (across non-locked space)?
I have a hard time imagining that we would be willing or able to develop the infrastructure for children to grow up on Mars anytime soon. It is one thing to send (adult) astronauts to Mars, they can wear the same sized space suit pretty much until they die. But if you send a child (or a pregnant woman) to Mars, the growing child will need far more of everything in order to survive. I understand that space suits are not exactly cheap to manufacture here on earth - can you imagine trying to make on one Mars? And if a child on Mars grew at anywhere near the rate they grow on Earth, the wait time to ship a new suit from Earth would likely be completely unacceptable.
And that says nothing about the piles of diapers, or the need for something resembling a proper education, or proper pediatric care and nutrition...
I just don't see it being reasonable to have children on Mars until we have a sizable established population of adults there for a reasonably long time. And at that, we might want to wait until we have figured out the round trip (although a long car ride with a child can be infuriating - I can't imagine what interplanetary transport would be like!).
Using cell phones to cheat? All we had were a couple cans and a crummy piece of string. But we got by... Next they'll ask for transportation, too, I'll bet.
Anyone who actually expected the volume to stay down either doesn't know whats going on here, or was deliberately trying to fool themselves. Sure every once in a while something will happen that will cause a downward tick in the spam delivery rates. But in the end the rate always comes back up.
We need to ask ourselves why this is - and the answer is fairly simple.
It's the economy, stupid. People aren't sending out spam to piss you off (as much as you might like to think so). They are sending out spam to make money. And as long as there is money to be made by sending out spam, there will continue to be spam. We all know how obscenely little money it costs to send out email - hence the profit margins can be huge even when the payment is rather small.
Hence the only way to stop spam is to go after the motivation - the money. If you can distance the spammers from their money, they will lose the incentive to send spam. As long as that incentive remains, so does the spam. We can dismantle botnets, make more filters, or even dismember spammers themselves. None of that is worth a damn as long as there is money to be made. Even when spammers have been murdered it didn't matter because there is always someone else who wants a cut of the action and is willing to pick up where the last guy left off.
The only conclusion I can draw is that schools have labs and servers which are the main hosts for delivering spam. With labs shut down the spam engines are off-line.
From my experience the computer labs at most colleges are managed fairly well, they don't tend to end up compromised often.
Remember now that most college kids these days live in dorms, and they have their own PCs on the colleges high-speed internet connection in those dorms. It's more likely that when the college kids return to their dorms they boot their (infected) Windows PCs back up and they are again running 24/7. Same kids likely didn't use their PCs much while they were at home for the holidays. It is generally much more difficult for college IT departments to make sure that the students are using halfway decent practices on their personal systems.
Facebook knows who everyone actually is online and everyone has invested time into building their profiles on it.
Facebook knows who everyone who set up an account with them is. As much as you might not realize it, there are still people who have never set up facebook accounts. Facebook may know our friends but they don't know us, or how we relate to those people since we aren't on their website.
They will never have everyone.
people value their Facebook profiles and are much less likely to spam, say obscene things, troll and generally be a total idiot on the internet if it is tied to their Facebook profile
Plenty of foolish college undergraduates have already proven that statement false.
Are all the internet connected TVs using the same CPUs and operating systems? If not you would need to craft ways to deploy your requisite applications for each CPU/OS combination (not to mention you would of course need compatible binaries for each of them).
Crafting a piece of malware that could compromise several tens of millions of TVs would be worth doing even if there were tens of millions of others that it would not run on.
I agree with that logic. However the question there is at what point will there be tens of millions of internet-connected TVs that are capable of running the same malware by exploitation of the same vulnerability?
Sure, you can run SSH and some of the others through Java, which may clear the CPU/OS hurdle (assuming of course that the set runs Java fairly well) but then how will you get them to run when you want?
The bot will run whenever the set is on, of course.
Which, depending on the TV and its usage pattern, might not end up being all that useful for the botnet master.
I pondered the possibility of that happening on a TV. And indeed, it seems like a pretty solid way to do it, however there is one large hurdle to clear - actually getting the applications to run on the TV. Are all the internet connected TVs using the same CPUs and operating systems? If not you would need to craft ways to deploy your requisite applications for each CPU/OS combination (not to mention you would of course need compatible binaries for each of them).
Sure, you can run SSH and some of the others through Java, which may clear the CPU/OS hurdle (assuming of course that the set runs Java fairly well) but then how will you get them to run when you want?
Basically, I'm not sold that it would be worth a hacker's time to do it. Someone will probably prove me wrong on this matter, but I don't see why it would be worthwhile at the moment.
I have a hard time seeing a compromised TV being as much of a security risk as a compromised PC. Would a TV have your personal information on it? Probably not. Would it be able to access a computer on your home network enough to get at personal information? Seems unlikely. Sure, I suppose it may be possible for an internet TV to become a botnet agent helping in a DDoS attack or something, but even that seems like it would be of minimal utility. I don't really see a TV as being useful in pumping out spam, either, unless the manufacturers were putting mail agents in there to report problems back to the manufacturer.
You don't find any use in insuring yourself against unlikely events, such as your house burning down? Surely it takes some of the fickleness out of life.
I am not opposed to the concept of insurance. I am, however, opposed to the way insurance companies operate. Every last one of them is, from my vantage point, legalized extortion. They are the slimiest of con artists, getting away with their crimes because they have all of our politicians of every stripe and color on their books.
And why wouldn't rates go down? Insurers need to compete to get the business, like everyone else.
Except for when they co-conspire against the consumers. Sure they can find that their rates are a bit high and driving customers elsewhere, but then they'll just do some more mathematical mumbo jumbo to bring the customers back (or use scare tactics), or just cheat (as they often prefer) and share a cut with their buddies in the other insurance companies. Morality left the insurance industry a long, long time ago, regardless of how clean cut their commercial spokespeople are.
So to answer your question, the rates don't go down because that would cut into their profit. They "reduce" rates by raising all the other ones and saying "look how your rates are lower [after we raised all the other ones]!"
While the actuaries themselves might be the most morally sound folks in the industry, that is like saying that chicken pox is less dangerous than small pox - they can both be extremely dangerous depending on your health state and either way you'll be ill for at least a while. Insurance, on the other hand, will make me ill until the day I die (at which point it will make everyone who knew me ill).
Or strong enough ethics to sell hookers and drugs on the street corner.
All they do is calculate risk for insurance purposes.
Which is inevitably used to justify rate increases. Never in recorded history has an actuary's new work been used to reduce insurance rates.
I don't get it, why the hostility?
Sorry for taking this out of order this time, but I despise all insurance industry workers. I see that industry as being morally bankrupt to an almost unfathomable level. Actuaries can do all they want to make themselves feel good at night, but in the end they are just aiding a machine that exists to make money off of making us miserable.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of a movie about a wealthy kid making absurd amounts of money by selling snake oil. I love that the MSM became so enamored with facebook that Time magazine named facebook kid "person of the year"
The "person of the year" is simply the one judged to have had the most influence on the world in that year; it doesn't mean the influence has to be positive.
Which only further supports the assertion that facebook boy was the wrong choice for person of the year. The person of the year should be someone who influenced some important event - there are several things of significance that have happened as a result of wikileaks and Julian Assange. Yet not a single event of any importance came out of facebook boy and his product that would not have occurred anyways.
Instead of a movie about a wealthy kid making absurd amounts of money by selling snake oil. I love that the MSM became so enamored with facebook that Time magazine named facebook kid "person of the year" in spite of the fact that Julian Assange had 10 times the number of votes.
When we keep cutting (or allowing to stagnate) the funding for science and engineering research, this is exactly what we get. We can't expect good science to be done with no financial backing. Scientists who love their work will indeed work for embarrassingly little money, but eventually they do need to pay the bills to keep the lights on in the lab to keep the work moving.
Fringe may have the best soundtrack of any show since ... well, I honestly can't think of a show that has chosen its music as well as Fringe. I particularly enjoy the tendency to select music from musicians known for their own mental issues (Thelonious Monk is a great example here) when focusing on Dr. Bishop.
Shows generally end up cut when their viewer numbers - as represented by Nielsen ratings - go down, right? As I understand though, a DVR recording of a show counts towards the Nielsen ratings, as there is still a tuner watching the show.
Being as there aren't likely many fans of Fringe who don't own a DVR, it seems unlikely that the viewer numbers will suffer much. We may find that even fewer of the fans are watching it the night it airs, but that shouldn't be a big deal.
It would be a crying fucking shame, however, if it was canceled. If it went, I might not even bother watching Bones or House anymore, just out of anger towards losing Fringe.
ending DADT on the side of inclusion
The sad thing is that is the most liberal act that Obama has seen ushered through since taking office.
comprehensive healthcare reform
While comprehensive bills are generally long, bills do not become comprehensive just because they are long. And this long bill was anything but comprehensive. Shit, in reality it was anything but reform, as well.
While we're at it, there wasn't all that much healthcare involved in it, either...
banking system overhaul
You're stretching the meaning of overhaul significantly here...
but those issues alone are pretty substantial and quite different from anything that Bush was willing to do
Are you joking? The health care bill was written by republicans, for republicans. They only opposed it because they knew they wouldn't get credit for it. Anything that was the slightest bit liberal was thrown out in very early revisions, and all that remained were parts that were written by conservatives under the false promise of "bipartisanship" and "cooperation". If the republican congress in 2006 had taken up the same issue they would have written the same bill and Bush would have happily signed it as a new "contract with America" or some such stupid shit.
Really, all you need to know about the lack of distinction between the current and most previous POTUS lies in that bill. If Obama ever intended to pass any health care reform (which is now very much an open question) he sure didn't do shit to hold his ground. Instead he passed a bill written by the other guys. He might as well have signed the Washington DC yellow pages into law, it would have been just as useful.
that Obama was going to change the world and usher in a utopia to please every libertarian and liberal alike?
I don't think anyone expected that to happen, either immediately or ... ever. But nonetheless we were promised "change", which we have not received.
there has clearly been a concerted effort to engage conservative and liberal proposals
If by that you mean there has been an effort to discard all the liberal proposals in the name of "bipartisanship"; then sure.
Did we suddenly forget that the previous president stopped engaging other nations
It appears that the countries we intentionally isolate remain intentionally isolated at this time as well.
ordered people to be tortured
And yet we are still torturing people...
invaded sovereign nations
And yet we are still occupying those sovereign nations...
passed absolutely NO domestic bills to address any looming problems (healthcare? They had the House/Senate/White House)
We sure as fuck did not solve the health care problem. We instead granted more power to the insurance companies who have been fucking over millions (and millions more) every year in this country.
Guantanamo
Remains open, with no viable plan to close it. Hell, Obama just signed into law a bill with a poison pill in it that pretty well makes it impossible for him to close it, ever.
lying about weapons of mass destruction
The WMD rhetoric was just an extension of the "war on terror" rhetoric, which is still an active part of this administrations foreign policy.
an anti-science agenda actively trying to discredit science findings
You don't stop an anti-science agenda by retaining the same science funding levels that were present when the anti-science agenda was dogma. We are gradually being overtaken in science research by other countries and we won't regain our previous position if we keep cutting budgets.
commuting the sentences administration members who committed crimes
Yeah, now we are instead refusing to investigate war crimes allegations against the previous administration. That really shows 'em!
Ordering the NSA to wiretap US civilians
Which has changed since in what important way?
did everyone suddenly get amnesia and forget what the fuck happened during the last 8 years of the Bush administration!?
Have you not noticed that the vast majority of that is still happening?
Yes, the Obama administration has continued some of the Bush era prcatices
It is exceedingly easy to find Bush era practices that the Obama administration has willingly embraced and extended. It is nearly impossible to find any that they have ended or significantly altered.
But there is no fucking way you can objectively sit there and tell me he is anywhere NEAR the level of fuckup the previous president was
Well, I will give you that Obama hasn't made many of his own mistakes yet - he has instead opted to continue making the same mistakes that his predecessor made. Whether that makes him more or less of a "fuckup" - by willingly choosing to extend failed policies - is a separate issue.
To be fair, the first name is different too.
Astute observation, for sure.
:)
That said, we tend to refer to it as the "(last name) administration" or "(last name) white house". Really the first name is pretty unimportant.
Really, the Obama Administration has been just a continuation of the Bush Administration. Every time they have had a choice, they have chosen to keep the status quo and to continue to favor large business. This is no exception. The only change we got is in the last name of the POTUS.
Could do a lot for education or health care in our country (as in the US). Instead we favor handing it to a defensive contractor with almost zero accountability. Yep, this makes perfect sense. I can see how this will help our national budget problems.
You need to upgrade your Flash Player to properly use this content
I might just stick to the Adam Sandler Horoscope instead; it seems to be pretty good most of the time.
We can't exactly send women home on maternity leave from Mars when accidents happen.
In a way that raises an interesting question that I don't know we have a way to know the answer to ahead of time - is natural human reproduction even possible on Mars? The female reproductive cycle is influence by the Moon, which is about 15 times larger in diameter than the larger Martian moon. The larger Martian mon also has an especially fast orbit in comparison to our Moon, which could also have an effect.
And of course, who knows what the 9 month journey would do to the ability to reproduce as well...
go see how eskimos lived
That isn't really a valid comparison. In spite of what some people (particularly south of the Mason-Dixon line) might claim, the extreme north is habitable. It has breathable air, usable water supply, and available food. Mars has none of those.
I think all the hubbub about humans not being able to cope with the isolation, stress etc, is bogus
The extreme north is not isolated, either. Significant populations have thrived up there. However the isolation of space travel is a different matter - particularly when you talk about one-way space travel.
however it all depends how you define "proper".
It is more than just "proper". If you colonize Mars and end up raising kids with IQs that are barely above drool-cup level because you didn't stimulate them while they were in the crucial development phase, then your colony will inevitably collapse.
Keep in mind the kid may not need to go "outside", so no need for a suit. Kids can move through airlocks, and don't participate in EVA.
True, but how long will it take to establish a reasonably-sized built up colony? Sure an adult can suffer through full days in a 5x5 cubicle but it would generally be considered inhumane to do the same to a child. Kids need space to move about, they need stimulation, etc.
And besides, what if there is an emergency that requires moving the child from one building to another (across non-locked space)?
I have a hard time imagining that we would be willing or able to develop the infrastructure for children to grow up on Mars anytime soon. It is one thing to send (adult) astronauts to Mars, they can wear the same sized space suit pretty much until they die. But if you send a child (or a pregnant woman) to Mars, the growing child will need far more of everything in order to survive. I understand that space suits are not exactly cheap to manufacture here on earth - can you imagine trying to make on one Mars? And if a child on Mars grew at anywhere near the rate they grow on Earth, the wait time to ship a new suit from Earth would likely be completely unacceptable.
And that says nothing about the piles of diapers, or the need for something resembling a proper education, or proper pediatric care and nutrition...
I just don't see it being reasonable to have children on Mars until we have a sizable established population of adults there for a reasonably long time. And at that, we might want to wait until we have figured out the round trip (although a long car ride with a child can be infuriating - I can't imagine what interplanetary transport would be like!).
Using cell phones to cheat? All we had were a couple cans and a crummy piece of string. But we got by... Next they'll ask for transportation, too, I'll bet.
Disrespectful punks, get off my lawn!
Anyone who actually expected the volume to stay down either doesn't know whats going on here, or was deliberately trying to fool themselves. Sure every once in a while something will happen that will cause a downward tick in the spam delivery rates. But in the end the rate always comes back up.
We need to ask ourselves why this is - and the answer is fairly simple.
It's the economy, stupid. People aren't sending out spam to piss you off (as much as you might like to think so). They are sending out spam to make money. And as long as there is money to be made by sending out spam, there will continue to be spam. We all know how obscenely little money it costs to send out email - hence the profit margins can be huge even when the payment is rather small.
Hence the only way to stop spam is to go after the motivation - the money. If you can distance the spammers from their money, they will lose the incentive to send spam. As long as that incentive remains, so does the spam. We can dismantle botnets, make more filters, or even dismember spammers themselves. None of that is worth a damn as long as there is money to be made. Even when spammers have been murdered it didn't matter because there is always someone else who wants a cut of the action and is willing to pick up where the last guy left off.
The only conclusion I can draw is that schools have labs and servers which are the main hosts for delivering spam. With labs shut down the spam engines are off-line.
From my experience the computer labs at most colleges are managed fairly well, they don't tend to end up compromised often.
Remember now that most college kids these days live in dorms, and they have their own PCs on the colleges high-speed internet connection in those dorms. It's more likely that when the college kids return to their dorms they boot their (infected) Windows PCs back up and they are again running 24/7. Same kids likely didn't use their PCs much while they were at home for the holidays. It is generally much more difficult for college IT departments to make sure that the students are using halfway decent practices on their personal systems.
Facebook knows who everyone actually is online and everyone has invested time into building their profiles on it.
Facebook knows who everyone who set up an account with them is. As much as you might not realize it, there are still people who have never set up facebook accounts. Facebook may know our friends but they don't know us, or how we relate to those people since we aren't on their website.
They will never have everyone.
people value their Facebook profiles and are much less likely to spam, say obscene things, troll and generally be a total idiot on the internet if it is tied to their Facebook profile
Plenty of foolish college undergraduates have already proven that statement false.
I said the same thing in my slashdot journal a few days ago. I guess I should have sent my journal entry in to CNN.
Are all the internet connected TVs using the same CPUs and operating systems? If not you would need to craft ways to deploy your requisite applications for each CPU/OS combination (not to mention you would of course need compatible binaries for each of them).
Crafting a piece of malware that could compromise several tens of millions of TVs would be worth doing even if there were tens of millions of others that it would not run on.
I agree with that logic. However the question there is at what point will there be tens of millions of internet-connected TVs that are capable of running the same malware by exploitation of the same vulnerability?
Sure, you can run SSH and some of the others through Java, which may clear the CPU/OS hurdle (assuming of course that the set runs Java fairly well) but then how will you get them to run when you want?
The bot will run whenever the set is on, of course.
Which, depending on the TV and its usage pattern, might not end up being all that useful for the botnet master.
I pondered the possibility of that happening on a TV. And indeed, it seems like a pretty solid way to do it, however there is one large hurdle to clear - actually getting the applications to run on the TV. Are all the internet connected TVs using the same CPUs and operating systems? If not you would need to craft ways to deploy your requisite applications for each CPU/OS combination (not to mention you would of course need compatible binaries for each of them).
Sure, you can run SSH and some of the others through Java, which may clear the CPU/OS hurdle (assuming of course that the set runs Java fairly well) but then how will you get them to run when you want?
Basically, I'm not sold that it would be worth a hacker's time to do it. Someone will probably prove me wrong on this matter, but I don't see why it would be worthwhile at the moment.
I have a hard time seeing a compromised TV being as much of a security risk as a compromised PC. Would a TV have your personal information on it? Probably not. Would it be able to access a computer on your home network enough to get at personal information? Seems unlikely. Sure, I suppose it may be possible for an internet TV to become a botnet agent helping in a DDoS attack or something, but even that seems like it would be of minimal utility. I don't really see a TV as being useful in pumping out spam, either, unless the manufacturers were putting mail agents in there to report problems back to the manufacturer.
You don't find any use in insuring yourself against unlikely events, such as your house burning down? Surely it takes some of the fickleness out of life.
I am not opposed to the concept of insurance. I am, however, opposed to the way insurance companies operate. Every last one of them is, from my vantage point, legalized extortion. They are the slimiest of con artists, getting away with their crimes because they have all of our politicians of every stripe and color on their books.
And why wouldn't rates go down? Insurers need to compete to get the business, like everyone else.
Except for when they co-conspire against the consumers. Sure they can find that their rates are a bit high and driving customers elsewhere, but then they'll just do some more mathematical mumbo jumbo to bring the customers back (or use scare tactics), or just cheat (as they often prefer) and share a cut with their buddies in the other insurance companies. Morality left the insurance industry a long, long time ago, regardless of how clean cut their commercial spokespeople are.
So to answer your question, the rates don't go down because that would cut into their profit. They "reduce" rates by raising all the other ones and saying "look how your rates are lower [after we raised all the other ones]!"
While the actuaries themselves might be the most morally sound folks in the industry, that is like saying that chicken pox is less dangerous than small pox - they can both be extremely dangerous depending on your health state and either way you'll be ill for at least a while. Insurance, on the other hand, will make me ill until the day I die (at which point it will make everyone who knew me ill).
Or strong enough ethics to sell hookers and drugs on the street corner.
All they do is calculate risk for insurance purposes.
Which is inevitably used to justify rate increases. Never in recorded history has an actuary's new work been used to reduce insurance rates.
I don't get it, why the hostility?
Sorry for taking this out of order this time, but I despise all insurance industry workers. I see that industry as being morally bankrupt to an almost unfathomable level. Actuaries can do all they want to make themselves feel good at night, but in the end they are just aiding a machine that exists to make money off of making us miserable.