RockYou is a MySpace photo/video sharing site (from what I could gather from googling, never used it myself) and it's certainly no excuse that people implement bone-head password choices such as the 10 shame shame list FTFA. However, I didn't really see the article address or even consider that their target users on the RockYou site aren't generally what geek, wanna-be security folks on/. are security conscious. I'm glad the analysis and study was done, but I'm really not surprised. If people are picking '123456' as the #1 password, as much as we have a PEBKAC situation on our hands, fault RockYou for not implementing some sort of semi-secure password standard.
Maybe it's different for a bigger news outlet like NYT, but I'd say it's about time. Dozens of News paper printing companies have long and done this many years ago (including Wall Street Journal many years back) and even the podunk news outlets in my midwest state. Anymore, I can't even read local news around here unless I pay for it online or catch it on the 6 o'clock or 10 o'clock news. I've long grown tired of dipshit delivery kids throwing my paper in a snow bank, at the end of my 30ft driveway or leaving the paper on my doorstep without a plastic bag in the rain.
It's definitely a good thing that Google held off launch in China; Asian companies are the central hub for embedded technologies, although I think the U.S. gets the brunt of garbage technological imports, but the Chinese population long ago adopted and integrated cell phone usage into their daily lives bigtime. They've been power-using phones long before anyone in the U.S. started promoting it. PDA's where always a big thing, but until the iPhone and Blackberry craze of 2008-2009, we didn't see anything like that virally spread, phone wise. TFA is right; China probably has something total to their population and market that rival very well with the Android and why move away from that? It's not to say China's techies or phone enthusiasts would shy away from trying something new, but like I said, they've been integrating phone usage into their lives for a lot longer than we in the U.S. have nation-wide.
I have no idea if this is at all a best-practice (nost likely not), but I still feel like sharing how encryption is used in our 2-person office.
2-person office, *NOT* an IT organization. Of course doing that is going to work for you because you only have one other person besides yourself to get on board, get up-to-speed, get their stuff together, and know what they are doing. Not an entire team, organization, department, etc. comprised of hundreds and hundreds of people. Apples to oranges IMHO.
My main worry is that someone walks away with the server machine and/or the backup drives and has access to all company relevant data of the past 20 years.
The server is unlocked with a keyfile stored on a USB flash drive, which is stored in a safe. The only time it is needed is when the server gets rebooted (practically never). The keyfiles for the external backup drives are stored on the local encrypted server partion. They get read every time the backup drives are switched and mounted. All drives aditionally share a common master keyphrase, in case the USB flash drive dies.
...so you have this grand plan in place for all this implemented server-side encryption, but there's a high potential for someone to physically walk out the door with your server? Are we still talking about security here? Sounds like you've clearly adopted the "obscurity" method.
Thank you Superman for throwing that Hydrogen bomb out into space in 'Superman 2'. We're all potentially doomed by your stupidity and lack of knowledge in the realm of physics and astronomy. I expected more out of a super hero.
Knowing Google, I'm sure they have actually thought about the repercussions of allowing all types of documents to be hosted/uploaded, or paving the way for mal/spy/shitware and alike or piracy. As much as everyone is going to look at the negatives, I"m sure Google has developed some sort of scalable trolling application to look for patterns or heuristics for that type of thing. After all, is Google not the king of the hill when it comes to data mining, pilfering, trends, habits, popularity of all of us already?
Why sit there and tromp on Mark Zuckerberg? Isn't that the point of social networking is to give up a bit of the normal privacy for a bit of the networking aspect? For that point, you're the grind in your own engine over time; you're allowed to share "as much as you want to" on these social networking sites (a la Facebook). What you give up on your own free will is your own gain (or demise) in the world of privacy. To expect anything else would be contradictory.
My project I work on at the USGS used to host this data until we turned it over to the USGS long-term archive project in late 2009. And just clarify so it doesn't sound like as though you need a special NASA contact to go get this, go to the SRTM website and more importantly, go download it from here
What is really humorous to begin with is... is this even news? FTFA, "...Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books." Uh, e-book piracy has been huge for the last 6-8 years if not more (newsgroup book flood posts, anyone?) I've been reading/collecting e-books for some time when I'm in a hurry and don't want to sit in the uber-long lines at Barnes-and-Noble or equivalent, but guess what I do? I either pay the little extra money to have my e-book print and bound professionally if I use it a lot or I just find the real book online for the cheapest price. The point I am making is there is a nostalgia associated with having a tangible book to flip through, bookmark, come back to reference, read again, read to your kids for the first time, etc. That's why I have (and the rest of the good world) has shelves full of tangible books at home.
Since we're on the topic of e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle, let's look at their target audience and why people are using them in the first place: Convenience, timeliness and information readiness. If I can use my e-reader to subscribe to my favorite XYZ newspaper and have it 'digitally' delivered to my kitchen table next to my hot cup of coffee, why the hell would I walk my ass outside in the snow to go pick it up off my driveway because the lazy delivery boy didn't want to put it in my delivery box? Same goes for wanting to buy that favorite/popular/just-released book and you don't want to stand in line at midnight to get it? Doesn't mean you won't go buy the hard-copy later on if that literary piece happens to be something you enjoyed enough to have as a tangible keepsake on your bookshelf, does it? And to end it, how many of those people are going to crack their Kindle with 'Swindle'? A few, but not the majority, because I don't mind paying for convenience, timeliness and information readiness once in a while.
The Hero of Time will probably be the next Zelda story-line game Nintendo releases... it was a pretty good story line IMHO. It would not surprise me that Nintendo compensated them for the story (I'm sure not much for it being infringement) and will mangle it for their own liking. Any takers?
Why not simply work on virtual machines? Then you know they are clean and you can have all the rights you want and still have comply with company rules.
Ok, so a virtual machine can be created on the fly with a few mouse clicks (and blown away just as easily), but I guess I don't see your point? Virtual Machine or not, you still have an OS to administer and apply your operating/security guidelines to. And if you have a stream-lined IT shop, then maybe the distance to walk to go power on the physical server might be the only deterrent.
In a lot of environments, setting up a good seperation is simply to costly in time, so you either end up with dev's with not enough rights to do their job or to many where they can endanger systems they shouldn't.
Totally Agreed. It seems like in any development environment I've had to set up for Project XYZ or Prototype ABC, the separation and security needs to be there, but it seems it's always a rush job and Manager John Doe wanted it done "yesterday" when you found out about it "today". If you get development environments without the permission(s) to do their job, then you need a better SysAdmin or at least one with a better clue.
So it should not be needed to have local admin rights, but then the sysadmins got a hell of a job to setup everything so that it is not needed. Most sysadmins simply ain't capable of that, or if they are, are not given the time.
You hit the nail on the head. A lot of sysadmin's I've come across really lack a good wide-range of knowledge in areas they are getting paid to support and in turn, the Lone Ranger SysAdmin, who actually knows his stuff, gets stuck with it all. If you're organized, then it's just your time that gets stretched and your plate gets bigger. I know SysAdmin's can be way egotistical but I take a different approach and have a really good working relationship with my development team(s). I learn off them (e.g. new web technologies or the programming-language-of-the-day) and they learn from me (e.g. we got it set up, but now let's secure it, lock it down, establish user/group policies and get you access to what you need). It's almost impossible to know everything anymore and specialty positions are dwindling bigtime in the IT industry. If you're not a Jack-of-all-trades with a good head on your shoulders, then you're more able to sink quicker than swim anywhere anymore.
It's not anti-technology at all. We, as humans, abuse things by nature. We use up resources, only to go find another resource to pilfer, etc. Look at how we consume natural resources for pete's sake. Same goes for technology. A good example of that is cell phones. Instead of using texting or pictures for what it's purpose was, we have teens 'sext'ing' on their phones, taking crazy viral photos/videos and clogging up the internet, updating their status every 5 minutes, ignoring reality and real contact for a digital one and hardly even know how to use the 10 digit keypad on the phone, its REAL intent: To call someone and not be tied to land line communication. Again, a lot of this going to be opinionated to a great extent, but the movie is almost a future, truth concept of technology than it is a contradictory for it, IMHO. Furthermore, you also can't tell me if our current world found an alien world, that we wouldn't rape it for all it's worth?
If having a passenger with the last name "Seagal" on your plane doesn't foil something of a terrorist-type attack like this... then what will? Steven Seagal has been busting up terrorist plots left and right with little effort all throughout the late 80's and 90's.
This is bad ass and probably worth the $17 for the half-CPU cluster time. However, on a sour note, I can see it getting abused for it's short worth of security affirmation. With monetary gain at stake, I can imagine funding this service is going to far outweigh validating who's using it for malicious intent. It's a far stretch and would get rather expensive for some d0uch3b4g pwning neighboor networks, but if there a network of value to get into, the $17 (or $34) can't even fill my gas take.
If it's not one study condoning the intake of things like red meat because of known killers like heart disease (which shorten your life), and instead eat the "other" meat, such as fish, turkey, chicken, only to have *this* new study tell me I could live longer if I stay away from foods and specifically meats, such as fish and turkey, that contain amino acids that make me live less? Who are we kidding?
We've now identified the first known, and clearly single, Mt. Dew-crazed, Oreo-gluttonous Taiwanese man who still lives in his parent's basement. Weather at 6.
$299 is not a high price tag. I clearly remember any gaming console experience I wanted to try was *always* around the ~$300 pricetag, from the last two decades of even recently (Xbox360, PS3, Wii, etc.). The main points in any survival and success of a gaming system is: 1) NOT being a hyped up, terrible design and cumbersome usability, 2) It's unique and starts a mad, new and wild gaming experience that everyone wants to try (a la Guitar Hero/Rockband) because point #1 lived up to it's purpose.
I've tried my many attempts at a MythTV HTPC setup and it truly is a lot of work and time. What really got me every time is exactly what the author stated: the many handful hack attempts to get everything to work right. I ended up sufficing back to using my useset + newzbin + hellanzb + hellavcr setup. For mainstream TV recording, it's *always* on Usenet somewhere with-in 40 minutes after showing and the whole point of a DVR is to watch your recorded shows after the fact. Then set up a Samba share (for WIndows) or NFS or use your samba share for your Linux hosts, lock it down and use `mplayer`'s "-cache" parameter and you're golden. I'm on my laptop much of the time anyway, so sitting in bed watching a show becomes pretty effort-less streaming it over the network or hooking my laptop to my LCD dvd (that has VGA-in port). If I want to watch DVDs, I either use `mplayer` again over the network or just burn the dang DVD image, because again... Useset is also useful for that and my newzbin indexing report service + hellafox makes it even easier.
I think regardless of it's a typewriter, computer, laptop or whatever tool was used to create some literary genius's art simply comes down to obsession, personal value and inspiration at limitless cost. It's kind of a no-brainer that if there's enough followers to anyone's beloved work, regardless of what it is, there's always going to be the biggest fan with the deepest pocket book that is going to snatch it up because it fills some void in them, aspires them to do something similar, goes along with with their fanatic obsession of other collected items to or it's just a good damn conversation piece.
Being attached to a piece of technology at the hip where I can still get hampered with 'the-sky-is-falling' on-call calls when I'm *not* on-call, people I don't feel like talking to me can annoying me with phone calls/txts that I have to take the time to silence, my flip/touch-phone device for a bordem-killer to the point that it takes two years off it's design worth, knowing what time is ANY time of the day (it's actually nice not to keep track of time once in a while), yet another device I have to carry around with me besides my netbook/ipod/work-laptop/gps, etc. (unless you're an uber-UBER power phone user, I don't agree WTFA on that one totally), never knowing anyone's phone number anymore (leaves you dead in the water, especially when you leave your cell phone at home by accident), substituting nice, quality memorable photos from a good, quality digital camera for 1MP squashed ones, loosing total track of your walking and ability to dogde solid objects when trying to answer that important txt msg while on run or in the car (I've seen people almost kill themselves to fulfill that 160 character impulse). The list can go on and on... It's a mere trade-off for the extra added stress is causes us IMHO.
I'm not sure what type of phone ol' Woody Hobbs uses... but I think that's kind of a flawed analogy at best. Over the years, my phones from a cold start have taken easily 5 - 10 seconds to post up (...and that includes the gracious amount of Verizon Wireless foo that flashes around at the beginning) Regardless of the pounding Chrome OS is taking, 7 second boot up time with instant access is killer. Really that's not any less/more than my Acer AspireOne + LinuxMint coming back up from hibernation mode. I'm really anxious to give Chrome OS a spin. Just like people argue for the sake of arguing, I think it's safe to say people also ridicule for the sake of ridiculing.
I'm pretty excited. I did happen to see the Leonids back in 1998/1999 when they, according to professional space geeks, the best showing they could remember, and have watched annually ever since. If anything, these are the types of events that at least gets my children actively interested in the super unknown in the sky. However, it's not easy trying to make 50 'falling star' wishes come true for your kids either... that's if they make it to 0400 for the Leonids. The Persied's were much more time friendly this year (2130 - 2200 in the midwestern U.S. here)
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RockYou is a MySpace photo/video sharing site (from what I could gather from googling, never used it myself) and it's certainly no excuse that people implement bone-head password choices such as the 10 shame shame list FTFA. However, I didn't really see the article address or even consider that their target users on the RockYou site aren't generally what geek, wanna-be security folks on /. are security conscious. I'm glad the analysis and study was done, but I'm really not surprised. If people are picking '123456' as the #1 password, as much as we have a PEBKAC situation on our hands, fault RockYou for not implementing some sort of semi-secure password standard.
Maybe it's different for a bigger news outlet like NYT, but I'd say it's about time. Dozens of News paper printing companies have long and done this many years ago (including Wall Street Journal many years back) and even the podunk news outlets in my midwest state. Anymore, I can't even read local news around here unless I pay for it online or catch it on the 6 o'clock or 10 o'clock news. I've long grown tired of dipshit delivery kids throwing my paper in a snow bank, at the end of my 30ft driveway or leaving the paper on my doorstep without a plastic bag in the rain.
It's definitely a good thing that Google held off launch in China; Asian companies are the central hub for embedded technologies, although I think the U.S. gets the brunt of garbage technological imports, but the Chinese population long ago adopted and integrated cell phone usage into their daily lives bigtime. They've been power-using phones long before anyone in the U.S. started promoting it. PDA's where always a big thing, but until the iPhone and Blackberry craze of 2008-2009, we didn't see anything like that virally spread, phone wise. TFA is right; China probably has something total to their population and market that rival very well with the Android and why move away from that? It's not to say China's techies or phone enthusiasts would shy away from trying something new, but like I said, they've been integrating phone usage into their lives for a lot longer than we in the U.S. have nation-wide.
Magic SysRQ key command for the *NIX world.
I have no idea if this is at all a best-practice (nost likely not), but I still feel like sharing how encryption is used in our 2-person office.
2-person office, *NOT* an IT organization. Of course doing that is going to work for you because you only have one other person besides yourself to get on board, get up-to-speed, get their stuff together, and know what they are doing. Not an entire team, organization, department, etc. comprised of hundreds and hundreds of people. Apples to oranges IMHO.
My main worry is that someone walks away with the server machine and/or the backup drives and has access to all company relevant data of the past 20 years.
The server is unlocked with a keyfile stored on a USB flash drive, which is stored in a safe. The only time it is needed is when the server gets rebooted (practically never). The keyfiles for the external backup drives are stored on the local encrypted server partion. They get read every time the backup drives are switched and mounted. All drives aditionally share a common master keyphrase, in case the USB flash drive dies.
...so you have this grand plan in place for all this implemented server-side encryption, but there's a high potential for someone to physically walk out the door with your server? Are we still talking about security here? Sounds like you've clearly adopted the "obscurity" method.
Thank you Superman for throwing that Hydrogen bomb out into space in 'Superman 2'. We're all potentially doomed by your stupidity and lack of knowledge in the realm of physics and astronomy. I expected more out of a super hero.
Knowing Google, I'm sure they have actually thought about the repercussions of allowing all types of documents to be hosted/uploaded, or paving the way for mal/spy/shitware and alike or piracy. As much as everyone is going to look at the negatives, I"m sure Google has developed some sort of scalable trolling application to look for patterns or heuristics for that type of thing. After all, is Google not the king of the hill when it comes to data mining, pilfering, trends, habits, popularity of all of us already?
Why sit there and tromp on Mark Zuckerberg? Isn't that the point of social networking is to give up a bit of the normal privacy for a bit of the networking aspect? For that point, you're the grind in your own engine over time; you're allowed to share "as much as you want to" on these social networking sites (a la Facebook). What you give up on your own free will is your own gain (or demise) in the world of privacy. To expect anything else would be contradictory.
My project I work on at the USGS used to host this data until we turned it over to the USGS long-term archive project in late 2009. And just clarify so it doesn't sound like as though you need a special NASA contact to go get this, go to the SRTM website and more importantly, go download it from here
What is really humorous to begin with is... is this even news? FTFA, "...Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books." Uh, e-book piracy has been huge for the last 6-8 years if not more (newsgroup book flood posts, anyone?) I've been reading/collecting e-books for some time when I'm in a hurry and don't want to sit in the uber-long lines at Barnes-and-Noble or equivalent, but guess what I do? I either pay the little extra money to have my e-book print and bound professionally if I use it a lot or I just find the real book online for the cheapest price. The point I am making is there is a nostalgia associated with having a tangible book to flip through, bookmark, come back to reference, read again, read to your kids for the first time, etc. That's why I have (and the rest of the good world) has shelves full of tangible books at home.
Since we're on the topic of e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle, let's look at their target audience and why people are using them in the first place: Convenience, timeliness and information readiness. If I can use my e-reader to subscribe to my favorite XYZ newspaper and have it 'digitally' delivered to my kitchen table next to my hot cup of coffee, why the hell would I walk my ass outside in the snow to go pick it up off my driveway because the lazy delivery boy didn't want to put it in my delivery box? Same goes for wanting to buy that favorite/popular/just-released book and you don't want to stand in line at midnight to get it? Doesn't mean you won't go buy the hard-copy later on if that literary piece happens to be something you enjoyed enough to have as a tangible keepsake on your bookshelf, does it? And to end it, how many of those people are going to crack their Kindle with 'Swindle'? A few, but not the majority, because I don't mind paying for convenience, timeliness and information readiness once in a while.
The Hero of Time will probably be the next Zelda story-line game Nintendo releases... it was a pretty good story line IMHO. It would not surprise me that Nintendo compensated them for the story (I'm sure not much for it being infringement) and will mangle it for their own liking. Any takers?
Why not simply work on virtual machines? Then you know they are clean and you can have all the rights you want and still have comply with company rules.
Ok, so a virtual machine can be created on the fly with a few mouse clicks (and blown away just as easily), but I guess I don't see your point? Virtual Machine or not, you still have an OS to administer and apply your operating/security guidelines to. And if you have a stream-lined IT shop, then maybe the distance to walk to go power on the physical server might be the only deterrent.
In a lot of environments, setting up a good seperation is simply to costly in time, so you either end up with dev's with not enough rights to do their job or to many where they can endanger systems they shouldn't.
Totally Agreed. It seems like in any development environment I've had to set up for Project XYZ or Prototype ABC, the separation and security needs to be there, but it seems it's always a rush job and Manager John Doe wanted it done "yesterday" when you found out about it "today". If you get development environments without the permission(s) to do their job, then you need a better SysAdmin or at least one with a better clue.
So it should not be needed to have local admin rights, but then the sysadmins got a hell of a job to setup everything so that it is not needed. Most sysadmins simply ain't capable of that, or if they are, are not given the time.
You hit the nail on the head. A lot of sysadmin's I've come across really lack a good wide-range of knowledge in areas they are getting paid to support and in turn, the Lone Ranger SysAdmin, who actually knows his stuff, gets stuck with it all. If you're organized, then it's just your time that gets stretched and your plate gets bigger. I know SysAdmin's can be way egotistical but I take a different approach and have a really good working relationship with my development team(s). I learn off them (e.g. new web technologies or the programming-language-of-the-day) and they learn from me (e.g. we got it set up, but now let's secure it, lock it down, establish user/group policies and get you access to what you need). It's almost impossible to know everything anymore and specialty positions are dwindling bigtime in the IT industry. If you're not a Jack-of-all-trades with a good head on your shoulders, then you're more able to sink quicker than swim anywhere anymore.
It's not anti-technology at all. We, as humans, abuse things by nature. We use up resources, only to go find another resource to pilfer, etc. Look at how we consume natural resources for pete's sake. Same goes for technology. A good example of that is cell phones. Instead of using texting or pictures for what it's purpose was, we have teens 'sext'ing' on their phones, taking crazy viral photos/videos and clogging up the internet, updating their status every 5 minutes, ignoring reality and real contact for a digital one and hardly even know how to use the 10 digit keypad on the phone, its REAL intent: To call someone and not be tied to land line communication. Again, a lot of this going to be opinionated to a great extent, but the movie is almost a future, truth concept of technology than it is a contradictory for it, IMHO. Furthermore, you also can't tell me if our current world found an alien world, that we wouldn't rape it for all it's worth?
If having a passenger with the last name "Seagal" on your plane doesn't foil something of a terrorist-type attack like this... then what will? Steven Seagal has been busting up terrorist plots left and right with little effort all throughout the late 80's and 90's.
This is bad ass and probably worth the $17 for the half-CPU cluster time. However, on a sour note, I can see it getting abused for it's short worth of security affirmation. With monetary gain at stake, I can imagine funding this service is going to far outweigh validating who's using it for malicious intent. It's a far stretch and would get rather expensive for some d0uch3b4g pwning neighboor networks, but if there a network of value to get into, the $17 (or $34) can't even fill my gas take.
I missed where I wrote 'overly large quantities' in my post? Did you, too?
If it's not one study condoning the intake of things like red meat because of known killers like heart disease (which shorten your life), and instead eat the "other" meat, such as fish, turkey, chicken, only to have *this* new study tell me I could live longer if I stay away from foods and specifically meats, such as fish and turkey, that contain amino acids that make me live less? Who are we kidding?
We've now identified the first known, and clearly single, Mt. Dew-crazed, Oreo-gluttonous Taiwanese man who still lives in his parent's basement. Weather at 6.
$299 is not a high price tag. I clearly remember any gaming console experience I wanted to try was *always* around the ~$300 pricetag, from the last two decades of even recently (Xbox360, PS3, Wii, etc.). The main points in any survival and success of a gaming system is: 1) NOT being a hyped up, terrible design and cumbersome usability, 2) It's unique and starts a mad, new and wild gaming experience that everyone wants to try (a la Guitar Hero/Rockband) because point #1 lived up to it's purpose.
Should I be making popcorn and get a glass of soda for this? I've said this before... "...only on the internet would I *ever* be exposed to see this."
I've tried my many attempts at a MythTV HTPC setup and it truly is a lot of work and time. What really got me every time is exactly what the author stated: the many handful hack attempts to get everything to work right. I ended up sufficing back to using my useset + newzbin + hellanzb + hellavcr setup. For mainstream TV recording, it's *always* on Usenet somewhere with-in 40 minutes after showing and the whole point of a DVR is to watch your recorded shows after the fact. Then set up a Samba share (for WIndows) or NFS or use your samba share for your Linux hosts, lock it down and use `mplayer`'s "-cache" parameter and you're golden. I'm on my laptop much of the time anyway, so sitting in bed watching a show becomes pretty effort-less streaming it over the network or hooking my laptop to my LCD dvd (that has VGA-in port). If I want to watch DVDs, I either use `mplayer` again over the network or just burn the dang DVD image, because again... Useset is also useful for that and my newzbin indexing report service + hellafox makes it even easier.
I think regardless of it's a typewriter, computer, laptop or whatever tool was used to create some literary genius's art simply comes down to obsession, personal value and inspiration at limitless cost. It's kind of a no-brainer that if there's enough followers to anyone's beloved work, regardless of what it is, there's always going to be the biggest fan with the deepest pocket book that is going to snatch it up because it fills some void in them, aspires them to do something similar, goes along with with their fanatic obsession of other collected items to or it's just a good damn conversation piece.
Being attached to a piece of technology at the hip where I can still get hampered with 'the-sky-is-falling' on-call calls when I'm *not* on-call, people I don't feel like talking to me can annoying me with phone calls/txts that I have to take the time to silence, my flip/touch-phone device for a bordem-killer to the point that it takes two years off it's design worth, knowing what time is ANY time of the day (it's actually nice not to keep track of time once in a while), yet another device I have to carry around with me besides my netbook/ipod/work-laptop/gps, etc. (unless you're an uber-UBER power phone user, I don't agree WTFA on that one totally), never knowing anyone's phone number anymore (leaves you dead in the water, especially when you leave your cell phone at home by accident), substituting nice, quality memorable photos from a good, quality digital camera for 1MP squashed ones, loosing total track of your walking and ability to dogde solid objects when trying to answer that important txt msg while on run or in the car (I've seen people almost kill themselves to fulfill that 160 character impulse). The list can go on and on... It's a mere trade-off for the extra added stress is causes us IMHO.
I'm not sure what type of phone ol' Woody Hobbs uses... but I think that's kind of a flawed analogy at best. Over the years, my phones from a cold start have taken easily 5 - 10 seconds to post up (...and that includes the gracious amount of Verizon Wireless foo that flashes around at the beginning) Regardless of the pounding Chrome OS is taking, 7 second boot up time with instant access is killer. Really that's not any less/more than my Acer AspireOne + LinuxMint coming back up from hibernation mode. I'm really anxious to give Chrome OS a spin. Just like people argue for the sake of arguing, I think it's safe to say people also ridicule for the sake of ridiculing.
I'm pretty excited. I did happen to see the Leonids back in 1998/1999 when they, according to professional space geeks, the best showing they could remember, and have watched annually ever since. If anything, these are the types of events that at least gets my children actively interested in the super unknown in the sky. However, it's not easy trying to make 50 'falling star' wishes come true for your kids either... that's if they make it to 0400 for the Leonids. The Persied's were much more time friendly this year (2130 - 2200 in the midwestern U.S. here)