Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.
well if i had RTFA-d I would have realized that they are indeed performing a real MITM, as https can't be really proxied without a MITM. my first post is kind of dumb, but i still don't think they are doing it for sniffing our details.
Even if you trust Nokia to not steal your private data, do you trust their network security enough to believe that someone else isn't stealing it? Everything you normally think of as private and sensitive is available through their proxy servers... seems like an awfully attractive target for thieves - why steal your credit card number when they can steal your online banking password and transfer all of your cash to themselves?
Based on my experience with HIPAA, it's very likely the officer thought he was correct.
Based on my experience with police, it's more likely that the officer knew he was incorrect. They'll make up rules and laws that don't exist if you are doing something they don't like because there are no repercussions when they lie to you.
There is no ASCII mu. ASCII is a seven-bit encoding which only covers unadorned latin alphabetic characters, arabic digits, and some random punctuation. Even latin1 (aka ISO8859-1) lacks a mu character. I'm not sure what you think you typed, but it definitely wasn't ASCII.
There's also the problem of potential confusion between U+00B5 MICRO SIGN and U+03BC GREEK SMALL LETTER MU (among others), but neither of those is remotely ASCII.
Anyway, yeah, slashdot sucks when it comes to international character support.
ISO8859-1 (colloquially called "Extended-ASCII", "High-ASCII" or just "ASCII" even if it's ambigous since there's more than one extended ASCII character set) does have a "mu", it's 0xB5
THIS. You know, if startups actually cared about their customers, they wouldn't sell out so readily (at least, to That Company) or, when doing so, would extract some agreement to not kill the service outright for X years after. I won't mourn MS killing the messenger, but the larger trend is just depressing.
(Filming this with my Flip camera.)
People that start startups want to get paid for all of the time they've put into it - and sometimes they get paid quite handsomely. As much as I dislike Microsoft, if they wanted to acquire the startup that I work for, I wouldn't turn down their millions of dollars.
If you want to start a more altruistic startup and tell your employees that there's not going to be a big payout because you'll only accept offers from ethical companies (are there any?) who agree to restrictions on how they can use the company they've bought, feel free to do so.
50g! Forget Avogadro's constant and spheres of silicon, I could do better than that with a brick and a shoebox.
Oh sorry, I typed "50 ug", but I used an ASCII "mu" but it seems to have been eaten by Slashdot and I didn't notice it in the preview. For the record, Slashdot doesn't accept the µ HTML entity either)
Just to preempt all comments about imperial or home-grown measurement systems: All measurement systems in the world are defined from the metric base units, which are in turn defined from a few physical constants and this kilogram prototype. When the kilogram prototype gains mass, this affects the kilogram, pound, liter and fluid ounce equally.
Not for me, I still define the pound as 7000 grains of barley. Must more stable than some unreliable reference standard that let's a little hydrocarbon tarnish screw it up
A few years ago, the kilogram reference standard was losing mass -- coincidentally, they said it had lost 50 g, the amount of mass it's now said to have gained. So it should be just right by now.
There are a million ways to communicate in secret, and this ranks among the stupidest.
Which ways are less stupid than hiding your packets in a stream that's believed to be innocuous and even if the voice packets are monitored, your hidden data would presumably remain hidden?
So skype has 1kilobit/sec spare capacity when transmitting silence ? How much data does it actually sent then ? just for silence ? This protocol is either very inefficient, or there is reason for this 'waste' of bandwidth. So what does skype use it for ?
From TFA, it's 70 bytes per packet (560 bits, excluding packet overhead), so less than 2 packets/second gives 1kbit/second of data. That doesn't seem all that inefficient.
You would think that a packet specifying X seconds of simulated silence could be packed into a few bits, so maybe two bytes should suffice.
Clearly there is something else going on, or they would not have designed such a large packet to "represent silence". That one can distinguish the silence packets from the voice packets doesn't speak too well of the encryption that Skype has always claimed they use.
If the Skype client didn't send packets during 'silence', then the client on the receiving end of an extended silent session wouldn't know whether there was silence on the other end or a network problem. That's why the client keeps sending packets even during "silence" rather than just timing silent sections then sending out a packet at the end of the silence saying "It was silent for the past 10 seconds, so that's why you didn't receive any data from me".
Aside from the earth not being spherical, its size isn't static either.
That's why the meter is no longer defined by a distance of a physical object - it was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum, until 1983 when it was defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1299,792,458 of a second. (more info here)
And water at what temperature?
Unless you're a scientist, you generally don't need to account for the small change in density over temperature. If you are a scientist, then you know it's 4 degrees C and you're already using the metric system.
As much I as like the consistency and simplicity of metric there is still one area where the imperial system makes sense:
When I see a distance of a multiple of 60 one can quickly determine how many hours it will take to get there when driving.:-)
Until time is also switched over to base 10 using miles/hr has a very nice 1:1 mapping with time! (assuming one drives 60 mi/hr.) The metric is a nice scientific system; the imperial system is a "nice" organic system. There is no reason BOTH systems couldn't be kept on the signage.
If the speed limit is 100km/hr (62mi/hr), then wouldn't the same convenience apply to distances that are a multiple of 100?
Just like how if something is 120 miles away, you can estimate 2 hours @ 60 mi/hr, if it's 200 km away, you can also estimate 2 hours @ 100 km/hr.
Likewise, a 45 mile drive takes 45 minutes @ 60mph, it's not that hard to look at a 75km drive and see that it's.75 hours, or about 45 minutes @ 100km/hr
Dealing with odd distances like 37 miles might make the conversion easier when dealing with mph, but when you see a distance of 59 km, you know that's.59 hours, or a bit over half an hour, which is about as accurate as saying "37 minutes", since it's really just a rough estimate -- few people drive a steady 60mph for long distances - in my commute, the speed limit varies from 35 mph on surface streets jumping up speeds that vary among 50mph, 55mph, and 65mph on the freeway. (which, if in km/hour would be around 80km/hour, 90km/hour and 100km/hour).
That's a lot of time to kill. You'd need every escape you could get.
And since I won't be living in my house where I have my shelves full of books, good thing I have my books on my Kindle (that I can recharge once every few weeks at the shelter).
People managed, but it was a pretty disruptive event. 1997, I think, is when it happened.
Such an event will inevitably happen again.
Right, and a hundred thousand people frozen out of their homes lived in shelters.
Like I said, without power, my home would be uninhabitable in the winter - no heat, no water, not even a toilet. My ability to read a book would be the least of my concerns.
I'm sorry this is one of the lamest arguments I have heard. Your typical e-book reader will last MONTHS in the hands of a heavy reader without recharge. The most common problem around our house is that by the time these things need charging we need to try and actually find the charger.
That doesn't stop you from having a "doh" moment when you realize it's out and you're not near an outlet. Same as Steam's offline mode is great if you've planned to be offline and checked that it works, but it sucks when the service is down and for some reason it insists on connecting to the mothership before you can play. Same if it breaks, if it happens often you're doing it wrong but it's almost impossible to "break" a book, while I have managed to damage a netbook because the suitcase got flipped around by the airport system until the netbook was stuck at an angle and all the heavy stuff landed on top of it. Books always work and are all but indestructible.
Unless I'm traveling, I'm never more than 15 minutes from a power outlet - even my train has some outlets if you know where to look.
When I travel, I carry along a 5000mAH USB charge pack. Mainly for my phone, but it would work for recharging the Kindle too. I've never broken a kindle, but they are cheap enough that it's not worth worrying about - if I break it, Amazon can have a new one here tomorrow.
Books always work and are indestructable if you keep them away from water - try reading a book while waiting for your train in the rain, then try the same thing with a Kindle in a baggie.
Quebec suffered a massive ice storm in the 1990s. Some areas lacked electricity for several months.
The apocalypse need not be nuclear.
I imagine there are still areas of New Jersey that lack electricity due to Hurricane Sandy.
Recharge from your car, or if you don't have a car, invest in a 5 or 10W solar charger and a day of sunlight will give you weeks of reading - if your eBook reader has a light, you can even read in the dark.
But if my house was without power for months, it would be uninhabitable in the winter since my furnace requires electricity. I'd either need to find a source of power, or a new place to live.
No, instead of batteries, you require shelves, lots and lots of shelves in a clean, dry environment.
Are you suggesting that your ebook library works well when wet?
I think he's suggesting that if you take your "no maintenance" books out of your climate controlled house and store them outside where they are subject to temperature extremes, humidity, insects and rodents, you'll find that they do need infrastructure after all. After my dad passed away, my siblings and I helped clear out a lot of junk from my parents basement - they had a lot of books stored in the basement, a basement that had a humidity problem. We threw away hundreds of books that were covered in mold and bindings were falling apart.
That doesn't imply the the eReader doen't need the same climate controlled environment, but it's easier to keep it stored on the bedside table than 20 shelves of books. And when the roof leaks after a heavy rain, you can move the eReader to the other side of the bed to keep it dry, rather than having to scramble around to protect and dry out your book shelves.
Charging the eReader once a month is not really an inconvenience for me since I charge my phone every night - if I let the battery get too low the worst that happens is that I have to keep the USB cable plugged in while I read. I'm not too worried about being able to read in an extended power outage, I can charge it from the car if I really want to read, and if a power outage lasts longer than the month long battery lifetime of the eReader, well, I'm probably worried about more than reading. Plus I can read in the dark with the eReader and its built in light.
The future is 20 years from now. Let me know if your library is still usable then, when your 350 gram e-reader is an oversized museum piece and Amazon has declared bankruptcy.
I always strip the DRM from my eBooks, so my unencrypted eBook files will remain readable forever - the file formats are published, so there will always be software to read them. My Kindle may not be here in 20 years, but the eBooks will remain. What happens to books if you have a fire or flood? My eBooks (along with the rest of my data) are backed up to a cloud storage provider, so even if my house goes up in flames, my eBooks will remain safe).
It's fantastic to have so much space reclaimed that other homes have stuffed with shelf upon shelf of books, video games, movies, and albums.
shelf upon shelf of books piled on top of more books.. sounds like home sweet home to me.
i'll keep my books and videos and albums and compact discs, thank you very much.. for the rights and freedoms that come with the physical formats as well as i just very much prefer a real book to staring at a display.
Others prefer a different kind of freedom -- the ability to move to a new place without carting along boxes upon boxes of books. I used to carry my books around before the internet was so big and before eReaders were even available. I had quite a few reference books and a lot of pleasure reading books. Then I had the chance to move overseas briefly.
I donated 23 boxes of books to a local library - took two trips with all of the car seats fully loaded. Of course, I got rid of a lot of other possessions I really wasn't using and likely would never use.
I ripped my 300 disk CD collection to MP3 and got rid of the bulky jewel boxes and put the disks into a big CD binder. I didn't have many DVD's at the time, but over time my collection has grown to over a 100, so I've done the same with them - ripped them all to hard disk and put the physical disks in a binder. I haven't played a physical disk in years, I only hold onto them for proof of ownership.
Now all of the stuff I care about (excluding furniture) fits on a standard sized shipping pallet which makes me much more mobile and means I can live in a small apartment without needing to store my stuff somewhere.
I don't miss the books at all -- the reference books have mostly all been replaced by online documentation, and when I feel like reading a book, I just pick up my eReader... If I'm not at home I can read on my phone, or a laptop.
The first thing I do when I buy an eBook is strip the DRM, so I really do "own" my books.
Yeah, and an ebook reader is suited to reading lying on the couch - they're lighter and easier to use with one hand.
On the other hand, a paper book is better for reading while soaking in the tub. When you drop a trade paperback in the water, you're out a few bucks, and you are not harmed by the experience. If you drop a reader in the tub, you're out a fair chunk of change, and you probably don't want to breathe the magic smoke that erupts from it, either.
Or you could just put the eReader into a 10 cent baggie (or waterproof case) -- my Kindle fits perfectly into a quart sized Ziplock baggie, and it's survived many dunks in the tub (as well as floating across the hot tub).
Which is more than I can say for some books I've accidentally dunked - once they get wet, the pages get stuff and hard to turn even if you can dry it out before mold sets in.
It's much easier to protect an eReader from water than a paper book or magazine since it's easier to convey a simple tap or swipe through the case to the eReader than to accomodate page turns of a book.
No eReader is going to smoke when its 3.3V powered electronics get wet, it's just going to stop working.
Because sometimes electricity fails and eventually the batteries in the flashlight and smartphone and laptop and ereader run down. Then again, sometimes people want to pretend there is no electricity or cellphone or laptop or ereader.
I want a candle with a USB outlet to charge my smartphone
While it's not exactly a candle, here's a camp stove that uses heat from the stove to charge your USB device:
For the videos I really want to keep from prying eyes, I keep them in an encfs encrypted folder that only I know the password to, then I mount it when I want to use it.
If you're looking for security, setup a RADIUS server and use 802.1x authentication instead of PSK.
Not to get nitpicky, but it's Slashdot and we're supposed to know better. The standard is 802.1X, not 802.1x. Capital letters for stand-alone standards, lowercase for addendums to a standard.
Case matters, people.
Welll, it doesn't really matter, except to pedants. There should never be a case (no pun intended) where two different projects differ only in the case of the letters, so no one will be confused when they look up 802.1x instead of 802.1X.
Unless your company is a large international one then targeted WPA hacking is for any other purpose than free internet is probably not a concern. What you should worry about is former employees borderline psychopaths that you somehow have shown up. (You'd be surprised how often psychopaths show up in a corporate environment.)... MAC filtering can very will be useful to protect the network in those cases but should never be the only method.
If you're worried about psychopath employees, why would you use something as ineffectual as MAC filtering when there is a much more secure method that will actually work (802.1x) to keep him out of your network?
Would you tape a sheet over the front doorway to keep out a psychopathic employee, or would you install a security door? The sheet may keep someone out, but the security door is much more likely to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.
Which strains were in this year's vaccine?
well if i had RTFA-d I would have realized that they are indeed performing a real MITM, as https can't be really proxied without a MITM. my first post is kind of dumb, but i still don't think they are doing it for sniffing our details.
Even if you trust Nokia to not steal your private data, do you trust their network security enough to believe that someone else isn't stealing it? Everything you normally think of as private and sensitive is available through their proxy servers... seems like an awfully attractive target for thieves - why steal your credit card number when they can steal your online banking password and transfer all of your cash to themselves?
Note before anyone says anything: this isn't related to Windows Phone or Microsoft.
Obviously, Microsoft is behind this to push users to Windows Phone.
Based on my experience with HIPAA, it's very likely the officer thought he was correct.
Based on my experience with police, it's more likely that the officer knew he was incorrect. They'll make up rules and laws that don't exist if you are doing something they don't like because there are no repercussions when they lie to you.
There is no ASCII mu. ASCII is a seven-bit encoding which only covers unadorned latin alphabetic characters, arabic digits, and some random punctuation. Even latin1 (aka ISO8859-1) lacks a mu character. I'm not sure what you think you typed, but it definitely wasn't ASCII.
There's also the problem of potential confusion between U+00B5 MICRO SIGN and U+03BC GREEK SMALL LETTER MU (among others), but neither of those is remotely ASCII.
Anyway, yeah, slashdot sucks when it comes to international character support.
ISO8859-1 (colloquially called "Extended-ASCII", "High-ASCII" or just "ASCII" even if it's ambigous since there's more than one extended ASCII character set) does have a "mu", it's 0xB5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1
THIS. You know, if startups actually cared about their customers, they wouldn't sell out so readily (at least, to That Company) or, when doing so, would extract some agreement to not kill the service outright for X years after. I won't mourn MS killing the messenger, but the larger trend is just depressing.
(Filming this with my Flip camera.)
People that start startups want to get paid for all of the time they've put into it - and sometimes they get paid quite handsomely. As much as I dislike Microsoft, if they wanted to acquire the startup that I work for, I wouldn't turn down their millions of dollars.
If you want to start a more altruistic startup and tell your employees that there's not going to be a big payout because you'll only accept offers from ethical companies (are there any?) who agree to restrictions on how they can use the company they've bought, feel free to do so.
50g! Forget Avogadro's constant and spheres of silicon, I could do better than that with a brick and a shoebox.
Oh sorry, I typed "50 ug", but I used an ASCII "mu" but it seems to have been eaten by Slashdot and I didn't notice it in the preview. For the record, Slashdot doesn't accept the µ HTML entity either)
Just to preempt all comments about imperial or home-grown measurement systems: All measurement systems in the world are defined from the metric base units, which are in turn defined from a few physical constants and this kilogram prototype. When the kilogram prototype gains mass, this affects the kilogram, pound, liter and fluid ounce equally.
Not for me, I still define the pound as 7000 grains of barley. Must more stable than some unreliable reference standard that let's a little hydrocarbon tarnish screw it up
A few years ago, the kilogram reference standard was losing mass -- coincidentally, they said it had lost 50 g, the amount of mass it's now said to have gained. So it should be just right by now.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070921110735.htm
There are a million ways to communicate in secret, and this ranks among the stupidest.
Which ways are less stupid than hiding your packets in a stream that's believed to be innocuous and even if the voice packets are monitored, your hidden data would presumably remain hidden?
So skype has 1kilobit/sec spare capacity when transmitting silence ? How much data does it actually sent then ? just for silence ?
This protocol is either very inefficient, or there is reason for this 'waste' of bandwidth. So what does skype use it for ?
From TFA, it's 70 bytes per packet (560 bits, excluding packet overhead), so less than 2 packets/second gives 1kbit/second of data. That doesn't seem all that inefficient.
Exactly what I was thinking.
You would think that a packet specifying X seconds of simulated silence could be packed into a few bits, so maybe two bytes should suffice.
Clearly there is something else going on, or they would not have designed such a large packet to "represent silence".
That one can distinguish the silence packets from the voice packets doesn't speak too well of the encryption that Skype has always claimed they use.
If the Skype client didn't send packets during 'silence', then the client on the receiving end of an extended silent session wouldn't know whether there was silence on the other end or a network problem. That's why the client keeps sending packets even during "silence" rather than just timing silent sections then sending out a packet at the end of the silence saying "It was silent for the past 10 seconds, so that's why you didn't receive any data from me".
Aside from the earth not being spherical, its size isn't static either.
That's why the meter is no longer defined by a distance of a physical object - it was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum, until 1983 when it was defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1299,792,458 of a second. (more info here)
And water at what temperature?
Unless you're a scientist, you generally don't need to account for the small change in density over temperature. If you are a scientist, then you know it's 4 degrees C and you're already using the metric system.
As much I as like the consistency and simplicity of metric there is still one area where the imperial system makes sense:
When I see a distance of a multiple of 60 one can quickly determine how many hours it will take to get there when driving. :-)
Until time is also switched over to base 10 using miles/hr has a very nice 1:1 mapping with time! (assuming one drives 60 mi/hr.) The metric is a nice scientific system; the imperial system is a "nice" organic system. There is no reason BOTH systems couldn't be kept on the signage.
If the speed limit is 100km/hr (62mi/hr), then wouldn't the same convenience apply to distances that are a multiple of 100?
Just like how if something is 120 miles away, you can estimate 2 hours @ 60 mi/hr, if it's 200 km away, you can also estimate 2 hours @ 100 km/hr.
Likewise, a 45 mile drive takes 45 minutes @ 60mph, it's not that hard to look at a 75km drive and see that it's .75 hours, or about 45 minutes @ 100km/hr
Dealing with odd distances like 37 miles might make the conversion easier when dealing with mph, but when you see a distance of 59 km, you know that's .59 hours, or a bit over half an hour, which is about as accurate as saying "37 minutes", since it's really just a rough estimate -- few people drive a steady 60mph for long distances - in my commute, the speed limit varies from 35 mph on surface streets jumping up speeds that vary among 50mph, 55mph, and 65mph on the freeway. (which, if in km/hour would be around 80km/hour, 90km/hour and 100km/hour).
That's a lot of time to kill. You'd need every escape you could get.
And since I won't be living in my house where I have my shelves full of books, good thing I have my books on my Kindle (that I can recharge once every few weeks at the shelter).
This was winter. It was an ice storm.
People managed, but it was a pretty disruptive event. 1997, I think, is when it happened.
Such an event will inevitably happen again.
Right, and a hundred thousand people frozen out of their homes lived in shelters.
Like I said, without power, my home would be uninhabitable in the winter - no heat, no water, not even a toilet. My ability to read a book would be the least of my concerns.
I'm sorry this is one of the lamest arguments I have heard. Your typical e-book reader will last MONTHS in the hands of a heavy reader without recharge. The most common problem around our house is that by the time these things need charging we need to try and actually find the charger.
That doesn't stop you from having a "doh" moment when you realize it's out and you're not near an outlet. Same as Steam's offline mode is great if you've planned to be offline and checked that it works, but it sucks when the service is down and for some reason it insists on connecting to the mothership before you can play. Same if it breaks, if it happens often you're doing it wrong but it's almost impossible to "break" a book, while I have managed to damage a netbook because the suitcase got flipped around by the airport system until the netbook was stuck at an angle and all the heavy stuff landed on top of it. Books always work and are all but indestructible.
Unless I'm traveling, I'm never more than 15 minutes from a power outlet - even my train has some outlets if you know where to look.
When I travel, I carry along a 5000mAH USB charge pack. Mainly for my phone, but it would work for recharging the Kindle too. I've never broken a kindle, but they are cheap enough that it's not worth worrying about - if I break it, Amazon can have a new one here tomorrow.
Books always work and are indestructable if you keep them away from water - try reading a book while waiting for your train in the rain, then try the same thing with a Kindle in a baggie.
Quebec suffered a massive ice storm in the 1990s. Some areas lacked electricity for several months.
The apocalypse need not be nuclear.
I imagine there are still areas of New Jersey that lack electricity due to Hurricane Sandy.
Recharge from your car, or if you don't have a car, invest in a 5 or 10W solar charger and a day of sunlight will give you weeks of reading - if your eBook reader has a light, you can even read in the dark.
But if my house was without power for months, it would be uninhabitable in the winter since my furnace requires electricity. I'd either need to find a source of power, or a new place to live.
No, instead of batteries, you require shelves, lots and lots of shelves in a clean, dry environment.
Are you suggesting that your ebook library works well when wet?
I think he's suggesting that if you take your "no maintenance" books out of your climate controlled house and store them outside where they are subject to temperature extremes, humidity, insects and rodents, you'll find that they do need infrastructure after all. After my dad passed away, my siblings and I helped clear out a lot of junk from my parents basement - they had a lot of books stored in the basement, a basement that had a humidity problem. We threw away hundreds of books that were covered in mold and bindings were falling apart.
That doesn't imply the the eReader doen't need the same climate controlled environment, but it's easier to keep it stored on the bedside table than 20 shelves of books. And when the roof leaks after a heavy rain, you can move the eReader to the other side of the bed to keep it dry, rather than having to scramble around to protect and dry out your book shelves.
Charging the eReader once a month is not really an inconvenience for me since I charge my phone every night - if I let the battery get too low the worst that happens is that I have to keep the USB cable plugged in while I read. I'm not too worried about being able to read in an extended power outage, I can charge it from the car if I really want to read, and if a power outage lasts longer than the month long battery lifetime of the eReader, well, I'm probably worried about more than reading. Plus I can read in the dark with the eReader and its built in light.
The future is 20 years from now. Let me know if your library is still usable then, when your 350 gram e-reader is an oversized museum piece and Amazon has declared bankruptcy.
I always strip the DRM from my eBooks, so my unencrypted eBook files will remain readable forever - the file formats are published, so there will always be software to read them. My Kindle may not be here in 20 years, but the eBooks will remain. What happens to books if you have a fire or flood? My eBooks (along with the rest of my data) are backed up to a cloud storage provider, so even if my house goes up in flames, my eBooks will remain safe).
shelf upon shelf of books piled on top of more books.. sounds like home sweet home to me.
i'll keep my books and videos and albums and compact discs, thank you very much.. for the rights and freedoms that come with the physical formats as well as i just very much prefer a real book to staring at a display.
Others prefer a different kind of freedom -- the ability to move to a new place without carting along boxes upon boxes of books. I used to carry my books around before the internet was so big and before eReaders were even available. I had quite a few reference books and a lot of pleasure reading books. Then I had the chance to move overseas briefly.
I donated 23 boxes of books to a local library - took two trips with all of the car seats fully loaded. Of course, I got rid of a lot of other possessions I really wasn't using and likely would never use.
I ripped my 300 disk CD collection to MP3 and got rid of the bulky jewel boxes and put the disks into a big CD binder. I didn't have many DVD's at the time, but over time my collection has grown to over a 100, so I've done the same with them - ripped them all to hard disk and put the physical disks in a binder. I haven't played a physical disk in years, I only hold onto them for proof of ownership.
Now all of the stuff I care about (excluding furniture) fits on a standard sized shipping pallet which makes me much more mobile and means I can live in a small apartment without needing to store my stuff somewhere.
I don't miss the books at all -- the reference books have mostly all been replaced by online documentation, and when I feel like reading a book, I just pick up my eReader... If I'm not at home I can read on my phone, or a laptop.
The first thing I do when I buy an eBook is strip the DRM, so I really do "own" my books.
On the other hand, a paper book is better for reading while soaking in the tub. When you drop a trade paperback in the water, you're out a few bucks, and you are not harmed by the experience. If you drop a reader in the tub, you're out a fair chunk of change, and you probably don't want to breathe the magic smoke that erupts from it, either.
Or you could just put the eReader into a 10 cent baggie (or waterproof case) -- my Kindle fits perfectly into a quart sized Ziplock baggie, and it's survived many dunks in the tub (as well as floating across the hot tub).
Which is more than I can say for some books I've accidentally dunked - once they get wet, the pages get stuff and hard to turn even if you can dry it out before mold sets in.
It's much easier to protect an eReader from water than a paper book or magazine since it's easier to convey a simple tap or swipe through the case to the eReader than to accomodate page turns of a book.
No eReader is going to smoke when its 3.3V powered electronics get wet, it's just going to stop working.
there are still candle makers in existence.
Because sometimes electricity fails and eventually the batteries in the flashlight and smartphone and laptop and ereader run down.
Then again, sometimes people want to pretend there is no electricity or cellphone or laptop or ereader.
I want a candle with a USB outlet to charge my smartphone
While it's not exactly a candle, here's a camp stove that uses heat from the stove to charge your USB device:
http://biolitestove.com/campstove/camp-overview/features/
For the videos I really want to keep from prying eyes, I keep them in an encfs encrypted folder that only I know the password to, then I mount it when I want to use it.
It's all full of educational videos, of course.
If you're looking for security, setup a RADIUS server and use 802.1x authentication instead of PSK.
Not to get nitpicky, but it's Slashdot and we're supposed to know better. The standard is 802.1X, not 802.1x. Capital letters for stand-alone standards, lowercase for addendums to a standard.
Case matters, people.
Welll, it doesn't really matter, except to pedants. There should never be a case (no pun intended) where two different projects differ only in the case of the letters, so no one will be confused when they look up 802.1x instead of 802.1X.
Unless your company is a large international one then targeted WPA hacking is for any other purpose than free internet is probably not a concern. What you should worry about is former employees borderline psychopaths that you somehow have shown up. (You'd be surprised how often psychopaths show up in a corporate environment.) ...
MAC filtering can very will be useful to protect the network in those cases but should never be the only method.
If you're worried about psychopath employees, why would you use something as ineffectual as MAC filtering when there is a much more secure method that will actually work (802.1x) to keep him out of your network?
Would you tape a sheet over the front doorway to keep out a psychopathic employee, or would you install a security door? The sheet may keep someone out, but the security door is much more likely to do so.