Keep in mind that I'm mostly talking about routers. If you plug directly in to one, your computer will use DHCP and will be assigned an address by the router. Once you go to any web page, the router will use DNS poisoning to redirect you to its "wizard" page.
This would be an easy way for a beginner to take a router and have it up and running in a few minutes pretty securely.
I don't disagree, but you also have some control over this.
Most phones allow you to decide whether you want to allow usage of the phone (both voice and data) on "roaming" networks. If you haven't done so, it's probably worth going into your phone's configuration screens and making sure that any sort of roaming access is turned off.
I am a former prepaid customer, and I loved it dearly when I used it, but prepaid is really only good for "really casual" use. My prepaid plan had two basic offerings:
1. $1 per day of use plus $0.10 per minute of airtime (free airtime to other AT&T customers). 2. $0.25 per minute of airtime, no daily fee, no free airtime to anyone.
On both plans, text messages were $0.25 each, no monthly plan available. Though I'm sure someone has a prepaid texting plan somewhere.
They tuned expiration dates so minutes expired at the rate of about $8 per month, I used to buy $100 cards that were good for a year. And loved it, because I used the phone about one week out of the month when I traveled, to save money on hotel long distance charges and have a way to reach my wife while I was at the airport, etc. I averaged maybe 8 days of use and a total of about an hour of airtime a month at peak, so my cost was around $14 a month.
The really good part was that overages were impossible. I could buy a $30 card good for three months, and if I ran out of airtime the card gave me a $2 warning then ceased to function once I ran out of airtime credits. If someone stole the phone or I lost it or broke it, I could simply walk to Best Buy, get a new $10 phone, buy a new airtime card, and give the 3-4 people who knew my number the new telephone number. It was great.
The really bad part was the cost. If you use the phone daily for a ten-minute conversation, the phone costs you between $60 and $75 depending what plan you chose. Unless you are a REALLY casual cell phone user, prepaid is not really what you are looking for.
You'd think so, but the GPS receiver built into my several-year-old BlackBerry works GREAT in my extended-cab Dakota pickup, no problems at all with the metal roof. And, if you're thinking "ah, but there's a clear horizon view through the windows", I have also held it up against the ceiling for giggles and still received a good GPS signal. In fact, I haven't owned a GPS that can't read signal through the metal roof of a car in at least 5 years. My BlackBerry's GPSr even works (intermittently and not terribly well, but it does work sometimes) inside my house, despite the fact that the metal roof and aluminum siding defeat the actual cell signal and I've had to invest in a repeater to get cell signal inside.
And my BlackBerry is the size of a deck of cards and has a lot of stuff other than a GPS (camera, keyboard, screen, battery, etc). If you just wanted a cell radio and GPS receiver and were OK hooking it up to the car's power supply, you could probably make a package the size of a matchbox out of it, with two power leads and a bit of wire for the antenna hanging out.
Just use a simple IP redirect. The "wizard" can be a simple web page. The only requirement is that someone plug a computer into an Ethernet port the very first time the device is used.
The first time you plug a computer into the router (or the first time after you do a factory reset) the wireless is turned off and any attempt to connect to the Internet on a plugged-in device gets redirected to the wizard. I'd envision the wizard being about three web pages with a couple of fields and a NEXT button on each. And, of course, an "ADVANCED" button right up front for people who want to skip the wizard and go straight to the "normal" configuration screens.
First step: Security configuration. Ask about things like the admin password, etc. Once the password is set, have the user log back in using that security setting to continue. Your router is now secured before it is on the Internet.
Second step: Connection to the Internet. Test the connection using DCHP. If you get a good connection, just skip this page. If not, try spoofing the MAC address of the machine you are connected to. If that fails, ask about DSL passwords, etc. Have an "Advanced" button that goes to the main config screens for people who know what they are doing and want to craft something more complex.
Third step: Wireless configuration. Allow the user to assign their SSID, WPA password, and channel (autoscan and default to the channel with the least interference, obviously). Or, of course, give the user the option of leaving wireless off. Require the user to go into more advanced configuration screens to set their network as WEP or Open.
Once the configuration is complete, the router can then turn off the redirect and connect to the Internet, then you're good to go.
From there, it can have a spoofed local DNS entry that always translates "MYROUTER" into its own local IP address if you need to get back into the router config for something, so http://myrouter/ will always go to the configuration screen on the local router.
No CDs, no special hardware/software requirements, no nothing. Just a computer with an Ethernet port and a browser that can handle HTTP.
So, if I have an electrical outlet outside of my house and I don't "secure it", should people be able to plug into my electricity with impunity?
No. But, as has been stated before, that analogy is flawed.
If you plugged a bright orange extension cord into your outlet, ran it down onto the sidewalk, and attached a 4-foot-high sign that said "FREE ELECTRICITY - PLEASE HELP YOURSELF" could you then call the cops when someone plugged in to the outlet? They are on a public space, using a resource you've advertised as available for public use.
That's how routers are designed. You can configure them so that the public can use them. Or you can configure them so they tell people that the signal is not for public use. These are clear and easy settings on the router that allow you, as the router's owner, to indicate to others whether that signal is for public use or not. If you've configured them to broadcast the availability of a freely-available connection and you've allowed that signal to intrude on a public space, then how am I to tell you didn't want my phone to use it as I'm driving by?
If you don't want people to use it, it's a trivial matter to configure your router to stop inviting people to use it. Turn off SSID. Lower the signal strength so it stays on your own property and out of public spaces. Implement WEP or WPA.
If someone then intrudes on your property or attempts to hack your network after you've indicated that you don't want it used, I'll be right alongside you supporting charging the assholes with trespassing or some other crime, and put some teeth into enforcement.
But you have to take the first step. If you insist on intruding on public spaces with your open signal, you really have no right to complain if someone uses it. Unless, of course, you've successfully petitioned the FCC and hold a license for exclusive use of that channel in your vicinity. Good luck with that.
The nice side effect to taking the 5 minutes to enable WPA2 is that you are also protected from snoops, because the data is no longer sent out "in the clear" for anyone in the vicinity to intercept.
Are you really comfortable with anyone with a Pringles can and a netbook being able to record your email password? Is saving the 5 minutes to secure your network really that important to you, that you expect the rest of the world to understand that "yes means no if I say it" and you're willing to take security risks with all the data you send over that channel on an annual basis.
Hell, you could have secured your network in less time than it took you to type your post, and solved the problem yourself rather than expecting the rest of the world to do it for you.
I got my smartphone nearly two years ago, issued by my company (a BlackBerry). My contract is up in another few months. We had our choice of three BlackBerry models (81xx, 83xx, and 88xx) and two carriers (Verizon and AT&T).
A significant population of people really wanted iPhones, but at the time they were most certainly NOT ready for corporate prime time.
More importantly, AT&T's coverage is a little worse than Verizon's up in this area, too, so locking into AT&T for everyone was completely impractical.
Now things are very different.
If my company decides to replace our phones when the contract is up, who knows what options will be available to us? iPhone seems to be ready for corporate use now - they've beefed them up to acceptable security, added remote wipe, encrypted the onboard data, etc. A lot of things that, much as I'm a fan of the Droid OS, Droid has yet to deliver as far as I know. So I suspect it'll be iPhone or BlackBerry for us.
Of course, the iPhone is still impractical at the moment, because there are a lot of people who were forced to choose Verizon for their BlackBerries simply because AT&T lacked coverage at their houses or places where they needed it. This despite the fact that Verizon crippled the GPS and a few other features on the phone, so there was a decided preference for AT&T for most of us (fortunately, I'm in a good AT&T coverage area at home so I was able to use AT&T). If your phone don't work, then it don't work. So unless the iPhone was somehow available on Verizon, it's simply not an option around here for many people.
But if the iPhone hits Verizon, there's little reason to even offer AT&T any more at work. They could easily consolidate to the platform most people seem to want (iPhone) on the carrier that has better coverage around these parts (Verizon) and consolidate to one single handset model rather than six and one carrier rather than two. They'd need fewer swap spares and probably get better pricing on plans, too.
Personally, I'd prefer a newer BlackBerry, but hey - I'm not paying for it. If the company decides to standardize on Verizon iPhones, then that's what I'll carry. And it'll beat the hell out of paying for my own phone.
Integrate some form of sea anchor on the flotation device, so at least the floatie is being pulled by the same currents as the swimmer. It's still up to the swimmer to cover the distance, but at least they aren't fighting a current trying to reach a floatie that's being blown in some other direction by the wind.
You hear MOB, you get out a floatie gun or two and shoot it off in the person's general direction. If the person is within 50 yards of the landing point, there's a decent chance they can swim to it. If not, at least you have an extra "beacon" on the water to tell you the general vicinity of the person (especially if the device has a small sea anchor to keep it from blowing in the wind too terribly fast).
If you can get it close enough to the victim so they can swim to it and get out of the cold water, you've just bought yourself a bunch of time for the rescue. If not, you've got a bit of flotsam you need to pick up after the rescue is over (fail or succeed).
I'm sure the launcher could be ramped WAY up from 150 meters and the accuracy could be improved considerably if this were a permanent emplacement on the stern of a ship that thought it might have a fairly regular use for such a device (military/Coast Guard ship, cruise ship, etc).
In the US, firefighting is paid for using property taxes, not income taxes. If you own a house, you pay taxes on that house that help pay for local items like firefighting, police, road maintenance, schools, etc etc. Very little of that is handled by the federal government, or even generally the individual state governments.
No, the better policy would have been to have the $75 fee added to everyone's property tax bill in the small town, and have the town pay on behalf of all citizens so they don't forget and so the fire company in the larger town isn't in the collection business.
But, if you want to operate in a mode where you have freedom, then you have to take personal responsibility. The dude didn't buy firefighting insurance, and the fire department is not obligated to risk their lives and expend their resources trying to save his house.
Bet the paper delivery guy would drive right by his house not leaving a paper if he hadn't subscribed, too.
Correct. Certain shared government services are, in fact, a form of socialism.
Fire departments are something that the majority feel are necessary. So, the majority gets together and determines (by and large) what they want a fire department to look like. Do we want to buy Hank a big dually truck with a 500-gallon tank attached and pay him $1000 a month to stay home all day so he's available if someone yells "fire!", or do we want to put up a building and buy actual pumper trucks and fancy suits and whatnot?
Then they figure out how much it costs, split the costs up using some formula most everyone can agree on, and send everyone a bill. Usually the amount is included in their property tax bill.
Each individual contributes to something that no one citizen could afford to pay for effectively, but that every citizen benefits from (or could potentially benefit from).
This is the same model that roads, sewer systems, police forces, and Social Security are all based on.
In the case of this specific small town, the majority of citizens apparently felt that firefighting was not something they could afford on their own, so they opted to allow a larger nearby town to offer it to their citizens as a subscription service. They could have made it mandatory by adding it to the property tax and forwarding the money for each citizen along to the larger town's fire department, but I guess they decided that they wanted to keep taxes low. So they just allowed each citizen to make their own decisions like adults.
That means that, if a citizen doesn't want to pay into the system, they don't have to. But if they don't pay into the system, then they don't get access to it.
In this case, the free market worked exactly as it should. This guy had a series of actions he could have taken to get fire coverage. One was to pay $75 a year to a fire service. One was to buy his own fire gear. He opted not to get fire coverage, and didn't have his own gear. Then he got a fire. And he hadn't made any arrangements for anyone to help him with it.
It's called "personal responsibility". You no wanna pay for a public good? Fine. Don't expect to benefit from it.
Then, much as I love the idea of solar power, if you can't get enough power from a nuke plant to run Camp Victory, the battle for solar power is already lost.
I'm going to take "dozens if not hundreds" and approximate that to about 100 generators. If they are, as you say, 1.5 megawatt generators, then we can assume that Camp Victory's power needs would be approximately 150 Megawatts, right?
I can see solar as a supplementary power source for certain low-power systems, but at about 10 watts per square foot, you'd need 150 thousand square feet of solar panels to replace a single one of the 1.5 Megawatt generators you cited. Plus you'd have an energy shortage at, say, night, so you'd have to at least triple your solar coverage in order to charge the batteries to get you through the night (or run generators or something during non-daylight times).
The issue is not that the solar panels are more delicate than a generator. It's simply that, in order to get enough power out of them, you need a lot more surface area of them, and they are therefore an easier target. You can't harden them or conceal them in any way, or they can't get the sunlight they need.
Your insurgents might not be able to hit a container-sized generator in the middle of camp, but when that same generator has to be replaced by a shiny square nearly 400 feet on a side, it'd be hard to miss. Sure, they couldn't take out all of it, but they could keep knocking down bits of it.
If you needed 100 of those generators, and to account for nighttime power, you'd need to replace them with a square of solar panels over 6,700 feet on a side. Ignoring the cost, and the fact that you'd need at least triple that to get through the night, you're talking well over a square mile of solar panels operating at peak efficiency to replace 100 generators, plus shitloads of batteries. Imagine how long that would take to set up.
Instead, you could replace those gas or Diesel generators with a 150 megawatts of quiet portable nuke generators, for 24/7 power in units that can be hardened and scattered about camp.
Look, I'm all for renewable power and saving energy. I ride my bike to work when I can. I carpool. I have a solar "sunshower" to heat my shower water. I'm anal about turning off lights and stuff I don't need. I run a 50MPG car to save fuel. Any pragmatic measures I can take to save power, I'm going to take.
But equipment that might get into harms way needs to be far more portable, far smaller, and far easier to harden than a solution that's practical for us civvie dweebs.
Well, for starters, if I ever got an infected email it might warn me before I passed it along to someone who might be susceptible. I also get occasional files from Windows friends and I don't want to become a carrier.
Except, of course, that ISPs can block selectively.
Comcast offers me a free subscription to Norton. They could easily send me a warning message with a link to it. If I ignored their warning for a week, they could block all but port 80, and all port 80 requests could be DNS-spoofed to go directly to http://security.comcast.net/norton/resi/?cid=NET_33_258
That way, I can download Norton and install it, let it scan and scrub my machine, and once Comcast sees that I've downloaded Norton they can allow full access unless I start showing signs of bot activity again.
What's to stop them from doing it now and stating that you were doing something you weren't? They control the server logs.
I realize something like this can be a slippery slope, but clearly putting boundaries around this is better than simply tying the hands of ISPs and telling them that they must allow traffic that is known to be actually malicious.
I'm not in favor of ISPs being given law enforcement responsibilities, or even authorities, but if they can run an Antivirus-style signature sniffer and detect known and identifiable bots, then help their customers clean up their machines, that's a win for everyone. The ISP reduces their traffic, the customer stops losing personal information to a bot or whatever else the bot might have been doing, and the Internet as a whole is healthier.
Once a machine is updated to the latest service packs and protected with even a half-assed firewall and Antivirus, it makes it a whole lot less likely that a new bot infestation will get to that machine again.
Could ISPs abuse this authority? Possibly, but hell - if they wanted to abuse it they already can. They can cut you off anyway, and make up a reason later. This doesn't give the ISP any new powers, in any real sense.
I'm with Comcast, and they already offer a free subscription to the Norton Security Suite as part of my subscription.
I don't use it, but it's readily available, and free, to Comcast customers.
Hint: If you're with almost any ISP and you're paying for Antivirus you're almost certainly wasting your money. I don't think I've ever been with an ISP that didn't provide free Antivirus if I wanted to download it.
Of course, I'm running Linux, so Norton doesn't do me a lot of good for any of my machines. But there are a few AV scanners for Linux (I run ClamAV).
Heavy-lift vehicles get all the materials we need into orbit.
Or locate our manufacturing stations closer to sources of raw materials that are not encumbered by a huge gravity well. The Moon would be a decent candidate, at 1/6 Earth gravity and very close by. The asteroids would be even better, assuming we can find a couple of them with enough useful materials to justify building a station there.
Instead of focusing on reusable rockets, we need to figure out what to do with the materials we've just spent massive amounts of energy getting out of the gravity well. Having them coast back into the gravity well for reuse seems amazingly wasteful. We're not exactly short on metal here on Earth to the point where something the size of a few dozen Shuttles would make the difference between luxury and the collapse of Humanity. Send simple, non-reusable ships up there and leave them there as raw materials, then bring their occupants back in smaller, lighter capsules. Then the brains at NASA can start planning how to assemble those pieces into a mobile manufacturing facility that we can launch at the asteroid belt so it can start building colonization craft.
Yup, meaning if we wait ten years to send the radio transmissions, it'll be 50 years from now when we could possibly get a reply.
Aim a radiotelescope there, send a bunch of clear repeating signals for a couple of months, then in 40 years aim a radiotelescope back at the star and listen for a year or so. The chances of any possible success are incredibly low, but then again so is the cost.
Then work like hell to outrun those radio signals, of course.:)
In the Abrams' Trekiverse, all plot holes will be explained by different-colored bits of matter. The reason for this is simple. Burnt Umber Matter made it that way.
Or determine how to slow down using energy at the destination.
Picture two HUGE but lightweight array of focusing mirrors capable of focusing sunlight onto a solar sail. Fire a set off using a small solar sail to the destination star, then it can use its own mirrors to slow itself down when it gets there. Once the mirrors reach a distant sun, they can be a permanent installation there for future trips, serving as decelerators for incoming ships and accelerators for outgoing ships.
So, you get a big push from one Sun when you leave, and your deceleration comes from another Sun when you arrive. Your onboard fuel needs would be relatively minimal. Basically enough for any course corrections while you're outside the effective range of both focusing arrays, and of course whatever energy you need to support whatever systems or people are on board for the journey.
Fantasy? Probably. But it's an intriguing possibility.
Of course, the images it drew didn't even appear to be caricatures, only a random-looking image of the vague outline of a person, with circles for representing the boobs for women (and, if I ever met a women with boobs up on her shoulders, I'd probably run for my life) and a crudely drawn schlong and meatballs for men. It's like they had a 3-year-old spend 5 minutes looking at a copy of Playboy and Playgirl and having the child draw what they thought they saw.
Plus, if I gotta take a piss, no way I'm standing still long enough for that glacially-slow robotic arm to draw anything.
Hence the difference between "BBC Planet Earth" and "Discovery Planet Earth". Same show, but they had to cut 20 minutes of footage out of the Discovery version of every 60-minute show in order to shoehorn in commercials. Fair enough, but then the video and David Attenborough's voice can't line up, so they re-voiced it. With Sigourney Weaver. Don't get me wrong, Weaver is a talented actress. But this is not her forte.
This is one case where buying the DVD (or Blu-ray, if you've got the gear for it) is worth every penny. You don't want to miss a single second of the footage, and Attenborough just has such a glorious sense of wonder and excellent timing, and a very good sense of when to just shut up and let the events speak for themselves.
Why Discovery couldn't have just made it a 90-minute presentation and shown the original BBC version (even with "sudden" commercial breaks), I'll never understand. Same 33% of commercial time, more airtime filled up, better quality show, and lowered production costs. Instead, they really ruined it.
To be honest, I did watch the first episode of the US version while staying in a hotel. I thought it was very good. Then I saw the same episode in the BBC version. I was utterly floored at the difference. More footage, smoother flow, and, well, David Attenborough's voice. Now I wouldn't watch the rest of the US version if you paid me. Well, OK, I'd watch it if you paid me, but it'd have to be decent money. And I'd insist on a working volume control so I could turn it down and play some nice music instead.
To everyone out there who watched and enjoyed Discovery's version of Planet Earth - I agree - it was a good show. Now go out and buy the DVD or Blu-Ray of the BBC version and watch it with proper narration and with uninterrupted flow and with all the footage you missed.
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Keep in mind that I'm mostly talking about routers. If you plug directly in to one, your computer will use DHCP and will be assigned an address by the router. Once you go to any web page, the router will use DNS poisoning to redirect you to its "wizard" page.
This would be an easy way for a beginner to take a router and have it up and running in a few minutes pretty securely.
I don't disagree, but you also have some control over this.
Most phones allow you to decide whether you want to allow usage of the phone (both voice and data) on "roaming" networks. If you haven't done so, it's probably worth going into your phone's configuration screens and making sure that any sort of roaming access is turned off.
Well, yes and, umm, no.
I am a former prepaid customer, and I loved it dearly when I used it, but prepaid is really only good for "really casual" use. My prepaid plan had two basic offerings:
1. $1 per day of use plus $0.10 per minute of airtime (free airtime to other AT&T customers).
2. $0.25 per minute of airtime, no daily fee, no free airtime to anyone.
On both plans, text messages were $0.25 each, no monthly plan available. Though I'm sure someone has a prepaid texting plan somewhere.
They tuned expiration dates so minutes expired at the rate of about $8 per month, I used to buy $100 cards that were good for a year. And loved it, because I used the phone about one week out of the month when I traveled, to save money on hotel long distance charges and have a way to reach my wife while I was at the airport, etc. I averaged maybe 8 days of use and a total of about an hour of airtime a month at peak, so my cost was around $14 a month.
The really good part was that overages were impossible. I could buy a $30 card good for three months, and if I ran out of airtime the card gave me a $2 warning then ceased to function once I ran out of airtime credits. If someone stole the phone or I lost it or broke it, I could simply walk to Best Buy, get a new $10 phone, buy a new airtime card, and give the 3-4 people who knew my number the new telephone number. It was great.
The really bad part was the cost. If you use the phone daily for a ten-minute conversation, the phone costs you between $60 and $75 depending what plan you chose. Unless you are a REALLY casual cell phone user, prepaid is not really what you are looking for.
You'd think so, but the GPS receiver built into my several-year-old BlackBerry works GREAT in my extended-cab Dakota pickup, no problems at all with the metal roof. And, if you're thinking "ah, but there's a clear horizon view through the windows", I have also held it up against the ceiling for giggles and still received a good GPS signal. In fact, I haven't owned a GPS that can't read signal through the metal roof of a car in at least 5 years. My BlackBerry's GPSr even works (intermittently and not terribly well, but it does work sometimes) inside my house, despite the fact that the metal roof and aluminum siding defeat the actual cell signal and I've had to invest in a repeater to get cell signal inside.
And my BlackBerry is the size of a deck of cards and has a lot of stuff other than a GPS (camera, keyboard, screen, battery, etc). If you just wanted a cell radio and GPS receiver and were OK hooking it up to the car's power supply, you could probably make a package the size of a matchbox out of it, with two power leads and a bit of wire for the antenna hanging out.
Just use a simple IP redirect. The "wizard" can be a simple web page. The only requirement is that someone plug a computer into an Ethernet port the very first time the device is used.
The first time you plug a computer into the router (or the first time after you do a factory reset) the wireless is turned off and any attempt to connect to the Internet on a plugged-in device gets redirected to the wizard. I'd envision the wizard being about three web pages with a couple of fields and a NEXT button on each. And, of course, an "ADVANCED" button right up front for people who want to skip the wizard and go straight to the "normal" configuration screens.
First step: Security configuration. Ask about things like the admin password, etc. Once the password is set, have the user log back in using that security setting to continue. Your router is now secured before it is on the Internet.
Second step: Connection to the Internet. Test the connection using DCHP. If you get a good connection, just skip this page. If not, try spoofing the MAC address of the machine you are connected to. If that fails, ask about DSL passwords, etc. Have an "Advanced" button that goes to the main config screens for people who know what they are doing and want to craft something more complex.
Third step: Wireless configuration. Allow the user to assign their SSID, WPA password, and channel (autoscan and default to the channel with the least interference, obviously). Or, of course, give the user the option of leaving wireless off. Require the user to go into more advanced configuration screens to set their network as WEP or Open.
Once the configuration is complete, the router can then turn off the redirect and connect to the Internet, then you're good to go.
From there, it can have a spoofed local DNS entry that always translates "MYROUTER" into its own local IP address if you need to get back into the router config for something, so http://myrouter/ will always go to the configuration screen on the local router.
No CDs, no special hardware/software requirements, no nothing. Just a computer with an Ethernet port and a browser that can handle HTTP.
So, if I have an electrical outlet outside of my house and I don't "secure it", should people be able to plug into my electricity with impunity?
No. But, as has been stated before, that analogy is flawed.
If you plugged a bright orange extension cord into your outlet, ran it down onto the sidewalk, and attached a 4-foot-high sign that said "FREE ELECTRICITY - PLEASE HELP YOURSELF" could you then call the cops when someone plugged in to the outlet? They are on a public space, using a resource you've advertised as available for public use.
That's how routers are designed. You can configure them so that the public can use them. Or you can configure them so they tell people that the signal is not for public use. These are clear and easy settings on the router that allow you, as the router's owner, to indicate to others whether that signal is for public use or not. If you've configured them to broadcast the availability of a freely-available connection and you've allowed that signal to intrude on a public space, then how am I to tell you didn't want my phone to use it as I'm driving by?
If you don't want people to use it, it's a trivial matter to configure your router to stop inviting people to use it. Turn off SSID. Lower the signal strength so it stays on your own property and out of public spaces. Implement WEP or WPA.
If someone then intrudes on your property or attempts to hack your network after you've indicated that you don't want it used, I'll be right alongside you supporting charging the assholes with trespassing or some other crime, and put some teeth into enforcement.
But you have to take the first step. If you insist on intruding on public spaces with your open signal, you really have no right to complain if someone uses it. Unless, of course, you've successfully petitioned the FCC and hold a license for exclusive use of that channel in your vicinity. Good luck with that.
The nice side effect to taking the 5 minutes to enable WPA2 is that you are also protected from snoops, because the data is no longer sent out "in the clear" for anyone in the vicinity to intercept.
Are you really comfortable with anyone with a Pringles can and a netbook being able to record your email password? Is saving the 5 minutes to secure your network really that important to you, that you expect the rest of the world to understand that "yes means no if I say it" and you're willing to take security risks with all the data you send over that channel on an annual basis.
Hell, you could have secured your network in less time than it took you to type your post, and solved the problem yourself rather than expecting the rest of the world to do it for you.
I got my smartphone nearly two years ago, issued by my company (a BlackBerry). My contract is up in another few months. We had our choice of three BlackBerry models (81xx, 83xx, and 88xx) and two carriers (Verizon and AT&T).
A significant population of people really wanted iPhones, but at the time they were most certainly NOT ready for corporate prime time.
More importantly, AT&T's coverage is a little worse than Verizon's up in this area, too, so locking into AT&T for everyone was completely impractical.
Now things are very different.
If my company decides to replace our phones when the contract is up, who knows what options will be available to us? iPhone seems to be ready for corporate use now - they've beefed them up to acceptable security, added remote wipe, encrypted the onboard data, etc. A lot of things that, much as I'm a fan of the Droid OS, Droid has yet to deliver as far as I know. So I suspect it'll be iPhone or BlackBerry for us.
Of course, the iPhone is still impractical at the moment, because there are a lot of people who were forced to choose Verizon for their BlackBerries simply because AT&T lacked coverage at their houses or places where they needed it. This despite the fact that Verizon crippled the GPS and a few other features on the phone, so there was a decided preference for AT&T for most of us (fortunately, I'm in a good AT&T coverage area at home so I was able to use AT&T). If your phone don't work, then it don't work. So unless the iPhone was somehow available on Verizon, it's simply not an option around here for many people.
But if the iPhone hits Verizon, there's little reason to even offer AT&T any more at work. They could easily consolidate to the platform most people seem to want (iPhone) on the carrier that has better coverage around these parts (Verizon) and consolidate to one single handset model rather than six and one carrier rather than two. They'd need fewer swap spares and probably get better pricing on plans, too.
Personally, I'd prefer a newer BlackBerry, but hey - I'm not paying for it. If the company decides to standardize on Verizon iPhones, then that's what I'll carry. And it'll beat the hell out of paying for my own phone.
No, but we need a superfund team to help clean up the pollution from the burning karma.
Integrate some form of sea anchor on the flotation device, so at least the floatie is being pulled by the same currents as the swimmer. It's still up to the swimmer to cover the distance, but at least they aren't fighting a current trying to reach a floatie that's being blown in some other direction by the wind.
So now imagine one of these on board.
You hear MOB, you get out a floatie gun or two and shoot it off in the person's general direction. If the person is within 50 yards of the landing point, there's a decent chance they can swim to it. If not, at least you have an extra "beacon" on the water to tell you the general vicinity of the person (especially if the device has a small sea anchor to keep it from blowing in the wind too terribly fast).
If you can get it close enough to the victim so they can swim to it and get out of the cold water, you've just bought yourself a bunch of time for the rescue. If not, you've got a bit of flotsam you need to pick up after the rescue is over (fail or succeed).
I'm sure the launcher could be ramped WAY up from 150 meters and the accuracy could be improved considerably if this were a permanent emplacement on the stern of a ship that thought it might have a fairly regular use for such a device (military/Coast Guard ship, cruise ship, etc).
In the US, firefighting is paid for using property taxes, not income taxes. If you own a house, you pay taxes on that house that help pay for local items like firefighting, police, road maintenance, schools, etc etc. Very little of that is handled by the federal government, or even generally the individual state governments.
No, the better policy would have been to have the $75 fee added to everyone's property tax bill in the small town, and have the town pay on behalf of all citizens so they don't forget and so the fire company in the larger town isn't in the collection business.
But, if you want to operate in a mode where you have freedom, then you have to take personal responsibility. The dude didn't buy firefighting insurance, and the fire department is not obligated to risk their lives and expend their resources trying to save his house.
Bet the paper delivery guy would drive right by his house not leaving a paper if he hadn't subscribed, too.
Correct. Certain shared government services are, in fact, a form of socialism.
Fire departments are something that the majority feel are necessary. So, the majority gets together and determines (by and large) what they want a fire department to look like. Do we want to buy Hank a big dually truck with a 500-gallon tank attached and pay him $1000 a month to stay home all day so he's available if someone yells "fire!", or do we want to put up a building and buy actual pumper trucks and fancy suits and whatnot?
Then they figure out how much it costs, split the costs up using some formula most everyone can agree on, and send everyone a bill. Usually the amount is included in their property tax bill.
Each individual contributes to something that no one citizen could afford to pay for effectively, but that every citizen benefits from (or could potentially benefit from).
This is the same model that roads, sewer systems, police forces, and Social Security are all based on.
In the case of this specific small town, the majority of citizens apparently felt that firefighting was not something they could afford on their own, so they opted to allow a larger nearby town to offer it to their citizens as a subscription service. They could have made it mandatory by adding it to the property tax and forwarding the money for each citizen along to the larger town's fire department, but I guess they decided that they wanted to keep taxes low. So they just allowed each citizen to make their own decisions like adults.
That means that, if a citizen doesn't want to pay into the system, they don't have to. But if they don't pay into the system, then they don't get access to it.
In this case, the free market worked exactly as it should. This guy had a series of actions he could have taken to get fire coverage. One was to pay $75 a year to a fire service. One was to buy his own fire gear. He opted not to get fire coverage, and didn't have his own gear. Then he got a fire. And he hadn't made any arrangements for anyone to help him with it.
It's called "personal responsibility". You no wanna pay for a public good? Fine. Don't expect to benefit from it.
Then, much as I love the idea of solar power, if you can't get enough power from a nuke plant to run Camp Victory, the battle for solar power is already lost.
I'm going to take "dozens if not hundreds" and approximate that to about 100 generators. If they are, as you say, 1.5 megawatt generators, then we can assume that Camp Victory's power needs would be approximately 150 Megawatts, right?
I can see solar as a supplementary power source for certain low-power systems, but at about 10 watts per square foot, you'd need 150 thousand square feet of solar panels to replace a single one of the 1.5 Megawatt generators you cited. Plus you'd have an energy shortage at, say, night, so you'd have to at least triple your solar coverage in order to charge the batteries to get you through the night (or run generators or something during non-daylight times).
The issue is not that the solar panels are more delicate than a generator. It's simply that, in order to get enough power out of them, you need a lot more surface area of them, and they are therefore an easier target. You can't harden them or conceal them in any way, or they can't get the sunlight they need.
Your insurgents might not be able to hit a container-sized generator in the middle of camp, but when that same generator has to be replaced by a shiny square nearly 400 feet on a side, it'd be hard to miss. Sure, they couldn't take out all of it, but they could keep knocking down bits of it.
If you needed 100 of those generators, and to account for nighttime power, you'd need to replace them with a square of solar panels over 6,700 feet on a side. Ignoring the cost, and the fact that you'd need at least triple that to get through the night, you're talking well over a square mile of solar panels operating at peak efficiency to replace 100 generators, plus shitloads of batteries. Imagine how long that would take to set up.
Instead, you could replace those gas or Diesel generators with a 150 megawatts of quiet portable nuke generators, for 24/7 power in units that can be hardened and scattered about camp.
Look, I'm all for renewable power and saving energy. I ride my bike to work when I can. I carpool. I have a solar "sunshower" to heat my shower water. I'm anal about turning off lights and stuff I don't need. I run a 50MPG car to save fuel. Any pragmatic measures I can take to save power, I'm going to take.
But equipment that might get into harms way needs to be far more portable, far smaller, and far easier to harden than a solution that's practical for us civvie dweebs.
Well, for starters, if I ever got an infected email it might warn me before I passed it along to someone who might be susceptible. I also get occasional files from Windows friends and I don't want to become a carrier.
AVG does a decent job, and it has a free version.
Except, of course, that ISPs can block selectively.
Comcast offers me a free subscription to Norton. They could easily send me a warning message with a link to it. If I ignored their warning for a week, they could block all but port 80, and all port 80 requests could be DNS-spoofed to go directly to http://security.comcast.net/norton/resi/?cid=NET_33_258
That way, I can download Norton and install it, let it scan and scrub my machine, and once Comcast sees that I've downloaded Norton they can allow full access unless I start showing signs of bot activity again.
What's to stop them from doing it now and stating that you were doing something you weren't? They control the server logs.
I realize something like this can be a slippery slope, but clearly putting boundaries around this is better than simply tying the hands of ISPs and telling them that they must allow traffic that is known to be actually malicious.
I'm not in favor of ISPs being given law enforcement responsibilities, or even authorities, but if they can run an Antivirus-style signature sniffer and detect known and identifiable bots, then help their customers clean up their machines, that's a win for everyone. The ISP reduces their traffic, the customer stops losing personal information to a bot or whatever else the bot might have been doing, and the Internet as a whole is healthier.
Once a machine is updated to the latest service packs and protected with even a half-assed firewall and Antivirus, it makes it a whole lot less likely that a new bot infestation will get to that machine again.
Could ISPs abuse this authority? Possibly, but hell - if they wanted to abuse it they already can. They can cut you off anyway, and make up a reason later. This doesn't give the ISP any new powers, in any real sense.
I'm with Comcast, and they already offer a free subscription to the Norton Security Suite as part of my subscription.
I don't use it, but it's readily available, and free, to Comcast customers.
Hint: If you're with almost any ISP and you're paying for Antivirus you're almost certainly wasting your money. I don't think I've ever been with an ISP that didn't provide free Antivirus if I wanted to download it.
Of course, I'm running Linux, so Norton doesn't do me a lot of good for any of my machines. But there are a few AV scanners for Linux (I run ClamAV).
Heavy-lift vehicles get all the materials we need into orbit.
Or locate our manufacturing stations closer to sources of raw materials that are not encumbered by a huge gravity well. The Moon would be a decent candidate, at 1/6 Earth gravity and very close by. The asteroids would be even better, assuming we can find a couple of them with enough useful materials to justify building a station there.
Instead of focusing on reusable rockets, we need to figure out what to do with the materials we've just spent massive amounts of energy getting out of the gravity well. Having them coast back into the gravity well for reuse seems amazingly wasteful. We're not exactly short on metal here on Earth to the point where something the size of a few dozen Shuttles would make the difference between luxury and the collapse of Humanity. Send simple, non-reusable ships up there and leave them there as raw materials, then bring their occupants back in smaller, lighter capsules. Then the brains at NASA can start planning how to assemble those pieces into a mobile manufacturing facility that we can launch at the asteroid belt so it can start building colonization craft.
Yup, meaning if we wait ten years to send the radio transmissions, it'll be 50 years from now when we could possibly get a reply.
Aim a radiotelescope there, send a bunch of clear repeating signals for a couple of months, then in 40 years aim a radiotelescope back at the star and listen for a year or so. The chances of any possible success are incredibly low, but then again so is the cost.
Then work like hell to outrun those radio signals, of course. :)
Fuscia Matter, silly boy!
In the Abrams' Trekiverse, all plot holes will be explained by different-colored bits of matter. The reason for this is simple. Burnt Umber Matter made it that way.
Or determine how to slow down using energy at the destination.
Picture two HUGE but lightweight array of focusing mirrors capable of focusing sunlight onto a solar sail. Fire a set off using a small solar sail to the destination star, then it can use its own mirrors to slow itself down when it gets there. Once the mirrors reach a distant sun, they can be a permanent installation there for future trips, serving as decelerators for incoming ships and accelerators for outgoing ships.
So, you get a big push from one Sun when you leave, and your deceleration comes from another Sun when you arrive. Your onboard fuel needs would be relatively minimal. Basically enough for any course corrections while you're outside the effective range of both focusing arrays, and of course whatever energy you need to support whatever systems or people are on board for the journey.
Fantasy? Probably. But it's an intriguing possibility.
Apparently.
Of course, the images it drew didn't even appear to be caricatures, only a random-looking image of the vague outline of a person, with circles for representing the boobs for women (and, if I ever met a women with boobs up on her shoulders, I'd probably run for my life) and a crudely drawn schlong and meatballs for men. It's like they had a 3-year-old spend 5 minutes looking at a copy of Playboy and Playgirl and having the child draw what they thought they saw.
Plus, if I gotta take a piss, no way I'm standing still long enough for that glacially-slow robotic arm to draw anything.
Hence the difference between "BBC Planet Earth" and "Discovery Planet Earth". Same show, but they had to cut 20 minutes of footage out of the Discovery version of every 60-minute show in order to shoehorn in commercials. Fair enough, but then the video and David Attenborough's voice can't line up, so they re-voiced it. With Sigourney Weaver. Don't get me wrong, Weaver is a talented actress. But this is not her forte.
This is one case where buying the DVD (or Blu-ray, if you've got the gear for it) is worth every penny. You don't want to miss a single second of the footage, and Attenborough just has such a glorious sense of wonder and excellent timing, and a very good sense of when to just shut up and let the events speak for themselves.
Why Discovery couldn't have just made it a 90-minute presentation and shown the original BBC version (even with "sudden" commercial breaks), I'll never understand. Same 33% of commercial time, more airtime filled up, better quality show, and lowered production costs. Instead, they really ruined it.
To be honest, I did watch the first episode of the US version while staying in a hotel. I thought it was very good. Then I saw the same episode in the BBC version. I was utterly floored at the difference. More footage, smoother flow, and, well, David Attenborough's voice. Now I wouldn't watch the rest of the US version if you paid me. Well, OK, I'd watch it if you paid me, but it'd have to be decent money. And I'd insist on a working volume control so I could turn it down and play some nice music instead.
To everyone out there who watched and enjoyed Discovery's version of Planet Earth - I agree - it was a good show. Now go out and buy the DVD or Blu-Ray of the BBC version and watch it with proper narration and with uninterrupted flow and with all the footage you missed.
The difference will make you cry.