50 million people was a heavy price to wipe out the wildfire-like expansion of Nazi power and crush Japanese impirialism, but I think most people will agree it was a price worth paying.
The tech that came about as a result was pure bonus.
You are the kind of guy that would happily eat your seed potatoes if you get a bit hungry in the winter.
Today, you have to do research or your grand children will be poor farmers.
Personally, I'm not counting on NASA to feed my eventual grand-children. Call me crazy, but I don't expect much more out of them than the occasional pretty picture of Jupiter or something.
Oh, and here's a news flash kids: Space is already militarized. Those GPS toys you like playing with? Yeah, those satelites are there to guide are tanks and target our bombs. The fact that you can use them to mark nav points at your favorite fishing holes and/or WiFi hotspots is just a bonus.
Well, if Michael Krepon, the director of something called the "Space Security Project" for something called the "Stimson Center" says we don't need space-based weapons, that pretty much settles the issue, doesn't it?
I mean, he's an EXPERT!
It sounds like he might even be an expert on SCIENCE and stuff!
With the kind of RF noise in my neighborhood? I wish them lots of luck. I have to use a wok-built dish just to get the bluetooth signal to carry across my living room!
An unlocked door does not mean you are welcome. It just means that it's easy to get in.
A personal standing invitation from the home-owner to just wander in is what I was talking about, and it was not an analogy. That's really the way it was back then. Wi-Fi networks are very much the same way at the moment, because, as you said, cybercrime via home Wi-Fi nets is not very widespread yet. If it becomes widespread, people like me will probably be foreced to lock things down.
Still, nobody has been able to articulate why any would-be criminal would bother sitting on my lawn, where my neighbors would likely see him and call the cops to investigate the stranger on the block doing weird stuff with a laptop, when he could just as easilly use one of hundreds of free and open Wi-Fi hotspots all over the city (in libraries, coffee shops, etc.) and completely blend in with all the other yuppies in the room, enjoying total anonymity as well as considerably more comfort.
But the weeds are a nice touch. Did you import those?
The blackthorn has established an impressive network of it's own over the last couple decades from a single original source plant a couple houses away from me. Its roots are woven into the soil of the whole block now.
The dandelions were delivered to me by air from the local High School across the street. Very kind of them. I should send them a card or something.
If noone had educated you to lock your door, how would you know to do it? Or would it be ok to live in ignorance until someone actually wandered into your home and stole all your stuff?
When I was a kid, there were several neighborhoods within walking distance of me where nobody ever did lock their doors.
If I dropped by a friend's house after school and nobody was home yet, I could walk into his house and wait for them in the living room. In some cases, their parents would even be cool with it for me to help myself to a can of soda.
This was considered perfectly normal behavior, because daytime home invasions were almost completely unheard of at the time.
These days, robberies are sadly a little more common, and everybody in the same neighborhoods lock their doors when they are not home (and often install security systems.)
If hijacking home ISP connections via local WiFi becomes a common crime which actually damages the owners of said networks, people will turn on security.
Meanwhile, there's nothing a criminal could do with my network that they could not do considerably more easilly & comfortably in the back corner of a Dunn Brothers' Coffee house or a Panera Bread restaurant, both of whom provide free and unmonitored Wi-Fi.
Having had a lock busted in once, that's actually a good question.
The answer is simple: I care more about hardening my house as a target than my LAN, because there's nothing on my local servers which I have a problem with people seeing, and my systems all use an OS which is damn near impossible to hack without me giving you some of the admin-level information. If you want to prove me wrong, feel free to sit on my lawn and give it a try sometime. Enjoy listening to my iTunes playlist while you are at it.
The main lesson which one takes away from watching that movie is that evolutionists are smug assholes who feel better about themselves by belittling anybody who doesn't immediately embrace their enlightened teachings...
At least the Evolutionists are right, unlike the Christians and Republicans.
Wow. Way to prove the preception wrong. You didn't sound like a smug asshole who is belittling other people to make himself feel better at all there.
If everyone has their networks unsecured, crackers start using them for nefarious purposes. If crackers start using them, wardriving and the like will become suspicious, pseudo-illegal activities. I don't want wardriving to be considered suspicious, because it isn't illegal. I don't want my neighbors' naïvete in setting up their networks and some crackers' stupid identity theft/etc... exploits to make my harmless activities suspicious to law enforcement.
News flash: Your harmless activities should be suspicious to law enforcement. You are walking around snooping for unsecured connections in your neighborhood. That is very suspicious behavior.
Even if you are doing it as a hobby (or as a "white hat" who has nothing better to do then survey everybody else's security systems), a good cop who saw you doing it would probably stop you and ask you a few questions, and I would applaud him for doing so.
I was thinking of more, how can I phrase a flyer to put in people's mailboxen (God, am I a geek...) and on bulletin boards. I'm not really comfortable sending stuff to people's computers, because, although the threshold of legal/illegal use of someone's WiFi is fuzzy, I would consider that past it, or at least quite suspicious.
I've got a great idea for how you can handle this situation.
You can mind your own business.
If there's a sudden rise of criminals using home WiFi all over the country, there will be a crackdown, and people will learn to take the steps they need to. Until then, there are bigger things in the world to be concerned about.
Gosh, you mean they could listen to my iTunes playlist or view my (read-only) web page files? I feel so violated!
Wait. No I don't. I don't care.
As for packet sniffers, unless they've figured out a way to "pwn" one of the systems on my (all-OS X) network and install it (in which case, a fabulous career in network security awaits them, because nobody's done that yet without crafty "social engineering" as the back door), they would need to be connected to the network at the same time as I am performing the activity they want to watch. Under such circumstances, I'm very likely to ask myself, "hey, what's that guy with a laoptop doing on my front lawn?"
It's silly. If somebody wanted to steal identities and/or credit card numbers, it would be far less hassle to take a part-time job as a waiter. People hand you their cards all night, and even give you a sample of their signature without a second thought. If the restaurant serves alcohol, you even get to take a "close look" (long enough to memorize the number) at their driver's license.
This isn't the 1980s. Hacking the networks of individuals is no longer the easiest way for a criminal to make a living. Credit protection is such that he's generally better off just throwing a rock through your window when you are not home and taking all your stuff. Lower risk, faster pay-off, lighter sentences if caught.
If you have ever owned a Windows box and had it connected to the internet, you ran the risk of somebody "pwning" it and using it for a phishing scam. When something like that happens, it pretty much comes down to you telling the ISP and the bank being defrauded, "hey, what can I say? I got hacked," and as long as you put a stop to the offending activity it's all forgotten about.
Likewise with my WiFi. If some joker was to use it for illegal activity, and questions were asked of me, I would simply point out that pretty much anybody could have been connected via my WiFi system during the time in question, and that would be that.
Besides, what criminal hacker would park in front of my house to use WiFi for his activity, when he can freely do the same thing from any of a hundred coffee shops and restaurants while running zero risk of raising suspicions, and enjoy a nice latte while he's at it?
Bah. I've been running an unsecured and unencrypted 802.11b/g network out of my house (in a city and right next to a large High School) for several years now. Anyone who detects the network could use the Internet for free. I figure if I ever see too high of an activity spike from freeloaders using it maliciously, I'll have to lock it down, but I seriously doubt that I will ever need to.
The range of WiFi still sucks enough that somebody wanting to actually utilize my bandwidth would pretty much need to park in my driveway or the street immediately in front of my living-room window while doing so... or at the very least hide a relay behind my garage (the only electrical source within 400' of my house without actually going inside.)
I've got a friend who lives in a remote suburb even more spread out than me, with nothing but private homes surrounding him, and he's gone to insane lengths to lock down his WiFi, to the point that it's a pain in the ass to legitimately add systems to the network. I keep asking him, "who the hell is even going to wardrive in this neighborhood, let alone actually use your connection?" He doesn't have a good answer, but he's terrified of the idea of running an open network.
IMHO, WEP and other security protocols made 802.11 okay for the corporate world to accept, but they also took a lot of the fun out of WiFi.
Why bother even with that if Apple can supply you with an HD movie encoded with H264/AAC over the internet?
Personally, I can hardly wait. I just had to send back a DVD of "The Aviator" to NetFlix because a scratch prevented the last half of the movie from playing. Now I gotta wait for them to mail me a new copy. If Apple can offer an on-demand video service which:
1. Has quality as good or better than DVD
2. Is faster than sending DVD's through the US Mail
3. Costs about the same
4. Has a similar variety of selections.. then I'm all over it, even if I need to buy a new Mac to do it. (And I probably would... My current media computer is a Mac mini, and while it handles raw HDTV signals via EyeTV just fine, the CPU can't decode H264 fast enough.)
Hrm. I'm not so sure it's a minority. Survey after survery shows over 60% of the American population rejecting evolution, and over 70% of the American Population stating that Intelligent Design should be taught in the class room.
I find these numbers very, very depressing.
I think those numbers are more damning to the history of science education than the masses themselves.
When I was in public high-school in the 80's, my education about evolution amounted to some badly-drawn charts of darwinian ascention, and having to sit through every goddamn dull minute of the famous Christian-bashing movie, "Inherit the Wind." The main lesson which one takes away from watching that movie is that evolutionists are smug assholes who feel better about themselves by belittling anybody who doesn't immediately embrace their enlightened teachings... very much like the preachers they are opposed to.
I learned more about evolution from PBS nature and astronomy specials then I ever did from my school. If it wasn't for my personal ambition to read about science on my own time, I probably could have also skated through college without ever understanding it.
So, given that most Americans regard evolution a, "the way athiests and communists think the mankind came about," without ever having been taught a sliver of the real science behind it (in spite of it being in the cirruculum of public schools nation-wide for about a century), it's not in the least bit surprising that they are open to hearing out somebody who offers and even slightly plausible-sounding alternative theory.
Science teachers and profs all over the country from every generation have nobody to blame but themselves for the current state of affairs. You won the fight to teach evolution, but then failed to actually deliver a proper education on the topic.
Intelligent Design requires that intelligence can *only* arise by design.
Huh.
One could just as easilly require that intelligence never arises by design.
So far, we know of one way to give rise to an intelligent object: Fucking.
The march of science has provided several other ways of assembling an embryonic human from the genetic material of two other people (all of them less fun than the old-fashioned way), but for the most part the only way we've ever been able to do it ammounts to: create an embryo, then watch what it grows into.
We don't know how to "design" an intelligence, therefore we don't know that intelligence can be designed.
Slashdot Mirror
50 million people was a heavy price to wipe out the wildfire-like expansion of Nazi power and crush Japanese impirialism, but I think most people will agree it was a price worth paying.
The tech that came about as a result was pure bonus.
You are the kind of guy that would happily eat your seed potatoes if you get a bit hungry in the winter.
Today, you have to do research or your grand children will be poor farmers.
Personally, I'm not counting on NASA to feed my eventual grand-children. Call me crazy, but I don't expect much more out of them than the occasional pretty picture of Jupiter or something.
Oh, and here's a news flash kids: Space is already militarized. Those GPS toys you like playing with? Yeah, those satelites are there to guide are tanks and target our bombs. The fact that you can use them to mark nav points at your favorite fishing holes and/or WiFi hotspots is just a bonus.
Well, if Michael Krepon, the director of something called the "Space Security Project" for something called the "Stimson Center" says we don't need space-based weapons, that pretty much settles the issue, doesn't it?
I mean, he's an EXPERT!
It sounds like he might even be an expert on SCIENCE and stuff!
What more is there to discuss!?
With the kind of RF noise in my neighborhood? I wish them lots of luck. I have to use a wok-built dish just to get the bluetooth signal to carry across my living room!
By the way, I'm shocked (shocked, I say!) that of all the people I know, you would fail to spell "Aunt Beru" correctly.
Please hand in your geek ID card and pocket protector on your way out.
An unlocked door does not mean you are welcome. It just means that it's easy to get in.
A personal standing invitation from the home-owner to just wander in is what I was talking about, and it was not an analogy. That's really the way it was back then. Wi-Fi networks are very much the same way at the moment, because, as you said, cybercrime via home Wi-Fi nets is not very widespread yet. If it becomes widespread, people like me will probably be foreced to lock things down.
Still, nobody has been able to articulate why any would-be criminal would bother sitting on my lawn, where my neighbors would likely see him and call the cops to investigate the stranger on the block doing weird stuff with a laptop, when he could just as easilly use one of hundreds of free and open Wi-Fi hotspots all over the city (in libraries, coffee shops, etc.) and completely blend in with all the other yuppies in the room, enjoying total anonymity as well as considerably more comfort.
But the weeds are a nice touch. Did you import those?
The blackthorn has established an impressive network of it's own over the last couple decades from a single original source plant a couple houses away from me. Its roots are woven into the soil of the whole block now.
The dandelions were delivered to me by air from the local High School across the street. Very kind of them. I should send them a card or something.
I find that if I never water it, I don't need to mow it as often. You're just jealous that you didn't think of that.
If noone had educated you to lock your door, how would you know to do it? Or would it be ok to live in ignorance until someone actually wandered into your home and stole all your stuff?
When I was a kid, there were several neighborhoods within walking distance of me where nobody ever did lock their doors.
If I dropped by a friend's house after school and nobody was home yet, I could walk into his house and wait for them in the living room. In some cases, their parents would even be cool with it for me to help myself to a can of soda.
This was considered perfectly normal behavior, because daytime home invasions were almost completely unheard of at the time.
These days, robberies are sadly a little more common, and everybody in the same neighborhoods lock their doors when they are not home (and often install security systems.)
If hijacking home ISP connections via local WiFi becomes a common crime which actually damages the owners of said networks, people will turn on security.
Meanwhile, there's nothing a criminal could do with my network that they could not do considerably more easilly & comfortably in the back corner of a Dunn Brothers' Coffee house or a Panera Bread restaurant, both of whom provide free and unmonitored Wi-Fi.
Having had a lock busted in once, that's actually a good question.
The answer is simple: I care more about hardening my house as a target than my LAN, because there's nothing on my local servers which I have a problem with people seeing, and my systems all use an OS which is damn near impossible to hack without me giving you some of the admin-level information. If you want to prove me wrong, feel free to sit on my lawn and give it a try sometime. Enjoy listening to my iTunes playlist while you are at it.
It is my business.
If everyone has their networks unsecured, crackers start using them for nefarious purposes. If crackers start using them, wardriving and the like will become suspicious, pseudo-illegal activities. I don't want wardriving to be considered suspicious, because it isn't illegal. I don't want my neighbors' naïvete in setting up their networks and some crackers' stupid identity theft/etc... exploits to make my harmless activities suspicious to law enforcement.
News flash: Your harmless activities should be suspicious to law enforcement. You are walking around snooping for unsecured connections in your neighborhood. That is very suspicious behavior.
Even if you are doing it as a hobby (or as a "white hat" who has nothing better to do then survey everybody else's security systems), a good cop who saw you doing it would probably stop you and ask you a few questions, and I would applaud him for doing so.
Good one. You owe me a keyboard.
I was thinking of more, how can I phrase a flyer to put in people's mailboxen (God, am I a geek...) and on bulletin boards. I'm not really comfortable sending stuff to people's computers, because, although the threshold of legal/illegal use of someone's WiFi is fuzzy, I would consider that past it, or at least quite suspicious.
I've got a great idea for how you can handle this situation.
You can mind your own business.
If there's a sudden rise of criminals using home WiFi all over the country, there will be a crackdown, and people will learn to take the steps they need to. Until then, there are bigger things in the world to be concerned about.
Gosh, you mean they could listen to my iTunes playlist or view my (read-only) web page files? I feel so violated!
Wait. No I don't. I don't care.
As for packet sniffers, unless they've figured out a way to "pwn" one of the systems on my (all-OS X) network and install it (in which case, a fabulous career in network security awaits them, because nobody's done that yet without crafty "social engineering" as the back door), they would need to be connected to the network at the same time as I am performing the activity they want to watch. Under such circumstances, I'm very likely to ask myself, "hey, what's that guy with a laoptop doing on my front lawn?"
It's silly. If somebody wanted to steal identities and/or credit card numbers, it would be far less hassle to take a part-time job as a waiter. People hand you their cards all night, and even give you a sample of their signature without a second thought. If the restaurant serves alcohol, you even get to take a "close look" (long enough to memorize the number) at their driver's license.
This isn't the 1980s. Hacking the networks of individuals is no longer the easiest way for a criminal to make a living. Credit protection is such that he's generally better off just throwing a rock through your window when you are not home and taking all your stuff. Lower risk, faster pay-off, lighter sentences if caught.
Not worth fretting over.
If you have ever owned a Windows box and had it connected to the internet, you ran the risk of somebody "pwning" it and using it for a phishing scam. When something like that happens, it pretty much comes down to you telling the ISP and the bank being defrauded, "hey, what can I say? I got hacked," and as long as you put a stop to the offending activity it's all forgotten about.
Likewise with my WiFi. If some joker was to use it for illegal activity, and questions were asked of me, I would simply point out that pretty much anybody could have been connected via my WiFi system during the time in question, and that would be that.
Besides, what criminal hacker would park in front of my house to use WiFi for his activity, when he can freely do the same thing from any of a hundred coffee shops and restaurants while running zero risk of raising suspicions, and enjoy a nice latte while he's at it?
Bah. I've been running an unsecured and unencrypted 802.11b/g network out of my house (in a city and right next to a large High School) for several years now. Anyone who detects the network could use the Internet for free. I figure if I ever see too high of an activity spike from freeloaders using it maliciously, I'll have to lock it down, but I seriously doubt that I will ever need to.
The range of WiFi still sucks enough that somebody wanting to actually utilize my bandwidth would pretty much need to park in my driveway or the street immediately in front of my living-room window while doing so... or at the very least hide a relay behind my garage (the only electrical source within 400' of my house without actually going inside.)
I've got a friend who lives in a remote suburb even more spread out than me, with nothing but private homes surrounding him, and he's gone to insane lengths to lock down his WiFi, to the point that it's a pain in the ass to legitimately add systems to the network. I keep asking him, "who the hell is even going to wardrive in this neighborhood, let alone actually use your connection?" He doesn't have a good answer, but he's terrified of the idea of running an open network.
IMHO, WEP and other security protocols made 802.11 okay for the corporate world to accept, but they also took a lot of the fun out of WiFi.
considering that half the population statistically has problems with fractions
Holy crap! That must be... what? About 28% or so?
Pathetic!
A fund for these people? Perhaps it should be called "People United to Save Society from Inapropriate Entertainment Selections."
Why bother even with that if Apple can supply you with an HD movie encoded with H264/AAC over the internet?
.. then I'm all over it, even if I need to buy a new Mac to do it. (And I probably would... My current media computer is a Mac mini, and while it handles raw HDTV signals via EyeTV just fine, the CPU can't decode H264 fast enough.)
Personally, I can hardly wait. I just had to send back a DVD of "The Aviator" to NetFlix because a scratch prevented the last half of the movie from playing. Now I gotta wait for them to mail me a new copy. If Apple can offer an on-demand video service which:
1. Has quality as good or better than DVD
2. Is faster than sending DVD's through the US Mail
3. Costs about the same
4. Has a similar variety of selections
Hrm. I'm not so sure it's a minority. Survey after survery shows over 60% of the American population rejecting evolution, and over 70% of the American Population stating that Intelligent Design should be taught in the class room.
I find these numbers very, very depressing.
I think those numbers are more damning to the history of science education than the masses themselves.
When I was in public high-school in the 80's, my education about evolution amounted to some badly-drawn charts of darwinian ascention, and having to sit through every goddamn dull minute of the famous Christian-bashing movie, "Inherit the Wind." The main lesson which one takes away from watching that movie is that evolutionists are smug assholes who feel better about themselves by belittling anybody who doesn't immediately embrace their enlightened teachings... very much like the preachers they are opposed to.
I learned more about evolution from PBS nature and astronomy specials then I ever did from my school. If it wasn't for my personal ambition to read about science on my own time, I probably could have also skated through college without ever understanding it.
So, given that most Americans regard evolution a, "the way athiests and communists think the mankind came about," without ever having been taught a sliver of the real science behind it (in spite of it being in the cirruculum of public schools nation-wide for about a century), it's not in the least bit surprising that they are open to hearing out somebody who offers and even slightly plausible-sounding alternative theory.
Science teachers and profs all over the country from every generation have nobody to blame but themselves for the current state of affairs. You won the fight to teach evolution, but then failed to actually deliver a proper education on the topic.
Intelligent Design requires that intelligence can *only* arise by design.
Huh.
One could just as easilly require that intelligence never arises by design.
So far, we know of one way to give rise to an intelligent object: Fucking.
The march of science has provided several other ways of assembling an embryonic human from the genetic material of two other people (all of them less fun than the old-fashioned way), but for the most part the only way we've ever been able to do it ammounts to: create an embryo, then watch what it grows into.
We don't know how to "design" an intelligence, therefore we don't know that intelligence can be designed.
Central Bank of Nigeria^H^H^HNew York
Central Bank of NigeNew York?
It wasn't meant to be a come-back, it was a silly "Triumph" homage.
If you don't get a joke, just let it go. No need to get angry or anything. Life is too short to be that miserable.
Do you have any actual objection to XML as a document format, or do you just fear change?
.xml over .doc any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
Personally, I'll take