If they want access to encrypted data, just give it to them. If they need it decrypted, that's their problem./quote.
My thought: "We have started work on decrypting the message. Lacking the private key, we expect it to be decrypted in 10^15 years. We'll let you know when it's done".
How many people who only take pre-calc statistics even consider what distribution they are looking at before blindly applying formulas?
Having taken both non-calculus and calculus statistics, I'd say that they're about the same. Both taught that you had to look at the data and play with it's representation a bit in order to find the best match. They gave us a lot of tools to look at the data in varying ways, in order to figure out what sort of distribution it was. Standard? Long Tail? Normal? Etc...
It is FAR easier to get good grades by being good at memorizing while having modest analytical abilities than it is to be great analytically but pedestrian at memorizing.
Returned college student, after 20 years of being out, I went directly into calculus. Managed to pass 1-3 with at least a B, first time through.
While I'm not busting the bell curve for either, I'm 'decent' at memorization and analysis. However, given time constrained tests, I found that if you didn't have the 'shortcuts' memorized you simply didn't have time to do more than 1-2 of the problems analytically.
And I'm talking as a guy who got points back by graphing *my solution* multiple times against the *official solution*, showing that, yes, they were identical. I just took the problem in a bass ackwards way while integrating, and while my solution took twice as many lines, my answer was just as valid.
If I had more time or reference materials, sure, I could find the quick/easy way to do it more consistently. But with no notes, references, and time limited? That's memorization more than analysis.
You can do a basic stats class for people who haven't had calculus.
Indeed. As a returning college student in a different degree field, due to shifting requirements I've had about 4 classes that I need to 'upgrade'. IE my 100 level physics class isn't good enough, I need the 200 level one. My 300 level 'calculus based' statistics class used calculus ONE DAY, and was otherwise mostly identical to my 200 level non-calculus based statistics course.
Other than it having been two decades since I took the earlier classes, the skills learned(and what little maintenance they received) made passing the latter courses easy.
Most people can understand a bell curve just fine without ever having taken a calculus class. Just because they can't derive the formula for the curve doesn't mean they can't understand the concept it represents.
I think this is the critical part to understand. 99% of people today are not going to be collecting statistics on a formal basis, however I'd argue that 99% of people need to understand how basic statistics work. Of those who are doing statistics formally, they will be using some sort of software package to automate most of the tasks, especially the calculus, and mostly need enough familiarity to recognize if something is off - IE the ability to recognize different distribution models.
The fact that I subscribe to netflix and not Hulu indicates that in select situations I'm willing to pay. My TV hasn't been on in approximately a year. I find television ads painful today, short of select superbowl ones.
Other than that I'd suggest that they get with the program - it's rapidly reaching the point that 'acceptable' ads will have a higher response rate simply because people will actually see them. They're generally cheaper to serve as well, no loading a multi-meg package in order to allow me to 'punch the monkey', as opposed to a simple graphic that's a few kilobytes. Not that I ever punched the monkey except by mistake. So there's another thing for acceptable ads: Followthrough might be higher because if they're clicking it's deliberate, not because a site is crafted to make mis-clicks easy.
What I'm unlikely to ever do is trust the sites or ad middlemen to police themselves. They'll surely try some scheme to bypass adblocker whitelisting. It will be ignored.
They're actively trying to bypass the black lists. It takes time to get onto the white list, and far less time to get removed if they violate it. As it costs money to get onto it, it's not something they'll want to lose.
Yes, the raison d'être of an ad is to attract attention.
I only have so much money though. I'd liken it to a game of shuffleboard - or perhaps a race to a cliff. The faster/closer to the cliff you get, the more points you earn. However, go over and you lose all the points.
As others have mentioned - Ad blocking wouldn't be such a big deal if the advertisers hadn't shat in their own pool and poisoned the viewing of it's audience. Ad-block for browsers. Taping and fast forwarding through ads. DVRs with skip forward. Hell, netflix and torrents.
I remember movies shown where, when I timed it, were over 50% ads. I could cook, and eat, a burger during the commercial breaks.
As Jerry mentioned, the choice is 'acceptable ads' for me, or NO ads. My policy is simple. You put up a 'I won't let you access the content without allowing ads' notice and I'll go elsewhere.
Where? I copy-pasted some of what was on adblockplus's page. They didn't have 'blipverts' in there. They would probably be covered under 'overlay ads'.
Except that they're not just charging to allow content through. They're charging to be able to pay people to actually check the content for acceptableness. People have already compared it to the various ratings organizations charging in order to rate material into the various grades.
Hell, I'll assert that I think that it's less the fee, because most companies would be willing to accept less money where they currently get no money, than it is the content rules. Not being allowed to use flash, sound, movies, blinking images, all the other annoying 'sight pullers' results in what they think are less effective ads. This is despite said distracting ads being precisely why we install ad-blockers in the first place.
That someone was willing to pay them should be the LAST factor for whether an ad is "acceptable" and unblocked by default.
How about you review their policy? Payment is pretty far down the list. Placement - can't disrupt reading flow Distinction - must be able to tell it's an ad. Size - Limited to 15% 'above the fold', IE visible on the screen when it first loads, and no more than 25% for scrolling "Specific Rules" Text ads designed with excessive use of colors and/or other elements to grab attention are not permitted. Static image ads may qualify as acceptable, according to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on the webpage. In-feed ads - For ads in lists and feeds, the general criteria differ depending on: Placement requirements, Ads are permitted in between entries and feeds.
Not acceptable:
Ads that visibly load new ads if the Primary Content does not change
Ads with excessive or non user-initiated hover effects
Animated ads
Autoplay-sound or video ads
Expanding ads
Generally oversized image ads
Interstitial page ads
Overlay ads
Overlay in-video ads
Pop-ups
Pop-unders
Pre-roll video ads
Rich media ads (e.g. Flash ads, Shockwave ads, etc.)
From a time management standpoint, I find the above rules acceptable. If you're willing to comply with them, I'm willing to be served by those ads. Also, by allowing Adblock to manage the list, I save everybody time over having to roll my own solution, which I used to do via proximatron and hosts file, way, way, back in the day.
Forbes says 'if you're not willing to see the ads here, then please don't come to our site'.
And thus I don't go to their site, they don't get to count my accesses as views, their 'readership' just went down in a small way.
Hell, last time I tried they delivered the 'turn off adblock' even when I had it turned off, with the goal of seeing what they considered 'minimal ads', so it seemed that they weren't interested in delivering content to me, period. Screw them.
I have 'allow acceptable ads' checked in adblock. You want to deliver ads to me? There's a program to get white listed. The primary reason I see for NOT being in that list is that you're unwilling to meet the standards. IE you want to keep delivering active, interrupting, ads that potentially contain malicious code. Nope.
You have not had modern electric motors or motor controllers for a century.
The modern electric motors are just refined versions of the old ones. You have a point about the controllers - the AC frequency sets the speed at which they rotate at, and changing the AC frequency is how you turn them from a static speed drive as used in industry into a variable speed drive used in cars. So yes, the question as to how long the controller will last is a valid question, but I haven't heard of them going out all that frequently. As you say, cooling is critical, but they do keep them cooled.
I shouldn't need an overhaul for at least 500,000 miles. When I bought the car I asked the service manager how far the VW TDI would go before it needed an overhaul. He said, "I don't know. We've never had to overhaul one."
Electric cars shouldn't need 'overhauls' either. We've had electric motors, individual ones, that use the same basic technology as is in an EV engine, running for darn near a century without needing major repair. You might need to open one up every few hundred thousand miles to replace the bearings and/or grease, but that should be about it. The drive train, minus the battery, should long outlast the interior.
As for the AC calling EVs a fad and Tesla disappearing, I figure that the worst we'll see for Tesla is it being bought by a major auto manufacturer and becoming their EV luxury line.
They would have about a 300 span (being generous) from "first visible via radio waves" to "went silent."
Unless they're transmitting signals into space in a deliberate attempt to be noticed.
Using the Arecibo observatory - the detection radius for the Earth, even at it's 'loudest', isn't even to Proxima Centauri. So in order for aliens to detect us, or presumably for us to detect aliens at the development level we were at, would need a radio observatory of unprecedented sensitivity to be looking in the right direction at the right time.
To be blunt - In order to communicate with aliens within ~100 light years, we would need a transmitter, probably in space, that's as large or larger than Arecibo, hooked up to a gigawatt level power source.
We'd need a good candidate to target before bothering with that. So - back to ever more sensitive telescopes, to find those 'earth like' planets.
I'm reminded of the Drake equations. You know, the one that's a series of odds/steps necessary for intelligent tool using life capable of talking to us happening?
If one figures that having a planet in the goldilocks zone is lottery level odds, then that the size of the planet being right is another lottery, that the composition is right, etc... Don't forget the relatively huge moon in proportion to the planet it orbits.
I can see the odds of such a planet being small enough that, on average, you wouldn't expect to find one in any given galaxy.
Plus, while a colonization sphere of even 1% of the speed of light would (relatively)quickly encompass a galaxy, the difference between covering a galaxy's distance and reaching a different one, on average, is greater than the difference between us reaching the moon and reaching Proxima Centauri.
That and they also have superior "stopping power" - causing the target to cease hostile actions(and often all actions) faster than with FMJ of the same caliber.
Citations for the AC: NYPD switched to them in ~1998. - ''It is the standard around the world in law enforcement to use hollow points,'' he said. LAPD switched ~1990 -" Nonetheless, the report found that in 1987, when only solid-nosed bullets were used, a slightly higher percentage of people died after being shot by police officers than in 1989, when hollow-point bullets were tested."
I'm sure someone in the Army has read the Hague Convention of 1899, Declaration III [yale.edu] which prohibits "the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body".
I'm USAF and I read it. However, I'll point out that the USA didn't sign that convention. Our non-use of expanding bullets is based on the Geneva 'no undue harm' standard, which bans weapons that cause unnecessary suffering, which is taken to be small explosive rounds(below.50 Cal), non-metallic(so it can't be seen via x-ray and metal detectors), and expanding bullets.
However, I once wrote a paper arguing that expanding rounds SHOULD be issued, showing that lethality and disability tends to be on a per-bullet basis, and people tend to be shot fewer times with expanding rounds. Ergo, you're more likely to survive and less likely to be disabled from being shot 3 times(average) with hollow points rather than the (average) 5 FMJ shooters tend to fire. The lower number of shots also indicates an increase in effectiveness per round, which means that hollowpoints would meet the 'military effectiveness' standard. Which allows darn near anything as long as it's the most effective, economical way to do something.
Nope, didn't miss that. You simply repeated the same experiment 'a case worth' of times. Same model Laptops, same production run of mice/keyboards. Hell the mice & keyboards were probably sequentially produced on the same line.
Then, as mindwhip mentioned - how noisy is your environment? My house is a lot quieter on the 2.4Ghz zone than an office with lots of laptops connecting wireless. For one, my network is in the 5GHz.
testing with my Mint install: Alt-F2 instead, then gnome-terminal. or start button ->terminal both bring up a command prompt, which will allow you to(depending on settings) download and execute a file.
assuming they're not stupid enough to run as root, they're at least limited to the user's rights unless an exploit exists; getting code to execute on the target machine is 90% of the work.
The button that typically has the picture of a window on it.
start->R gives you the ability to execute a command via type interface on windows. Use it to spawn a CLI shell. use CLI shell to write a script that spawns a process that downloads & executes the malware.
Yes, it's operating system specific. So freaking what? So isn't the malware I'm going to attempt to load. There's not enough linux users out there to matter, as the AC mentions. Crackers, like terrorists, like to target soft targets. I'm trying to compromise computers, not your specific computer, normally speaking.
I'm not an apple guy, so I don't know how I'd go about compromising one of them, given an open point.
True, but many (most?) PC laptops don't have enough range to use a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse.
And you're basing this on ONE test case? I don't know whether it was the logitech or the Dell stuff that sucked, but one of them must have.
Between several keyboards, mice, and laptops (logitech, microsoft, dell, and a few no-names), I've never had any real problem with bluetooth range. The 'whole house' seems to be the range - I only get problems from the furthest bedroom to the garage on the opposite side.
There have been a few once-off transmissions of cancer in humans; but no (known) ones under 'natural' conditions.
Indeed, with roughly 7 Billion humans and what you could consider 'intensive' monitoring of much of them, one should expect to see reports of just about everything, rarely.
A number of people have brought up the Tasmanian Devil - looking it up, it seems that Europeans are about twice as diverse as the Tasmanian devil. Polar Bears, Pandas, Gorillas all have much more diversity.
So it might be a possibility, like with the HeLa cancer cell line - which contaminated and took over quite a few other human cell lines.
But yeah, between the way we behave, modern hygene, and extra diversity, a transmissible cancer should be quickly controlled.
Slashdot Mirror
If they want access to encrypted data, just give it to them. If they need it decrypted, that's their problem./quote.
My thought: "We have started work on decrypting the message. Lacking the private key, we expect it to be decrypted in 10^15 years. We'll let you know when it's done".
That's my take on it. Algebra II? I hardly use it. Statistics? I encounter those every day.
How many people who only take pre-calc statistics even consider what distribution they are looking at before blindly applying formulas?
Having taken both non-calculus and calculus statistics, I'd say that they're about the same. Both taught that you had to look at the data and play with it's representation a bit in order to find the best match. They gave us a lot of tools to look at the data in varying ways, in order to figure out what sort of distribution it was. Standard? Long Tail? Normal? Etc...
It is FAR easier to get good grades by being good at memorizing while having modest analytical abilities than it is to be great analytically but pedestrian at memorizing.
Returned college student, after 20 years of being out, I went directly into calculus. Managed to pass 1-3 with at least a B, first time through.
While I'm not busting the bell curve for either, I'm 'decent' at memorization and analysis. However, given time constrained tests, I found that if you didn't have the 'shortcuts' memorized you simply didn't have time to do more than 1-2 of the problems analytically.
And I'm talking as a guy who got points back by graphing *my solution* multiple times against the *official solution*, showing that, yes, they were identical. I just took the problem in a bass ackwards way while integrating, and while my solution took twice as many lines, my answer was just as valid.
If I had more time or reference materials, sure, I could find the quick/easy way to do it more consistently. But with no notes, references, and time limited? That's memorization more than analysis.
You can do a basic stats class for people who haven't had calculus.
Indeed. As a returning college student in a different degree field, due to shifting requirements I've had about 4 classes that I need to 'upgrade'. IE my 100 level physics class isn't good enough, I need the 200 level one. My 300 level 'calculus based' statistics class used calculus ONE DAY, and was otherwise mostly identical to my 200 level non-calculus based statistics course.
Other than it having been two decades since I took the earlier classes, the skills learned(and what little maintenance they received) made passing the latter courses easy.
Most people can understand a bell curve just fine without ever having taken a calculus class. Just because they can't derive the formula for the curve doesn't mean they can't understand the concept it represents.
I think this is the critical part to understand. 99% of people today are not going to be collecting statistics on a formal basis, however I'd argue that 99% of people need to understand how basic statistics work. Of those who are doing statistics formally, they will be using some sort of software package to automate most of the tasks, especially the calculus, and mostly need enough familiarity to recognize if something is off - IE the ability to recognize different distribution models.
where you either pay or get junk.
The fact that I subscribe to netflix and not Hulu indicates that in select situations I'm willing to pay. My TV hasn't been on in approximately a year. I find television ads painful today, short of select superbowl ones.
Other than that I'd suggest that they get with the program - it's rapidly reaching the point that 'acceptable' ads will have a higher response rate simply because people will actually see them. They're generally cheaper to serve as well, no loading a multi-meg package in order to allow me to 'punch the monkey', as opposed to a simple graphic that's a few kilobytes. Not that I ever punched the monkey except by mistake. So there's another thing for acceptable ads: Followthrough might be higher because if they're clicking it's deliberate, not because a site is crafted to make mis-clicks easy.
What I'm unlikely to ever do is trust the sites or ad middlemen to police themselves. They'll surely try some scheme to bypass adblocker whitelisting. It will be ignored.
They're actively trying to bypass the black lists. It takes time to get onto the white list, and far less time to get removed if they violate it. As it costs money to get onto it, it's not something they'll want to lose.
Yes, the raison d'être of an ad is to attract attention.
I only have so much money though. I'd liken it to a game of shuffleboard - or perhaps a race to a cliff. The faster/closer to the cliff you get, the more points you earn. However, go over and you lose all the points.
As others have mentioned - Ad blocking wouldn't be such a big deal if the advertisers hadn't shat in their own pool and poisoned the viewing of it's audience. Ad-block for browsers. Taping and fast forwarding through ads. DVRs with skip forward. Hell, netflix and torrents.
I remember movies shown where, when I timed it, were over 50% ads. I could cook, and eat, a burger during the commercial breaks.
As Jerry mentioned, the choice is 'acceptable ads' for me, or NO ads. My policy is simple. You put up a 'I won't let you access the content without allowing ads' notice and I'll go elsewhere.
Where? I copy-pasted some of what was on adblockplus's page. They didn't have 'blipverts' in there. They would probably be covered under 'overlay ads'.
Except that they're not just charging to allow content through. They're charging to be able to pay people to actually check the content for acceptableness. People have already compared it to the various ratings organizations charging in order to rate material into the various grades.
Hell, I'll assert that I think that it's less the fee, because most companies would be willing to accept less money where they currently get no money, than it is the content rules. Not being allowed to use flash, sound, movies, blinking images, all the other annoying 'sight pullers' results in what they think are less effective ads. This is despite said distracting ads being precisely why we install ad-blockers in the first place.
That someone was willing to pay them should be the LAST factor for whether an ad is "acceptable" and unblocked by default.
How about you review their policy? Payment is pretty far down the list.
Placement - can't disrupt reading flow
Distinction - must be able to tell it's an ad.
Size - Limited to 15% 'above the fold', IE visible on the screen when it first loads, and no more than 25% for scrolling
"Specific Rules"
Text ads designed with excessive use of colors and/or other elements to grab attention are not permitted.
Static image ads may qualify as acceptable, according to an evaluation of their unobtrusiveness based on their integration on the webpage.
In-feed ads - For ads in lists and feeds, the general criteria differ depending on: Placement requirements, Ads are permitted in between entries and feeds.
Not acceptable:
Ads that visibly load new ads if the Primary Content does not change
Ads with excessive or non user-initiated hover effects
Animated ads
Autoplay-sound or video ads
Expanding ads
Generally oversized image ads
Interstitial page ads
Overlay ads
Overlay in-video ads
Pop-ups
Pop-unders
Pre-roll video ads
Rich media ads (e.g. Flash ads, Shockwave ads, etc.)
From a time management standpoint, I find the above rules acceptable. If you're willing to comply with them, I'm willing to be served by those ads. Also, by allowing Adblock to manage the list, I save everybody time over having to roll my own solution, which I used to do via proximatron and hosts file, way, way, back in the day.
Forbes says 'if you're not willing to see the ads here, then please don't come to our site'.
And thus I don't go to their site, they don't get to count my accesses as views, their 'readership' just went down in a small way.
Hell, last time I tried they delivered the 'turn off adblock' even when I had it turned off, with the goal of seeing what they considered 'minimal ads', so it seemed that they weren't interested in delivering content to me, period. Screw them.
I have 'allow acceptable ads' checked in adblock. You want to deliver ads to me? There's a program to get white listed. The primary reason I see for NOT being in that list is that you're unwilling to meet the standards. IE you want to keep delivering active, interrupting, ads that potentially contain malicious code. Nope.
You have not had modern electric motors or motor controllers for a century.
The modern electric motors are just refined versions of the old ones. You have a point about the controllers - the AC frequency sets the speed at which they rotate at, and changing the AC frequency is how you turn them from a static speed drive as used in industry into a variable speed drive used in cars. So yes, the question as to how long the controller will last is a valid question, but I haven't heard of them going out all that frequently. As you say, cooling is critical, but they do keep them cooled.
I shouldn't need an overhaul for at least 500,000 miles. When I bought the car I asked the service manager how far the VW TDI would go before it needed an overhaul. He said, "I don't know. We've never had to overhaul one."
Electric cars shouldn't need 'overhauls' either. We've had electric motors, individual ones, that use the same basic technology as is in an EV engine, running for darn near a century without needing major repair. You might need to open one up every few hundred thousand miles to replace the bearings and/or grease, but that should be about it. The drive train, minus the battery, should long outlast the interior.
As for the AC calling EVs a fad and Tesla disappearing, I figure that the worst we'll see for Tesla is it being bought by a major auto manufacturer and becoming their EV luxury line.
They would have about a 300 span (being generous) from "first visible via radio waves" to "went silent."
Unless they're transmitting signals into space in a deliberate attempt to be noticed.
Using the Arecibo observatory - the detection radius for the Earth, even at it's 'loudest', isn't even to Proxima Centauri. So in order for aliens to detect us, or presumably for us to detect aliens at the development level we were at, would need a radio observatory of unprecedented sensitivity to be looking in the right direction at the right time.
To be blunt - In order to communicate with aliens within ~100 light years, we would need a transmitter, probably in space, that's as large or larger than Arecibo, hooked up to a gigawatt level power source.
We'd need a good candidate to target before bothering with that. So - back to ever more sensitive telescopes, to find those 'earth like' planets.
I'm reminded of the Drake equations. You know, the one that's a series of odds/steps necessary for intelligent tool using life capable of talking to us happening?
If one figures that having a planet in the goldilocks zone is lottery level odds, then that the size of the planet being right is another lottery, that the composition is right, etc... Don't forget the relatively huge moon in proportion to the planet it orbits.
I can see the odds of such a planet being small enough that, on average, you wouldn't expect to find one in any given galaxy.
Plus, while a colonization sphere of even 1% of the speed of light would (relatively)quickly encompass a galaxy, the difference between covering a galaxy's distance and reaching a different one, on average, is greater than the difference between us reaching the moon and reaching Proxima Centauri.
Do you have the problems I have with polar bears high on PCP breaking in that I do?
That and they also have superior "stopping power" - causing the target to cease hostile actions(and often all actions) faster than with FMJ of the same caliber.
Citations for the AC:
NYPD switched to them in ~1998. - ''It is the standard around the world in law enforcement to use hollow points,'' he said.
LAPD switched ~1990 -" Nonetheless, the report found that in 1987, when only solid-nosed bullets were used, a slightly higher percentage of people died after being shot by police officers than in 1989, when hollow-point bullets were tested."
I'm sure someone in the Army has read the Hague Convention of 1899, Declaration III [yale.edu] which prohibits "the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body".
I'm USAF and I read it. However, I'll point out that the USA didn't sign that convention. Our non-use of expanding bullets is based on the Geneva 'no undue harm' standard, which bans weapons that cause unnecessary suffering, which is taken to be small explosive rounds(below .50 Cal), non-metallic(so it can't be seen via x-ray and metal detectors), and expanding bullets.
However, I once wrote a paper arguing that expanding rounds SHOULD be issued, showing that lethality and disability tends to be on a per-bullet basis, and people tend to be shot fewer times with expanding rounds. Ergo, you're more likely to survive and less likely to be disabled from being shot 3 times(average) with hollow points rather than the (average) 5 FMJ shooters tend to fire. The lower number of shots also indicates an increase in effectiveness per round, which means that hollowpoints would meet the 'military effectiveness' standard. Which allows darn near anything as long as it's the most effective, economical way to do something.
Nope, didn't miss that. You simply repeated the same experiment 'a case worth' of times. Same model Laptops, same production run of mice/keyboards. Hell the mice & keyboards were probably sequentially produced on the same line.
Then, as mindwhip mentioned - how noisy is your environment? My house is a lot quieter on the 2.4Ghz zone than an office with lots of laptops connecting wireless. For one, my network is in the 5GHz.
testing with my Mint install: Alt-F2 instead, then gnome-terminal.
or start button ->terminal
both bring up a command prompt, which will allow you to(depending on settings) download and execute a file.
assuming they're not stupid enough to run as root, they're at least limited to the user's rights unless an exploit exists; getting code to execute on the target machine is 90% of the work.
What's a “start button”?
The button that typically has the picture of a window on it.
start->R gives you the ability to execute a command via type interface on windows. Use it to spawn a CLI shell. use CLI shell to write a script that spawns a process that downloads & executes the malware.
Yes, it's operating system specific. So freaking what? So isn't the malware I'm going to attempt to load. There's not enough linux users out there to matter, as the AC mentions. Crackers, like terrorists, like to target soft targets. I'm trying to compromise computers, not your specific computer, normally speaking.
I'm not an apple guy, so I don't know how I'd go about compromising one of them, given an open point.
Really? With just keystrokes and mouse moves? With no feedback about where the keystrokes and clicks end up?
start-button->cmd->ftp(malware site & file)->execute downloaded malicious file.
as long as the start button isn't actually up when you do it, it should have a reasonable chance of success.
True, but many (most?) PC laptops don't have enough range to use a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse.
And you're basing this on ONE test case? I don't know whether it was the logitech or the Dell stuff that sucked, but one of them must have.
Between several keyboards, mice, and laptops (logitech, microsoft, dell, and a few no-names), I've never had any real problem with bluetooth range. The 'whole house' seems to be the range - I only get problems from the furthest bedroom to the garage on the opposite side.
There have been a few once-off transmissions of cancer in humans; but no (known) ones under 'natural' conditions.
Indeed, with roughly 7 Billion humans and what you could consider 'intensive' monitoring of much of them, one should expect to see reports of just about everything, rarely.
A number of people have brought up the Tasmanian Devil - looking it up, it seems that Europeans are about twice as diverse as the Tasmanian devil. Polar Bears, Pandas, Gorillas all have much more diversity.
So it might be a possibility, like with the HeLa cancer cell line - which contaminated and took over quite a few other human cell lines.
But yeah, between the way we behave, modern hygene, and extra diversity, a transmissible cancer should be quickly controlled.