No, the easiest and cheapest solution (almost stupidly so) is to set WPA/WEP on your access point and then post the network password on the wall of your business. The effort and cost involved is that of minutes and pennies and the reward (both in good will toward your customers and actual security) is nearly infinite in comparison.
Again, why do we make such exceptions when it comes to technology? If you show ignorance and stupidity in caring for your home, children, pets, automobile, home appliances, or other things the world is happy to apply those labels to you. Show the same lack of interest, attention, effort, and common sense toward technology and you're not stupid or ignorant. You're just "weighing your options and risks".
You would have difficulty with your insurance coverage if your house was robbed and they discovered that you didn't lock your doors and windows. Or even left them wide open. You are forced to maintain insurance on a variety of things (car, home, health) so that you don't impact other people for your own risk assessments. But when it comes to technology, we permit this "aw, shucks" mentality. Even though identity theft of various types and degrees carry just as much damage to people well beyond just the direct "victim".
Also, there is absolutely no viable analogy between protecting your network and "if I lock my door, they'll just break the window".
By the way, what are these "costs" that you're talking about? Every wifi router in the last decade allows some type of WPA/WEP/whatever encryption. There is no cost involved in setting up WPA/WEP and then putting a sign up in your cafe that says "THE WIFI PASSWORD IS 'P@SSWORD'". Problem solved. Are you really suggesting there is any cost/benefit comparison that would find that trivial action too costly for the return?
Why do we allow such ridiculous exceptions, where technology is involved? I'm not sure how you describe "I'm not taking security precautions and I don't care about the implications" as anything *BUT* stupid and ignorant.
The problem is the same as any other discussion of exercising your civil liberties (and the fourth amendment, etc). The average person says things like "you have to give up a little freedom to get some security" and "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?".
The average American believes that privacy is for terrorists and encryption is for people peddling child porn.
Yes, people "want answers to shit" and that's why they invent bullshit like meditation and numerology and astrology and chi and acupuncture. Because they don't care if they're logical or sensible answers. Just as long as they can put their primitive monkey-brains at rest.
The time and money would have had a greater return on the investment if they had sent everyone to a remedial course on the constitution and civil liberties, since law enforcement officers tend to know the least about the actual laws they're enforcing or abusing.
I keep hearing people talk about how the singularity will occur and the amount of processing power and storage will be so abundant that we can finally have artificial intelligence. My problem with that has always been that this implies artificial intelligence will never be anything more than producing vaguely human/intelligent *like* results based on sheer brute force.
Humans don't operate by brute force. You and I respond to humor with laughter, because we instinctively acknowledge something is humorous; not because our brains have brute-forced matching every possible reaction to something until we deduced that what we were presented with was some form of joke or humor and that the appropriate response was most likely to say "hah hah hah!" and slap our knee while smiling.
I'm an outsider to the entire field, but from my perspective, our loftiest goals are currently little more than to produce slightly more advanced versions of Disneyland animatronics.
The Turing test is fairly pointless, anyway. Whether or not it fools a human has little to nothing to do with intelligence (artificial or otherwise). I can put on a white coat and a stethoscope and fool a couple people outside a hospital into thinking I'm a doctor, but that doesn't mean squat. The Turing test is interesting on a philosophical level, but it seems an incredibly poor stick for measuring the progress of the AI field.
I'm not an expert on history, but I know enough that there are documented historical events in which governments (many governments, around the world) have instigated events and swayed support through subversive involvement. That isn't a conspiracy theory. It is documented, historically referenced fact.
However, does that mean that everything that occurs is evidence of yet another such manufactured event? Certainly not.
You need to apply critical thinking and also question authority in all situations. Skeptics question everything. Including other skeptics.
When musicians and other creative artists are given this same type of "choice", we say the labels are exploiting them. When lawyers and the legal system do it to people (and on top of that, people who have been criminally violated, and on top of *that*, children) -- we say "hey, at least you got *something*".
Frankly, the full amount awarded to begin with is obscenely small considering the type of violations we're talking about, here. It should have been enormous and painful. Enough so that the whole local government would have felt it -- including all the tax payers. After all, they are each culpable in culminating and supporting an environment all these years in which we systematically permit and enable and excuse the erosion of countless liberties (especially children, who are rarely in a position to assert and/or defend themselves against such violations -- be they fingerprinting for lunch tickets, dropping their drawers so a pervy teacher can find a lost pen, or spying on them in the privacy of their own homes through webcams).
As little tech as possible. In fifth grade, it'd be nice to make sure children can read, write, and perform basic math. Maybe have a little general history, civics, and science knowledge. None of these things should require anything beyond a spiral notebook, a pen, some books, maybe a few reel to reel projector films, and an engaging teacher.
Government agents infiltrate situations or causes to instigate and manufacture threats, violence, or confusion in order to promote or convince the rest of the country to condone action against said infiltrated group? Tell me it ain't so?
Also, in other news, the sky is blue.
It baffles me how people just accept the stories they are fed without ever questioning them. It is downright sickening to see how people just open their heads and let things just pour in, unchecked.
Next thing you know, someone is going to suggest that governments spread stories through the media outlets or back actual actions -- either of which promote suspicion of and urgency in dealing with foreign threats to justify taking action on a national level -- from sanctions to blockades and tariffs to military action against them....!
I've found that almost everything in the world is done better and more efficiently and with a better attitude when I am contracting with a private company to do it rather than relying on some tax-funded, indifferent, inefficient government waste of cash.
If I were a fire fighter and there were no lives at risk in your burning house and you had repeatedly disregarded the meager fee for our services (and therefore, a disregard for our value and my need to earn a living), my response to putting out your house might also be a big "fuck you".
Seriously. You can't even pay the $75 for service, but you want me to risk my fucking LIFE for your shitty unoccupied house? Fuck that.
If you can afford to buy a house and you can afford to pay a couple thousand a year in property tax on that house, you should probably be able to pay $75 for fire service. Especially since, I suspect, your insurer would refuse to cover you if you're not going to secure fire service.
Of course, people can fall on hard times and $75 can be a lot during those times. But you're still paying property tax and (probably) insurance, so if you can maintain ownership of a home, $75 *shouldn't* be the difference between eating human food or eating cat food, right?
Of course, in a town with only 2,000 people . . . we're probably only talking about a few hundred homes and we may be talking a far different amount of money involved for home ownership compared with the rest of the country.
Yeah, too bad I have to pay my bills in US Dollars and "basic human compassion" isn't a viable currency. It's not like their own city fire department refused to service them. They don't even HAVE a fire department. Hence the need to pay for the remote fire department services. No pay no service. Seems sensible, to me.
You make it sound like the other 99.999% of the country is like this one single case in a remote area. Like the fire department I pay taxes for in my city is going to roll up to my place or my neighbors and decide whether or not to help us based on what kind of car is in your driveway.
Of course, it's always a lot of fun to talk about how other people should perform their job for free. It's quite a different story if someone asks you to do what you do for a living, gratis.
So is religion, last I heard. A booming industry around a product is only proof that consumers buy into the hype; not that there is any validity to the hype. Snake oil salesmen have always counted on the ignorance of consumers to get rich.
All anyone has to do is calculate the actual sun exposure in their home. The number of panels and batteries to meet that. The life span of those panels (usually around 20 years) and then calculate their power bill for the next 20 years versus the cost of the equipment and installations (factoring in efficiency, which varies by location and installation). Chances are, they'll discover that they'll either be breaking even or actually losing money.
Your homes must be incredibly expensive, in Germany. I spent a lot of money on my home and the last thing I want to do is spend another, say, $40k to install enough solar panels and batteries to provide the energy I draw in my home all year. Not to mention, the cost of maintaining the system over the years.
I priced out a few panel installations as well as even simple solar water heating solutions on their own and in almost every instance, it appeared that the life span of the installation would expire by or just after the unit finally reached the "break-even" point and would start to save me money. That's an awful lot of work not to save any cash.
Not to mention, you're then stuck with giant ugly panels all over the roof of your house. Possibly obscuring your neighbors view. Possibly in violation of your HOA or even your city's laws.
You also have to factor in that outside of the sun-belt, a lot of places have sub-optimal exposure to enough sun.
I've priced a number of systems that are supposedly more energy efficient (water heaters using ambient solar heat, geothermal, etc) and various home roof solar units. When you factor in the expense of the equipment, installation, and maintenance -- they start to finally save you money right about the time that they have exceeded their life span (typically 20 years). In other words, it'd make just about as much economical sense to buy something fairly cheap and average.
On the other hand, if people want to make "green" industries more wealthy, they should go right ahead and install $50,000 worth of solar panels on their house and $10k worth of batteries in their basement.
Baby boomers are mostly in their 50s and 60s, so that quote is fairly stupid, anyway. There are far fewer of them in the industry to begin with, I suspect, simply because the industry boom (and therefore, population within the industry) didn't happen until that age group was well into their careers.
Not to say there isn't age-ism and I certainly hope I don't become involved in it (I have no aspirations for MBA or management - I like tech). Just that it seems a hard statistic to validate, considering the shift in popularity and numbers of the age groups over the course of the industry's growth.
Also, younger workers don't have all the job security suggested by that claim, since there's always someone willing to do your job cheaper and be worked over with less complaint somewhere else. We're in a global economy and that means that while you have a fixed cost of living defined by the country you live in, the employer has an entire planet to cull from in direct competition to you. Even if you're an eager twenty-two year old kid happy to sleep under his desk for two hours a day so he can work the other 22 for low wages.
By "credit", do you mean "cost of living"? The cost of living does tend to increase an average of something like three percent, but it seems to me that pay typically scales along with it, over time. (You may have a company-wide pay freeze this year, but a five percent or more raise next year, for example).
The problem seems to be that there is so much instability right now, that that next thing you might be moving to could be a sinking ship that takes a chunk of your career down with it, for awhile. The number of people I've seen move on from one place -- to another and another and another -- in quick succession is fairly stunning, recently. And these are seasoned professionals that any company would be fortunate to employ.
If stimulating debate over politics and religion are too "polarizing" (takes too much thinking?) and some topics are too banal, what exactly are the middle ground topics that keep 500M people addicted to FB?
Agreed. I have major hesitations about people who claim to be interested in a career path, but haven't really made any effort toward it until they enter an educational program. If you really have a passion for something, you've probably been self-motivated enough to have advanced to some point within the interest on your own, long before then.
Lie to the suckers and tell them that CS is the way to go, even if it isn't. When they start looking around at the real world and look at the $30-50k that they can make as a virtual slave in developing videogames versus he six figures they could make as a unix systems admin or something along those lines, they'll make the obvious decision and thank you for it.
Unless, of course, if what they mean by "I want to make videogames" is "I don't want to actually know any icky computer stuff; I just want to make models in Maya".
Slashdot Mirror
No, the easiest and cheapest solution (almost stupidly so) is to set WPA/WEP on your access point and then post the network password on the wall of your business. The effort and cost involved is that of minutes and pennies and the reward (both in good will toward your customers and actual security) is nearly infinite in comparison.
Again, why do we make such exceptions when it comes to technology? If you show ignorance and stupidity in caring for your home, children, pets, automobile, home appliances, or other things the world is happy to apply those labels to you. Show the same lack of interest, attention, effort, and common sense toward technology and you're not stupid or ignorant. You're just "weighing your options and risks".
You would have difficulty with your insurance coverage if your house was robbed and they discovered that you didn't lock your doors and windows. Or even left them wide open. You are forced to maintain insurance on a variety of things (car, home, health) so that you don't impact other people for your own risk assessments. But when it comes to technology, we permit this "aw, shucks" mentality. Even though identity theft of various types and degrees carry just as much damage to people well beyond just the direct "victim".
Also, there is absolutely no viable analogy between protecting your network and "if I lock my door, they'll just break the window".
By the way, what are these "costs" that you're talking about? Every wifi router in the last decade allows some type of WPA/WEP/whatever encryption. There is no cost involved in setting up WPA/WEP and then putting a sign up in your cafe that says "THE WIFI PASSWORD IS 'P@SSWORD'". Problem solved. Are you really suggesting there is any cost/benefit comparison that would find that trivial action too costly for the return?
Why do we allow such ridiculous exceptions, where technology is involved? I'm not sure how you describe "I'm not taking security precautions and I don't care about the implications" as anything *BUT* stupid and ignorant.
The problem is the same as any other discussion of exercising your civil liberties (and the fourth amendment, etc). The average person says things like "you have to give up a little freedom to get some security" and "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care about privacy?".
The average American believes that privacy is for terrorists and encryption is for people peddling child porn.
Yes, people "want answers to shit" and that's why they invent bullshit like meditation and numerology and astrology and chi and acupuncture. Because they don't care if they're logical or sensible answers. Just as long as they can put their primitive monkey-brains at rest.
The time and money would have had a greater return on the investment if they had sent everyone to a remedial course on the constitution and civil liberties, since law enforcement officers tend to know the least about the actual laws they're enforcing or abusing.
I keep hearing people talk about how the singularity will occur and the amount of processing power and storage will be so abundant that we can finally have artificial intelligence. My problem with that has always been that this implies artificial intelligence will never be anything more than producing vaguely human/intelligent *like* results based on sheer brute force.
Humans don't operate by brute force. You and I respond to humor with laughter, because we instinctively acknowledge something is humorous; not because our brains have brute-forced matching every possible reaction to something until we deduced that what we were presented with was some form of joke or humor and that the appropriate response was most likely to say "hah hah hah!" and slap our knee while smiling.
I'm an outsider to the entire field, but from my perspective, our loftiest goals are currently little more than to produce slightly more advanced versions of Disneyland animatronics.
The Turing test is fairly pointless, anyway. Whether or not it fools a human has little to nothing to do with intelligence (artificial or otherwise). I can put on a white coat and a stethoscope and fool a couple people outside a hospital into thinking I'm a doctor, but that doesn't mean squat. The Turing test is interesting on a philosophical level, but it seems an incredibly poor stick for measuring the progress of the AI field.
I'm not an expert on history, but I know enough that there are documented historical events in which governments (many governments, around the world) have instigated events and swayed support through subversive involvement. That isn't a conspiracy theory. It is documented, historically referenced fact.
However, does that mean that everything that occurs is evidence of yet another such manufactured event? Certainly not.
You need to apply critical thinking and also question authority in all situations. Skeptics question everything. Including other skeptics.
When musicians and other creative artists are given this same type of "choice", we say the labels are exploiting them. When lawyers and the legal system do it to people (and on top of that, people who have been criminally violated, and on top of *that*, children) -- we say "hey, at least you got *something*".
Frankly, the full amount awarded to begin with is obscenely small considering the type of violations we're talking about, here. It should have been enormous and painful. Enough so that the whole local government would have felt it -- including all the tax payers. After all, they are each culpable in culminating and supporting an environment all these years in which we systematically permit and enable and excuse the erosion of countless liberties (especially children, who are rarely in a position to assert and/or defend themselves against such violations -- be they fingerprinting for lunch tickets, dropping their drawers so a pervy teacher can find a lost pen, or spying on them in the privacy of their own homes through webcams).
As little tech as possible. In fifth grade, it'd be nice to make sure children can read, write, and perform basic math. Maybe have a little general history, civics, and science knowledge. None of these things should require anything beyond a spiral notebook, a pen, some books, maybe a few reel to reel projector films, and an engaging teacher.
Government agents infiltrate situations or causes to instigate and manufacture threats, violence, or confusion in order to promote or convince the rest of the country to condone action against said infiltrated group? Tell me it ain't so?
Also, in other news, the sky is blue.
It baffles me how people just accept the stories they are fed without ever questioning them. It is downright sickening to see how people just open their heads and let things just pour in, unchecked.
Next thing you know, someone is going to suggest that governments spread stories through the media outlets or back actual actions -- either of which promote suspicion of and urgency in dealing with foreign threats to justify taking action on a national level -- from sanctions to blockades and tariffs to military action against them....!
I've found that almost everything in the world is done better and more efficiently and with a better attitude when I am contracting with a private company to do it rather than relying on some tax-funded, indifferent, inefficient government waste of cash.
If I were a fire fighter and there were no lives at risk in your burning house and you had repeatedly disregarded the meager fee for our services (and therefore, a disregard for our value and my need to earn a living), my response to putting out your house might also be a big "fuck you".
Seriously. You can't even pay the $75 for service, but you want me to risk my fucking LIFE for your shitty unoccupied house? Fuck that.
If you can afford to buy a house and you can afford to pay a couple thousand a year in property tax on that house, you should probably be able to pay $75 for fire service. Especially since, I suspect, your insurer would refuse to cover you if you're not going to secure fire service.
Of course, people can fall on hard times and $75 can be a lot during those times. But you're still paying property tax and (probably) insurance, so if you can maintain ownership of a home, $75 *shouldn't* be the difference between eating human food or eating cat food, right?
Of course, in a town with only 2,000 people . . . we're probably only talking about a few hundred homes and we may be talking a far different amount of money involved for home ownership compared with the rest of the country.
Yeah, too bad I have to pay my bills in US Dollars and "basic human compassion" isn't a viable currency. It's not like their own city fire department refused to service them. They don't even HAVE a fire department. Hence the need to pay for the remote fire department services. No pay no service. Seems sensible, to me.
You make it sound like the other 99.999% of the country is like this one single case in a remote area. Like the fire department I pay taxes for in my city is going to roll up to my place or my neighbors and decide whether or not to help us based on what kind of car is in your driveway.
Of course, it's always a lot of fun to talk about how other people should perform their job for free. It's quite a different story if someone asks you to do what you do for a living, gratis.
Sounds like Christians make shitty business men, then.
Right, because a guy who won't pay $75 is totally going to pay $750.
So is religion, last I heard. A booming industry around a product is only proof that consumers buy into the hype; not that there is any validity to the hype. Snake oil salesmen have always counted on the ignorance of consumers to get rich.
All anyone has to do is calculate the actual sun exposure in their home. The number of panels and batteries to meet that. The life span of those panels (usually around 20 years) and then calculate their power bill for the next 20 years versus the cost of the equipment and installations (factoring in efficiency, which varies by location and installation). Chances are, they'll discover that they'll either be breaking even or actually losing money.
Your homes must be incredibly expensive, in Germany. I spent a lot of money on my home and the last thing I want to do is spend another, say, $40k to install enough solar panels and batteries to provide the energy I draw in my home all year. Not to mention, the cost of maintaining the system over the years.
I priced out a few panel installations as well as even simple solar water heating solutions on their own and in almost every instance, it appeared that the life span of the installation would expire by or just after the unit finally reached the "break-even" point and would start to save me money. That's an awful lot of work not to save any cash.
Not to mention, you're then stuck with giant ugly panels all over the roof of your house. Possibly obscuring your neighbors view. Possibly in violation of your HOA or even your city's laws.
You also have to factor in that outside of the sun-belt, a lot of places have sub-optimal exposure to enough sun.
I've priced a number of systems that are supposedly more energy efficient (water heaters using ambient solar heat, geothermal, etc) and various home roof solar units. When you factor in the expense of the equipment, installation, and maintenance -- they start to finally save you money right about the time that they have exceeded their life span (typically 20 years). In other words, it'd make just about as much economical sense to buy something fairly cheap and average.
On the other hand, if people want to make "green" industries more wealthy, they should go right ahead and install $50,000 worth of solar panels on their house and $10k worth of batteries in their basement.
Okay, you first.
Baby boomers are mostly in their 50s and 60s, so that quote is fairly stupid, anyway. There are far fewer of them in the industry to begin with, I suspect, simply because the industry boom (and therefore, population within the industry) didn't happen until that age group was well into their careers.
Not to say there isn't age-ism and I certainly hope I don't become involved in it (I have no aspirations for MBA or management - I like tech). Just that it seems a hard statistic to validate, considering the shift in popularity and numbers of the age groups over the course of the industry's growth.
Also, younger workers don't have all the job security suggested by that claim, since there's always someone willing to do your job cheaper and be worked over with less complaint somewhere else. We're in a global economy and that means that while you have a fixed cost of living defined by the country you live in, the employer has an entire planet to cull from in direct competition to you. Even if you're an eager twenty-two year old kid happy to sleep under his desk for two hours a day so he can work the other 22 for low wages.
By "credit", do you mean "cost of living"? The cost of living does tend to increase an average of something like three percent, but it seems to me that pay typically scales along with it, over time. (You may have a company-wide pay freeze this year, but a five percent or more raise next year, for example).
The problem seems to be that there is so much instability right now, that that next thing you might be moving to could be a sinking ship that takes a chunk of your career down with it, for awhile. The number of people I've seen move on from one place -- to another and another and another -- in quick succession is fairly stunning, recently. And these are seasoned professionals that any company would be fortunate to employ.
If stimulating debate over politics and religion are too "polarizing" (takes too much thinking?) and some topics are too banal, what exactly are the middle ground topics that keep 500M people addicted to FB?
Themselves.
Agreed. I have major hesitations about people who claim to be interested in a career path, but haven't really made any effort toward it until they enter an educational program. If you really have a passion for something, you've probably been self-motivated enough to have advanced to some point within the interest on your own, long before then.
Lie to the suckers and tell them that CS is the way to go, even if it isn't. When they start looking around at the real world and look at the $30-50k that they can make as a virtual slave in developing videogames versus he six figures they could make as a unix systems admin or something along those lines, they'll make the obvious decision and thank you for it.
Unless, of course, if what they mean by "I want to make videogames" is "I don't want to actually know any icky computer stuff; I just want to make models in Maya".
The popularity of this event is really blowing up, this year.