P is the set of problems that can be solved quickly.
I'd take issue with that, in that P is the set of problems that scales polynomially and for simplicity people like to call that "fast" or "quick". But it can still be computationally infeasible in the real world.
My gut level assumption from being "into" this stuff for decades is we're Probably going to find out that theoretically, yes P=NP, but all the practical P solutions of NP problems unfortunately end up with crazy coefficients, such that its useless in the real world.
An example might be, a typical NP fail would be something that scales where the exponent is the problem size. What I'm talking about is a magic way will probably eventually be found to solve that NP problem in poly time, its just the polynomial constant or linear coefficient might be like a billion times the age of the universe or something like that.
There's a lot of wailing and tooth gnashing that proving P=NP would instantly permanently break all cryptosystems, like all magically and stuff with no more effort or computation required than Harry Potter waving a wand. That sort of hucksterism is an entirely separate, social, not technical, problem.
Its strongly related to the "CS" vs "IT" division amongst "computer people". Its hard to find a topic that more strongly shows the separation.
The "IT" guys simply don't care (look at many of the posts in this article) but for the "CS" guys its proof would be pretty close to the ultimate "super bowl win" or "moon landing" or "date with a girl" moment.
am I the only person who does not get what this means?
The most non-mathematical way to express it, probably somewhat innacurately, is the fastest way to figure out if you can learn what "p=np" means is for you to figure out what "p=np" means and then see how long it took.
Its also used as a stereotypical filter... If you know what it is, you're somewhere on the "computer science" path. If you don't, even if you don't know it, you're on the "IT" "IS" or "code monkey" path. It's almost as accurate as asking someone if they've heard of a programmer named "Knuth".
If you're involved in any problems similar to any on this list:
For my entire life I've been told the paperless office is arriving and soon people will relegate printers, faxes, and xerox machines to wherever telegraph sounders and stock market tickers have been landfilled. For at least thirty years I've heard how in just short five years, people won't even remember the concept of a "printer" or a "photocopier".
The only casualty I've seen is the FAX. With a couple exceptions, for example, a couple years ago my health insurance required something FAXed to them... I'm like, who even owns a FAX anymore? Kind of like email, nothing ever arrives anymore but endless spam. I ended up having to snail mail it.
Yes, sir, I assure you that all our ATM machines are networked with the TCP/IP protocol, so yes, they are automatic.
Traditionally around here they were all SNA/SDLC over either analog multipoint or a short lived interval of digital multipoint or frame relay connections. I suppose times change...
No, you're right. I don't go to the bank to have a lovely little conversation with the teller about the weather and the local sports team.
Around here, its never, ever, lovely. Its all about propositioning for sales:
1) Would you like to "upgrade" to a checking account with higher fees and higher required balance and some useless features no one uses?
2) We're selling home equity loans, would you like to eliminate your net worth in exchange for a jet ski?
3) Have you talked to our co-located investment personnel about starting a retirement account?
4) Would you like to buy this overpriced useless piece of lead painted flair handmade by Chinese political prisoners to support America's (insert politically correct flavor of the day)?
I believe they hit me up for insurance, savings bonds, and credit card apps at least once in the past.
Avoiding talking to beautiful young woman bank tellers about the weather by visiting the ATM is NOT anti-social... the anti-social part is their boss making them recite ridiculous sales pitches from a script or else they get fired.
The *VAST* majority of game development, and an ever increasing amount of sales is now done on the iPhone. You might demand PC quality graphics for gaming, but there are millions and millions of other people who are more than happy with angry birds. Apple has won the console wars, and the landscape of game development has changed radically as a result.
One important part of the landscape, is get used to selling 4 million copies at 99 cents each, not 50K copies at $50 each.
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
A real VOIP engineer would falsify the SS7 logs. Why F around with hardware?
Or if you want to F around with hardware, get a surplus security dialer and a simple timer...
He might be a "VOIP engineer" in that he pulls cable and the employer doesn't want to pay him overtime, so he's now an "engineer". Or he might be a real switch engineer. I don't know.
trust me...when you can pull nearly 4 to 500 gigs of data off usenet a month and your ISP doesn't complain...you stay with 'em.
I don't know about your story...
How can you even consume that much content per month? the biggest bandwidth burner I can think of is.avi divxs figure 700 megs for a movie, that's something like 23 "two hour" movies per day... So we have a visual bandwidth problem here unless you watch multiple simultaneous movies. Also despite hollywood having a hundred year head start, you're going to catch up at the rate of about a year every two days, so you'll literally run out of mass-produced video content in about a year or so. Even if you only take 8 gig DL isos thats still over two per day, every day, and just scaring up the time to watch that much TV would be a stretch for most people, but I suppose its theoretically possible.
As a datapoint, I use "leafnode" and "brag" on some a.b ebook groups and some a.b.sounds.mp3 groups on a pretty decent feed and rarely if ever hit double digit gigs per month.
Furthermore that's only 500e9*8/30/24/60/60 about 1.5 megabits/sec which isn't really impressive for FiOS, not even very impressive for my cablemodem, isn't really all that impressive for my DSL a decade ago, isn't FiOS supposed to be like 100 megabits/sec or so?
The discomfort may legitimately arise from society's assuming that each individual reflects his group's average.
Abuse of science is the most common cause of mass murder.
The folks whom are most motivated to ignore the elephant in the room, are traditionally the folks stuck with the philosophy that individuals are inherently meaningless and unproductive and only groups (led by them, of course) have ever accomplished anything, all the usual collectivist/statist stuff.
Unfortunately that is precisely the thought experiment where group averages would have the highest impact...
Leading to all kinds of cognitive dissonance about both topics. At least by that group.
Some linuxes, like puppy, run in only 0.06 gig of RAM so no need to waste money upgrading perfectly-good hardware.
Sure as long as you have almost no applications installed and are doing next to nothing with your computer.
I can install a zillion LXC virtualized containers on my $100 desktop from surpluscomputers. Well, I've never tried more than 10 or so Debian clients so I don't know. If each virtualized linux costs me a couple dozen megs I'm all good. If each virtualized Win7 costs me a gig and $200 then I'm not all good.
Having a dozen or so virtualized hosts in a box is as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.
You put your quagga on each virtual host, link the virtual hosts using weird arrays of virtual bridges, and go BGP insane. Or OSPF insane. Or any ole routing protocol insane. Also a good time can be had with setting up a compute cluster, you get some pretty interesting experience with the software tools.
Reboot your router on the 1st of every month (so you remember how, etc). Better to find out it doesn't boot when you're ready to fix it, rather than 2am some random day. That would imply the 1st is an excellent day to upgrade to the latest everything, just in case you missed a security advisory, etc.
Then, anytime, log in and "ifconfig" and look at the second to last line of the external interface (last line is a blank). Probably, you initially set up the firewall with eth0 plugged into the LAN and got it all set up, then plugged eth1 into the cablemodem or DSL modem or wireless gadget or whatever while reconfiguring eth0 to the old firewall's inside ethernet config. So probably "ifconfig eth1 | tail -2 | head -1" is all you really need. Assuming your email is working, have a cron job run that nightly or whatever and get an email. Or put it in a nice little script, or have the MOTD updated to contain that hourly, or whatever.
I do VLANs on the inside for the phones vs everything else (yeah for linux support of dot1q), and some traffic routes from the inside webservers to the phone web interfaces, so its much simpler to watch the "outside" than the "inside".
Some of those "10 boring Boston area" companies sound pretty interesting to me, with a revenue model based on creating services valuable enough for people to pay for them.
From the article:
SMTP currently employs 31 people, most of them in Ukraine; four are based in Cambridge.
If the only American is the CEO, and maybe his secretary, the janitor, and a fourth person, I'm not thinking it's a "Boston area" company. Toyota has a better argument at being a local company, as they surely employee more locals at the dealership. My local McDonalds employs probably 30 people, admittedly all illegal aliens, does that make them a local area company?
Typical kids book report of 2030, assuming our native language remains The Queens English instead of switching to textspeak:
Before the Intertubes, there was a collection of nets, like PSN, Qriocity, and PS3 netflix streaming. Then the 'Inter' prefix was added by linking these nets altogether, and everyone was given the freedom to request all credit card numbers stored in the playstation network, from any computer out there.
The Android version of Firefox on your phone can suck down all of the bookmarks, history, passwords, and even open tabs. Then when you're back at your desk, you can push back the changes you've made while you're typing on your phone.
And if you delete or edit a bookmark on on machine, firefox sync will replicate multiple copies! Except when it deletes them all, of course. Essentially its a write-only filesystem which occasionally truncates.
Every time I've tried it, FF sync has been an absolute nightmare. xmarks, on the other hand, actually works.
Finally I understand we must all bow to worship the mobile smartphone and ignore legacy platforms, such as everything else with a CPU in it. But... Is there anyone out there with access to ONLY one full sized machine? I've found the killer app for xmarks is syncing every machine I have access to, not just my "one PC" to my phone. Aside from the fact I have no smartphone nor use for one.
And I'm also quite mystified why so many people are celebrating this. It took almost 10 years, trillions of dollars, the invasion of two countries (neither of which he was found in), and an untold number of lives lost to find a 6 foot 6 inch multi-millionaire (with diabetes!) living in a private luxury compound (in a well populated city) which was at least eight times larger then anything nearby. I don't think there is too much to celebrate here.
Some of the guys I work with were all high five-ing and cheering, and I'm like "dude, you know we lost, right?"... wake me when I can fly on an airplane without my wife and daughter being molested by govt agents, when we've got at least some of our civil rights back, when my tax dollars aren't paying for a concentration camp, etc. So the leader of the guys who won, is now dead. Who cares, as if its going to improve anything for us.
Roosevelt died right around the end of WWII... were any of the Germans dumb enough to celebrate, despite their obvious loss? Yeah we're totally screwed here, uh huh, but the boss of the other guys is dead, so lets party like its 1935 again?
Who knows, maybe they made a deal with him and he's now in South America to live out his days in (even more) luxury.
More likely gitmo, spilling da beans about everyone else in his org whom are still (temporarily) alive? Later to be buried at sea in the gulf of mexico? Like anyone is ever gonna know. I suppose if the back pages report about 20 times as many people of interest have been captured this month than normal, then we'll "know".
I read about this dude, he's on vacation, "trying to get away from it all" and after all this breaks he's complaining that he can't get away from it all.
Dude, your problem is your idea of "getting away from it all" is warped, in that you're twittering every 30 minutes when you see a F-ing airplane. Give your cellphone a burial at sea, then chill on a lawn chair (they have those in pakistan, right?) with a religiously appropriate mood enhancing substance and enjoy the solitude.
Bury that thing in concrete, push it into the ocean, or inject seawater. Every day, they admit its getting a little bit worse. Just a teenie tiny little itty bitty bit worse. It might take months, years, maybe, but we'll finally learn its a complete utter disaster. They are doing a good job of keeping themselves in the news by releasing a little bad news each day. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess. Oh wait, were we talking about Sony or the reactors here?
They're prohibited, by the way, though there is a healthy black market.
OK, we're narrowing in on it, is it 3rd world prohibited, like wave some cash and its all good, so everyone has a AK-47 even though no one officially has one. Or is it 1st world prohibited like the UK where only some of the crooks are armed and rest of the population is disarmed (aka victim)?
You're also broadcasting your Slashdot password through many ISPs' servers unencrypted
That has no technological meaning, unless your ISP is doing something beyond bizarre with a PC-server as a software routing platform and 10 megabit ethernet hubs, or maybe you mean a proxy server with two (or at least one) wifi interfaces instead of wired networks.
but that doesn't mean it should be legal for them to record it
With respect to service level analysis, line problem troubleshooting, billing by the byte or peak meg rate?. I think you mean disclosure to 3rd parties, well, thats complicated, even giving protocol analysis traces to vendors like Cisco in a trouble ticket is "questionable" although everyone does it if necessary to repair a service impacting bug.
Meh, it only takes a couple of seconds to configure Kismet (which apparently was one of the used applications) to only log the networks information (E/BSSID, channel, encryption, geographic location from GPS, etc) without logging the actual packages. And it doesn't take more CPU than logging everything.
They are broadcasting it, why shouldn't they listen? Never understood that whole issue. Now someone breaks into my house, cuts an ethernet cable, splices in a sniffer, then I'll be justifiably annoyed. But listening to a broadcast I'm intentionally transmitting out to the world as they drive by? Who cares.
Location data that is anonymous (or uses random IDs that frequently change) can't be abused easily
Sure it can, any time you are in the real world.
GOOG report shows "The anonymous owner of this phone supports rights for X people, where X is a minority opinion" therefore evil majority member guy beats up the anonymous phone's owner. I only used majority / minority language to gain support, its just as evil when swapped around or there is no majority / minority issue.
There is also a semi-anonymous failure mode. "The anonymous owner of this phone, which happens to be located at the Lat/Lon coordinates of this interview room, often visits websites which are mostly popular amongst people of the political persuasion generally opposite to yours". Result -> "I'm sorry to inform you we found a candidate more closely suited to the position, who would be a better fit with the team."
Slashdot Mirror
P is the set of problems that can be solved quickly.
I'd take issue with that, in that P is the set of problems that scales polynomially and for simplicity people like to call that "fast" or "quick". But it can still be computationally infeasible in the real world.
My gut level assumption from being "into" this stuff for decades is we're Probably going to find out that theoretically, yes P=NP, but all the practical P solutions of NP problems unfortunately end up with crazy coefficients, such that its useless in the real world.
An example might be, a typical NP fail would be something that scales where the exponent is the problem size. What I'm talking about is a magic way will probably eventually be found to solve that NP problem in poly time, its just the polynomial constant or linear coefficient might be like a billion times the age of the universe or something like that.
There's a lot of wailing and tooth gnashing that proving P=NP would instantly permanently break all cryptosystems, like all magically and stuff with no more effort or computation required than Harry Potter waving a wand. That sort of hucksterism is an entirely separate, social, not technical, problem.
Can anyone explain what all the fuss is about ?
Its strongly related to the "CS" vs "IT" division amongst "computer people". Its hard to find a topic that more strongly shows the separation.
The "IT" guys simply don't care (look at many of the posts in this article) but for the "CS" guys its proof would be pretty close to the ultimate "super bowl win" or "moon landing" or "date with a girl" moment.
am I the only person who does not get what this means?
The most non-mathematical way to express it, probably somewhat innacurately, is the fastest way to figure out if you can learn what "p=np" means is for you to figure out what "p=np" means and then see how long it took.
Its also used as a stereotypical filter... If you know what it is, you're somewhere on the "computer science" path. If you don't, even if you don't know it, you're on the "IT" "IS" or "code monkey" path. It's almost as accurate as asking someone if they've heard of a programmer named "Knuth".
If you're involved in any problems similar to any on this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems
and you've ever thought about scalability, then you're at least on the path to understanding P=NP
For my entire life I've been told the paperless office is arriving and soon people will relegate printers, faxes, and xerox machines to wherever telegraph sounders and stock market tickers have been landfilled. For at least thirty years I've heard how in just short five years, people won't even remember the concept of a "printer" or a "photocopier".
The only casualty I've seen is the FAX. With a couple exceptions, for example, a couple years ago my health insurance required something FAXed to them... I'm like, who even owns a FAX anymore? Kind of like email, nothing ever arrives anymore but endless spam. I ended up having to snail mail it.
Yes, sir, I assure you that all our ATM machines are networked with the TCP/IP protocol, so yes, they are automatic.
Traditionally around here they were all SNA/SDLC over either analog multipoint or a short lived interval of digital multipoint or frame relay connections. I suppose times change...
No, you're right. I don't go to the bank to have a lovely little conversation with the teller about the weather and the local sports team.
Around here, its never, ever, lovely. Its all about propositioning for sales:
1) Would you like to "upgrade" to a checking account with higher fees and higher required balance and some useless features no one uses?
2) We're selling home equity loans, would you like to eliminate your net worth in exchange for a jet ski?
3) Have you talked to our co-located investment personnel about starting a retirement account?
4) Would you like to buy this overpriced useless piece of lead painted flair handmade by Chinese political prisoners to support America's (insert politically correct flavor of the day)?
I believe they hit me up for insurance, savings bonds, and credit card apps at least once in the past.
Avoiding talking to beautiful young woman bank tellers about the weather by visiting the ATM is NOT anti-social... the anti-social part is their boss making them recite ridiculous sales pitches from a script or else they get fired.
The *VAST* majority of game development, and an ever increasing amount of sales is now done on the iPhone. You might demand PC quality graphics for gaming, but there are millions and millions of other people who are more than happy with angry birds. Apple has won the console wars, and the landscape of game development has changed radically as a result.
One important part of the landscape, is get used to selling 4 million copies at 99 cents each, not 50K copies at $50 each.
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
A real VOIP engineer would falsify the SS7 logs. Why F around with hardware?
Or if you want to F around with hardware, get a surplus security dialer and a simple timer...
He might be a "VOIP engineer" in that he pulls cable and the employer doesn't want to pay him overtime, so he's now an "engineer". Or he might be a real switch engineer. I don't know.
trust me...when you can pull nearly 4 to 500 gigs of data off usenet a month and your ISP doesn't complain...you stay with 'em.
I don't know about your story...
How can you even consume that much content per month? the biggest bandwidth burner I can think of is .avi divxs figure 700 megs for a movie, that's something like 23 "two hour" movies per day ... So we have a visual bandwidth problem here unless you watch multiple simultaneous movies. Also despite hollywood having a hundred year head start, you're going to catch up at the rate of about a year every two days, so you'll literally run out of mass-produced video content in about a year or so. Even if you only take 8 gig DL isos thats still over two per day, every day, and just scaring up the time to watch that much TV would be a stretch for most people, but I suppose its theoretically possible.
As a datapoint, I use "leafnode" and "brag" on some a.b ebook groups and some a.b.sounds.mp3 groups on a pretty decent feed and rarely if ever hit double digit gigs per month.
Furthermore that's only 500e9*8/30/24/60/60 about 1.5 megabits/sec which isn't really impressive for FiOS, not even very impressive for my cablemodem, isn't really all that impressive for my DSL a decade ago, isn't FiOS supposed to be like 100 megabits/sec or so?
The discomfort may legitimately arise from society's assuming that each individual reflects his group's average.
Abuse of science is the most common cause of mass murder.
The folks whom are most motivated to ignore the elephant in the room, are traditionally the folks stuck with the philosophy that individuals are inherently meaningless and unproductive and only groups (led by them, of course) have ever accomplished anything, all the usual collectivist/statist stuff.
Unfortunately that is precisely the thought experiment where group averages would have the highest impact...
Leading to all kinds of cognitive dissonance about both topics. At least by that group.
The woman buys ... nothing ...
Now you're confusing us with unrealistic examples.
TLDR:
Intelligence = (0.5) (genetics) + (everything else)
It seems the coefficient of 0.5 has been proven, but Myji Humoz claims the numerical value of (everything else) >> (genetics)
Hybrid vigor. Check your ancestors family trees.
Some linuxes, like puppy, run in only 0.06 gig of RAM so no need to waste money upgrading perfectly-good hardware.
Sure as long as you have almost no applications installed and are doing next to nothing with your computer.
I can install a zillion LXC virtualized containers on my $100 desktop from surpluscomputers. Well, I've never tried more than 10 or so Debian clients so I don't know. If each virtualized linux costs me a couple dozen megs I'm all good. If each virtualized Win7 costs me a gig and $200 then I'm not all good.
Having a dozen or so virtualized hosts in a box is as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.
You put your quagga on each virtual host, link the virtual hosts using weird arrays of virtual bridges, and go BGP insane. Or OSPF insane. Or any ole routing protocol insane. Also a good time can be had with setting up a compute cluster, you get some pretty interesting experience with the software tools.
Reboot your router on the 1st of every month (so you remember how, etc). Better to find out it doesn't boot when you're ready to fix it, rather than 2am some random day. That would imply the 1st is an excellent day to upgrade to the latest everything, just in case you missed a security advisory, etc.
Then, anytime, log in and "ifconfig" and look at the second to last line of the external interface (last line is a blank). Probably, you initially set up the firewall with eth0 plugged into the LAN and got it all set up, then plugged eth1 into the cablemodem or DSL modem or wireless gadget or whatever while reconfiguring eth0 to the old firewall's inside ethernet config. So probably "ifconfig eth1 | tail -2 | head -1" is all you really need. Assuming your email is working, have a cron job run that nightly or whatever and get an email. Or put it in a nice little script, or have the MOTD updated to contain that hourly, or whatever.
I do VLANs on the inside for the phones vs everything else (yeah for linux support of dot1q), and some traffic routes from the inside webservers to the phone web interfaces, so its much simpler to watch the "outside" than the "inside".
Some of those "10 boring Boston area" companies sound pretty interesting to me, with a revenue model based on creating services valuable enough for people to pay for them.
From the article:
SMTP currently employs 31 people, most of them in Ukraine; four are based in Cambridge.
If the only American is the CEO, and maybe his secretary, the janitor, and a fourth person, I'm not thinking it's a "Boston area" company. Toyota has a better argument at being a local company, as they surely employee more locals at the dealership. My local McDonalds employs probably 30 people, admittedly all illegal aliens, does that make them a local area company?
Typical kids book report of 2030, assuming our native language remains The Queens English instead of switching to textspeak:
Before the Intertubes, there was a collection of nets, like PSN, Qriocity, and PS3 netflix streaming. Then the 'Inter' prefix was added by linking these nets altogether, and everyone was given the freedom to request all credit card numbers stored in the playstation network, from any computer out there.
The Android version of Firefox on your phone can suck down all of the bookmarks, history, passwords, and even open tabs. Then when you're back at your desk, you can push back the changes you've made while you're typing on your phone.
And if you delete or edit a bookmark on on machine, firefox sync will replicate multiple copies! Except when it deletes them all, of course. Essentially its a write-only filesystem which occasionally truncates.
Every time I've tried it, FF sync has been an absolute nightmare. xmarks, on the other hand, actually works.
Finally I understand we must all bow to worship the mobile smartphone and ignore legacy platforms, such as everything else with a CPU in it. But... Is there anyone out there with access to ONLY one full sized machine? I've found the killer app for xmarks is syncing every machine I have access to, not just my "one PC" to my phone. Aside from the fact I have no smartphone nor use for one.
And I'm also quite mystified why so many people are celebrating this. It took almost 10 years, trillions of dollars, the invasion of two countries (neither of which he was found in), and an untold number of lives lost to find a 6 foot 6 inch multi-millionaire (with diabetes!) living in a private luxury compound (in a well populated city) which was at least eight times larger then anything nearby. I don't think there is too much to celebrate here.
Some of the guys I work with were all high five-ing and cheering, and I'm like "dude, you know we lost, right?" ... wake me when I can fly on an airplane without my wife and daughter being molested by govt agents, when we've got at least some of our civil rights back, when my tax dollars aren't paying for a concentration camp, etc. So the leader of the guys who won, is now dead. Who cares, as if its going to improve anything for us.
Roosevelt died right around the end of WWII ... were any of the Germans dumb enough to celebrate, despite their obvious loss? Yeah we're totally screwed here, uh huh, but the boss of the other guys is dead, so lets party like its 1935 again?
Who knows, maybe they made a deal with him and he's now in South America to live out his days in (even more) luxury.
More likely gitmo, spilling da beans about everyone else in his org whom are still (temporarily) alive? Later to be buried at sea in the gulf of mexico? Like anyone is ever gonna know. I suppose if the back pages report about 20 times as many people of interest have been captured this month than normal, then we'll "know".
I read about this dude, he's on vacation, "trying to get away from it all" and after all this breaks he's complaining that he can't get away from it all.
Dude, your problem is your idea of "getting away from it all" is warped, in that you're twittering every 30 minutes when you see a F-ing airplane. Give your cellphone a burial at sea, then chill on a lawn chair (they have those in pakistan, right?) with a religiously appropriate mood enhancing substance and enjoy the solitude.
Bury that thing in concrete, push it into the ocean, or inject seawater.
Every day, they admit its getting a little bit worse. Just a teenie tiny little itty bitty bit worse.
It might take months, years, maybe, but we'll finally learn its a complete utter disaster.
They are doing a good job of keeping themselves in the news by releasing a little bad news each day. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.
Oh wait, were we talking about Sony or the reactors here?
They're prohibited, by the way, though there is a healthy black market.
OK, we're narrowing in on it, is it 3rd world prohibited, like wave some cash and its all good, so everyone has a AK-47 even though no one officially has one.
Or is it 1st world prohibited like the UK where only some of the crooks are armed and rest of the population is disarmed (aka victim)?
You're also broadcasting your Slashdot password through many ISPs' servers unencrypted
That has no technological meaning, unless your ISP is doing something beyond bizarre with a PC-server as a software routing platform and 10 megabit ethernet hubs, or maybe you mean a proxy server with two (or at least one) wifi interfaces instead of wired networks.
but that doesn't mean it should be legal for them to record it
With respect to service level analysis, line problem troubleshooting, billing by the byte or peak meg rate?. I think you mean disclosure to 3rd parties, well, thats complicated, even giving protocol analysis traces to vendors like Cisco in a trouble ticket is "questionable" although everyone does it if necessary to repair a service impacting bug.
Meh, it only takes a couple of seconds to configure Kismet (which apparently was one of the used applications) to only log the networks information (E/BSSID, channel, encryption, geographic location from GPS, etc) without logging the actual packages. And it doesn't take more CPU than logging everything.
They are broadcasting it, why shouldn't they listen? Never understood that whole issue. Now someone breaks into my house, cuts an ethernet cable, splices in a sniffer, then I'll be justifiably annoyed. But listening to a broadcast I'm intentionally transmitting out to the world as they drive by? Who cares.
Location data that is anonymous (or uses random IDs that frequently change) can't be abused easily
Sure it can, any time you are in the real world.
GOOG report shows "The anonymous owner of this phone supports rights for X people, where X is a minority opinion" therefore evil majority member guy beats up the anonymous phone's owner. I only used majority / minority language to gain support, its just as evil when swapped around or there is no majority / minority issue.
There is also a semi-anonymous failure mode. "The anonymous owner of this phone, which happens to be located at the Lat/Lon coordinates of this interview room, often visits websites which are mostly popular amongst people of the political persuasion generally opposite to yours". Result -> "I'm sorry to inform you we found a candidate more closely suited to the position, who would be a better fit with the team."