While I'm sure hypothetical danger exists, IMHO this needs to be put into perspective. A rabbit is carrying around a bit of radioactive material, though not enough to cause it too many problems obviously. Its droppings contain a tiny fraction of that, yet our equipment is sensitive enough to detect it, and our standards classify it as dangerous. Remember that humans are slightly larger than rabbits, so a rabbit is going to suffer a lot more than we would from the same amount of radioactive material.
Given nuclear paranoia and airport security, you have to seriously wonder why flu shots aren't mandatory and cigarettes aren't banned. (Really, there are excellent civil liberty arguments for the latter two, but they apparently don't apply for the former two...) IIRC the cut-off for "too expensive" for recommended vaccines and such is around $30,000 per life saved. How much is being spent on this rabbit I wonder?
I would assume they used Great Britain because they're culturally more similar. Japan, for example, has a longer life expectancy, but there are enough cultural differences that you can't honestly attribute an increased life expectancy to differences in healthcare systems.
Plus you start needing to account for genetic and pathogen differences. I.e. if you pick a country in Africa with high rates of malaria and sickle cell anemia, they'll have a lower life expectancy regardless of how good their healthcare system is.
Well, the numbers are arbitrary but I think they are reasonable and explain the point well enough. I'm comparing ad-free websites to ad-supported websites regarding battery life, not whether the sites would exist without ads or not. My goal is to point out that websites often sacrifice great amounts of energy and time efficiency for marginal improvements in ad delivery, which designers should at least be conscious of when designing them in such a way.
Also, it's pedantic, but the word free means "costing nothing", which categorically excludes ad-supported content that has non-monetary costs (namely attention). The spelling of the marketing requires exclamation points and an asterisk in addition to being in all caps. =P
Well, even static image ads require more power. First, there's the extra network overhead. Second, the extra rendering. Third, the user has to scroll around the ads. Fourth, websites are formatted/paginated to make the user look at as many ads as possible, so more page loads and more time wasted.
In other words, if a site takes 3 seconds to load without ads, and 30 seconds to read the content, then your wireless adapter is running for ~3 seconds, and the screen is on for 33 seconds. With ads the site might take 4.5 seconds to load each of two pages and the user might spend 60 seconds on each scrolling around the 900 pixel header + ads on the top of the page, and scrolling to read the text squeezed between vertical ads. So the wireless adapter is going for three times as long, and the screen for four times as long. The CPU will need to render for two page loads plus a lot of scrolling as well.
IMHO, privacy concerns like this (and panopticlick) are a primary reason I prefer my browser to not send the USER_AGENT header. It's optional according to the HTTP spec, and most sites work fine without it. For those that don't, my useragent is a phrase, such as "I am not a script" for Wikipedia. Very occasionally I have to set a real one, so I just use WebPositive's.
In any case, I see no benefit to me, as a user, for a site to know my browser and operating system. Perhaps not knowing will cause them to write their webpages to standards rather than to specific browsers.
Well, at least it forces you to own up to your own bias. Plus it's useful if you want to learn about the other side. Even people that are mostly wrong usually have a few good points, so it's a good way of knowing the shortcomings of your own position.
From TFA apparently he wants to be able to use (Omega) to name a variable, and ÷ (Division Sign) as an operator. My interpretation of his opinion is that a descriptive name for a variable is inferior to using greek letters, and that using mathematical operators that take an extra five or so keystrokes are superior to the standard +-*/^ set that people have become accustomed to.
IMHO, if you use more than 26 single letter variables something is seriously wrong, and trying to make mathematical formulas pretty in code isn't practical without a whole lot of unneeded complexity. Sure, having an eight line formula with fractions within fractions and tiny exponent numbers might be (slightly) better than five layers of parenthesis, but you aren't going to get that with just unicode (AFAIK), and the pain of dealing with a slightly misplaced term confounding the unicode to math converter isn't one I'd like to experience. Unicode or even LaTeX code for comments might be useful though.
IMHO, we need some celebrity to decry airport scanners as a cause of autism. That's highly unlikely, but a lot more plausible than most of the stuff they're blaming. In any case, it'll put the TSA in a pretty rough spot. I'm sure it'll demoralize all but the sickest TSA workers to be forced to essentially molest children all day. Plus it'll put some much needed attention on these useless practices.
My first thought was about the impractically of leaving the male end sticking out as well. Not all laptops orient their USB ports the same way nor put them in the same place. Just imagine someone trying to use this with a vertically oriented port on the front of the laptop... Plus the fact it sticks out makes it highly vulnerable to physical damage, and it'll probably rust eventually. How hard would it have been to just use a coupler on the drive first?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
IMHO, it's more likely this was an honest bug since we all know how skilled Verizon is at basic math. Since it wasn't costing* them money they probably never had much incentive to make fixing it a priority. OTOH, it does show a pretty serious lack of concern for their customers as people rather than revenue-generating-database-entries.
* By "cost" it probably made them money, but they also lost customers who got angry and probably spent quite a bit on support/billing phone calls. So it's not all "profit".
Not necessarily. Someone might invent such a time machine tomorrow. Reality doesn't have a tech tree like a game, it's very likely that we could develop a few things "out of order". Plus, who is to say that our technology isn't right on the verge of that discovery, it's not like anyone knows the prerequisites for the "breakthrough". Fifty years ago people would've expected us to have fusion reactors, a colony on Mars and android servants by this point, but Google would probably blow their mind. The future has a way of being unpredictable.
So, in other words, she's willfully committing copyright infringement for profit with a ridiculous number of sales? Aren't the fines for commercial infringement quite high? The sites she ripped stories from should sue for the penalties and for her hypothetical revenue. Sucks for her if her collections department can't keep up, a sale is a sale so far as liability is concerned. (All IMHO, IANAL.)
Perhaps it's higher res if you average the number of photoceptors over the whole retina. The fovea handles your sharp vision, covers about four square inches at arm's length, and has more than 200,000 photoceptors. Throw in all the visual processing your nervous system does and I'd expect far greater than the 50,000 dpi resolution afforded by basic anatomy. There's also the fact that your photoceptors aren't perfectly aligned to pixels on the screen, so it's useful to increase the screen's resolution even beyond what the eye can see.
So you're saying that disabling the page file is a bad idea if you use most of the memory you have? AFAIK that's the most obvious trade off with disabling the paging file. Hence why everyone says "if you have enough memory".
OTOH, if your computer has 4 GB of RAM and you rarely, if ever, use over 800 MB of physical memory, then there is never a reason to page anything to disk. Windows will still preemptively page stuff there, in some idiotic fear that those 3.2 GB are going to get used sometime soon, so there's extra disk activity. While generally innocuous, that extra activity has an annoying habit of cutting into battery life (let's periodically spin up the HDD for no useful reason!), or happening when you're already disk IO saturated.
It all comes down to your usage, hence why it's a "tweak" and not the default. I'm sure people make the mistake of not examining their needs (especially if they fail to account for the disk cache), but, yeah, that's what happens if you do cargo cult tweaks. At the other extreme, there still seem to be a lot of people that think "free memory" makes your computer (or phone) run faster. So they install extra RAM, memory defraggers, decrease disk cache size, and increase swap size and swappiness so they live at 2-3 GB of free memory rather than 1 GB. Free memory is wasted memory, and until RAM is filled up there's no logical reason to use the (very slow) disk for short term storage.
Anonymity on a social networking site is rather paradoxic. HTTPS prevents a shady classmate from sniffing your facebook login details when you log in during class on open wifi. (Substitute a coffee shop if you aren't a slacker student.)
Personally I like to use the EFF's "HTTPS Everywhere" to keep as much of my facebook activity as private as possible. While there's nothing on my facebook page that I particularly care about, I can't say the same for my friends whose profiles I may visit.
In 2008 the poorest 50% of the population paid 2.7% of the income tax revenue. The next 25% paid 11.0%. The top 10% paid 69.9%, with the top 1% contributing 38.0%.
In other words, poor people hardly pay any income tax. Sales tax and such depends on how much you spend, and since poor people can't buy as much I highly doubt the figures are much different there. Living in America is 700 times more expensive for a wealthy person than the average person. (I'm not saying that's how it should or shouldn't be, just pointing out that rich people do pay taxes.)
Complete economic collapse? That hardly seems likely, or even possible for a sustained period. Realistically, the US losing 3.7% of its exports and 10.5% of its imports will hurt a lot. China losing the ~40% (IIRC) of their GDP that comes from trade with western nations will be catastrophic for them. Plus there's the fact that the US exports food to China. OTOH, you should play nice when you're the weaker player.
First off, why are we linking to a frame/url shortener rather than directly to the article?
But blind extrapolation tells us nothing. If you're an economist then you think exponential growth can happen indefinitely. If you're a biologist you know that populations follow a sigmoidal curve if they approach their carrying capacity. For humans, our population curve will likely fall somewhere in between.
The most developed nations are already at zero population growth, and the developing world isn't going to magically become developed if the resources simply aren't there. For those countries, maintaining an agrarian birth rate despite modern medicine and an economy transitioning away from food production is a good way to ensure lasting poverty. That's a big problem for them, but not for English speaking Internet users. Or, more precisely, it's not "our" problem unless we want to involve ourselves in their affairs (for better or for worse).
Is our 2D perception natural, or is it simply because we deal with 2D media most of the time? Television is 2D, books are 2D, computers are 2D, chalkboards are 2D, paper is 2D, text is 2D, etc.. Since these are all limited by technology, perhaps removal of the technological limitation will allow people to maintain the third dimension in everything that they do. It's probably not even healthy to be constantly exposed to that artificial limitation, perhaps that's why so many people have differing degrees of myopia between eyes.
The American team used a combined set of observations: One 11-year-long set consisted of 122 measurements made by the team, while the other set was 4.3 years long and consisted of 119 measurements published by the consortium.
[The Swiss group] used only their own observations, but they expanded their published data set from what the U.S. group included in its analysis to a length of 6.5 years and 180 measurements.
So, the American study had 241 observations over at least 11 years and the data is peer reviewed and published. The Swiss apparently are refuting that by ignoring half the data and adding 61 data points from 2.2 years that haven't been peer reviewed. Obviously they're a reputable group, but I'll wait for them to look at *all* of the data available to them, preferably published data, before just taking them at their word. Doubly so for a negative finding since alpha (chance of a false positive) tends to be a lot smaller than beta (chance of a false negative).
Water is inorganic, oils of all types are organic. The term "organic" basically means it has carbon in it. It has little bearing on whether or not things grow in it if you leave it out.
I have to wonder. Surely these vehicles will have blackboxes that record the last minute or so of sensor data in case there is an accident. The driving program would be absolutely consistent with the law and best driving practices. It would be fairly simple to blame the other vehicle as being responsible for the accident, with a fancy 3D reconstruction (according to what the computer perceived, not necessarily exactly consistent with reality) and complete rationale for every action the computer took. The human would only have their word.
Of course, this won't happen until computers are better drivers than most humans. Once that happens, having a human driver will become the liability. After all, juries like flashy visuals and I suspect they'll favor "computers don't make mistakes" rather than distrust of new technology. Of course, they'll all think that they personally are a better driver than a computer, but that confidence doesn't extend to other people. We've all seen bad drivers and the human tendency is to think we have control over our life, so an accident was obviously caused by the crappy driver making a mistake.
That's not quite how our immune system works, but I agree with the idea. IMHO a good measure would be to enforce a whitelist for system changes and permitted executables. Wanna change the wallpaper, that's whitelisted for "*" so go ahead. Wanna add an autorun, oops, it's not on the list, the registry key (or shortcut, or service, or system task, or line in a config file, etc.) cannot be created. Large businesses can run their own whitelist, home users can pick one (or none) that they like, e.g. the "keep crapware from slowing stuff down" list, or the "don't let me change/delete anything important since I'm a noob" list.
I think it's great that Comcast is trying to address the bot problem. But they picked a rather poor method IMHO. Surely it's obvious that you can't rely on the infected computer to relay the message... All the bot has to do is run a filtering proxy server and these HTTP insertions are long gone. The best solution would be to use another communication device, i.e. a telephone or letter. Besides, you may have a little old lady that only uses (non-ISP) e-mail twice a month, which might not get the message.
My own ISP does something similar, but a little better (again, IMHO). A few weeks ago I opened my wireless network because one of my devices was choking on WPA2. Sure enough, someone must have hopped on it and sent a fair bit of spam. So my ISP killed my connection and changed the DNS server so everything resolved to their "Call tech support now" page (although it took a while to for me to figure that out since I wasn't using their DNS server, but I digress). A quick call had me talking with a representative with an explanation, and I was reconnected. (Obviously I re-enabled WPA2 and blocked/logged port 25 at the router in case I really did get rooted.)
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While I'm sure hypothetical danger exists, IMHO this needs to be put into perspective. A rabbit is carrying around a bit of radioactive material, though not enough to cause it too many problems obviously. Its droppings contain a tiny fraction of that, yet our equipment is sensitive enough to detect it, and our standards classify it as dangerous. Remember that humans are slightly larger than rabbits, so a rabbit is going to suffer a lot more than we would from the same amount of radioactive material.
Given nuclear paranoia and airport security, you have to seriously wonder why flu shots aren't mandatory and cigarettes aren't banned. (Really, there are excellent civil liberty arguments for the latter two, but they apparently don't apply for the former two...) IIRC the cut-off for "too expensive" for recommended vaccines and such is around $30,000 per life saved. How much is being spent on this rabbit I wonder?
I would assume they used Great Britain because they're culturally more similar. Japan, for example, has a longer life expectancy, but there are enough cultural differences that you can't honestly attribute an increased life expectancy to differences in healthcare systems.
Plus you start needing to account for genetic and pathogen differences. I.e. if you pick a country in Africa with high rates of malaria and sickle cell anemia, they'll have a lower life expectancy regardless of how good their healthcare system is.
Well, the numbers are arbitrary but I think they are reasonable and explain the point well enough. I'm comparing ad-free websites to ad-supported websites regarding battery life, not whether the sites would exist without ads or not. My goal is to point out that websites often sacrifice great amounts of energy and time efficiency for marginal improvements in ad delivery, which designers should at least be conscious of when designing them in such a way.
Also, it's pedantic, but the word free means "costing nothing", which categorically excludes ad-supported content that has non-monetary costs (namely attention). The spelling of the marketing requires exclamation points and an asterisk in addition to being in all caps. =P
Well, even static image ads require more power. First, there's the extra network overhead. Second, the extra rendering. Third, the user has to scroll around the ads. Fourth, websites are formatted/paginated to make the user look at as many ads as possible, so more page loads and more time wasted.
In other words, if a site takes 3 seconds to load without ads, and 30 seconds to read the content, then your wireless adapter is running for ~3 seconds, and the screen is on for 33 seconds. With ads the site might take 4.5 seconds to load each of two pages and the user might spend 60 seconds on each scrolling around the 900 pixel header + ads on the top of the page, and scrolling to read the text squeezed between vertical ads. So the wireless adapter is going for three times as long, and the screen for four times as long. The CPU will need to render for two page loads plus a lot of scrolling as well.
IMHO, privacy concerns like this (and panopticlick) are a primary reason I prefer my browser to not send the USER_AGENT header. It's optional according to the HTTP spec, and most sites work fine without it. For those that don't, my useragent is a phrase, such as "I am not a script" for Wikipedia. Very occasionally I have to set a real one, so I just use WebPositive's.
In any case, I see no benefit to me, as a user, for a site to know my browser and operating system. Perhaps not knowing will cause them to write their webpages to standards rather than to specific browsers.
Well, at least it forces you to own up to your own bias. Plus it's useful if you want to learn about the other side. Even people that are mostly wrong usually have a few good points, so it's a good way of knowing the shortcomings of your own position.
From TFA apparently he wants to be able to use (Omega) to name a variable, and ÷ (Division Sign) as an operator. My interpretation of his opinion is that a descriptive name for a variable is inferior to using greek letters, and that using mathematical operators that take an extra five or so keystrokes are superior to the standard +-*/^ set that people have become accustomed to.
IMHO, if you use more than 26 single letter variables something is seriously wrong, and trying to make mathematical formulas pretty in code isn't practical without a whole lot of unneeded complexity. Sure, having an eight line formula with fractions within fractions and tiny exponent numbers might be (slightly) better than five layers of parenthesis, but you aren't going to get that with just unicode (AFAIK), and the pain of dealing with a slightly misplaced term confounding the unicode to math converter isn't one I'd like to experience. Unicode or even LaTeX code for comments might be useful though.
IMHO, we need some celebrity to decry airport scanners as a cause of autism. That's highly unlikely, but a lot more plausible than most of the stuff they're blaming. In any case, it'll put the TSA in a pretty rough spot. I'm sure it'll demoralize all but the sickest TSA workers to be forced to essentially molest children all day. Plus it'll put some much needed attention on these useless practices.
My first thought was about the impractically of leaving the male end sticking out as well. Not all laptops orient their USB ports the same way nor put them in the same place. Just imagine someone trying to use this with a vertically oriented port on the front of the laptop... Plus the fact it sticks out makes it highly vulnerable to physical damage, and it'll probably rust eventually. How hard would it have been to just use a coupler on the drive first?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
IMHO, it's more likely this was an honest bug since we all know how skilled Verizon is at basic math. Since it wasn't costing* them money they probably never had much incentive to make fixing it a priority. OTOH, it does show a pretty serious lack of concern for their customers as people rather than revenue-generating-database-entries.
* By "cost" it probably made them money, but they also lost customers who got angry and probably spent quite a bit on support/billing phone calls. So it's not all "profit".
Not necessarily. Someone might invent such a time machine tomorrow. Reality doesn't have a tech tree like a game, it's very likely that we could develop a few things "out of order". Plus, who is to say that our technology isn't right on the verge of that discovery, it's not like anyone knows the prerequisites for the "breakthrough". Fifty years ago people would've expected us to have fusion reactors, a colony on Mars and android servants by this point, but Google would probably blow their mind. The future has a way of being unpredictable.
So, in other words, she's willfully committing copyright infringement for profit with a ridiculous number of sales? Aren't the fines for commercial infringement quite high? The sites she ripped stories from should sue for the penalties and for her hypothetical revenue. Sucks for her if her collections department can't keep up, a sale is a sale so far as liability is concerned. (All IMHO, IANAL.)
Perhaps it's higher res if you average the number of photoceptors over the whole retina. The fovea handles your sharp vision, covers about four square inches at arm's length, and has more than 200,000 photoceptors. Throw in all the visual processing your nervous system does and I'd expect far greater than the 50,000 dpi resolution afforded by basic anatomy. There's also the fact that your photoceptors aren't perfectly aligned to pixels on the screen, so it's useful to increase the screen's resolution even beyond what the eye can see.
So you're saying that disabling the page file is a bad idea if you use most of the memory you have? AFAIK that's the most obvious trade off with disabling the paging file. Hence why everyone says "if you have enough memory".
OTOH, if your computer has 4 GB of RAM and you rarely, if ever, use over 800 MB of physical memory, then there is never a reason to page anything to disk. Windows will still preemptively page stuff there, in some idiotic fear that those 3.2 GB are going to get used sometime soon, so there's extra disk activity. While generally innocuous, that extra activity has an annoying habit of cutting into battery life (let's periodically spin up the HDD for no useful reason!), or happening when you're already disk IO saturated.
It all comes down to your usage, hence why it's a "tweak" and not the default. I'm sure people make the mistake of not examining their needs (especially if they fail to account for the disk cache), but, yeah, that's what happens if you do cargo cult tweaks. At the other extreme, there still seem to be a lot of people that think "free memory" makes your computer (or phone) run faster. So they install extra RAM, memory defraggers, decrease disk cache size, and increase swap size and swappiness so they live at 2-3 GB of free memory rather than 1 GB. Free memory is wasted memory, and until RAM is filled up there's no logical reason to use the (very slow) disk for short term storage.
Anonymity on a social networking site is rather paradoxic. HTTPS prevents a shady classmate from sniffing your facebook login details when you log in during class on open wifi. (Substitute a coffee shop if you aren't a slacker student.)
Personally I like to use the EFF's "HTTPS Everywhere" to keep as much of my facebook activity as private as possible. While there's nothing on my facebook page that I particularly care about, I can't say the same for my friends whose profiles I may visit.
In 2008 the poorest 50% of the population paid 2.7% of the income tax revenue. The next 25% paid 11.0%. The top 10% paid 69.9%, with the top 1% contributing 38.0%.
In other words, poor people hardly pay any income tax. Sales tax and such depends on how much you spend, and since poor people can't buy as much I highly doubt the figures are much different there. Living in America is 700 times more expensive for a wealthy person than the average person. (I'm not saying that's how it should or shouldn't be, just pointing out that rich people do pay taxes.)
I don't know, I'm no history buff, but as I recall the British Navy was rather fond of hanging pirates.
Complete economic collapse? That hardly seems likely, or even possible for a sustained period. Realistically, the US losing 3.7% of its exports and 10.5% of its imports will hurt a lot. China losing the ~40% (IIRC) of their GDP that comes from trade with western nations will be catastrophic for them. Plus there's the fact that the US exports food to China. OTOH, you should play nice when you're the weaker player.
First off, why are we linking to a frame/url shortener rather than directly to the article?
But blind extrapolation tells us nothing. If you're an economist then you think exponential growth can happen indefinitely. If you're a biologist you know that populations follow a sigmoidal curve if they approach their carrying capacity. For humans, our population curve will likely fall somewhere in between.
The most developed nations are already at zero population growth, and the developing world isn't going to magically become developed if the resources simply aren't there. For those countries, maintaining an agrarian birth rate despite modern medicine and an economy transitioning away from food production is a good way to ensure lasting poverty. That's a big problem for them, but not for English speaking Internet users. Or, more precisely, it's not "our" problem unless we want to involve ourselves in their affairs (for better or for worse).
Is our 2D perception natural, or is it simply because we deal with 2D media most of the time? Television is 2D, books are 2D, computers are 2D, chalkboards are 2D, paper is 2D, text is 2D, etc.. Since these are all limited by technology, perhaps removal of the technological limitation will allow people to maintain the third dimension in everything that they do. It's probably not even healthy to be constantly exposed to that artificial limitation, perhaps that's why so many people have differing degrees of myopia between eyes.
The American team used a combined set of observations: One 11-year-long set consisted of 122 measurements made by the team, while the other set was 4.3 years long and consisted of 119 measurements published by the consortium.
[The Swiss group] used only their own observations, but they expanded their published data set from what the U.S. group included in its analysis to a length of 6.5 years and 180 measurements.
So, the American study had 241 observations over at least 11 years and the data is peer reviewed and published. The Swiss apparently are refuting that by ignoring half the data and adding 61 data points from 2.2 years that haven't been peer reviewed. Obviously they're a reputable group, but I'll wait for them to look at *all* of the data available to them, preferably published data, before just taking them at their word. Doubly so for a negative finding since alpha (chance of a false positive) tends to be a lot smaller than beta (chance of a false negative).
Water is inorganic, oils of all types are organic. The term "organic" basically means it has carbon in it. It has little bearing on whether or not things grow in it if you leave it out.
I have to wonder. Surely these vehicles will have blackboxes that record the last minute or so of sensor data in case there is an accident. The driving program would be absolutely consistent with the law and best driving practices. It would be fairly simple to blame the other vehicle as being responsible for the accident, with a fancy 3D reconstruction (according to what the computer perceived, not necessarily exactly consistent with reality) and complete rationale for every action the computer took. The human would only have their word.
Of course, this won't happen until computers are better drivers than most humans. Once that happens, having a human driver will become the liability. After all, juries like flashy visuals and I suspect they'll favor "computers don't make mistakes" rather than distrust of new technology. Of course, they'll all think that they personally are a better driver than a computer, but that confidence doesn't extend to other people. We've all seen bad drivers and the human tendency is to think we have control over our life, so an accident was obviously caused by the crappy driver making a mistake.
That's not quite how our immune system works, but I agree with the idea. IMHO a good measure would be to enforce a whitelist for system changes and permitted executables. Wanna change the wallpaper, that's whitelisted for "*" so go ahead. Wanna add an autorun, oops, it's not on the list, the registry key (or shortcut, or service, or system task, or line in a config file, etc.) cannot be created. Large businesses can run their own whitelist, home users can pick one (or none) that they like, e.g. the "keep crapware from slowing stuff down" list, or the "don't let me change/delete anything important since I'm a noob" list.
I think it's great that Comcast is trying to address the bot problem. But they picked a rather poor method IMHO. Surely it's obvious that you can't rely on the infected computer to relay the message... All the bot has to do is run a filtering proxy server and these HTTP insertions are long gone. The best solution would be to use another communication device, i.e. a telephone or letter. Besides, you may have a little old lady that only uses (non-ISP) e-mail twice a month, which might not get the message.
My own ISP does something similar, but a little better (again, IMHO). A few weeks ago I opened my wireless network because one of my devices was choking on WPA2. Sure enough, someone must have hopped on it and sent a fair bit of spam. So my ISP killed my connection and changed the DNS server so everything resolved to their "Call tech support now" page (although it took a while to for me to figure that out since I wasn't using their DNS server, but I digress). A quick call had me talking with a representative with an explanation, and I was reconnected. (Obviously I re-enabled WPA2 and blocked/logged port 25 at the router in case I really did get rooted.)