I have a router that allows for setting multiple SSIDs and for setting the access rules, so I set up an SSID of openwireless.org a few months ago, with no access to my LAN but otherwise unrestricted access. I live in a dense urban area, near a heavily-trafficked shopping and dining area. I get a dozen or so unique MACs connecting to the open WiFi a day. They usually just connect for a minute or two. The increase in bandwidth usage has been negligible: less than 1%.

I haven't checked exactly what they're connecting to, but it looks a lot to me like they're just checking Google Maps, and no one is downloading porn.

Hear, hear.

The degree of cowardice in this thread is astonishing.

What is it with these anti-science hippies, quoting scientists, instead of trusting in corporations? We only produce about twice the amount of food needed to feed everyone in the world, so, clearly, we need to bring food production more tightly under the control of a tiny number of gigantic agribusinesses, in order to eliminate hunger.

That's my last line of psychological defense.

Science has fed the world with an unbelievable array of giant, hearty and delicious foods. It's called agriculture, and it was invented 10,000 years ago.

Hunger and poverty are political weapons.

I was beginning to think that the Democrats maybe weren't so bad, and maybe I should reconsider my stance of refusing to vote for them. Then I was in a bookstore, and saw Madeline Albrights lich-like grimace on a book cover, and I remembered.

Look at a globe that shows elevations, and notice how there's a nearly continuous belt of plains around the northern hemisphere, that generally coincides with the range of latitudes with a range of temperatures optimal for growing grains. That's where the large-scale industrialized agriculture that feeds most of the human race occurs.

A global warming trend would shift that range of latitudes with optimal temperatures northward, where there is significantly less terrain suitable for industrialized agriculture. This would mean a significant reduction in agricultural production, and thus to famine and violent conflicts for control of food supplies. Humans probably wouldn't go extinct, but it would certainly be a tremendous disaster.

It depends upon how you define AI, I suppose. If you look at armed robots, Predator drones, and the interest in increasing the automation of these machines, I think you can see something that could become increasingly dangerous.

I only saw a few episodes. I believe the series, in a nutshell, was summed up when the chief of staff of a ministry is discussing the new minister's ostensible policies with another career civil servant.

"Open government? That's a contradiction in terms!"

I suppose my response wasn't as direct as I thought it was. I do think I am basically agreeing with your point.

I was objecting to the common, "This will teach you to be tough, which is good for you in the long run", which I thought I read implied in tbird81's comment. Though that may be a misreading of tbird81's comment, on reflection.

The first stage of the bully's attack was encircling the victim with his pack. So, no, putting the bully down was never a possibility.

That's already a significant improvement.

Furthermore, in my experience of bullying, the bullies counted on the indifference of adults, and occasionally, tacit encouragement. On most occasions when I asked for help from an adult, the response was, "Shut up, you little faggot." (Incidentally, I don't believe I'd worked out my sexual orientation when I was eight.) I seriously doubt the bullies would have been so confident had adults intervened with any consistency. Of course, it's classic for bullies to threaten retaliation if the victim complains and a parent is informed, but that actually was relatively effective, at least in the case of parents who disapproved of bullying.

I totally agree.

My experience of early elementary school was that the bullies were actually encouraged by many of the teachers and administrators, and I was explicitly blamed for "inciting" them.

We live in a cruelly hierarchical society, in which victim-blaming is extremely common.

Not mine. One good punch to the bully, and they'll call out to their pack, and they'll all beat you until you're bleeding and can't cry out anymore.

It's far more effective if an adult simply walks over and tells the bully to knock it off.

I keep thinking that one of the conceptual errors people frequently make is to confuse what makes a species tougher, in the sense of natural selection, with what makes an individual stronger. If you see a tree growing from a crevice on a sheer cliff, you know that's a pretty tough species of tree. But that's not a strong tree. It would have been a much stronger tree if it had grown in ideal conditions.

We're not getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers anymore. We need people who are strong -- as in, creative, empathetic, mutually supportive -- far more than we need people who are tough.

We're homeschooling my younger stepson. It was becoming clear that elementary school was simply a waste of his time, even when he was attending a progressive private school (with a generous tuition assistance program). He learns more efficiently on his own initiative. We live in an urban area, one in which there's a fairly substantial community of homeschoolers who coordinate activity, and of course there's the Internet. I'd say he has far more social interaction than I did at his age, both with other children and with adults.

From everything I've heard about modern educational theory, elementary school is pretty much pointless, and I'm increasingly dubious about the structure of later stages of formal education. I took classes on programming and system administration, and that prompted me to study specific topics that I wouldn't have, otherwise -- but, most of what I know about those subjects, I knew from tinkering with Linux on my own desktop, and most of the topics I studied that I wouldn't have on my own initiative, have proven to be obsolete or irrelevant to both my personal and my professional work. Meanwhile, I'm watching my ten-year-old, rapidly learning the ins and outs of package management and system administration, because of his interest in Minecraft.

The main problem with homeschooling, in general, is that I think it's relatively unusual for most people families to be able to ensure there's an adult at home to supervise a younger child. Fortunately, my wife is in graduate school, and my work schedule gives me several weekdays off, so there's always an adult around in our household; we also have adult relatives nearby, as backup. But, I think more broadly yet, our social and economic organization is grossly irrational. We work far more hours than we ought to -- real wages have been static in the US for forty years, even as productivity has more than doubled, so I think we'd all be better off in many ways if our wages were increased, we worked fewer hours, and we did less useless crap that just wastes resources to prop up an irrational economic system based on perpetual expansion.