I think the vast majority of the votes are in by now, and "Surveillance For The Purpose Of Targeted Ads" was voted just plain evil.

It is a waste of precious resources to turn a woman into a computer programmer when she's a lot more valuable as a mother.

Ha ha! What a great satire of a shitheaded sexist troll you've done here. I especially like the bit about how any distraction, disruption or stress could cause a miscarriage. My doctor, a black belt in karate who trained up until her 8th month, would get a real belly laugh out of that. And my sensei, the EE, would surely get a chuckle out of the implication that she wasted her life by not being a baby machine. Keep polishing the satire and you could have a real career here.

(Assuming, of course, you're not serious. Because no one that stupid could survive.)

So it's also the 80s movies to blame that women are not interested in careers like soldier, spy, pilot, policeman (apology, -woman), archaeologist, exorcist, karate fighter,...

Has anyone ever looked closer at the 80s? The 80s were not a geek decade. The only movie I can remember where geeks were not just the comic foil (ok, even in that one they were) was "Revenge of the nerds". The whole "engineering geeks" were no role model in 80s movies, and even less so in TV series. Whenever they were in some prominent role, they were the little sidekick of the actual hero. Be it Automan's creator Walter, who was mostly a comic sidekick (ok, the show wasn't that memorable, but the special effects were great for its time) or Street Hawk's Norman who was some timid, beancounter-ish scaredy-cat. The geek roles were at best meant to make the hero shine some more.

Actually, the only engineer role I can remember that was allowed to be superior in areas to the hero and be more than a nuisance to him was that of Bonnie in Knight Rider.

A woman.

The second channel will not secure a compromised channel, but it will make it easier to detect it.

There are various defenses against replay attacks, most of them relying on keys being tied to the current time and only being valid NOW but neither before nor after. But that is only good against a replay, it is quite useless when the attacker is manipulating your own communication. That has been the staple of attacks against banking software since the advent of the OTPs, and the only sensible defense against that is actually a two channel communication. Out of band one way transmission (i.e. sending a OTP to the customer to use in the transaction) doesn't help here.

There is very little you can do to combat malware infections unless you are willing to use a second channel. At some point in the communication the data is vulnerable to modifiction, no matter how well you try to shield it. It resides in memory, unencrypted, at some point in time. And if nothing else, this is where it will be manipulated.

And it's heaps easier to do if the interface used is a browser. You can literally pick and choose just where you want to mess with the data.

PVRs are great for caching live events. Let it start the recording and leave it be for 15 or so minutes so that you've got enough "buffer" so that you won't catch up to those ads.

This approach is also good for sporting events where there might be a lot of nonsense and commentary that you don't necessarily want to see.

If it's a less interesting sport like soccer or most of what's on the Olympics, you can fast forward to the interesting parts.

Plus you don't have to worry about "starting on time". It's actually better if you don't.

Ok, using what frequency? As far as I'm aware the whole spectrum that could be used by 3G is owned by some telcos and considering just how expensive using those freqs is they will hardly be so nice to let you use them for a little bit. They'll want to see money for that!

> Maybe, but it's good enough for me because I don't give a fuck about sports.

+...or new content.

Netflix is great as a "rerun channel". It's like a juiced up version of MeTV or AntennaTV on steroids.

Beyond that, it kind of sucks and there's really no point in denying it. Netflix by itself is no cable substitute. There's no point in pretending Netflix is something it's not. There's no point in trying to give people the wrong idea.

Fortunately the streaming landscape is not merely limited to Netflix.

Although more complete options will require you to be not a complete cheapskate.

By promising him dancing pigs if he just presses it for me...

Seriously, don't overengineer it. You'll only hate yourself for investing too much brain power when you learn that all it took was the promise of cute kittens of bouncing boobs.

The system you describe has been implemented often. Most often I've seen it with online games and the like where the main threat is the use of credentials by a malicious third party (i.e. some account hijacker stealing username and password, logging into your account and doing nefarious things with it). For that, you don't need a dongle. You need two synchronized devices that output the same (usually numeric) key at the same time. Basically you get the same if you take a timestamp, sign it using PKI and have the other side verify it. If you have two synchronized clocks, transmitting the signature (or its hash) suffices. That doesn't really require plugging anything anywhere, although it probably gets a lot easier and faster to use if you don't have to type in some numbers and instead have a USB key transmit it at the push of a button.

But that's no silver bullet. All it does is verify that whoever sits in front of the computer is supposedly who they claim to be and entitled to do what they're doing. It does NOT verify what is being sent, or that the content being sent is actually what this user wanted to send.

If anything, it protects Google rather than the user. Because all that system does is making whatever is done by the user of the account non repudiable. Because whatever is done, it MUST have been you. Nobody else could have done it, nobody else has your dongle.

> Hm....you never watch a movie and have to go to the can?

There is a loo in my home theater. If I leave the door open, I can still see the screen.

Technically, "real" two factor authentication, with two different channels involved, require an attacker to infect and hijack BOTH channels if he doesn't want the victim to notice it.

As an example, take what many banks did with text message as confirmation for orders. You place the order on your computer, then you get a text message to your cell phone stating what the order is and a confirmation code you should enter in your computer if the order you get as confirmation on your cellphone is correct. That way an attacker would have to manipulate both, browser output on the computer and text messages on the phone, to successfully attack the user.

In other words, it does of course not avoid the infection. It makes a successful attack just much harder and a detection of the attack (with the ability to avoid damage) much more likely.

The entire freshman year of your typical engineering program tends to actively discourage slackers.

I am fascinated by that other guy that says that these "programmers" were nothing more than secretaries that managed the punch cards. There used to be a lot of grunt work and manual labor in computing that isn't there anymore. Those jobs just disappeared.

We have to be careful about which computing jobs we're talking about because even now they all aren't created equal.

Some jobs are more interesting than others. Some jobs are more lucrative than others. Some jobs require less training and education than others.

The same goes for law, medicine, and science.

That might be the same article that mentioned that Cosmo used to push the idea of women programmers. Do they still do that or did they stop doing that in the 80's.

It's the SJW ninnies that are trying to pretend that nerds are the perpetrators here when they are generally powerless and denigrated.

Nerds are the tail end of the problem. You're expecting them to wag the dog when it's the greeks and the jocks that control all of the really relevant media outlets.

Everything is relative.

Netflix compares poorly to a $200 cable package.

It compares very well to raw broadcast TV or even broadcast TV filtered through a Tivo.

Plus antenna reception is a very tricky thing. It's often far from perfect both in terms of the channels you can get and how well you can get them. It's very much a YMMV proposition and is a very fussy sort of thing. Most people don't want to mess with that crap. That's why they have cable.