I just want to say this is my favorite Slashdot post in some time....

We know what happened to the Golgafrinchans

It's Disaster Area's stage in a parking orbit.

You're assuming two things:
1. The abbreviation isn't usually recognized
2. Everything needs to abbreviated
3. Misunderstandings stemming from shortness are any more prevalent in short form are any more common than those occurring in other typical informal written communication.

In the first case, there are many many examples of abbreviations being universally understood and evolving into regular lexicon. In the second, there are many things which -can- be concisely and clearly represented, as happens on twitter fairly often. Re number three: I couldn't prove a similarity in here, but I've certainly read a lot of bad, unclear crap on the net and it went on for -pages-.

I don't get it. What's the problem with grammar evolving to fit different mediums? Grammar evolves every day and always has. There's absolutely nothing that says the grammar we're using at this moment in time is any better at all. In fact, given the amount of data we're generating and the amount of processing we're going to need to do to it (as a society) to make it useful and accessible knowledge, short form communication is beneficial in many circumstances and should be encouraged. As time moves on, the practical etiquette of where it is and is not appropriate to use short form will develop. I love people who make the assumption that because this is how they're doing it now, this is how it should be done ;)

Twitter forces brevity and conciseness of communication which is often a beneficial attribute...and it's something which neither irc, nor email, or blogging do. RSS, which DOES shorten things, has a lot of fail when it comes to typical data sources (like blogs) which were not written with the intent of being short and so lose fidelity.

Twitter also can be used with built in sms on phones easily and quickly. Email can, too, but you have to select a distro ahead of time...which loses twitter's second communication value...reaching people you might not have thought were interested in the subject at hand through subscriptions. You can do this with irc in general channels, but most phones dont have built in irc clients and so doesn't and will never have the user base of a system that you can use in every SMS capable phone without additional application installs. You'll just never ever have the same kind of usebase in irc without a drastic, radical change in the market.

Finally, the irony of people biatching about how boring or useless twitter is have largely themselves to blame. If you know interesting people, they typically have interesting, useful things to say. If your friends are all doormats, well, theyre going to talk about what they had for breakfast today. And the weather. And etc.

If the only thing you focused on at Defcon were talks and panels, you sort of missed the point and the benefit of being there. The talks and panels are just excuses to get a bunch of smart people together to jam. Next time, stay after the talks and grab some of the speakers to chat. Find some of the parties, chat. Meet people, network, discuss ideas, drink heavily and relax.

I have to add: I'm not saying bad stuff isn't happening - it is and has been. Just the attribution to state actors is ridiculous speculation.

They're not credible. None of these reports has any concrete evidence as to who, what, where, why, or even always how. Mostly they get the "when" :) But even then, not always.

The attribution in these articles is like saying because someone made a threatening call to you from a payphone in chicago that the city of chicago was threatening you specifically. It COULD be, but it could also be someone who lives there but is just a guy with no affiliation with the city. It could also be someone who doesn't live there but is passing through. They could also be rerouting the call. And whichever of those actors it might be may be targeting you specifically, or they could just be randomly dialing numbers.

It's dumb FUD spreading.

1. The people who own those assets are responsible for it, at the end of the day. In many cases, they're private companies which are free to figure out how to run their own businesses as they see fit. In some cases, it's a sort of mixed situation where they're owned by local municipalities with some of the same constraints (and sometimes additional constraints) as privately owned utilities. Finally, some are nationally regulated.

2. It would have been nice to never have connected these utilities to the internet in the first place, but as they are now there extracting them can be extremely difficult.

3. If you think having something as politically hampered, slow moving, and expensive as the US government take control of privately or local government owned utilities, you haven't dealt much with the federal government.

If you think response has been slow and crappy so far? Just imagine the world's largest bureaucracy running national cyber security and trying to keep up with evuhl -insert country of choice- hackers. That's a good solution, really!

You obviously do need an education here. Go check out the actual reality of the situation, how about? As I said, read the NIPP. Then HSPD-7 which generated it. Then look at the sector specific plans. Then check out the archives of SCADASEC for some asset-owner perspectives. Maybe you'll come away with a better idea of the grey, in-progress state it's in, the progress that's been (or not) made, and what the financial and operational constraints are. Some of it sucks. Some of it's good. Mostly, it's an evolving, complex situation that is being worked on.

As an aside, if you do actually want to get educated on current efforts, start here: http://www.dhs.gov/xprevprot/programs/editorial_0827.shtm

"Public Officials" have absolutely -nothing- to do with where "public infrastructure" networks are connected since this "public infrastructure" is almost exclusively -privately- owned. You really, really don't want the federal government making these decisions. Really.

But that's not even taking it far enough: It doesn't matter if the Bible is right or not. Since you can't prove it or repeat it, it's simply not part of the same domain as science. Let's assume everything in the bible IS true, even if it conflicts what we know scientifically. Does it matter? Science works well enough to change how we farm, heal ourselves, travel, entertain ourselves, build and protect ourselves from the elements, etc. If science works in its domain, the bible works in its domain, any differences in conclusions might be interesting to those who believe both, but they don't negate each other inherently. Their measure of "true" is completely different.

SETI follows a process (as far as I know). They might not find anything, but they certainly try and follow a process to come up with testable, repeatable results. The act of classifying a frog also follows a scientific method, I would hope? This isn't "my scheme" heh. This is elementary school stuff - not sure why Im getting push-back on it? Im guessing my original point was more correct than I thought...kind of scared here.