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Comment Parenting (Score 4, Insightful) 72

It comes down to knowing your kid.

I have a 6 yr old too. If she sees me looking at something on the computer, she'll come up, looking away and say "Daddy, is that kid appropriate?" before looking. I have no concerns that she'll break the rules, so I don't feel the need for any preventive controls. If I had a child with a different temperament I would react differently of course. For what its worth, my day job involves ensuring that people employed by my company are safe on the internet. Generally my 6 yr old is better behaved :)

Comment Re:They did not hack it (Score 2) 140

Here's the difference - we have firewalls on the Internet.

What they're saying is that the Bluetooth is sitting on the same network as your anti-lock brakes and there is no firewall.

Not sure about you, but where I work, if I didn't put a firewall between the internet, and my web servers and at least one more between my web servers and the database, I'd be looking for a new job. These guys hooked it up to the "internet" (bluetooth) and decided they didn't need any additional security between there and the "database" (your brakes).

Security is all about layers, and they've said that Bluetooth is all the security your health and safety critical systems needs. Not sure about you, but that doesn't leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling.

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Comment No one is ever influenced by advertising (Score 4, Insightful) 254

No one is ever influenced by advertising, ask around. People say "no, I'd never buy something because it's on TV" but those infomercials stay in business for a reason.

So polling people and asking them if advertising is effective on them is a bit of a red herring. Like IQ tests - logically half the world has IQs less then 100. Oddly, I've never met any of them.

Now the question 'is social advertising effective' is certainly open for debate, but not because some survey says people believe it's not effective on themselves.

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Comment Re:Actually RTFA (Score 2) 40

Agreed, as a DC attendee I'd give it a miss, and if there wasn't anything on that was more interesting in the slot use it to fulfill some of the 3-2-1 rule of attending Defcon. The talk is an interesting read, and there are other confs I've attended where it would be a fit, but DC isn't it.

I think the review committee made the right call on this one.

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Comment If you're going to volunteer... (Score 1) 309

If you're going to volunteer, go find an non profit that speaks to you and volunteer there. At least if you don't get a job lead out of it you'll feel good about the work you did instead of bitter over doing free labour for a company that didn't give you a job in the end.

In my personal case, I did volunteer work for an non-profit ISP just starting up way up north. 6 months later, I was being paid for the same work, and jump started my professional career.

There are options for lots of types of geeks, from the "we recycle used computers for disadvantaged people" to the "We send you to an impoverished country to bootstrap their technology base" ones.

I believe the ICRC is always looking for skilled technical people who can think outside the box too.

I enjoyed my time doing non profit work immensely and it still comes up 15 yrs later in job interviews, as some of my best war stories come from those jobs. There's something about the combination of the startup shoestring budget and the feeling that you're actually improving the world that comes together and energizes me. Your mileage may of course very.

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Comment Re:Certificate extortion (Score 1) 60

Actually, unless I'm missing something in TFS, this isn't about rotating your certificate (although that's a good plan if you were vulnerable to Heartbleed, but do your own risk assessment there).

Heartbleed was a vulnerability against openssl, mitigate that and you won't be vulnerable to Heartbleed. You may want to swap out your SSL certs too in case someone grabbed them while you' were vulnerable, but certainly not wanting to pay for the cert rotation shouldn't stop you from updating openssl.

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Comment Re:You know what worked better for me then longhan (Score 1) 191

Understood, and agreed in so far as everything you wrote is concerned. My (unwritten) assertion, which is probably obvious to someone who understands that the research is about statistical medians, is that it would be dangerous to extrapolate from the study's conclusions that it would be appropriate to mandate a particular note taking style (e.g. "No laptops") because you would likely be doing a disservice to a portion of your student population who is not the 'average' student.

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Comment Re:You know what worked better for me then longhan (Score 1) 191

In point of fact I scored a 4.0 in English class, and technical writing. After that I spent 20 years in the school of working for a living. The first two taught me correct diction, grammar, and proofreading skills. The latter taught me that there was a time and place for perfection, and a time and place for writing quickly with enough accuracy to get a point across. No one pays me to write Slashdot comments, so it falls into the second category.

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Comment Re:You know what worked better for me then longhan (Score 1) 191

Yep, but I'm dysgraphic, so anything involving my fine motor system is a cognitive, rather then an associative task, as it probably is for you. E.g. writing requires cognitive processing for me as opposed to happening as an 'automatic' background task as it likely does for you.

Thus my point about the danger of making sweeping statements for 'students'. We all learn differently, so making decisions based on this sort of study is treacherous ground.

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