Note that I also said I was concerned that an outside party accidentally changes the settings on the pods. I think that is far more likely, but people aren't really going think that walking past the microwave or the 802.11 router is really a threat.

Just a followup to this, I posted a summary of the article on Facebook, and my wife predictably reacted the same way the press did.

Me: "Guy gives a talk about the *possibility* of hacking a wireless insulin pump"
Wife filter: ZOMG HACKERS ARE GOING TO KILL US!

After answering questions of responsible disclosure and security through obfuscation, she asked why someone would want to do such a thing as try to kill a diabetic. She was unfamiliar with the term "for teh lulz"

I disagree. My wife is a brittle diabetic, and she's spent so much time in her childhood years at extreme highs and lows, she's become somewhat desensitized to low blood sugar until she's in the 50 range. There have been a few cases where she has felt a low coming on and collapsed before she could get to something to eat. Other times, she's acted drunk while hypoglycemic and refused to eat anything.

Of course, she's probably one of the exceptions for the "most diabetics" case, but it matters to me.

My wife uses the OmniPod disposable pumps. They are controlled by a wireless PDA-like device. When she was switching from a conventional pump to the Omnis, I wrote to the company and asked them to explain to me how their wireless technology works, what protocols are they using, what security measures they have taken to protect the pods from malicious activity. My concern was the possibility of an outside party either deliberately or accidentally messing with the pod settings, and minimizing insulin delivery or pushing a huge bolus.

I even offered to sign an NDA. Obviously, the company was less than willing to divulge their proprietary secrets, and I was shuffled off to a PR flack, who just reiterated the same marketing material over and over.

I've had to go through a BSA audit after we fired a former employee. The BSA sent their usual demand that we provide proof that we're fully licensed. We (I mean the Finanace and IT department) spent weeks going over years old receipts and license records. Countless hours lost to this bullshit while real work went uncompleted.... the BSA then said that out paperwork was insufficient, that that we would have to produce the original purchase orders. Round and round it went until the C-levels at the company finally bent over and begged "not too hard please". We wound up having to pay a fine for like a single copy of Visio or something. the most expensive copy of Visio anyone has every paid.

The BSA exists entirely to make money for itself. Everything you do will not satisfy them. They really should be stopped under RICO.

What was the ROI on the Apollo program?

We made trillions on Tang and pressurized pens that write in zero-g, right?

This is -finally- a first step towards getting off the oil/coal tit. I'd rather spend 3/4 of a billion on this than on killing some more brown skinned people in foreign lands. Like in any business, there is no guarantee of profit or breakeven, but at least it's a fucking start for once.

I remember reading about plants like this on Slashdot a while ago. A lot of people said that was a good idea, and we should start building them!

Well now that we're actually doing it, suddenly it's a bad idea. Why is that?

Because all of national endeavors must make sense financially, yes? If so, so long space program...

Sometimes we have to do things for reasons other than making the almighty dollar.

Problem with this is that the auto companies will fight - and succeed- at getting their vehicles exempted from certain brackets, or will find new, exciting and creative ways to have their vehicles reclassified into more "attractive" classifications. That's how they managed to bypass all the regulations for SUVs. This will also jack up transportation costs, since big rigs travel hundreds and thousands of miles, carrying tons of material. The savings get passed on to the consumer!

I've seen some people at Wal-Mart that should have their own event horizon, so you may be right.

People generally don't understand astrophysics. High school science classes generally concentrate on biology (baby pigs are cheap) and chemistry (most of the students probably understand how to make meth better than the teacher). Usually one or two experiments in physics, generally dropping things.

Secondly, people just understand that black holes are Bad Things, the "most destructive force in the universe" (thank you Disney) and that the universe will end with a Real Big One, because that's what they saw on the History Channel. I won't fault people too harshly for this, but it doesn't take a Einstein or Hawking to figure at least the basics out. I'm somewhat shocked that learned people are perpetuating this ballyhoo about black holes at the LHC.

People have a hard time with very small and very large things, so I usually put things in terms of the Sun. Yes, I know this is a very large thing, but they can at least see the sun and have an idea of its size. Should the Sun suddenly become a black hole, we won't get sucked in as most lay people think. A black hole with the mass of the Sun is still an object with the mass of the Sun and all the properties that go with it, such as gravitational pull. The earth will continue to orbit just as before, but it will become cold and dark. That's it. A black hole created at LHC from two particles will have the mass of those two particles.

And if I'm wrong, well we'll likely die so quickly that it wouldn't matter anyway.

In between rounds of slurping up Theo's man-juice, you might want to enroll in the local community college's reading comprehension class.

I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?