Oh, do tell... please name one of these "many models".

I spent 10-15 hair-pulling minutes yesterday with my 71 year old stepfather (whom I otherwise love dearly) as I, well, let me start from the beginning.

He called and said "We've broken flash on both Macs and can't watch youtube videos now. I've installed it twice on your mom's Mac but it didn't help."

So, I explained that 1) they didn't break anything, flash quits working automatically when it's outdated and waits for you to update it and 2) he didn't "install" it, he merely downloaded it and these two actions are not the same thing.

He apparently couldn't figure out where to download it from and I didn't want him to wander to some web site that would purport to give him flash while giving him something else so I sent him the official link from Adobe. So he went to that link.

I did, too, just so I would know what he would see. I asked if it popped up the box about downloading flash and he assured me that it didn't. He started getting frustrated around this point. (Note that it actually had downloaded and he hadn't paid attention to what he clicked). It was here that he claimed that his only option was to pay $9.99/month for "something called PS and LR - I have no idea what that is" (it's "Photoshop and Light Room" for those wondering).

I'll spare you some pain and just say that he finally found the download, which is in some popup thing on the dock at the bottom. He couldn't figure out how to open it and claimed that when he clicked it it wouldn't do anything. I tried to get him to drag it to the desktop but it finally just opened. I doubt he clicked on it the first 10 times he claimed that he did.

Now, at this point he is looking at the installer for the easiest piece of software in the world to install. He cannot proceed as there is no option to proceed. I ask him to tell me what he sees and (it's different than mine - no idea why - maybe because I have Yosemite) he says something about some license and there's a quit button. Oh, wait, there's an install button but it's black and I can't use it. So he clicks "quit" and says "well, it went away and isn't doing anything".

I asked him what he did and he said "I clicked the quit button, I couldn't do anything else and that doesn't seem to be doing anything".

I convince him to open it back up. I tell him there has to be something else to click. Then he says "there's a bunch of stuff!". I ask him if the browser is open and he replies "well, I don't know but there's a bunch of stuff." I suspect that he's clicked on the license stuff and it's showing it in a browser and he then begins reading the section headings for the license. I tell him "you're in the browser, you need to close it" but he's frustrated and pissed at this point so he begins talking louder over me as he continues to read section headings and then starts to tell me the url. I tell him again "you're in the browser and need to close it" and he finally listens and closes it.

At this point my blood pressure is "high over dangerous". He's back at the window where he can only quit. I ask him "isn't there a box to check to say you've agreed to their license?" and he finally says "oh, yeah" and clicks it and then "I can click install now". I actually expect it to not work but he clicks it and it works.

I cannot get my 10 minutes back.

Imagine that over and over and over and over again for 8 hours.

It doesn't make sense for Comcast to put experienced tech support people on the front lines because dealing with crap like that doesn't require a lot of knowledge. Comcast has a pretty good monitoring system and they know when their stuff isn't working 99% of the time. Most of their calls are probably stupid stuff where rebooting might actually fix it.

We who are computer savvy tend to think that people have problems like we do but that's just not the case. I still deal with my mom calling to tell me that her mail isn't working. I ask her if she can get to cnn.com and she asks "why do I care about that? I want my email to work". Then she says "oh, cnn isn't working, either". People here would understand "it's not email, it's my network connection". Comcast doesn't have to deal with us for a lot of stuff that we can fix - but they do have to deal with people like my folks.

God help them.

Wish I could mod you up.

No, it's because hijacking of airplanes ended on 9/11. Unless you can get more hijackers than passengers onto a plane (or at least enough hijackers to physically overpower the passengers) it can no longer work. It only worked before because passengers figured if they just went along all would end well and they would be - at worst - inconvenienced. That changed on 9/11/2001.

There have been people try to hijack planes since then. Here's one story:

http://news.investors.com/ibd-...

6 people tried to hijack a plane - 4 of them survived. I probably don't have to explain it but the other 4 didn't exactly "meet their objectives" if you know what I mean.

Here's a guy who actually had a gun on the plane - I think he was the one who's life was saved by the police who stormed the plane after it landed. He had boiling water thrown on him before the beating:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Again, he had two guns, it didn't matter.

Hijacking was ruined by Mohammed Atta and friends 13 years ago. Since then we had the shoe bomber (failed) and Smokey the Terrorist who set fire to his own penis (brilliant) before being subdued by the other passengers. Even on Flight 77 over Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001 the passengers found out what was going on, but the hijacker was able to ditch the plane before they breached the cabin door. The sap that they had left out to keep an eye on the passengers was burned with boiling water and beaten with a fire extinguisher - keep that in mind in case you have stupid hijacking friends and they want to lock you outside the cabin.

I don't want to oversimplify, but it is quite reasonable - and to me not overly "complex" - to postulate that the models do not properly account for ocean dynamics. It is entirely possible that every single model has it all completely wrong - we've been here before with "global cooling". But back then the models weren't very robust, and you actually had competing models with wildly different predictions.

Perhaps I'm more comfortable rolling with the science because the science doesn't threaten my ideology. I fully accept that we are probably warming the planet, but I also don't think that humanity will stop burning easy energy resources. As a result, I'd like to see the models applied to planning for the inevitable instead of a Quotidian quest to stop using fossil fuels. We're going to need to do a cost-benefit on things like seawalls for major coastal cities, flood control, and irrigation systems, and I think the models can provide valuable insight.

The Nook Simple Touch uses zForce Infrared, which is pretty much which this describes. Reviews at the time mentioned it, which links to here to describe it. I have NST too and it works fairly well, most of the time.

Yeah, I had read that, too. By took control I meant literally "took control". They infiltrated it (and there are rumors there was an insider to help with that) but then they activated everything very quickly, without warning, and basically stole data and destroyed the servers before anyone had a chance to do anything.

My point was the overall attack was way WAY beyond some simple trojan worm getting an admin password...

As you SHOULD know, you cannot test future accuracy.

I've read articles (about spam, but this is similiar) that talk about how they don't *want* it to be especially believable. It's harder for them to try to be believable and have smart people drop out as soon as they realize it's a scam. On the other hand, if they're blatantly obvious, the people they manage to net will likely be the most gullible and most likely to actually follow through with a scam.

This. I work at a telecom company, and we just got a new area code allocated in my area recently. People are getting virgin phone numbers that have never been used, and we've already had them calling asking for new numbers because they're getting so many scam and junk calls.

Really? Apparently they quickly took control of almost every one one of Sony's servers and workstations. Literally took entire control, stole all of the useful data, wiped out all of their servers, and then owned all of the workstations so that they were useless but able to broadcast any message they wanted to them.

That's a *bit* more coordinated than "your average trojan worm". Unless you really think based on extremely limited information you know more than all of the security researchers and government investigators looking into it... (hint: sorry, you don't).

Not samba, SMB. Samba is just the name of the open source Windows SMB server implementation. Most likely they were targeting Windows machines (though I admit I haven't seen anything on that either way).

Also, it's highly unlikely (but also possible I guess) they had SMB open to the Internet. But they just needed to compromise one internal machine (almost trivial these days) to attack SMB...

Umm, I think you answered that question already. You don't think North Korea's cyberterrorism military unit just might be part of those "privileged few"?

Maybe because their Supreme Leader is a total loon? This is the same guy who has among hundreds of other insane actions decreed that anyone with his name needed to change it immediately. He lives for drama and vanity and wants his citizens to think of him as a demigod. He's a fucking international drama queen of the highest level...

I'm sure the points in there are good, but I need to point out that while it is a "peer reviewed journal", you linked to something from the "Opinion & Comment" section. There is quite a bit of work being done to understand where all of the heat is going, but that has been discussed on here before.

If you link to that same editorial one more time, then I'll believe it.

As persuasive a source as an article by a British politician is, I'd like to hear from someone who actually does this for a living.