You never traveled outside the place you live in? Must be American I guess?

What? I agree that Slashdot sometimes ignores stuff that matters a lot, but this was covered, and there were a bunch of followup posts on Slashdot too.

If you are suggesting that people on Slashdot don't know about this event, you are delusional.

Also, I'm not going to take a bike ride in -26C, but if you want to take one in your cozy first world climate, be my guest.

Amen, I love Google, but for any search that is slightly complicated I turn to Yahoo these days. Google doesn't seem to take you serious when you enter search terms, often ignoring terms to give a more popular result. Having to add quotes is also a hell of a lot more annoying than the + sign was. That is four keypresses for quoting a single expression. Quote a couple of expressions on a mobile phone and it just gets annoying. Also it forces localization on you, which gets a pain when you speak English and another language roughly equally well and just want the best result. I wish there was just a version that treated all languages equally. The problem is that the 'local' languages gets precedence, regardless of quality of result. Yes there are settings for them, they work like crap, try them for a while.

Err, sorry, guess I was wrong, there is some rate limiting, just they have this other insanity (from el reg):
 

Eight digits should produce 100,000,000 possible combinations, and testing various routers Viehböck found it took an average of around two seconds to test each combination. So brute forcing should take several years unless the router was particularly responsive.

But the protocol used by Wi-Fi Protected Setup reports back after the first four digits have been entered, and indicates if they are right, which means they can be attacked separately. The last of the eight digits is just a checksum, so having got the first four the attacker only then has to try another 1,000 combinations (identifying the other three digits) and the entire PIN is known.

That combination means that our attacker only has to try 11,000 different combinations to find the right PIN, reducing the attack time to a couple of hours.

From the product page:

WPS allows users to enter an 8 digit PIN to connect to a secured network without having to enter a passphrase. When a user supplies the correct PIN the access point essentially gives the user the WPA/WPA2 PSK that is needed to connect to the network."

And they thought that was a good idea to implement without even substantial rate limiting or such? What the hell were they thinking?

If you are in security and serious about it, then you probably can get access to most systems in your company that you care about. Probably also know how not to get caught. Especially for smaller or less technical organizations.

But, paraphrasing from the BOFH, we have the internet with all the knowledge, pornography, movies, music in the world. Do you really think I'd spend my time going through some accountant's email?

Yes, and Apple would never abuse the courts in such a vile way! Give me a break. Also, how the hell is this a non issue? Yes it is just cellular tower locations. Of the cellular towers you were traveling near. This way, it allows anyone to see the route you travelled, timestamped, just by having access to your phone. You do not see any privacy issue with that?

I think when they started out they just used a different browser name every version?

Would it be a fair assumption that you went to school a while ago? I'd say in the current situation it isn't really the case.

Anyway, I don't have a particular opinion on the usefulness of learning a range of languages. I can understand your line of view for sure. I was merely surprized by you saying students in holland don't have time for drama or music classes.

American kids can take classes like art, drama, debating, literature etc. and play in the school band. Do you think kids who are forced to study three foreign languages have time for this?

Living in Holland, I can absolutely confirm that students here do have time for that yes. The way you learn languages here is devoid of rote memorization and not the time sink you seem to think it is.