Sure, you may run a mail server next to the dryer, but who knows where your mail is, or how it got there.

The internet is not about point-to-point communication. It's a *publishing* technology. The reason I can see this Slashdot page is because it was published on some servers, not sent over some secure wire to me. I click on a URL and somewhere a server sends the data comprising that page out into the net, broken up in itty-bit packets with my IP address embedded in them, and eventually they all get to me, where they are reconstructed and displayed in my browser.

Email is no different. Sure, you can use encryption. But, that's self-limiting unless the entire world knows everyone else's key, and then what good would encryption be?

Just as criminals rely on "social engineering" to get access to data, it's been used for centuries by governments and others to get access to data other people do not want them to see. No matter how anyone uses technology to secure their internet "privacy" (quotes because it's an oxymoron), you are really just depending that the folks who create the technology have not been "socially engineered".

So... if you don't want someone to find out something, don't publish it, on the net or elsewhere.

As I understand it (I'm NOT a doctor):

There are several other inner ear problems that produce vertigo.
What you've described sounds to me like one of the more transient ones. (Meniere's is the major progressive one.)

Even with Meniere's they're very reluctant to disable the inner ear - which also destroys the hearing. (In fact they're reluctant even to install the artificial pressure-relief valve until the hearing in the affected ear has been destroyed - because the surgery will usually damage or destroy it as a side-effect.)

As I understand balance you have three systems:
  - Inner ear "rate gyros and accellerometers" - which also sense gravity.
  - Visual modeling of your location/motion/environment.
  - Proprioception - muscle/tendon tension, joint position, ...
You need any two of the three to walk upright. Disasgeement between the set of three triggers vertigo / motion sickness / car/sea/airsickness, etc. (The system generally learns that disagreement is normal in a vehicle, which is why vertigo-producing diseases usually don't trigger during driving.)

A good authoritative source on this is the California Ear Institute in East Palo Alto.

You must also assess the likelihood of someone finding/using that hole.

You must also take into account that fixing the hole means the "someone" will just MOVE ON TO THE NEXT HOLE, raising its probability of being found.

Unless you fix enough that a substantial fraction of the attackers give up and move on to different targets or a different line of work, you've engaged in a futile effort.

This "fix the big, findable problems" approach is an obfuscated form of a familiar system design pathology: Pushing the problems around from component to component, rather than solving them.

The author is assuming that the opposition is dumb. It used to be, back when it was a kid in their parents' basement.

Actually, the "kid in the basement" usually wasn't dumb. Typically they'd be far above the average for their school.

Callow, yes.

Further, they had an advantage over the professionals: They could spend a LOT of time, in long, unbroken, sessions, pursuing a problem of their choosing down to the nitty-gritty-bits, until it fell before their persistence. Not having to earn a living, meet a schedule, build something they're not interested in to support a company's work (and do security on the side), commute to a work place (and having the tools available 24/7), having food, housing, and what-have-you provided by the parents, and (during the school vacation) having no distractions whatsoever, let them learn more, faster, and try more things.

A close relative of mine has MÃf©niÃfre's disease and resulting debilitating vertigo.

Spell that "Meniere's". (Slashdot didn't render the cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, where the original spelling has two different diacriticals above the two "e"s.)

A close relative of mine has MéniÃre's disease and resulting debilitating vertigo.

This is a horrible condition where failure of a pressure relief valve in the inner ear results in the progressive destruction of the inner ear's membranes, including those in the"rate gyros" and "linear accelerometers". This repeatedly changes the errors in the ear's balance signals, resulting in repeated and extreme triggering of a reflex apparently intended to eject neurotoxic poisons: Extreme "seasickness", fall down, projectile vomiting and diarrhea, can't even crawl, let alone stand, for several hours. After a couple days the new error is "mapped out" - then another tear in a membrane creates a new error, and repeat.

Meanwhile the loss of the balance signals means additional dependence on vision - and thus bone-breaking falls and additional nausea attacks and headaches (it's related to migraine) from flickering lights and confusing background images. (Even flickers far faster than the fusion rate causes attacks, apparently by delaying and distorting visual location cues during motion.)

It is so debilitating that a substantial fraction of the victims commit suicide.

Biocompatible MEMS systems could be used to create an implantable prosthetic replacement for the balance sensors. (We already know the signal can be coupled to the nerves in question magnetically.) This could result in restoration of the balance function and thus an effective treatment.

From another article about it:

Transmission efficiency is an impressive 85% thanks to the âoeshapedâ part of the technology, which targets the electromagnetic field at the vehicle, so that less energy is lost to the environment.

A tad low for a transformer, but with inches of air gap and moist dirt in the magnetic path you can expect less than ideal efficiency. It's better than many electric motors and most battery charge/discharge cycle losses. It's entirely adequate.

Why even have it on at all? You are practically unsecured anyway. Might as well just turn WEP off.

WEP is an expression of your intent.
  - With it off you have an open wireless access point: Anyone can pair with it, and some OSes, out of the box, will try to do so.
  - WIth it on you've told strangers that they're supposed to get permission to use it.

It's just like the lock on a screen door: It takes only seconds for someone to break through. But anyone breaking through loses the ability to claim that he thought you left the door unlocked because you intended that anyone at the door should just walk in.

An annoying thing about that poll (and all polls without comments) is that slashdot doesn't display WHEN the poll occurred, nor is it in the URL (which just gives the poll number. So without the comments to give a date/time it's not possible to date it.

Given that the subject was "time until facebook is replaced", when the poll occurred is especially significant.

In war, these bullets are banned by the Geneva convention. Wounds are hoped to be survivable by humans and the bullets are intended to poke a hole in enemy bodies that removes them from battle.

And in terms even a psychopath would understand:

A dead soldier takes one soldier out of action. A wounded solder takes two, plus a medic's time and a drain on the supply lines to provide food, medical attention, and transportation away from the front.

Fewer dead soldiers and wounds with better recovery means fewer vendettas and broken families. This makes it easier to make peace and interact peacefully with a former enemy in the years after the war, and for the warring parties' economies to recover once peace breaks out.

Expanding bullets, on the other hand, are the ammo of choice for personal protection - whether civilian or police. They are more likely to incapacitate an attacker (when fired, as is typical, from a moderate-powered handgun rather than a rifle) and less likely to penetrate an attacker or wall and continue on to injure an innocent bystander. (Generally, deadly force is only justifiable in self-defense until the attack is stopped. Even with expanding bullets it's only about one in five that a person shot until incapacitated actually dies.)

Steel is banned at many ranges because it can be more damaging to metallic target stands and steel targets.

It's also hell on barrels and chokes, especially in antique shotguns.

But for hunting it's a problem because it's less dense than lead (about 70%), causing it to decelerate more rapidly, reducing both accuracy and range. (At 40 yards #4 steel shot has about half the momentum of the same size lead that left the barrel at the same velocity.) Further, the lower density means you can't load as much mass into a shell of the same length while its higher strength means it doesn't deform and thus doesn't transfer as much momentum to the target. Both of these reduce the "stopping power" further.

What the Romans found out about was lead acetate.

They discovered that lining their wine storage containers made bad or old wine turn sweet, rather than sour. This is because the acetic acid of the vinegar reacted with the metallic lead of the lining, becoming and extremely sweet - and extremely soluble, bioavailable, and toxic - compound (nicknamed "sugar of lead"). This, far more than the metallic lead in the pipes, is currently believed to be the main source of lead-related poisoning in the Romans (especially among the upper classes, who could afford the wines in the fancy containers).

The NRA's point is that metallic lead is enormously less of a toxicity issue than water-soluble lead compounds, and that anti-gunners and anti-hunters are (in its opinion) using "junk science" claims to push for yet another piece of legislation restricting guns, ammunition, and hunting.

The obvious counter would be to bring up NON-junk-science research establishing that metallic lead from shot actually is a significant problem and quantifying the problem. That only works, of course, if such non-junk-science results exist.

That doesn't say poisoning from lead shot is NOT a problem (or not a significant one). But given the number of scientists looking for such an effect, I'd consider a lack of such papers (if, indeed, there is such a lack) would be an indicator that toxicity from shot is so low as to be buried in the noise, rather than that nobody has gotten around to documenting it.

(Now its lack in the POLITICAL DEBATE, of course, could just be a matter of the anti-lead-shot faction going with the most lurid claims as a political tactic.)

I would presume that while the field is quite robust, that the rate of alternation will be either absurdly fast, or very slow.

RTFA - or at least look at the pictures (it's in the caption of one): Feed to the coils in the road is 20 kHz, 200A.

... it wouldn't take a high school education to understand how to sap power from the road for free for powering your cell phone, laptop, or for the real inventive some parts of your house

A horsepower is 3/4 kW. Braking down from 50 MPH turns enough energy into heat to heat a snowbound house with only moderate insulation, in the dead of temperate-zone winter, for half an hour.

Running your laptop or charging your cellphone, like the incandescent lights in cars, is a very tiny drop in a very large lake.

Running about ten households on it is comparable to running an extra car continuously. (Cruising at highway speed takes high teens of HP - it's getting up to speed in a reasonable time that requires those big engines.) But it would also require enough of a pickup to constitute a traffic hazard, which would bring you to the attention of authorities.

Those buried conductors are what make repaving an intersection in US a bit more expensive than say the straight road

Note that they are talking about powering patches of the road (5% to 15%), not the whole thing. The car stores the power for the stretches between the patches. Such patches can be on straight sections where vehicles don't do things that cause extra wear. Also: A few dead patches don't kill the road - they just mean the car pulls a little more out of the battery before the road brings it back to full charge.

As another poster mentioned: Repaving a road with a concrete slab base only tweaks the top inch or two. The slabs can last a half-century or more. If the coils, cores, and local wiring can be embedded in or below the slab, with a couple inches of extra gap between the top of the core and the surface of the road, it can last a very long time.

With the "hot" sections of reasonable size and modular, I imagine a dead one could be replaced, slab and all, in an overnight or over-weekend operation, scheduled for when the road is not too busy and lane closures or detours are available.

Back in the days of netnews, store-and-forward email, private dialup BBSes, and a far lower proportion of script kiddies in cracker circles, there was concern that the government would be able to monitor (or already was monitoring) a larightrge amount of the Internet - netnews, mail, BBSes, etc., - and handle the volume by using keyword-searching software. (Snowden's recent revelations show their concerns were correct - through PERHAPS a bit early.) So some among the computer underground began obfuscating their text communications to try to stymie that approach to surveillance.

In addition to using slang (which, of course, would quickly be figured out), the approach was to distort the spelling of words in ways that (with a little effort) would be recognizable by a human eye but not by a straightforward word matcher. Misspellings (common, adjacent-key, adjacent-character substitution, etc.), homonyms, substitution of letters that looked similar, digits and punctuation for similar-looking letters (such as 3 for E, dyslexic style), building typewriter pictures of letters, etc. were typical. The idea was to pile distortion upon distortion until it was somewhat difficult to read, and constantly mutate the distortions, perhaps settling on a style but NOT on something that could be easily built into a pattern-matching.

Thus was born leet-speak (always, of course, spelled in its own form, such as "133t" or "I334".) Of course the constant-mutation was quickly lost in favor of more stable use of certain attractive forms, thus turning it into an ordinary slang and defeating the purpose.

At the time "owned" was already a slang term applied to systems which were cracked and controlled by a tacker, or the owner/operator of such systems. "pwned" falls right into the pattern on two rules: adjacent-key misspelling and "little p looks like little o" visual pattern matching. So I assumed, at the time, that it was just another instance of the form.

Now that does not say that it DIDN'T originate as an in-game typo that grew into an in-joke. But gaming and cracking circles have overlapped substantially since the breaking of early attempts at computer-game copy protection. So the two explanations are not in conflict:. A typo that fit right into the form would be immediately seized and used.