and useful to boot.

Well, face it, it won't be very useful if you don't boot it...

Home security systems are meant to stop the small time thieves. If you are smart enough to hack into my home automation stuff and turn off my lights its probably not worth your time.

This is the same flawed argument that makes DRM seem useful. The fundamental flaw in your logic is that you assume that each crook must learn about the systems and learn how to crack them for each home.

In reality, all that is required is for a single person to crack the security scheme once, and then develop a tool to reproduce the attack. He or she can then sell that tool to all the small-time crooks, and before long, they're as ubiquitous as lock picks. To make matters worse, you don't have to stand there looking suspicious while you pick an insecure digital lock or disable an insecure digital alarm system.

No, in the long term, easily cracked electronic door locks and alarm systems are going to make those small-time burglars very happy.

And then disable the alarm system, and if the home is really automated, unlock the door. Devices intended to provide security should, first and foremost, be secure. If they aren't, they are worthless—doubly so if they actually open up additional vulnerabilities that otherwise would not have existed.

Are you under the impression that if story A is here, story B is not?

I'm not sure that's how it works.

But in any case, I'm pretty sure the homosexual / straight distribution of nerds is the same as everyone else, pretty much. It really *is* news for nerds.

Exactly - I doubt he'd get such fun reactions if he sat in the corner of a room and aimed his camera at people (say like the surveillance he's trying to bring attention to), but his videos show that he's clearly trying to violate peoples' personal space by getting in their face. He's probably get the same reactions if he shoved his shoe at them.

Time to get out of mom's basement, then.

Cursing is family friendly. Repression is not. Learning how and why and when people curse is productive and useful. If you're not being raised by really broken people, you'll hear cursing, you'll get to curse, etc.

I am grateful I grew up in a home where language was respected, not repressed. The result? I *very* rarely curse. But when I do, it's situationally appropriate, meaning, I'm using it for emphasis -- not "I'm checking the age of the ears nearby"

The HAM network is almost completely self policed.

I think this is confusing "mostly well behaved" with self policed. For instance, look at the abject fuckery that goes on at 14.313 MHz each and every day. All manner of rule violations. Not judging the rules here, but no question, deep and serious violations of them. No one "polices" this in any sense of the term; nothing any ham does shuts it down, slows it down, restrains it, or otherwise serves as a "police" function. Reporting it to the FCC does nothing; years and years of reports have gone without any response.

Now, it's quite true that most hams don't take part, and further, view the situation as appalling; but this is like your neighbor disliking seeing crack sold on the sidewalk. That's behaving well, not policing. They're not policing it; they might report it, but that's still not policing it. Only the police can do that, because they have the authority and power to do something about it. In the ham situation, the feds aren't coming when they are called, either, so the activity goes unchallenged in any realistic way. And believe me, getting on there and arguing? Not helpful.

There's more than that going on, too. I know for a fact that there are stations on the air using considerably more than legal power; stations that intentionally interfere with others in several ways, etc. I *also* know that the FCC has the analytical tools to detect, and the authority to stop, this kind of behavior. I lay the blame for this shameful garbage entirely at the FCC's feet.

Allowing encrypted traffic would allow me to sell internet service to people in rural areas because there's no way to detect what is in the encrypted content.

Yes, but any ham can do the same thing for free. Encrypted or not. That's going to make your business model unsustainable. Also, I should point out that packet has allowed email back and forth to the Internet for decades now. So I think your idea of "providing Internet" isn't going to choke the spectrum. Hard to sell something others give away for free (not impossible... but hard.)

Another thing: With the plethora of digital modes available right now, it's become a royal PITA to try and figure out what you're listening to, much less decode it. Is it Olivia? RTTY? Amtor? Heil? Packet? and on and on for must be over a hundred modes and variants. The difference between an encrypted packet and one you can't figure out otherwise is... nothing.

And one more thing (lol): As far as HF goes, we don't have the bandwidth to supply anything like Internet to anyone. There's no risk whatsoever of commercial interest of that type coming in. You'd have to be talking about operation at UHF and above, and *that* means line of sight, and *that* means latency that grows with every link, and it also means that those 99.99% dead bands would see some use, which might keep them from being taken from us. Not a perfect reason by any means, but a reason regardless. The fact is, cellphones have almost entirely killed VHF/UHF ham activity. It's sad as hell, but there it is.

Oh, hey. One MORE thing: Your "Internet supply" is going to have to accept all manner of interference from other hams, etc. That's going to make your service really, really poor. Quite aside from the free competition that will start up the day after you do because you're going to offend every ham with half a wit.

It's news for everybody, including nerds. I'm straight, and I was pleased to see it here. You are free to not read any story that you're not interested in. For you to advocate kicking stories off smacks of interest -- not disinterest. Perhaps a little examination of your own motives is in order.

Yeah, I read that three times and my head is still spinning.

That's pretty much what happened the first time, too. Just doesn't want to sink in. I don't have the background to really comprehend this at the right level; just local physics instincts, and they often seem to come up short when cosmology is the subject at hand.

I would love to go over a couple things with you via email, if you felt you could spare the time. I'm at gmail, same handle. If not, no sweat, of course. Cheers!

Ok, let me elaborate. The HAM network is almost completely self policed. It would be trivially easy to abuse the spectrum and ruin it for everyone so it's in everyone's best interest that people who don't follow the rules, who are using it for commercial gain for just one example, are reported and stopped. Allowing encrypted traffic would allow me to sell internet service to people in rural areas because there's no way to detect what is in the encrypted content. If something becomes profitable enough eventually you'll choke the spectrum and make it unusable for everyone. Keep in mind that this isn't a managed slice of spectrum, there's no one in charge of who is using what frequency where. Get enough sources broadcasting and it simply won't work.

From the summary:

If hams can't decode messages, they can't identify if the communication even belongs on ham radio. A potentially worse problem is that encryption destroys the harmless nature of Amateur radio.There's no reason for governments to believe that encrypted communications are harmless

Physics doesn't care.

That's what I like about physics. :) (contrariwise, it's what makes me suspicious of quantum physics...)

Time can stop, go backward, go imaginary, you name it. It's just us forcing physics into a badly fitting mathematical suit.

Have you run into the "proof" of determinism demonstrated by showing that a viewpoint across an interval where the object being viewed is on an (I believe) approaching vector near lightspeed) results in viewing that object in the future, thereby assuring us of the fixed sequence of events that will lead to that view? I may have that a little jumbled, the idea had me dizzy for days.

Nova had some dumbed-down cosmological thing on where they diagrammed that out. I had to go listen to some Pink Floyd afterwards, lol.

The program was assumed to exist by large amounts of the public, in that way "everyone" knew about it.
The program was briefed to many, possibly all members of congress, in that way "everyone" knew about it.
The program was classified to the highest level of classification the US government has, in that way it was, in a very literal sense, "Top Secret"

In this situation it's going to be all about who you know. You say you have a long history of successes? Contact the people you worked with and worked for. Someone, somewhere, is hiring and at least some of those people will be in position to push your resume at least past the first layer of defense. Lack of a formal degree will see your resume to circular filing cabinet in record time, unless the HR drone has a reason to believe otherwise.