The WPA key is based on a hash of both the SSID and the password, so it's a good idea to make them both fairly long.

Since the password is secret and the SSID is not, the password contributes more to the security than the SSID. As soon as the SSID is long enough to avoid collisions, there is no additional security to be gained from making it longer.

It would make a lot more sense to deploy, say, ice-capable military ships

These kinds of criticisms seem to assume that Canada is doing this because it plans to base its entire defense on fleets of stealth snowmobiles. Canada is still acquiring new ships, attack aircraft, AFVs and the like. In fact it's spending billions of dollars on such programs. The question is whether spending a few million mre to investigate the potential of a stealth snowmobile makes sense given the marginal contributions such a weapon might make toward the nation's defense.

The Canadian Army already uses snowmobiles, presumably because it finds them practical for the missions they must prepare for and the conditions they must operate in. A few million dollars to test the potential of a quiet snowmobile seems very reasonable to me, and I'm a left-winger with little tolerance for corporate welfare for defense contractors.

A unit cost of $620,000 for a custom-designed, hand-built engineering prototype just doesn't seem all that extravagant to me. That might be too high for a production vehicle, but when you add up the cost of a team of engineers, mechanics and artisans it'd be very easy to spend a million dollars apiece if you're only building two or three.

Uh, no. We have domestic service. You can get charters to pretty much anywhere in the eastern Arctic from Iqaluit as well.

Some military flights to CFB Alert do pass through Greenland, but aside from that....

Not always useful in the Canadian Arctic. Pack ice sometimes extends for miles out to sea. It's a maze of 3-10 metre ridges that are an absolute bitch to navigate. Trying to pull ammo and supplies through on skis would be absolute torture. Hell, just crossing on a snowmobile through the pack ice on each side of the bay in Cape Dorset (maybe a kilometre and a half) left me sweating like a horse in -25 degree weather.

There's not a lot of pack ice on the old Finnish/Soviet border....

you don't see why Yahoo would take down a site arguing implicitly "it's okay to commit suicide"?

I sincerely believe that for every problem you try to solve through censorship, there exists a better solution. And I think freedom of speech is too important to take such a site down. But Martin Manley's right to publish this is much less important than everybody else's right to read it. There are other deceased people who have written much more harmful texts than this, which are not being censored. If you disagree with something, you present a different point of view rather than applying censorship.

I will not say this suicide was the right thing to do. But I think committing suicide leaving your friends wondering why is much worse than letting them know your reasoning behind. It would be even better if we could get those people to talk with somebody beforehand such that the decision to commit suicide is not something they are making all on their own. There may be alternatives. But we may need some changes to society to make that happen.

The concern about getting so ill or getting so old and worn out that you have only suffering left in your life is a valid concern. If any animal was in such a state you'd put it down because that is considered the most humane thing to do. Why do people have to be treated less humane than that? Martin Manley decided to put an end to his own life before it came to that. If he had believed he could be assisted to end his life once there really was nothing left to live for, he might not have been so proactive about it. In other words in a society a bit more positive towards suicide, Martin Manley might still have been alive today.

There are also stories about terminally ill people who travel to a different country just so they can legally be assisted in suicide instead of facing a slow and painful death. Some of those decide to take this final trip to die sooner than they would otherwise have done because they would otherwise be too weak to take the trip. Many would much rather have stayed home and lived for a few months longer among friends and family and then end life quietly when their health was getting too bad.

Finally being assisted in a suicide after having talked it over with your closest relatives plus a doctor and a psychiatrist would be the most humane way to end life for some people. When those people commit suicide on their own, it is a failure of society to treat them humanely.

It is even worse when a young and mostly healthy person end their own life. I don't know if I could ever be convinced that could ever be the right way to go. A friend of mine did that at the age of 31. I didn't see that coming. I don't know if I will ever stop wondering if there was anything we could have done differently.

it was a site that, in part, explained why he committed suicide.

I'm sure anybody who knew him would like to read it. That may very well include people who didn't know him all that well, so a website would be an obvious way to reach all potentially interested parties. A major part of the reason for creating the site may be to comfort those left behind. With that in mind I cannot see how anybody could think it was an acceptable move from Yahoo.

I used a string of random characters as my SSID to reduce the risk of collisions. It is annoying when a device recognizes the SSID and attempts to connect to an AP where it doesn't actually have access.

The password to my AP is a different string of random characters, and it is longer than the SSID.

One of my favorite overheard comments: "It's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective."

You understand why I chose that particular phrase, right?

Before the trip, draw up an outline for an essay, short story, novelette, or other piece on a topic of interest to you.

During the trip, write it.

When you get back, edit the text and submit it to magazines/publishers for consideration.

Before the trip, settle on a graphics artistic project such as a book of cartoons, a pop-up book, or movie.

During the trip, draw the cartoons, sketch out the pop-up book, or storyboard the movie.

Before the trip, choose a software project that's never been done before.

During the trip, map out the block functionality, drivers, database interface, or whatever else the project needs.

When you get back, program the project and release it on Github as open source.

Get a book on sleight-of-hand and read up on the basics.

During the trip, practice the techniques with a deck of cards or a coin or a small item. (I enjoy knuckle rolls and rolling ball manipulations.)

Get a video of someone whose stage presence you like. Play 1-minute loops of the video over and over, mimicking the hand motions and gestures of the speaker while he talks. (I like James Spader, but everyone should have their own likes.) Practice until your own stage presence is animated and engaging.

Get an audio of an announcer whose style you like (I chose Morly Safer), and play 1 sentence loops of whatever they're saying over and over. Mimic their vocal variety, tonal variation, and tempo - especially the way they use pauses and emphasis to make points. When you have any one sentence down pat, switch to the next sentence. Continue until your own vocal presentation is as polished and precise as the speaker.

Choose an aspect of life that you would like to improve, or for which you think improving would benefit you, and then come up with a way to learn more or practice during your trip.

How utterly uncromulent. What you're describing is clearly an insoundenator.

What are you talking about? This is the absolute bleedingest razor edge of science! Science, I say!

First, you'd need some kind of sonic waveform manipulation device, capable of turning mere electronic impulses into sound. Think of the ramifications of this! It's literally earth-shattering!

And then, you'd have to had a device that responds to auditory stimuli, transmuting sensory inputs into purest energy and then making sense of the electron stream! I need more exclamations points for this! Here!! Take these!!!

And finally, before we decide just how many Nobels we want to award (I know, I know: all of them), they would have to create some means, not only of MOdulating the signal, but DEModulating it as well. What brave new world is this, to have such inventors in it!!

As the great Thomas Huxley said, on reading Darwin's Origin of Species, 'How very stupid of me not to have thought of this before.'

As an outside observer, what do you think about the human race?

I have a measured IQ of 87 so yeah, I can be that retarded - but no more. What's IQ got to do with it anyway?

Here's an IQ test for you, fill in the blank:

rue is to pain as street is to ___________

It'll take about two years for this problem to disappear.

There's an enormous monetary incentive for cloud services to implement good privacy. Anyone who doesn't implement it will get their lunch eaten by someone who does.

There's already a massive exodus away from US based servers, both at home and abroad. People are thinking through the ramifications of having their sensitive information used as "incentives" to help business. Your client lists, sales information, costs and accounting - if any part of your local network is in the cloud, the US can rifle through it and trade the information to another company in return for help fighting terrorism. Many people will choose to believe that this is not happening, but what the heck - who can tell any more?

This is a self-correcting problem.

Mega has announced an encrypted E-mail service, the client software will be open for public inspection, and none of it will be hosted on US servers.

Google has admitted in court that they don't think users have an expectation of privacy.

Which E-mail service would you rather use? The one from a sleazy convicted criminal, but with impenetrable security? Or the one from a company that always rifles through the contents, but promises to only do it for the better good?