Unfortunately, the ony way I can see securing wireless right now is to replace it with a wire.

Use WPA2 with a strong password and you're pretty much bulletproof. There are no known shortcuts to cracking it and it's extremely slow. Even cracking a minimum length (8 char) random password is pretty much infeasible for a single computer.

The strong password is the key point. If you use a regular word or something easy like a couple of words or a word followed by a number then it becomes easy to crack fairly quickly. But if you choose something longer ( 20 or 30 chars....you can go up to 64) and at least partially random then there's no way anyone without serious resources are going to crack it.

So having the key is irrelevant.

Having the "key" is entirely relevant. If an attacker doesn't have the key, they can't even begin to attempt a brute force crack. Once the key has been obtained it becomes possible.

Furthermore, many people use stupidly simple passwords. The attacker will be able to find these passwords within just hours. Without the key though, even a crappy password is unbreakable.

Of course, that doesn't just leave everyone's password out in the open, the passwords still have to be guessed. But there's a wide gap between impossible and may take a while but is doable for many passwords. Having the key is completely relevant.

At a place I used to work at, there was one particular computer that was older than the rest. Specifically, it didn't have enough memory to do the job. It wasn't doing anything fancy, just running XP and then some in-house software for collecting data, but once everything was loaded it was left with no free physical memory so it was constantly going to the swap file whenever you wanted to use it for anything.

I explained all of this to the IT department. They could have doubled the memory for less than $20, but apparently that just wasn't feasible. They thought it made more sense to have people sit there in front of it and wait a few minutes a dozen times a day when it was used.

Fortunately, soon after that, the hard drive crashed mysteriously and they swapped out the box with a better one.

All of my devices use DC already. They always have. AC electric power from the grid is converted to DC right after it comes out of the wall. That's how we do it in the US anyways, maybe it's different in the UK.

According to NFL Films president Steve Sabol, it is the first since Super Bowl II.

My first thought as well.

At least it's a more accurate name than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea...

2. and anyway, that a HD encrypted by Google wouldn't be so (apparently) easy to break.

That was my first thought as well. Given how much most people know about encryption though, I'd be willing to bet that it wasn't even encrypted. There was probably some aspect of the data that was encoded in some way and the official(s) who wrote and/or gave the statement just said encryption.

Newsflash: We Brits left America over three hundred years ago, basically because we couldn't afford it. That's when the United States needed an armed militia. A home invasion is not likely I'm afraid, and you have this thing called the armed forces these days. Difficult to believe, I know.

When the GP said "home invasion" I don't think he was talking about being invaded by a foreign country. I think he meant criminals coming into your home to steal from, harm, or kill you. Of course, the invaders don't need a gun to accomplish this. I'm sure it happens in Britain as well.

Part of gun safety is storing guns in a manner that makes it difficult for people to steal them or for children to use them without adult supervision. A lot of guns used by criminals are stolen from law-abiding citizens' homes, who were not using a gun safe...

Although I agree with you on locking up stored guns, I think it's worthwhile to point out that criminals only really prefer stolen guns because there isn't a paper trail that leads back to them (and possibly they're cheaper (especially if you're the one who stole it in the first place!)... I haven't compared the price of stolen guns vs retail lately). If everyone started locking up their guns it wouldn't really reduce the number of criminals using them.

Their only reason is to kill people. Just ban guns already.

That's not true at all. Police use guns everyday in an effective manner without killing people (which isn't to say that police don't kill people with their guns, just that the vast majority of the time that they point one at someone they don't). Police can use their guns to kill people to defend themselves or others if necessary, but most powerful aspect is the threat of such a thing happening that allows them to better control situations.

That same aspect applies to people wanting to protect their homes from invaders and pretty much any other situation where a gun is pointed at a person as well. Even someone committing armed robbery need not kill anyone.

Pretty much no one buys a gun planning to kill someone with it. And very very few of those said people or guns will end up killing a person. I'm willing to bet that better than 99.9% of the time a gun is used there is no killing of people going on.

Of course, they may end up killing someone by accident, or in a fit of rage, or in self defense. People may even end up having their gun taken from them and end up being killed by it. I'd even say that in a way, guns make it far too easy for people to kill each other. But that isn't the point. The point is that saying that guns only purpose is to kill people is far off the mark.

Bah. The only download client I need is wget. ;)

That analogy is known as Russell's teapot, and it originated from Bertrand Russell.