Why would they need wait for you to be online then risk detection by using a backdoor when they can just make a call to facebook, your ISP or your mobile phone network and probably get far more valuable information?

Neither Facebook nor your ISP has any information about your network that you didn't volunteer. Unless you're not smart enough to put a hardware firewall between your modem and router (as well as other measures) they're not going to easily get your private data. Data you give your ISP, facebook, or any other cloud entity isn't private.

If you're putting, say, trade secrets in the cloud you're a fool.

Having the source to your firewall's OS and software is far more important than internal OSes, but code in your OS can "phone home" and let the attacker in to your network, so a closed source OS with network access is still dangerous.

By the time Google cars get here I'll probably really need one; I'm not getting any younger. I'm looking forward to them, too.

The "humanities" in modern American academia are so fucking orthodox they might as well be called the "government worship department."

Wow, that's sad. It's a complete 180 from how college was in the late seventies. Of course, we'd just gotten out of a very unpopular war, the previous President had resigned in disgrace, and we had recession and inflation at the same time.

However, a few humanities courses wouldn't hurt some slashdotters. I haven't seen any in this thread yet, but some comments make me think the commenter is a high school dropout. "i thought those dog's would loose there mind's." You can't write like that and be taken seriously by anyone with an education.

I also agree with another poster in this thread who said humanities majors should take more math and science. If you haven't gotten a well-rounded education, you're not really educated.

From your link: "At 05:38 GMT on Thursday 23rd May, Ecuadorâ(TM)s first and only satellite collided with the fuel tank of an S14 Soviet rocket, which was launched in 1985."

Yes, there was a collision between Ecuador's satellite (TFA doesn't say how big) but the satellite wasn't the debris, it was the discarded fuel tank that when jettisoned should have been thrown so that it would have come back down that was the debris. But the space junk problem hadn't really come up a quarter century ago. The rest of the article just showed the naming conventions of various satellite sizes.

Give me a link where two functional devices that were actually being used at the time collided. Space junk is a problem, but these de-orbit at EOL, unlike Russian fuel tanks.

LEO can still be hazardous.

Something that small can't, at least after it reaches the atmosphere. These things are, if I read right, about the size of a Rubic Cube. Skylab was just a little bigger. They'll vaporize instantly.

+1 funny, though, and that was a great link.

According to a link another slashdotter provided, these come down after three months.

Since, as others have pointed out, there is no possible way for this to be space junk the comment is not only way overrated but offtopic as well.

I know reading the article is seldom done, but if you're moderating you really should RTFA so you don't mod comments like the above badly.

Yes, but how do you know that MS hasn't inserted a nice big back-door for the spooks?

Microsoft wouldn't have to insert a backdoor. NSA spooks could easily infiltrate Microsoft's or any other company's programming staff and put them in themselves.

From a "security" perspective, you'll have to go with an open-source browser -- but even that's not a guarantee.

Turtles all the way down?

The haters are free to voice their opinions in their own blogs, where they will too be flamed.

I don't disagree with that. My problem with TFA was it looked like he wanted speech like that outlawed. My site didn't have a messageboard but I got a lot of email, and posted much of it and almost all of the negative mail, which I lampooned on the site.

There are plenty of offline trolls, too. Note some of the comments after the story, that's just how things are.

The same with my cats, cats can be trained, too. You just need to know the psychology and instincts of any species of animal to train it.

I don't say "excuse me" I say "Move!" Same thing, English is a foreign language (or second language) to an animal.

Excellent quote. I haven't read that book but it looks like he's making a statement about anthropomorphism. All I ever say to my computer (the one with Windows) is FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!!! I said the same thing to my car this morning when it wouldn't start.