Meteorology is the New Astrology

I'm not sure when it happened, or if it's always been this way, but meteorology is now resorting to cold reading techniques like those used in astrology, palm reading and lie detector tests. After issuing dire warnings about the 2006 hurricane season (and scaring the crap out of everyone within 200 miles of a coast) the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has quietly "revised" their prediction.

This of course, calls into question the value of a prediction that is constantly 'revised' to reflect the current reality. Now NOAA is saying that the hurricane season won't be that bad after all, however they made sure to throw a "but hey, watch your back!" comment just to cover them in case there's a Katrina Part II ("...we are not off the hook by any means").

So here's my "horoscope" reading of the 2006 hurricane season:

It will be a mild year for Hurricanes, but watch for the full moon! It can cause unpredictable results. September's rain will bring about a tempest in a teacup, and New Orleans will breathe a sigh of relief when the sun shines on Bourbon Street.

New WiFi virus?

Yesterday I was at a conference and pulled out my laptop to see if the building had any free wireless available. There was one, with an SSID of "Free public wifi" I tried to connect, then noticed that it was a peer-to peer wireless network. I thought that was odd...and it didn't work anyway. I closed my laptop and forgot about it. Then tonight, my girlfriend and I are both on the couch using our laptops with my wireless router and low and behold, the SSID "Free Public wifi" shows up again on both of our machines, with a very strong signal. This made me a bit concerned. It was the same SSID I had seen earlier, and was (on both machines) a peer-to-peer connection type. My machine automatically connected (for some reason my router dropped its connection at this time) to the "free public wifi". I disconnected it and after getting my router back up and running, did some research. Turns out there are a few other people who have noticed this same phenomenon. Also today, this story came out. Odd coincidence, or are we about to see a wildfire of wifi viruses?

Is this a new virus that's infecting machines via wireless connections? If so, this might be ugly. Let me know if you've seen anything like this, or if you know what this is.