The only one that didn't want Palm products to succeed was Palm. Horrible products. Support EOL for all their products were the day they shipped. Rarely got any sort of bug fixes, never any additional features. Palm Desktop for Mac is still a PowerPC only application (runs on intel via rosetta). Why bother trying to support something the vendor has no interest in supporting? I'll never make the mistake of buying another Palm product (I've had 2, Palm Pro and Palm T5). I've never heard anyone say a good thing about their Treo so I never went there. I don't expect anything will change with the Pre. I also don't understand the Pre hype, it's not bringing anything new to the table.
Well, I've enjoyed my Treo 650 - though perhaps more because of the hardware than the software. The combination of a good screen and a dedicated keyboard area was just the right design for me - and the Treo was one of the first products to do that well in a smartphone format.
After the way Palm has handled PalmOS over the last several years I'm more than a little hesitant to buy any new Palm devices myself. I mean, there was the never-ending reign of PACE, followed by the adoption of NVFS (which was great, in a way, since it protected the device from data loss due to power failure - but in older revisions it could lose entire databases if your device crashed while the database was open - and it changed a fundamental assumption about how databases work on PalmOS...
Had Palm rolled out a new OS platform... I don't know... before they allowed PalmOS to degrade into a complete joke... Before it completely ceased to be a reasonable fit for the devices on which it was running... Then I would be a lot less skeptical about the stuff they're rolling out now... I'm with you on the Pre - I can't understand the hype of it.
Open source advocates get off their asses, do something for the reward of just doing it and give you their tools for free, to do with what you will.
Well, Opens Source programmers do that. And not necessarily "for the reward of just doing it"... Open Source Advocates don't necessarily get off their asses at all.:)
Maybe I don't know, Palm could write their own Mac stuff instead of relying on Apple to do it for them ? I don't see how this is anti-competitive, Palm OS is not a Apple product, they don't have to support it, write software for it or update legacy code to work with their new OS.
Palm can do the work themselves if they think it's worth it. Apple isn't stopping them from downloading Xcode and writing a Cocoa based app to sync with their own hardware.
What bugs me about this story is I have no idea what the nature is of the "support" which Apple has dropped. Is it the customized USB serial driver for communicating with Palm devices? Was Palm Desktop previously bundled with Mac OS? Did Apple block Palm Desktop from interacting with their apps, thus preventing synchronization with iCal and such? I haven't used my Powerbook in long enough that I don't know what Apple had provided themselves, and TFA doesn't say what it is they removed...
I wouldn't call them "posers", but having an emotional liking or disliking for a language usually betrays an inability to select languages appropriately as needed. Let go of your anger.
Java is a fantastic language - as borne out by its huge take-up and popularity. It addresses many, many, issues with C++ and provides true portability and good performance. The language design and Sun's hard work allows for a plethora of development tools that aren't possible to implement in C++ without huge amounts of work and/or efficiently.
I wouldn't touch Java for low-level development, but "hating Java" is just ridiculous.
I don't see why.
Programmers' work must be expressed through languages like Java. If a language doesn't suit the programmer for whatever reason I think it's perfectly reasonable to hate it.
Bounds-checking could be implemented just as effectively in compiled, native code as in a virtual machine. If you don't want the programmer to have to worry about it, you build it into a library and have them use that.
Of course, if you look at the typical "net facing server" (like a web server) it's very common for web code to be interpreted PHP, Ruby, or Python. Using byte-compiled VM code would be a step up from that scenario in terms of performance.:)
I had respect for you post until that point. Then, for some reason, it disappeared.
Fuck you, indeed.
The situation called for a "fuck you". I could give two shits about whether Mr. Anonymous Coward respects me or not based on whether I tell a condescending prick to fuck off. It sounds like the whole validity of my post hinges on whether or not I bust out the effective vocabulary. What a crock of shit.
So you're saying they took the body of a mustang and put in an electric engine from a 1981 golf cart and you can't understand why anyone would want to drive that?
What? I'm just taking the title and the sig to a natural progression:)
I make analogies, it doesn't mean I understand 'em. XD
Nice try, but no. Marriage has, for millennia, been a civil (and mostly religious) arrangement between a man and woman to live together and have sex.
OK...
And now, ignoring your OT tirade about the government's involvement in marriage - what does this distinction have to do with the privacy granted to one partner with respect to the other, or to whether it's okay for one partner to look at porn without the other present?
Having sex with someone doesn't imply you give up privacy. And whether it's OK in that relationship to look at porn depends on that individual to whom you're married - whether they're cool with it, whether they find out and whether they care to find out...
Personally I'm down with Java as a language, I just don't see the point of running everything through a VM on a pocket machine.
If we were talking about running a huge J2SE-compliant VM on a phone, your outlook might be justified.
The Android virtual machine, Dalvik, does NOT have a Just-In-Time compiler and does NOT understand Java bytecode (no.class files here!).
It also, as I understand it, means that the Java software on the phone cannot take advantage of the Java acceleration features of the hardware...
Java is not bound to heavy VM implementations. You can compile it to native code (gcj); you can compile it with the Mono stack; or you can use any number of JVM implementations, from Kaffe to IBM Java to OpenJDK to whatever else.
I don't believe I ever said otherwise.
Now, how many of these options are available on Android? Which of the above do you target if you're writing for Android?
One. You write code for Android, you compile it for Dalvik. This is one of the reasons Android tends not to appeal to me.
VM advantages for mobile devices: security (VM sandboxing), system updates (update the VM software, not the actual phone OS), deal with hardware differences (port the VM to your device, hello instant app ecosystem, no ARM build vs. Intel build vs. MIPS build problems), crash protection (whoops the VM crashed, but the phone can just start another).
VM sandboxing and VM crash protection are no better than the process-level sandboxing and crash protection you'd get from native code on a decent OS. At best, maybe the hardware will contain some nasty privilege escalation bug - which, I'll grant you, is worth something - but then only if the platform is designed so that nobody (including those who do actually need it) has native code execution privileges. But it's worth a lot more to Google, the folks investing in the OS and the platform, than it is to me, who would be running and maybe coding for the platform.
I don't really understand your point about being able to update the VM. What's the benefit there? What's so great about being able to update the VM without updating the rest of the phone's OS? Seems like, either way, you're replacing a critical component upon which large chunks of the phone's ability to operate depend.
Everyone has their language preferences, and that's fine - but chiming in with an ambiguous opinion because you recognize a keyword in a discussion is not particularly helpful.
Fuck you. I made my statement perfectly clear. To repeat: Someone's not a "poser" just 'cause they don't like a programming language. I actually do like Java, just not the VM baggage that comes with it. I don't think that's an unreasonable or uninformed position.
The reason is that the designers were looking at the big picture and not just the release date. Yes, today VMing every app seperatly keeps the phone from being even more cool than it already is, but just like every other piece of computer technology, every year, they percentage of the systems resource that is used by the VMs will go down. The VMs are pretty well fixed on their performance draw. The hardware will improve. Certainly, it has to be clear that running each app in it's own VM will be huge in helping with this OS's security.
I'm still not convinced that it does much for security, really. Anything you can do, security-wise, for security can be done with an OS with memory protection anyway.
It just seems like one more thing that's nickel-and-diming away the benefits of that improved performance. If they want the VM to keep the platform from being tied to a specific architecture, it'd just be rather nice if they'd translate the instructions once, like when loading the app onto the device...
Then on Android - there's hardware (on the G1) specifically for accelerating Java - and they don't use it because Android uses its own bytecode format that's not compatible... <sigh>
If I buy a phone today, that phone will not improve every year. Other phones will appear which are better... I'm happy for platform designers if they feel comfortable making choices that make their lives easier in terms of the long-term maintenance of their platform - but these choices are not what I want on my phone, right now... I want all those cycles working for me.:)
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to say GSM service is everywhere I want it - I just think the discrepancy between that "cellularmap.net" map and the AT&T map might be somewhere in that six years...
I kid, I kid. I don't think I've ever gone farther North in Maine than Bangor. But I have family in the Augusta area, for instance, and it sucks to go somewhere and get no service... That's the nice thing about my (CDMA) Treo 650, old as it is, it actually is pretty good at the telephone part of its job...
I'm in your camp, however this is too good to be true.
SOMETHING is amiss. There's a heavy negative attached to this thing somewhere, we just haven't heard about it yet.
Well, it's expensive (don't know what the subsidized price would be like, but I've heard some dire warnings about T-Mobile lately so I don't know if I'd be comfortable going under contract with them) - the battery doesn't have as much capacity as I'd like (around 1300mAH - similar to the iPhone but less than my old Treo 650) - and it's a GSM phone, which may pose a coverage problem for those of us in the US. (Same is true of iPhone)
If I've missed anything, chime in. I still think this thing is gonna be awesome.
Personally I don't care for Android because it's so Javafied. I really truly detest Java.
People who "detest" programming languages are posers.
How's that, exactly? Some of us have simply worked with a particular language or tool long enough to know some good reasons to hate it...
Personally I'm down with Java as a language, I just don't see the point of running everything through a VM on a pocket machine. Translate the app to native code when installing it to the phone or something, there's no point JITing or VMing the code at runtime.
It's a mobile internet device that does telephony, not a phone. Phone capability is quite low on their feature list! And yes, it supports wifi..
So, what's the difference?
Seems to me it's just a matter of terminology. It's not a "smartphone" because Nokia has not chosen to call it such. But in terms of what you can do with it, it's a phone, and its form factor makes it a bit large for a phone these days but still within the smartphone size range (smaller than the old Palm Treos, 1cm longer and 2mm thicker than the Palm Pre, or 5mm thicker than the iPhone but with a slightly smaller profile...)
Whether you call such thing a "phone that can browse the web" or "an internet device which can make calls" seems a matter of preference - a matter of which features you want to emphasize as the device's main selling points.
If you don't think this thing is a phone, consider this: holding the device in vertical orientation launches the phone application. Why do that if the machine wasn't intended for use as a phone?
And you don't think a real freakin' keyboard, including the keys that you need for using a shell & co, which the iPhone does not have at all, and real physical tactile functionality, is a killer feature? ^^
Seriously, no matter how good a phone is. If it has no phone, it is right out of the contest.:)
I lust after this phone the way your mom lusts after the many strange and exciting men who come her way...
But I have to say that I'm not sold on their keyboard design. I have to try it first. I've been quite happy with my Treo 650's keyboard, which is more cramped than this thing but (due to not being a sliding design) has room for the keys to be really be defined, vertically. This thing's keyboard has the advantage of more real estate, but it's flat, and I can't help but think that if the slider were to slide a little further the keyboard could benefit from the extra space.
I'm not saying I think the keyboard is going to be bad - I'm just saying I gotta try it out... 'Course probably various people with older Nokia tablet devices can vouch for the keyboards on these things...
As much as I like and respect Stallman's works, and his fight for digital freedom, I find this little snippet quite disturbing.
What I appreciate about the statement, however, is that he's willing and able to deal logically with an issue which is too often dominated by fear. Most people aren't willing to discuss the issue, because if they come too close to advocating ephibophilia or pedophilia, or even just fail to assert opposition to it, they will be ostracized.
In my opinion, there's a basic problem of establishing consent. Children are not puppets, but it is relatively easy for an adult to manipulate them or silence them through threats or through the authority they hold over the child. From that perspective I agree with the law which says that when you're young enough you simply can't legally consent to various things, including sex. I don't believe any rule like "X years of age or older" will be perfect, erring on one side or other in various cases - I do think it's better to make the error of telling someone they're not old enough to consent when they are ready than to make the error of telling someone they are old enough to consent when they're truly not ready.
With teenagers I think we have a different set of problems: the age at which people are physically and mentally prepared to have sex does not correspond to the point at which they're legally allowed to. We've criminalized natural behavior.
My experience says that it's the female sex drive that ceases.
I'm sorry to hear that. How unfortunate for you. XD
Besides, I don't see an issue: I have my account on the computer, she has hers.... She doesn't know my password. I surf anything I want and she won't know.
Every user on a computer should have their own account... no excuses...
I feel like there's other issues - for instance, maybe I am in the "driver's seat" but I'm showing someone else a website - I don't really want "puretna" or whatever showing up in the awesome bar as I'm typing, regardless of whether it shares a few letters with the URL I'm entering...
But for me personally the common issue is just that I'm used to entering URLs, and if the URL bar pops up matches for what I'm typing, I want URL matches. Though as I get used to the "Awesome Bar" (god damn that is a stupid name) functionality I do find myself taking advantage of it more, too.
Trust issues much? I haven't used a non-shared password on a home computer since I left a dorm. My wife knows every password I have, and so do some trusted friends.
Trust, sure - but sharing a user account, to me, is kind of like sharing a toothbrush... I can do it, it won't freak me out or anything, but I don't really want to...
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The only one that didn't want Palm products to succeed was Palm. Horrible products. Support EOL for all their products were the day they shipped. Rarely got any sort of bug fixes, never any additional features. Palm Desktop for Mac is still a PowerPC only application (runs on intel via rosetta). Why bother trying to support something the vendor has no interest in supporting? I'll never make the mistake of buying another Palm product (I've had 2, Palm Pro and Palm T5). I've never heard anyone say a good thing about their Treo so I never went there. I don't expect anything will change with the Pre. I also don't understand the Pre hype, it's not bringing anything new to the table.
Well, I've enjoyed my Treo 650 - though perhaps more because of the hardware than the software. The combination of a good screen and a dedicated keyboard area was just the right design for me - and the Treo was one of the first products to do that well in a smartphone format.
After the way Palm has handled PalmOS over the last several years I'm more than a little hesitant to buy any new Palm devices myself. I mean, there was the never-ending reign of PACE, followed by the adoption of NVFS (which was great, in a way, since it protected the device from data loss due to power failure - but in older revisions it could lose entire databases if your device crashed while the database was open - and it changed a fundamental assumption about how databases work on PalmOS...
Had Palm rolled out a new OS platform... I don't know... before they allowed PalmOS to degrade into a complete joke... Before it completely ceased to be a reasonable fit for the devices on which it was running... Then I would be a lot less skeptical about the stuff they're rolling out now... I'm with you on the Pre - I can't understand the hype of it.
There is also a special place in Hell for people who traffic in unnecessary hyperbole.
What about car analogies?
And one for high UID morons.
Oh, look... Anonymous Coward just slammed you for your high numeric UID! XD
Open source advocates get off their asses, do something for the reward of just doing it and give you their tools for free, to do with what you will.
Well, Opens Source programmers do that. And not necessarily "for the reward of just doing it"... Open Source Advocates don't necessarily get off their asses at all. :)
Maybe I don't know, Palm could write their own Mac stuff instead of relying on Apple to do it for them ? I don't see how this is anti-competitive, Palm OS is not a Apple product, they don't have to support it, write software for it or update legacy code to work with their new OS.
Palm can do the work themselves if they think it's worth it. Apple isn't stopping them from downloading Xcode and writing a Cocoa based app to sync with their own hardware.
What bugs me about this story is I have no idea what the nature is of the "support" which Apple has dropped. Is it the customized USB serial driver for communicating with Palm devices? Was Palm Desktop previously bundled with Mac OS? Did Apple block Palm Desktop from interacting with their apps, thus preventing synchronization with iCal and such? I haven't used my Powerbook in long enough that I don't know what Apple had provided themselves, and TFA doesn't say what it is they removed...
I wouldn't call them "posers", but having an emotional liking or disliking for a language usually betrays an inability to select languages appropriately as needed. Let go of your anger.
Java is a fantastic language - as borne out by its huge take-up and popularity. It addresses many, many, issues with C++ and provides true portability and good performance. The language design and Sun's hard work allows for a plethora of development tools that aren't possible to implement in C++ without huge amounts of work and/or efficiently.
I wouldn't touch Java for low-level development, but "hating Java" is just ridiculous.
I don't see why.
Programmers' work must be expressed through languages like Java. If a language doesn't suit the programmer for whatever reason I think it's perfectly reasonable to hate it.
Not on a phone, I agree with that.
It does on a net facing server (think about it).
And why's that?
Bounds-checking could be implemented just as effectively in compiled, native code as in a virtual machine. If you don't want the programmer to have to worry about it, you build it into a library and have them use that.
Of course, if you look at the typical "net facing server" (like a web server) it's very common for web code to be interpreted PHP, Ruby, or Python. Using byte-compiled VM code would be a step up from that scenario in terms of performance. :)
Fuck you.
I had respect for you post until that point. Then, for some reason, it disappeared.
Fuck you, indeed.
The situation called for a "fuck you". I could give two shits about whether Mr. Anonymous Coward respects me or not based on whether I tell a condescending prick to fuck off. It sounds like the whole validity of my post hinges on whether or not I bust out the effective vocabulary. What a crock of shit.
So you're saying they took the body of a mustang and put in an electric engine from a 1981 golf cart and you can't understand why anyone would want to drive that?
What? I'm just taking the title and the sig to a natural progression :)
I make analogies, it doesn't mean I understand 'em. XD
Nice try, but no. Marriage has, for millennia, been a civil (and mostly religious) arrangement between a man and woman to live together and have sex.
OK...
And now, ignoring your OT tirade about the government's involvement in marriage - what does this distinction have to do with the privacy granted to one partner with respect to the other, or to whether it's okay for one partner to look at porn without the other present?
Having sex with someone doesn't imply you give up privacy. And whether it's OK in that relationship to look at porn depends on that individual to whom you're married - whether they're cool with it, whether they find out and whether they care to find out...
Personally I'm down with Java as a language, I just don't see the point of running everything through a VM on a pocket machine.
If we were talking about running a huge J2SE-compliant VM on a phone, your outlook might be justified.
The Android virtual machine, Dalvik, does NOT have a Just-In-Time compiler and does NOT understand Java bytecode (no .class files here!).
It also, as I understand it, means that the Java software on the phone cannot take advantage of the Java acceleration features of the hardware...
Java is not bound to heavy VM implementations. You can compile it to native code (gcj); you can compile it with the Mono stack; or you can use any number of JVM implementations, from Kaffe to IBM Java to OpenJDK to whatever else.
I don't believe I ever said otherwise.
Now, how many of these options are available on Android? Which of the above do you target if you're writing for Android?
One. You write code for Android, you compile it for Dalvik. This is one of the reasons Android tends not to appeal to me.
VM advantages for mobile devices: security (VM sandboxing), system updates (update the VM software, not the actual phone OS), deal with hardware differences (port the VM to your device, hello instant app ecosystem, no ARM build vs. Intel build vs. MIPS build problems), crash protection (whoops the VM crashed, but the phone can just start another).
VM sandboxing and VM crash protection are no better than the process-level sandboxing and crash protection you'd get from native code on a decent OS. At best, maybe the hardware will contain some nasty privilege escalation bug - which, I'll grant you, is worth something - but then only if the platform is designed so that nobody (including those who do actually need it) has native code execution privileges. But it's worth a lot more to Google, the folks investing in the OS and the platform, than it is to me, who would be running and maybe coding for the platform.
I don't really understand your point about being able to update the VM. What's the benefit there? What's so great about being able to update the VM without updating the rest of the phone's OS? Seems like, either way, you're replacing a critical component upon which large chunks of the phone's ability to operate depend.
Everyone has their language preferences, and that's fine - but chiming in with an ambiguous opinion because you recognize a keyword in a discussion is not particularly helpful.
Fuck you. I made my statement perfectly clear. To repeat: Someone's not a "poser" just 'cause they don't like a programming language. I actually do like Java, just not the VM baggage that comes with it. I don't think that's an unreasonable or uninformed position.
The reason is that the designers were looking at the big picture and not just the release date. Yes, today VMing every app seperatly keeps the phone from being even more cool than it already is, but just like every other piece of computer technology, every year, they percentage of the systems resource that is used by the VMs will go down. The VMs are pretty well fixed on their performance draw. The hardware will improve. Certainly, it has to be clear that running each app in it's own VM will be huge in helping with this OS's security.
I'm still not convinced that it does much for security, really. Anything you can do, security-wise, for security can be done with an OS with memory protection anyway.
It just seems like one more thing that's nickel-and-diming away the benefits of that improved performance. If they want the VM to keep the platform from being tied to a specific architecture, it'd just be rather nice if they'd translate the instructions once, like when loading the app onto the device...
Then on Android - there's hardware (on the G1) specifically for accelerating Java - and they don't use it because Android uses its own bytecode format that's not compatible... <sigh>
If I buy a phone today, that phone will not improve every year. Other phones will appear which are better... I'm happy for platform designers if they feel comfortable making choices that make their lives easier in terms of the long-term maintenance of their platform - but these choices are not what I want on my phone, right now... I want all those cycles working for me. :)
AT&T's coverage map. See all that vast, empty area?
That map is nearly six years old...
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to say GSM service is everywhere I want it - I just think the discrepancy between that "cellularmap.net" map and the AT&T map might be somewhere in that six years...
The northern half of Maine is that bad.
Yeah, but there's nothing up there. XD
I kid, I kid. I don't think I've ever gone farther North in Maine than Bangor. But I have family in the Augusta area, for instance, and it sucks to go somewhere and get no service... That's the nice thing about my (CDMA) Treo 650, old as it is, it actually is pretty good at the telephone part of its job...
Shaped, sized and weighted like a nonpocketable brick? Check.
It's a high-end smartphone. Par for the course.
It's smaller than my four-year-old Treo 650, so I see it as a step up. XD
That troll had id less than 20K. Surprised by that.
On the other hand, it is over nine thousand. ...Eight thousand in the original Japanese.
I'm in your camp, however this is too good to be true.
SOMETHING is amiss. There's a heavy negative attached to this thing somewhere, we just haven't heard about it yet.
Well, it's expensive (don't know what the subsidized price would be like, but I've heard some dire warnings about T-Mobile lately so I don't know if I'd be comfortable going under contract with them) - the battery doesn't have as much capacity as I'd like (around 1300mAH - similar to the iPhone but less than my old Treo 650) - and it's a GSM phone, which may pose a coverage problem for those of us in the US. (Same is true of iPhone)
If I've missed anything, chime in. I still think this thing is gonna be awesome.
Personally I don't care for Android because it's so Javafied. I really truly detest Java.
People who "detest" programming languages are posers.
How's that, exactly? Some of us have simply worked with a particular language or tool long enough to know some good reasons to hate it...
Personally I'm down with Java as a language, I just don't see the point of running everything through a VM on a pocket machine. Translate the app to native code when installing it to the phone or something, there's no point JITing or VMing the code at runtime.
It's a mobile internet device that does telephony, not a phone. Phone capability is quite low on their feature list! And yes, it supports wifi..
So, what's the difference?
Seems to me it's just a matter of terminology. It's not a "smartphone" because Nokia has not chosen to call it such. But in terms of what you can do with it, it's a phone, and its form factor makes it a bit large for a phone these days but still within the smartphone size range (smaller than the old Palm Treos, 1cm longer and 2mm thicker than the Palm Pre, or 5mm thicker than the iPhone but with a slightly smaller profile...)
Whether you call such thing a "phone that can browse the web" or "an internet device which can make calls" seems a matter of preference - a matter of which features you want to emphasize as the device's main selling points.
If you don't think this thing is a phone, consider this: holding the device in vertical orientation launches the phone application. Why do that if the machine wasn't intended for use as a phone?
And you don't think a real freakin' keyboard, including the keys that you need for using a shell & co, which the iPhone does not have at all, and real physical tactile functionality, is a killer feature? ^^
Seriously, no matter how good a phone is. If it has no phone, it is right out of the contest. :)
I lust after this phone the way your mom lusts after the many strange and exciting men who come her way...
But I have to say that I'm not sold on their keyboard design. I have to try it first. I've been quite happy with my Treo 650's keyboard, which is more cramped than this thing but (due to not being a sliding design) has room for the keys to be really be defined, vertically. This thing's keyboard has the advantage of more real estate, but it's flat, and I can't help but think that if the slider were to slide a little further the keyboard could benefit from the extra space.
I'm not saying I think the keyboard is going to be bad - I'm just saying I gotta try it out... 'Course probably various people with older Nokia tablet devices can vouch for the keyboards on these things...
Shame you don't know what you're talking about.
A-GPS == "integrated GPS with Assited [sic] GPS"
I.e., it's GPS with Assistance, like the name suggests. Both devices are equivalent.
Ah, I thought it just meant that the phone had, you know, a GPS.
As much as I like and respect Stallman's works, and his fight for digital freedom, I find this little snippet quite disturbing.
What I appreciate about the statement, however, is that he's willing and able to deal logically with an issue which is too often dominated by fear. Most people aren't willing to discuss the issue, because if they come too close to advocating ephibophilia or pedophilia, or even just fail to assert opposition to it, they will be ostracized.
In my opinion, there's a basic problem of establishing consent. Children are not puppets, but it is relatively easy for an adult to manipulate them or silence them through threats or through the authority they hold over the child. From that perspective I agree with the law which says that when you're young enough you simply can't legally consent to various things, including sex. I don't believe any rule like "X years of age or older" will be perfect, erring on one side or other in various cases - I do think it's better to make the error of telling someone they're not old enough to consent when they are ready than to make the error of telling someone they are old enough to consent when they're truly not ready.
With teenagers I think we have a different set of problems: the age at which people are physically and mentally prepared to have sex does not correspond to the point at which they're legally allowed to. We've criminalized natural behavior.
My experience says that it's the female sex drive that ceases.
I'm sorry to hear that. How unfortunate for you. XD
Besides, I don't see an issue: I have my account on the computer, she has hers.... She doesn't know my password. I surf anything I want and she won't know.
Every user on a computer should have their own account... no excuses...
I feel like there's other issues - for instance, maybe I am in the "driver's seat" but I'm showing someone else a website - I don't really want "puretna" or whatever showing up in the awesome bar as I'm typing, regardless of whether it shares a few letters with the URL I'm entering...
But for me personally the common issue is just that I'm used to entering URLs, and if the URL bar pops up matches for what I'm typing, I want URL matches. Though as I get used to the "Awesome Bar" (god damn that is a stupid name) functionality I do find myself taking advantage of it more, too.
Trust issues much? I haven't used a non-shared password on a home computer since I left a dorm. My wife knows every password I have, and so do some trusted friends.
Trust, sure - but sharing a user account, to me, is kind of like sharing a toothbrush... I can do it, it won't freak me out or anything, but I don't really want to...
Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
Fortunately the male sex drive ceases immediately after marriage begins, so this should be an entirely sensible solution...