I've got the perfect answer. How about a PORNTCHA? Use hi-res porn images as the CAPTCHA images, and use hard-to-automate anatomical questions like "are the blonde's boobs bigger than the brunette's?" or "Are these two lesbians?" Any wrong answer brings up another PORNTCHA challenge. Any correct answer ends the porn session and proceeds to the signup. The porn users probably won't "feel the need" to answer a lot of questions correctly, and the service users have a way to get past.
It's kinda like a honey pot, only with tasty, tasty honeys.
KittenAuth always makes me think of the Futurama episode where the crew had to deliver a package to the uninhabited planet full of robots (sure it's inhabited, like a warehouse is inhabited by boxes).
To prevent capture they dressed as robots, and were stopped at the city gates by two gate robots who administered a PuppyAuth-based anti-Turing test:
Robot Guard #1: Be you robot or human? Leela: Robot, we be. Fry: Yep, just two robots out roboting it up. Robot Guard #2: Administer the test. Robot Guard #1: Which of these would you prefer? A. a puppy; B. a flower from your sweetie; or C. a properly formatted data file? Choose! Fry: Is the puppy mechanical in any way? Robot Guard #1: No. It is the bad kind of puppy. Leela: Then we'll go with that data file. Robot Guard #1: Correct. The flower would have also been acceptable. Robot Guard #2: You may pass.
The National Map is a compendium of data provided by the states, cities, counties and municipalities. This is from the about page:
The National Map will be a foundation of information to which the private sector can contribute core feature content and to which proprietary datasets can be linked to provide access to higher resolution data, additional (non-base) features, and enriched attribute information. The National Map will promote cost effectiveness by minimizing the need to find, develop, integrate, and maintain geographic base data each time they are needed.
C'mon, you're on/. You're at least supposed to get the terminology straight.
Broadband is a transmission technology that employs multiple frequencies simultaneously, not a "speed." That is unless "mobile broadband" is actually blasting your reply on multiple transmitters all at once across a spectrum in order to increase the data rate to your phone.
Just because some marketroids stole the term from the technical people doesn't mean we should let them get away with it.
We really cannot prevent terrorism in an open society - our long-term choice is between living in a paranoid dictatorship and learning to live with the (statistically minor) risks of terrorism.
*DING* *DING* *DING*
Stop the commenting, folks, we have a winner!
Stop fearing the threats that are not likely to happen. That means 9/11 needs to be marginalized. Remember the victims, but forget the attackers. Ignore whatever the hell it was they stood for.
For anyone who is interested, Psychology Today had an article on how bad we are at evaluating risks, and had an interesting quiz on testing your grasp of risk. I've repeated it here:
You conservatives and your unwillingness to spend on our social need for guns. And there might be children on the plane, so won't someone think of the children? We need child-sized guns for child-sized hands!
Anyway, if you look at it rationally these guns are for defense, so if you think of buying them as another way of saying "defense appropriations" our current president should be willing to pay Halliburton about $35,000 apiece for them!
No, they turn them when deboarding the plane. Amortize them over several years use and it'll be less than $0.25 per passenger.
And I don't care about rubber bullets. They have to be lethal in order to be an effective deterrent. Mythbusters showed pretty conclusively that a bullet's not going to do much of anything to an airplane in flight -- no massive depressurization, etc. And a suicide terrorist isn't likely to bet their life on a 25% chance that their gun will contain a live bullet AND be a "good enough" shot to hit a vital control surface or cable from within the passenger cabin. Might want to armor the fuel tanks, though.
How about handing everyone in line a one-use single shot pistol? It'd take about 15 seconds to show them how to turn the safety off and shoot it -- no worse than figuring out how to use the seat belt.
You only get one bullet. It's preloaded, can't even be unloaded, maybe small caliber, maybe fairly low velocity, and has a 75% chance of being a blank. Tag the bullets, and maybe ink-tag the gun so it sprays the user when the trigger is pulled. Maybe even a point-blank "contact trigger", kind of like a nail gun -- you'd have to put the gun directly on someone to shoot them, avoiding aim problems in a crowded plane.
Turn them in at the end of a flight -- everyone got one while boarding, everyone better turn the same one over when leaving.
Anybody tries anything on the plane, and *bang* -- if a dozen passengers shoot at him, at least a couple are likely to nail him.
USA 193 5.0 2.5 0.0 4.3 v 20 256 x 250 km 1 29651U 06057A 08049.90355339.00233341 23303-4 27965-3 0 90004 2 29651 58.5130 35.7739 0005018 100.5255 259.5312 16.07731429 145
You don't have to pay me, of course, especially since slashdot screws up the spacing making them useless for copy/paste. I pulled them from this page by clicking on the little Orbital Elements (TLE) button.
There's a huge problem with this idea. To be effective, spy satellites have to be aimed. They don't just hover over interesting parts of the world, they orbit the globe while the earth spins beneath them. And interesting parts of the world don't magically appear beneath their tracks. To aim them means to change their orbit so they fly over the parts that you currently find interesting.
Rocket boosters are mostly uninteresting because they do not have to be aimed -- they are transferred once to a parking orbit, and there they stay until decay drops them back to earth.
But if a rocket booster were to change orbits more than twice, it would suddenly become a very interesting rocket booster.
Other than a handful of satellites with wide public visibility, payloads are not identified. Amateurs label them as they spot them, but civilians don't know for sure if satellite USA-193 is a spy satellite, military satellite, or whatever. The only thing the spotters know is that if a satellite changes orbits, someone on the ground surely cares about it. Yes, if something is dumped into a parking orbit and never changes, it will likely be ignored. But a never changing spy satellite isn't going to see much of the world, and will be pretty useless to its masters.
Why the hell would anyone consider that information private? Its on the company annual accounts FFS.
In the United States it is considered extremely impolite to ask about salaries or wages, and payroll data has always been treated more sensitively than any customer credit cards have ever been treated. Of course, that impoliteness and sensitivity is entirely artificial and is fostered by employers, and is used to hold wages down. If a group of employees figures out that some do their job for $50,000 while others do the same job for $40,000, the people earning $40,000 will demand a raise. "That way lies madness (and labor unions)!"
we're decreasing the momentum of many of the pieces to the point they will probably not burn up on reentry
The satellite is moving probably about 7 km/s right now. Fast high explosives have a velocity of detonation of 8.4 km/s. Assuming a spherical explosion, there would be a small cone's worth of material at the back of the sphere traveling at a relatively low velocity with respect to the earth.
But I wouldn't assume the military would use a spherical explosive, and I wouldn't assume they'd put the explosive into the middle of the satellite and then detonate it like some cartoon explosion. I'd guess they'd instead throw up a small cloud dense with heavy shrapnel aimed directly toward the satellite, and let the kinetic energy of the collisions do the work of shredding the satellite and reducing its velocity.
Small chunks that will be more likely to survive re-entry
Small chunks are still less likely to survive reentry than large chunks. The key is mass. Think of a burning log on a fire. Ten minutes after you light it, it's still a heavy chunk of wood that would hurt you if you got hit with it.
Now, think of chopping that log into a hundred splinters. Sure, the combined mass is still heavy. But each of those hundred splinters take much less energy to light on fire, and once lit will be consumed quickly. 10 minutes will reduce them all to ash.
Sure, some of the fragments are more likely to survive reentry, but that's why you detonate the satellite at a controlled point, to ensure they all deorbit over the ocean.
I'm sure the real goals here are not to keep the world safe from hydrazine. The chances of the tank surviving reentry intact are probably very small. The real goals are to utterly destroy the surveillance equipment to the maximum degree possible, and ensure the camera fragments that do survive reentry are lost at sea. I'd think they want to hide the diameter of the main optics, and the resolution of the sensors. That information would tell the world what the real capabilities of the satellite are. Another goal would be a live fire test of their latest antisatellite weaponry. That's always a valuable exercise. Finally, they're is probably perceived value in the sabre rattling with the Chinese.
It doesn't matter if someone removes the watermark. The watermark is like having the original negative back in the bad ol' days of film.
You claim that a shot is yours. I claim it's mine. You produce some RGB file with fake metadata and I produce a raw image with my biometric watermark clearly identifiable. Guess who the judge believes?
I understand the point you were trying to make, but the real answer to your question is more likely to be the same as the answer to this related question: "which lawyer was paid more money?"
Trying to get a civil jury to understand watermarks and digital signatures is hard and expensive. The plaintiff is going to have to produce expert witnesses, perhaps even an engineer from Canon to explain how the camera does what it does, and why their picture is the original and the defendant's is the fake, and how do we know this isn't a fake made by by taking a picture of the other picture? A good defense lawyer is going to get the experts to admit to some irrelevant weakness, and then claim to the jury that "if we can't trust this camera to do X, how can we be expected to believe that it can do Y?"
Don't forget that in a civil trial the plaintiff is usually the guy the jury hates -- it's his fault they're stuck in the damn box listening to all these experts blather on about hashes and crypshun and eyeball stuff.
It's sad but true. The O.J. Simpson trial is a perfect example of how an aggressive lawyer can get a jury to completely ignore scientific facts about something as reliable as DNA testing and statistics.
First, phones have those features because the vast majority of people find them desirable. Not everyone wants them, of course, but way more than half. Each different phone has a full set of engineering, manufacturing, marketing and packaging costs, which are substantial and have to be spread across a lot of phones to make them affordable. Thus it's cheaper to make, package, and market 100,000 phones than it is to make 1,000 simple phones plus another 99,000 complex phones. It's basic economies-of-scale.
Next, very few phone features turn into service charges, and none of them are particularly easy to access. (Verizon is the most guilty party there, as they deliberately cripple phones preventing you from uploading and downloading media without using their pay-per-use network.) And sure, I can see the providers charging for Assisted-GPS service -- so don't use it. But I've never heard of a cell phone provider charging you simply because your phone CAN do something -- they charge when you USE their services.
As far as using the GPS in phones to measure traffic congestion? It's an interesting theory, but I doubt seriously that it'll go any further than an NPR story. Besides, your phone is constantly talking all by itself. Every few minutes it makes contact with the tower. Your cell provider already knows which tower your phone is near whenever it's powered on, so if you're that paranoid you should consider turning the thing off unless you're on a call.
Seriously, how inconvenient is it to have the camera? Does it turn on in your pocket, and make embarrassing shutter noises? Or does the calendar chirp at you when you're trying to make a phone call?
There are still a lot of phone options out there, including some pretty simple phones with large, easy-to-read screens for you old people who have kids on your lawns. I know because my mom wanted one, and she's old, and the kids are on her damn lawn, too. And you know what? Even she figured out how to personalize her phone, with a different ring tone and a new background picture and everything.
P.S. If you think cell phones are bad, it is nothing like cable pricing. Cable is very different in that each and every channel they deliver to a subscriber has a price tag that they pay on your behalf (and extract from you), and the bundling of "super-basic" channels with their "premium" channels equals truckloads of extra money for everyone but us. So if you want Sci-fi in HD, well, you can only get it with the "Premium-overly-complex plan" with hyperbundling including unwatchable crap stations like the Faux News channel and the Oprah channel. Mistakenly applying that pricing logic to your cell phones would indeed give you the nightmare of charges that you seem to be imagining.
Please define "revocation certificate". As far as I know, X.509 only defines a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) which is a list of certificates that are revoked and is usually signed by the Certificate Authority (CA) that issued them. (In some installations another system may be granted the authority to serve as an "indirect CRL".)
But I am unaware of any mechanism to produce a "revocation certificate" or how or why you would issue one in advance of a certificate being revoked. Without the signature of the CA (or the indirect CRL) there's no way to "revoke" a certificate.
Sure, if your Certificate Authority's administrator is corrupt, you might get hosed. That's why you need secured access to the equipment, and a strong set of policies to protect it.
Revoking a key isn't going to harm a company. They can just issue a new key.
A revoked key can usually still be used without limitations, however a revoked key should not be trusted and should be considered exposed.
But how exactly would an attacker revoke a key in the first place? CRLs are supposed to be signed by the CA who issued the certificates in the first place. Are they suggesting that it's somehow easy to hack a certificate authority to revoke these keys? We're talking about a worse-than-useless CA if that's the case.
I think I'm declaring shenanigans. Anybody bring their broom?
A quick Google turned up this list of plugins, so if you want to pick and choose which bits of extreme uselessness you want to avoid, it makes it a bit easier. Seriously, does anybody think it's a good idea to let a PDF send an email?
Anyway, if you remove any of those files from your Reader/plug_ins folder, Acrobat Reader won't load them at launch time. It speeds up loading time of ordinary PDFs tremendously.
What I really really don't understand is why Acrobat Reader doesn't dynamically load those plug-ins only upon demand? Seriously, why does it need to bring in any of that extra code just to display a catalog page from a web site? Digital signatures? If the PDF doesn't have one, I don't need to load the code to verify it. Accessibility? I'm not handicapped, I don't need or use a screen reader, ever. eBooks? I've never bought one, and probably won't for many years to come. And I never, ever, ever want to let a PDF send an email. That's just WRONG.
It's a tremendous load of crap, made worse by their "always load, just in case" philosophy.
A long time ago, I learned that Acrobat Reader is so damn slow to launch because of all the crap plugins that are loaded with it. I couldn't remember exactly which of the various modules I removed, but a quick Google gave me this: http://dwtips.com/2006/06/17/how-to-speed-up-pdf-loading-with-adobe-acrobat/
It looks like the same type of instructions that I followed way back when.
the fact that you were using the technology back then puts you both in a small and exclusive group with similar interests. You may as well have been pen pals or classmates, and that has nothing to do with the ways people meet on the internet today.
She actually wasn't a computer nerd, she was hanging around after school killing time waiting for a friend when she started playing with the teletype in her high school classroom. Someone showed her the email and chat programs, and she then discovered there were large numbers of people constantly hanging out on the talk programs. You raise an interesting point, though: *she* is actually the groundbreaker -- she was one of the very first people ever to use computers for purely social purposes, and who had no technical interest in the equipment. (On the other hand, yes, I was a huge nerd. But you get no points for guessing that.)
If you still think that has nothing to do with the ways people meet on the internet today, then perhaps it isn't my interpretation of "on line" that's in question.
Exactly! It "seems" to be an epidemic because of the reporting. Do they report how many kids of the appropriate age are trying to make contact? In the context of all online meetings, though, what percent do predator-child contacts represent? 0.01% 1% 10%?
And I'm not suggesting recklessness, such as a parent letting an unknown 45 year old man drive off with their 13 year old daughter, or letting a 9 year old use IRC unsupervised. But even a small amount of parenting will teach most kids to avoid these sorts of situations, to meet people in a public place, or to have a bit of skepticism.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kinda like a honey pot, only with tasty, tasty honeys.
To prevent capture they dressed as robots, and were stopped at the city gates by two gate robots who administered a PuppyAuth-based anti-Turing test:
So what if one of the images is from Bonsai Kittens? Is it fuzzy or glossy?
The National Map already has that data.
The National Map is a compendium of data provided by the states, cities, counties and municipalities. This is from the about page:
The National Map will be a foundation of information to which the private sector can contribute core feature content and to which proprietary datasets can be linked to provide access to higher resolution data, additional (non-base) features, and enriched attribute information. The National Map will promote cost effectiveness by minimizing the need to find, develop, integrate, and maintain geographic base data each time they are needed.Broadband is a transmission technology that employs multiple frequencies simultaneously, not a "speed." That is unless "mobile broadband" is actually blasting your reply on multiple transmitters all at once across a spectrum in order to increase the data rate to your phone.
Just because some marketroids stole the term from the technical people doesn't mean we should let them get away with it.
</pedant>
*DING* *DING* *DING*
Stop the commenting, folks, we have a winner!
Stop fearing the threats that are not likely to happen. That means 9/11 needs to be marginalized. Remember the victims, but forget the attackers. Ignore whatever the hell it was they stood for.
For anyone who is interested, Psychology Today had an article on how bad we are at evaluating risks, and had an interesting quiz on testing your grasp of risk. I've repeated it here:
How good is your grasp of risk?
- What's more common in the United States, (a) suicide or (b) homicide?
-
What's the more frequent cause of death in the United States, (a) pool drowning or (b) falling out of bed?
-
What are the top five causes of accidental death in America, following motor-vehicle accidents, and which is the biggest one?
-
Of the top two causes of nonaccidental death in America, (a) cancer and (b) heart disease, which kills more women?
-
What are the next three causes of nonaccidental death in the United States?
-
Which has killed more Americans, bird flu or mad cow disease?
-
How many Americans die from AIDS every year, (a) 12,995, (b) 129,950, or (c) 1,299,500?
-
How many Americans die from diabetes every year? (a) 72,820, (b) 728,200, or (c) 7,282,000?
-
Which kills more Americans, (a) appendicitis or (b) salmonella?
-
Which kills more Americans, (a) pregnancy and childbirth or (b) malnutrition?
ANSWERS (all refer to number of Americans per year, on average):The terrorists would never know if their plane had the real Chuck Norris or a fake one, but Allah help them if they guess wrong.
Anyway, if you look at it rationally these guns are for defense, so if you think of buying them as another way of saying "defense appropriations" our current president should be willing to pay Halliburton about $35,000 apiece for them!
And I don't care about rubber bullets. They have to be lethal in order to be an effective deterrent. Mythbusters showed pretty conclusively that a bullet's not going to do much of anything to an airplane in flight -- no massive depressurization, etc. And a suicide terrorist isn't likely to bet their life on a 25% chance that their gun will contain a live bullet AND be a "good enough" shot to hit a vital control surface or cable from within the passenger cabin. Might want to armor the fuel tanks, though.
Who the hell modded me funny? I want my $500,000, dammit!
You only get one bullet. It's preloaded, can't even be unloaded, maybe small caliber, maybe fairly low velocity, and has a 75% chance of being a blank. Tag the bullets, and maybe ink-tag the gun so it sprays the user when the trigger is pulled. Maybe even a point-blank "contact trigger", kind of like a nail gun -- you'd have to put the gun directly on someone to shoot them, avoiding aim problems in a crowded plane.
Turn them in at the end of a flight -- everyone got one while boarding, everyone better turn the same one over when leaving.
Anybody tries anything on the plane, and *bang* -- if a dozen passengers shoot at him, at least a couple are likely to nail him.
That's security through strength in numbers.
Who do I go see about collecting my $500,000?
Rocket boosters are mostly uninteresting because they do not have to be aimed -- they are transferred once to a parking orbit, and there they stay until decay drops them back to earth.
But if a rocket booster were to change orbits more than twice, it would suddenly become a very interesting rocket booster.
Other than a handful of satellites with wide public visibility, payloads are not identified. Amateurs label them as they spot them, but civilians don't know for sure if satellite USA-193 is a spy satellite, military satellite, or whatever. The only thing the spotters know is that if a satellite changes orbits, someone on the ground surely cares about it. Yes, if something is dumped into a parking orbit and never changes, it will likely be ignored. But a never changing spy satellite isn't going to see much of the world, and will be pretty useless to its masters.
In the United States it is considered extremely impolite to ask about salaries or wages, and payroll data has always been treated more sensitively than any customer credit cards have ever been treated. Of course, that impoliteness and sensitivity is entirely artificial and is fostered by employers, and is used to hold wages down. If a group of employees figures out that some do their job for $50,000 while others do the same job for $40,000, the people earning $40,000 will demand a raise. "That way lies madness (and labor unions)!"
So the "A" ring is really just the astronomical equivalent of a crusty sock under Saturn's bed? Gross. Now I gotta go wash my telescope.
The satellite is moving probably about 7 km/s right now. Fast high explosives have a velocity of detonation of 8.4 km/s. Assuming a spherical explosion, there would be a small cone's worth of material at the back of the sphere traveling at a relatively low velocity with respect to the earth.
But I wouldn't assume the military would use a spherical explosive, and I wouldn't assume they'd put the explosive into the middle of the satellite and then detonate it like some cartoon explosion. I'd guess they'd instead throw up a small cloud dense with heavy shrapnel aimed directly toward the satellite, and let the kinetic energy of the collisions do the work of shredding the satellite and reducing its velocity.
Small chunks are still less likely to survive reentry than large chunks. The key is mass. Think of a burning log on a fire. Ten minutes after you light it, it's still a heavy chunk of wood that would hurt you if you got hit with it.
Now, think of chopping that log into a hundred splinters. Sure, the combined mass is still heavy. But each of those hundred splinters take much less energy to light on fire, and once lit will be consumed quickly. 10 minutes will reduce them all to ash.
Sure, some of the fragments are more likely to survive reentry, but that's why you detonate the satellite at a controlled point, to ensure they all deorbit over the ocean.
I'm sure the real goals here are not to keep the world safe from hydrazine. The chances of the tank surviving reentry intact are probably very small. The real goals are to utterly destroy the surveillance equipment to the maximum degree possible, and ensure the camera fragments that do survive reentry are lost at sea. I'd think they want to hide the diameter of the main optics, and the resolution of the sensors. That information would tell the world what the real capabilities of the satellite are. Another goal would be a live fire test of their latest antisatellite weaponry. That's always a valuable exercise. Finally, they're is probably perceived value in the sabre rattling with the Chinese.
Fee shirt? I don't think that makes much sense, either.
I understand the point you were trying to make, but the real answer to your question is more likely to be the same as the answer to this related question: "which lawyer was paid more money?"
Trying to get a civil jury to understand watermarks and digital signatures is hard and expensive. The plaintiff is going to have to produce expert witnesses, perhaps even an engineer from Canon to explain how the camera does what it does, and why their picture is the original and the defendant's is the fake, and how do we know this isn't a fake made by by taking a picture of the other picture? A good defense lawyer is going to get the experts to admit to some irrelevant weakness, and then claim to the jury that "if we can't trust this camera to do X, how can we be expected to believe that it can do Y?"
Don't forget that in a civil trial the plaintiff is usually the guy the jury hates -- it's his fault they're stuck in the damn box listening to all these experts blather on about hashes and crypshun and eyeball stuff.
It's sad but true. The O.J. Simpson trial is a perfect example of how an aggressive lawyer can get a jury to completely ignore scientific facts about something as reliable as DNA testing and statistics.
First, phones have those features because the vast majority of people find them desirable. Not everyone wants them, of course, but way more than half. Each different phone has a full set of engineering, manufacturing, marketing and packaging costs, which are substantial and have to be spread across a lot of phones to make them affordable. Thus it's cheaper to make, package, and market 100,000 phones than it is to make 1,000 simple phones plus another 99,000 complex phones. It's basic economies-of-scale.
Next, very few phone features turn into service charges, and none of them are particularly easy to access. (Verizon is the most guilty party there, as they deliberately cripple phones preventing you from uploading and downloading media without using their pay-per-use network.) And sure, I can see the providers charging for Assisted-GPS service -- so don't use it. But I've never heard of a cell phone provider charging you simply because your phone CAN do something -- they charge when you USE their services.
As far as using the GPS in phones to measure traffic congestion? It's an interesting theory, but I doubt seriously that it'll go any further than an NPR story. Besides, your phone is constantly talking all by itself. Every few minutes it makes contact with the tower. Your cell provider already knows which tower your phone is near whenever it's powered on, so if you're that paranoid you should consider turning the thing off unless you're on a call.
Seriously, how inconvenient is it to have the camera? Does it turn on in your pocket, and make embarrassing shutter noises? Or does the calendar chirp at you when you're trying to make a phone call?
There are still a lot of phone options out there, including some pretty simple phones with large, easy-to-read screens for you old people who have kids on your lawns. I know because my mom wanted one, and she's old, and the kids are on her damn lawn, too. And you know what? Even she figured out how to personalize her phone, with a different ring tone and a new background picture and everything.
P.S. If you think cell phones are bad, it is nothing like cable pricing. Cable is very different in that each and every channel they deliver to a subscriber has a price tag that they pay on your behalf (and extract from you), and the bundling of "super-basic" channels with their "premium" channels equals truckloads of extra money for everyone but us. So if you want Sci-fi in HD, well, you can only get it with the "Premium-overly-complex plan" with hyperbundling including unwatchable crap stations like the Faux News channel and the Oprah channel. Mistakenly applying that pricing logic to your cell phones would indeed give you the nightmare of charges that you seem to be imagining.
But I am unaware of any mechanism to produce a "revocation certificate" or how or why you would issue one in advance of a certificate being revoked. Without the signature of the CA (or the indirect CRL) there's no way to "revoke" a certificate.
Sure, if your Certificate Authority's administrator is corrupt, you might get hosed. That's why you need secured access to the equipment, and a strong set of policies to protect it.
I think I'm declaring shenanigans. Anybody bring their broom?
Anyway, if you remove any of those files from your Reader/plug_ins folder, Acrobat Reader won't load them at launch time. It speeds up loading time of ordinary PDFs tremendously.
What I really really don't understand is why Acrobat Reader doesn't dynamically load those plug-ins only upon demand? Seriously, why does it need to bring in any of that extra code just to display a catalog page from a web site? Digital signatures? If the PDF doesn't have one, I don't need to load the code to verify it. Accessibility? I'm not handicapped, I don't need or use a screen reader, ever. eBooks? I've never bought one, and probably won't for many years to come. And I never, ever, ever want to let a PDF send an email. That's just WRONG.
It's a tremendous load of crap, made worse by their "always load, just in case" philosophy.
A long time ago, I learned that Acrobat Reader is so damn slow to launch because of all the crap plugins that are loaded with it. I couldn't remember exactly which of the various modules I removed, but a quick Google gave me this: http://dwtips.com/2006/06/17/how-to-speed-up-pdf-loading-with-adobe-acrobat/ It looks like the same type of instructions that I followed way back when.
She actually wasn't a computer nerd, she was hanging around after school killing time waiting for a friend when she started playing with the teletype in her high school classroom. Someone showed her the email and chat programs, and she then discovered there were large numbers of people constantly hanging out on the talk programs. You raise an interesting point, though: *she* is actually the groundbreaker -- she was one of the very first people ever to use computers for purely social purposes, and who had no technical interest in the equipment. (On the other hand, yes, I was a huge nerd. But you get no points for guessing that.)
If you still think that has nothing to do with the ways people meet on the internet today, then perhaps it isn't my interpretation of "on line" that's in question.
And I'm not suggesting recklessness, such as a parent letting an unknown 45 year old man drive off with their 13 year old daughter, or letting a 9 year old use IRC unsupervised. But even a small amount of parenting will teach most kids to avoid these sorts of situations, to meet people in a public place, or to have a bit of skepticism.