Making a site 508 compliant is not really all that hard and it essentially consists of making sure your site validates as XHTML 1.0 (preferably 1.0 Strict) or even better, XHTML 1.1. Do that and you are about 90% of the way there.
I just want to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with HTML 4.01 Transitional. Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional code is just as valid as XHTML 1.1, and as an added bonus, can be made to render correctly on Internet Explorer, which completely valid XHTML can't.
us mac and linux users? Should we all sue the big websites that are only tested in IE?
It's our choice to use a Mac or Linux (I normally use an iBook for all my Slashdot needs, but happen to be on a Linux box at the moment). It's not their choice to be blind. Despite the pain and suffering that would undoubtedly be cause by doing so, if we wanted to badly enough, we could install Windows. They can't become sighted, no matter how much they might want to.
I don't remember the clipper chip, but that article doesn't seem to contradict my assertion that the Democrats are incompetent.
I think I might vaguely remember something about CALEA. It sounds like there are technical problems with it (thus supporting my claim of incompetency), but the intention is OK. I support the ability of the government to eavesdrop on my telephone conversations with a warrant, but doing so with encrypted VOIP isn't technically feasible. It's not a problem now because VOIP isn't that widespread now, but if a time comes when a significant percentage of the general public is using VOIP instead of more traditional telephone networks, it will be an issue.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which along with the DMCA are significantly evil things passed with full Democratic support. Still, it's not as if Republicans don't like those just as much.
I would expect a bigger uproar, because Republicans seem to be better at generating uproar from the general public. They're more organized, and they've got Fox News on their side.
If you just mean on Slashdot, yeah, many of us would be pleased to see the GOP kicked out of office. But don't think for a minute that it's because we actually like Democrats - we just hate them less at the moment, because they're too incompetent to do anything really evil. Some of us would rather see the Democrats win an election by cheating than see Republicans win fairly, just because we hate Republicans that much... but that doesn't mean we'd rather not see this problem fixed. If Democrats can use broken voting machines to swindle their way to electoral victory, it just proves that ANYBODY can use broken voting machines to swindle their way to electoral victory, and that's still a problem, even if the Republicans lose the White House and both houses of Congress.
Electronic voting machines can be designed to be easier to use and more accessible to people with disabilities than traditional voting machines. Blind people can connect a pair of headphones and have their choices read to them. People who don't speak English well can choose a different language such as Spanish or Korean or whatever. Touchscreens may be easier to operate for people with physical disabilities. The order of the candidates can be randomized for each voter, so alphabetical sorting doesn't affect the results (I believe Oregon chooses a random sorting order for the entire election, while California prints several different versions of the ballot with the candidates sorted differently in each version).
Using a computerized system to obtain each person's vote is NOT a bad thing, and can be very beneficial.
Also, using a computerized system to count the votes is also not a bad thing, since it can yield results much faster than manual counting. Indeed, I'm sure votes on paper balllots are machine-counted almost everywhere already.
The problem is this: we cannot and should not rely on a computerized system exclusively. We must have a way to verify what people really voted for. The solution is quite simple, though. We could have computerized voting machines with an instant count, with a paper trail. It works like this:
You have two machines. The first has a touch screen with a user-friendly interface. It presents your options in whatever language you prefer, and receives your votes. It prohibits you from entering invalid selections, such as selecting two candidates instead of one. Your votes are presented to you on the screen for review, with an option to go back and correct any mistakes. Finally if you are finished, the machine prints your votes on a paper ballot, in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You take this paper ballot, and review it for accuracy. The machine you just used erases any record of your vote in preparation for the next voter. Your vote is not counted at this point.
You then take this paper ballot, and feed it into a second machine, which counts your vote and securely stores your ballot. These ballots can be counted by hand later, and compared to the computerized count. If the counting machine isn't counting votes accurately, the problem can be easily detected, and the ballots counted by hand.
If the first machine isn't printing the ballots correctly, the problem can be detected by the voter, who reviews the paper ballots before submitting them to the counting machine. If the voter sees an error, he/she can report the mistake to an election official, who can shred the ballot and let the voter vote again.
Following that logic, wouldn't this then also be just as usefull a tool to spammers looking to crack those crazy registration verification images?
Yes, absolutely, and spammers are already using image obfuscation techniques: using italic difficult-to-read fonts spaced very close together (difficult to separate the image into individual characters and difficult to identify each character once you do), using colored backgrounds to make the text very low-contrast when converted into a monochrome image the OCR software can use, using animated GIFs (as mentioned previously in another article) so that if you only convert the first or last frame of the animation you won't get anything useful, and finally splitting the image into multiple pieces that are assembled together with HTML. The only solution I see to this last problem is to develop spam filtering software that uses Gecko or KHTML to render the HTML and analyze the rendered page.
In the war between spammers and anti-spammers, the spammers are clearly winning, and they will continue to win for the foreseeable future. No technical solution can stop spam, only certain limited types of spam - but the spammers are constantly adapting. I believe if Congress were to earmark funding for the investigation and prosecution of spammers, we could actually make a significant dent in the problem (other governments have already expressed a willingness to cooperate).
It's difficult to legally define spam in such a way that makes spam illegal without infringing the right to freedom of speech and press, and I believe we need to err on the side of protecting liberty at the expense of some spam being legal. This is what CAN-SPAM has done - it's far from perfect, but it's a good start. CAN-SPAM has gotten a lot of criticism for being too easy for spammers to work around, but how much spam do you get that actually complies with the law? Not much... so why aren't we prosecuting violators right and left? Limited resources. Given the choice between tracking down a spammer and tracking down a murderer/rapist/child molestor/etc., both of which cost money, most of us recognize that spam is a less severe problem. More resources need to be allocated to the appropriate law enforcement agencies so they can deal with both.
Oh, and if my argument about CAN-SPAM was unconvincing, consider this: nearly all the image-based spam I've been seeing lately has been either for penny stocks or prescription medications (i.e. "male enhancement" products). Both of these are already cleaerly illegal (the SEC and FDA are the respective government agencies responsible, I believe). It should be possible to prosecute the spammers for stock market manipulation and dispensing controlled drugs without a prescription, even if sending spam weren't against the law.
Some here will call for spammers to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, execution, castration, public hanging, public stoning, or worse. Get over it. Forget about revenge, that's not what our criminal justice system is for. All I want is for the spam to stop, and for the spammer to lose whatever they've gained from it. That should be enough. Let the spammers become productive members of society if they're capable of doing so; lock them up if they cause any further trouble.
Is this the final solution? No, of course not. But let's start with this, and see how it goes for now. If this works, spam won't go away, it will just change into new forms... and that's OK. When that happens, we can find new ways of dealing with it. The hope is that after that happens a few times, it will become much less of a problem. Maybe not, but I'd sure like to find out!
I am currently using the FuzzyOcr plugin to SpamAssassin, and it uses gocr to do the character recognition. To be sure, gocr is improving (the stable released version is practically useless, but the CVS version actually works, mostly), but if Tesseract is better, great!
How do people who are blind and deaf use the World Wide Web? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but unless it actually is done, we shouldn't need to worry about it.
If someone actually signed up to receive e-mail, and then decides they don't want it, that doesn't make it spam. If the user thinks it's spam, it doesn't mean the definition of spam is subjective, it just means the user is wrong.
If I were to receive the same e-mail that you're receiving even though I didn't sign up for it, because Nintendo scraped my e-mail address off a web page or used a Windows virus to extract it from someone's address book or bought a CD containing 500 million e-mail addresses for $500, then yeah, THAT would be spam. Fortunately, they don't do that.:-)
... their non-gif stuff. I'm not about to buy a stock which is advertised with multiple exclamation !!! marks. And with incomplete sentences.
I would hope that you wouldn't buy anything that was advertised via spam, regardless of the apparent quality of presentation. However, consider this: a lot of the spam I see is nearly unintelligible, because the intelligible spam already got blocked by my spam filtering.
This really has nothing to do with subliminal messages, and everything to do with trying to defeat OCR software. I was seeing animated GIFs exactly like this where the "buy" frames were just blank, before they started adding "BUY!" to those frames.
Sorry, you completely missed that one. Go back and read it again. Start with "When was it Apple's game..." His entire point was, all that stuff was never Apple's game, it's Microsoft's game. So, Microsoft isn't beating Apple at Apple's game, as the article title suggests.
shoving out $200 for a CD vs $400 for an entire computer.
Just so you know, Windows XP Home Edition is currently selling for $89.99 (plus shipping) on NewEgg. You have a point, but the price difference between a copy of Windows and a new PC is a bit more than you've suggested.
Please try to understand that while Macs are indeed personal computers, most people mean the term "PC" to exclude Macs. In fact, some people mean it to only include computers that are running Microsoft Windows.
If you like shiny GUIs with less functionality at a premium, go for it.
For what I do with it, Mac OS X offers me far more functionality than I could get from any other operating system, so yes, I am willing to pay a premium for that. It works out of the box with no hassle, and there are a ton of great apps that just aren't available for other platforms.
You have the Dock, where icons behave totally differently from any other icons anywhere else on the entire system
This is true, but the Dock isn't supposed to be consistent with the rest of the system, it's supposed to be unique and separate. I find the left/top side of the Dock to behave in a very reasonable way. The right/bottom side is a bit weirder.
and where a whole bunch of totally different tasks -- launching applications, monitoring running tasks, etc. -- are all mixed together
Launching and monitoring applications are not completely different tasks. Remember that the Dock was created partly to solve some of the usability problems of Mac OS 9, one of which was that new users were constantly confused as to which applications were currently running.
in one confusing zooming bouncing distracting usability nightmare.
If I'm not mistaken, it doesn't zoom by default, you have to explicitly enable magnification if you want that feature. And the bouncing is meant to be distracting. If you don't like application icons bouncing when the application launches, you can disable that feature, but most people aren't trying to get anything else done while waiting for an app to launch, and the bouncing is better than no visual feedback at all. Application icons also bounce to alert you that the application wants attention, and I think this is pretty effective.
You have Finder windows that flip from brushed metal to Aqua when you merely show/hide the toolbar, and that STILL, after six years of OS X, have not come close to regaining the unparalleled usability of the classic Finder.
Yep, this is dumb. I'm hoping they'll fix it in Leopard.
You have places where drag-and-drop works beautifully inexplicably mixed up with places where it doesn't work at all: why can't I drag a document from the Recent Items list to open it in a non-default application?
Hmm. Which Recent Items list are you thinking of? Are you thinking of the one in the Apple menu? If so, then the answer is obvious: you've never been able to drag anything from a menu on a Mac. Windows sometimes allows it, but the Mac OS never has. However, it would be nice if the Recent Items list worked the way it did on Mac OS 9, where it was actually a folder full of aliases that you could open and interact with the way you normally would in the Finder.
Why can't I assign an icon to a folder by dragging it into the Get Info window?
Good question! I'm not aware that this is a feature that has ever worked either, but it's not a bad idea. You should suggest it to Apple.
Why can't I drag a document from the Dock to the Desktop?
Because the Dock doesn't hold documents, it only holds icons. It's for launching things, not storing things. The behavior is similar to the sidebar in Finder windows. What you can do, however, is right-click (or control-click or click-and-hold) the icon and select Reveal in Finder.
I thought this was supposed to be the One Consistent OS, where everything Just Worked?!
I've decided to be mindlessly optimistic about Leopard. Maybe they'll get it right this time, even though I have seen very few indications to that effect.
And you have limitations introduced in the name of "elegance". Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in.
Not being able to type the path isn't a limitation they introduced; Mac OS never had that option. However, keyboard navigation is certainly far inferior to what it used to be in classic Mac OS.
Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
Sometimes there is a stop button, depending on what you're playing. Try to figure out how to change the visualizer opt
It is obnoxious and wizard-ish, but not normally as bad as described here. Although, if your wireless network is using WPA instead of WEP, don't be surprised if you can't get it working at all.
It's just as if a eleven-years-old published his home address in some website - it's known to be done, it's stupid, and the eleven year old is responsible for it.
Perhaps you mean, the eleven-year-old's parents are responsible for allowing the eleven-year-old to use the Internet unsupervised without first educating the child about basic safety rules.
You shouldn't let your children play in a public park without first teaching them not to take candy from strangers...
Slashdot Mirror
Making a site 508 compliant is not really all that hard and it essentially consists of making sure your site validates as XHTML 1.0 (preferably 1.0 Strict) or even better, XHTML 1.1. Do that and you are about 90% of the way there.
I just want to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with HTML 4.01 Transitional. Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional code is just as valid as XHTML 1.1, and as an added bonus, can be made to render correctly on Internet Explorer, which completely valid XHTML can't.
us mac and linux users? Should we all sue the big websites that are only tested in IE?
It's our choice to use a Mac or Linux (I normally use an iBook for all my Slashdot needs, but happen to be on a Linux box at the moment). It's not their choice to be blind. Despite the pain and suffering that would undoubtedly be cause by doing so, if we wanted to badly enough, we could install Windows. They can't become sighted, no matter how much they might want to.
I never claimed to have come up with the idea. ;-)
Because they're very cumbersome to use with a laptop, particularly if you want to run your laptop on batteries, you know, wirelessly.
For a desktop PC, an Ethernet bridge is a good idea, but not using wireless at all is usually a better idea.
I did say we hate them less at the moment.
I don't remember the clipper chip, but that article doesn't seem to contradict my assertion that the Democrats are incompetent.
I think I might vaguely remember something about CALEA. It sounds like there are technical problems with it (thus supporting my claim of incompetency), but the intention is OK. I support the ability of the government to eavesdrop on my telephone conversations with a warrant, but doing so with encrypted VOIP isn't technically feasible. It's not a problem now because VOIP isn't that widespread now, but if a time comes when a significant percentage of the general public is using VOIP instead of more traditional telephone networks, it will be an issue.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which along with the DMCA are significantly evil things passed with full Democratic support. Still, it's not as if Republicans don't like those just as much.
Nope
I would expect a bigger uproar, because Republicans seem to be better at generating uproar from the general public. They're more organized, and they've got Fox News on their side.
If you just mean on Slashdot, yeah, many of us would be pleased to see the GOP kicked out of office. But don't think for a minute that it's because we actually like Democrats - we just hate them less at the moment, because they're too incompetent to do anything really evil. Some of us would rather see the Democrats win an election by cheating than see Republicans win fairly, just because we hate Republicans that much... but that doesn't mean we'd rather not see this problem fixed. If Democrats can use broken voting machines to swindle their way to electoral victory, it just proves that ANYBODY can use broken voting machines to swindle their way to electoral victory, and that's still a problem, even if the Republicans lose the White House and both houses of Congress.
OK, so here's the theory.
Electronic voting machines can be designed to be easier to use and more accessible to people with disabilities than traditional voting machines. Blind people can connect a pair of headphones and have their choices read to them. People who don't speak English well can choose a different language such as Spanish or Korean or whatever. Touchscreens may be easier to operate for people with physical disabilities. The order of the candidates can be randomized for each voter, so alphabetical sorting doesn't affect the results (I believe Oregon chooses a random sorting order for the entire election, while California prints several different versions of the ballot with the candidates sorted differently in each version).
Using a computerized system to obtain each person's vote is NOT a bad thing, and can be very beneficial.
Also, using a computerized system to count the votes is also not a bad thing, since it can yield results much faster than manual counting. Indeed, I'm sure votes on paper balllots are machine-counted almost everywhere already.
The problem is this: we cannot and should not rely on a computerized system exclusively. We must have a way to verify what people really voted for. The solution is quite simple, though. We could have computerized voting machines with an instant count, with a paper trail. It works like this:
You have two machines. The first has a touch screen with a user-friendly interface. It presents your options in whatever language you prefer, and receives your votes. It prohibits you from entering invalid selections, such as selecting two candidates instead of one. Your votes are presented to you on the screen for review, with an option to go back and correct any mistakes. Finally if you are finished, the machine prints your votes on a paper ballot, in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. You take this paper ballot, and review it for accuracy. The machine you just used erases any record of your vote in preparation for the next voter. Your vote is not counted at this point.
You then take this paper ballot, and feed it into a second machine, which counts your vote and securely stores your ballot. These ballots can be counted by hand later, and compared to the computerized count. If the counting machine isn't counting votes accurately, the problem can be easily detected, and the ballots counted by hand.
If the first machine isn't printing the ballots correctly, the problem can be detected by the voter, who reviews the paper ballots before submitting them to the counting machine. If the voter sees an error, he/she can report the mistake to an election official, who can shred the ballot and let the voter vote again.
So, can we make braille CAPTCHAs?
If you've only used the latest released version of gocr, definitely try the development version; it's far superior (i.e. not completely useless).
My thoughts exactly...
Following that logic, wouldn't this then also be just as usefull a tool to spammers looking to crack those crazy registration verification images?
Yes, absolutely, and spammers are already using image obfuscation techniques: using italic difficult-to-read fonts spaced very close together (difficult to separate the image into individual characters and difficult to identify each character once you do), using colored backgrounds to make the text very low-contrast when converted into a monochrome image the OCR software can use, using animated GIFs (as mentioned previously in another article) so that if you only convert the first or last frame of the animation you won't get anything useful, and finally splitting the image into multiple pieces that are assembled together with HTML. The only solution I see to this last problem is to develop spam filtering software that uses Gecko or KHTML to render the HTML and analyze the rendered page.
In the war between spammers and anti-spammers, the spammers are clearly winning, and they will continue to win for the foreseeable future. No technical solution can stop spam, only certain limited types of spam - but the spammers are constantly adapting. I believe if Congress were to earmark funding for the investigation and prosecution of spammers, we could actually make a significant dent in the problem (other governments have already expressed a willingness to cooperate).
It's difficult to legally define spam in such a way that makes spam illegal without infringing the right to freedom of speech and press, and I believe we need to err on the side of protecting liberty at the expense of some spam being legal. This is what CAN-SPAM has done - it's far from perfect, but it's a good start. CAN-SPAM has gotten a lot of criticism for being too easy for spammers to work around, but how much spam do you get that actually complies with the law? Not much... so why aren't we prosecuting violators right and left? Limited resources. Given the choice between tracking down a spammer and tracking down a murderer/rapist/child molestor/etc., both of which cost money, most of us recognize that spam is a less severe problem. More resources need to be allocated to the appropriate law enforcement agencies so they can deal with both.
Oh, and if my argument about CAN-SPAM was unconvincing, consider this: nearly all the image-based spam I've been seeing lately has been either for penny stocks or prescription medications (i.e. "male enhancement" products). Both of these are already cleaerly illegal (the SEC and FDA are the respective government agencies responsible, I believe). It should be possible to prosecute the spammers for stock market manipulation and dispensing controlled drugs without a prescription, even if sending spam weren't against the law.
Some here will call for spammers to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, execution, castration, public hanging, public stoning, or worse. Get over it. Forget about revenge, that's not what our criminal justice system is for. All I want is for the spam to stop, and for the spammer to lose whatever they've gained from it. That should be enough. Let the spammers become productive members of society if they're capable of doing so; lock them up if they cause any further trouble.
Is this the final solution? No, of course not. But let's start with this, and see how it goes for now. If this works, spam won't go away, it will just change into new forms... and that's OK. When that happens, we can find new ways of dealing with it. The hope is that after that happens a few times, it will become much less of a problem. Maybe not, but I'd sure like to find out!
I am currently using the FuzzyOcr plugin to SpamAssassin, and it uses gocr to do the character recognition. To be sure, gocr is improving (the stable released version is practically useless, but the CVS version actually works, mostly), but if Tesseract is better, great!
How do people who are blind and deaf use the World Wide Web? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but unless it actually is done, we shouldn't need to worry about it.
If someone actually signed up to receive e-mail, and then decides they don't want it, that doesn't make it spam. If the user thinks it's spam, it doesn't mean the definition of spam is subjective, it just means the user is wrong.
:-)
If I were to receive the same e-mail that you're receiving even though I didn't sign up for it, because Nintendo scraped my e-mail address off a web page or used a Windows virus to extract it from someone's address book or bought a CD containing 500 million e-mail addresses for $500, then yeah, THAT would be spam. Fortunately, they don't do that.
... their non-gif stuff. I'm not about to buy a stock which is advertised with multiple exclamation !!! marks. And with incomplete sentences.
I would hope that you wouldn't buy anything that was advertised via spam, regardless of the apparent quality of presentation. However, consider this: a lot of the spam I see is nearly unintelligible, because the intelligible spam already got blocked by my spam filtering.
This really has nothing to do with subliminal messages, and everything to do with trying to defeat OCR software. I was seeing animated GIFs exactly like this where the "buy" frames were just blank, before they started adding "BUY!" to those frames.
Sorry, you completely missed that one. Go back and read it again. Start with "When was it Apple's game..." His entire point was, all that stuff was never Apple's game, it's Microsoft's game. So, Microsoft isn't beating Apple at Apple's game, as the article title suggests.
shoving out $200 for a CD vs $400 for an entire computer.
Just so you know, Windows XP Home Edition is currently selling for $89.99 (plus shipping) on NewEgg. You have a point, but the price difference between a copy of Windows and a new PC is a bit more than you've suggested.
Please try to understand that while Macs are indeed personal computers, most people mean the term "PC" to exclude Macs. In fact, some people mean it to only include computers that are running Microsoft Windows.
If you like shiny GUIs with less functionality at a premium, go for it.
For what I do with it, Mac OS X offers me far more functionality than I could get from any other operating system, so yes, I am willing to pay a premium for that. It works out of the box with no hassle, and there are a ton of great apps that just aren't available for other platforms.
You have the Dock, where icons behave totally differently from any other icons anywhere else on the entire system
This is true, but the Dock isn't supposed to be consistent with the rest of the system, it's supposed to be unique and separate. I find the left/top side of the Dock to behave in a very reasonable way. The right/bottom side is a bit weirder.
and where a whole bunch of totally different tasks -- launching applications, monitoring running tasks, etc. -- are all mixed together
Launching and monitoring applications are not completely different tasks. Remember that the Dock was created partly to solve some of the usability problems of Mac OS 9, one of which was that new users were constantly confused as to which applications were currently running.
in one confusing zooming bouncing distracting usability nightmare.
If I'm not mistaken, it doesn't zoom by default, you have to explicitly enable magnification if you want that feature. And the bouncing is meant to be distracting. If you don't like application icons bouncing when the application launches, you can disable that feature, but most people aren't trying to get anything else done while waiting for an app to launch, and the bouncing is better than no visual feedback at all. Application icons also bounce to alert you that the application wants attention, and I think this is pretty effective.
You have Finder windows that flip from brushed metal to Aqua when you merely show/hide the toolbar, and that STILL, after six years of OS X, have not come close to regaining the unparalleled usability of the classic Finder.
Yep, this is dumb. I'm hoping they'll fix it in Leopard.
You have places where drag-and-drop works beautifully inexplicably mixed up with places where it doesn't work at all: why can't I drag a document from the Recent Items list to open it in a non-default application?
Hmm. Which Recent Items list are you thinking of? Are you thinking of the one in the Apple menu? If so, then the answer is obvious: you've never been able to drag anything from a menu on a Mac. Windows sometimes allows it, but the Mac OS never has. However, it would be nice if the Recent Items list worked the way it did on Mac OS 9, where it was actually a folder full of aliases that you could open and interact with the way you normally would in the Finder.
Why can't I assign an icon to a folder by dragging it into the Get Info window?
Good question! I'm not aware that this is a feature that has ever worked either, but it's not a bad idea. You should suggest it to Apple.
Why can't I drag a document from the Dock to the Desktop?
Because the Dock doesn't hold documents, it only holds icons. It's for launching things, not storing things. The behavior is similar to the sidebar in Finder windows. What you can do, however, is right-click (or control-click or click-and-hold) the icon and select Reveal in Finder.
I thought this was supposed to be the One Consistent OS, where everything Just Worked?!
I've decided to be mindlessly optimistic about Leopard. Maybe they'll get it right this time, even though I have seen very few indications to that effect.
And you have limitations introduced in the name of "elegance". Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in.
Not being able to type the path isn't a limitation they introduced; Mac OS never had that option. However, keyboard navigation is certainly far inferior to what it used to be in classic Mac OS.
Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
Sometimes there is a stop button, depending on what you're playing. Try to figure out how to change the visualizer opt
You should read up on Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO).
It is obnoxious and wizard-ish, but not normally as bad as described here. Although, if your wireless network is using WPA instead of WEP, don't be surprised if you can't get it working at all.
It's just as if a eleven-years-old published his home address in some website - it's known to be done, it's stupid, and the eleven year old is responsible for it.
Perhaps you mean, the eleven-year-old's parents are responsible for allowing the eleven-year-old to use the Internet unsupervised without first educating the child about basic safety rules.
You shouldn't let your children play in a public park without first teaching them not to take candy from strangers...