I want Intel to get more experience designing GPUs that are competitive with nVidia and ATi. I want Intel to start offering PCIe graphics cards. Why?
Because Intel is committed to releasing open-source drivers. I want to support any company that does this, and currently if I'm in the market for a graphics card, I don't have the option at the moment.
Ugh, I have this problem with clients' Windows desktop PCs. They should have sensible names so you can identify them on the network, but you can't use either the location or the user at all, because both will change when I'm not around to make adjustments (my clients are small businesses without full-time IT).
Except that before too long, somebody will decide that Webserver1 should also handle a few other services like FTP and DNS, and then when you upgrade your web site and need more processing power you decide to invest in new hardware, but you don't want to touch the DNS/FTP stuff because you don't want to complicate things, so pretty soon Webserver1 is no longer running an HTTP server at all, but you can't rename it without breaking a dozen scripts.
Sure, maybe this doesn't happen when you're a large enough operation that devoting an entire machine to each service makes sense. On a smaller scale, it's almost inevitable - needs change in ways you can't predict.
No, you are applying your requirements to everyone. For a typical Slashdot user, computers are a requirement. For John or Jane doe, they are optional as they use them to browse occasionally, and to send joke e-mails to their grandparents down in Florida. Most could get by just using a PC at work, and failing that, they would simply do without.
Given normal use, and no uncaptured power surges, they could easily expect their PC to work for 10 years or more with maybe a hard drive replacement at some point.
Yes, John and Jane Doe can certainly do without their computer for awhile, but even they aren't likely to go very long. If they're still on dialup, they might go six months before getting a replacement; if they're on broadband, they're not going to wait that long.
Most PCs don't last much longer than six years, and the ones that do can't handle modern usage requirements (YouTube just isn't going to work on a PC that old).
You suggested "maybe a hard drive replacement"; that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I said "the best solution is to buy a new PC." If John Doe has a six-year-old computer, he cannot simply replace the hard drive for less than the price of buying a new PC, because he has to pay someone to 1) diagnose the problem, 2) advise him that he needs to specifically ask for an IDE hard drive instead of SATA, and that it doesn't matter which one because the cheapest ones on the market today have an order of magnitude more storage capacity than what he's replacing, 3) attempt to retrieve the photos of his grandchildren off the bad hard drive, because nothing was backed up, 4) reinstall Windows on the new drive, and 5) reinstall as many of his applications as he can find the original media for.
If he's lucky, he has an OEM PC with the Windows XP CD key stuck to the case. Otherwise, add the price of a new copy of XP, if you can still find it. If he's VERY lucky, he still has his MS Office CDs with the CD key.
John and Jane Doe cannot do all of this themselves. They don't know how. They even don't know that their hard drive is the source of the problem. Chances are, they don't really fully grasp the concept of what a hard drive is.
I completely agree, Apple should not be pushing iTunes on people who just want to install QuickTime. In fact, they only do this for Windows users; if you go to the QuickTime Download page on a Mac, it does NOT offer a bundle with iTunes.
By the way, if you weren't aware, you can disable iTunes' Bonjour features by unchecking the various "Look for..." checkboxes in Preferences.
Personally, I like Bonjour for Windows because it makes it easier to set up a network printer.
One minor point that they haven't 'fixed'. The economy still sucks. I doubt seriously people are going to drop for new hardware or another $300 bucks for an OS that offers nothing substantial that isn't already do-able in XP.
Computers are no longer a luxury. When they stop working, they must be fixed or replaced, and it doesn't matter how much money you have. When the best solution is to buy a new PC (rather than fix the old one), guess what OS will come pre-installed?
Also note that, if the Vista beta/RC releases are any indication, when the final shipping version of Windows 7 is released and the beta expires, you will ONLY be able to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. Installing the final release of any other edition will require a clean install.
I agree, this isn't news. It had never even occurred to me that it might not work this way.
Windows 7 really is just Vista with bugfixes, performance optimizations, and the most important feature: a name other than "Vista". Now that most of the third-party compatibility issues have been worked out and people have upgraded to Vista-compatible hardware, people are going to LOVE Windows 7.
I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.
They're working on it; they haven't gotten there yet. IE8 does not pass Acid3, but neither do the current shipping versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome. Most of these should pass Acid3 in their next major release, but Firefox won't pass Acid3 for awhile (probably not until 4.0).
IE8 does pass Acid2, which represents a major improvement in standards-compliance and compatibility over previous versions of IE.
Nobody's saying IE8 is a better browser than Firefox. If you're already running Firefox, that's great. Stick with that. Don't switch to IE. But for anyone currently running IE, this is a huge improvement (and, unlike the switch from IE6 to IE7, upgrading from IE7 to IE8 shouldn't break anything, because there's an IE7 compatibility mode for stupid broken web sites).
I assume you could, but then wouldn't it be the same as just taking a disk with one-time pads with you?
Yes, but then the disk could be intercepted between point A and point B. If it's a quantum thingie that happens simultaneously on both ends, there's no chance of interception.
NSI originally operated the.com/net/org/edu registry and was the sole registrar; after they started allowing competing registrars, Verisign bought NSI, then Verisign spun off NSI as a registrar but kept the registry. NSI now competes on even footing with other registrars (except NSI's customer base dates back to before competition existed).
I'm tired, I'll let somebody else correct my oversimplifications and misstatements.:-)
Is there any way this could be used, not for sending FTL messages, but exchanging a cipher? You said you can't know which state you'll measure, but if you can measure some as-yet-unknown random state at one end and measure the corresponding state at the other end, then you should be able to use this random pattern of bits to encode a message, which would then be transferred through traditional (light speed or slower) means. The message could be intercepted in transmission, but the cipher couldn't be.
That's incorrect. Photos on Facebook are not searchable, nor are the tags in them indexed.
Of course they're indexed. I keep getting an e-mail whenever somebody tags me in their photos, and the link in the e-mail takes me to a page where I can browse through all the photos that I'm tagged in, regardless of who took them.
I've pruned this list to eliminate false-positives, but if you need to receive legitimate mail from China or Korea you'll need to remove those lists.
Next, I use a lot of custom code I've written myself, which is executed by MIMEDefang. I've thrown all kinds of stuff in there.
Finally, I use ClamAV and SpamAssassin (also executed by MIMEDefang). ClamAV can detect certain known phishing scams; unfortunately I had to disable the feature that identifies misdirected links like phroggy.com because it was catching a ton of false-positives (including legitimate mail from BANKS! You'd think they'd know better...). I use a few rules from the SpamAssassin Rules Emporium; you'll have to pick and choose which ones work for you.
Or, if you don't want to do all of that work, there are commercial solutions such as Barracuda's firewall thingie. Or, just use GMail.
That's naive. Silverlight is their latest attempt to take over the web. IE is the only major browser that won't support SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), because they want to push proprietary solutions like Silverlight.
Alright, Silverlight is evil, I'll grant you that. I wouldn't say not supporting SVG is evil, however, nor am I sure that the lack of SVG support has anything to do with Silverlight.
I believe there are two reasons they haven't decided to start supporting SVG: first, they're working with a legacy codebase that doesn't support SVG, so they would have to create an implementation from scratch, or buy one. Either option would cost money and add complexity to the browser, and they have other priorities, such as improving CSS support. Second, the reason why SVG support isn't a high priority is a chicken-and-egg problem: very few sites currently use SVG, which of course is because IE doesn't support it.
Maybe; just maybe, Microsoft isn't the evil machine some slashdotters make out.
How about, Microsoft isn't the evil machine any more. They used to be, but they've turned around. They're still encumbered by a legacy code base and compatibility requirements, but they're trying to do the right thing as best they can, which they certainly weren't a decade ago.
Microsoft realizes that a lot of their old code is complete crap, and is not maintainable. The only way to fix it is to rewrite it from scratch, using a modern language. They didn't have a modern language they liked, and they do still have issues with "Not Invented Here", so they created a new language (and associated dev tools) that they could start rewriting things in. Note that the company has been in the language business longer than they've been in the OS business.
Internet Explorer, up through IE6, was developed with the old evil monopoly mentality. They reached their goal of market domination, then terminated the project and scattered the team. Then Firefox started becoming popular, and they realized that IE would soon be forgotten if they didn't do something, so they started working on it again - but this time, they're operating in a competitive/cooperative environment, where they're trying to develop a better product than their competitors while adhering to web standards to ensure compatibility. This process began with a few minor enhancements they added to XPSP2, some of which (such as the information bar) have since been adopted by other browsers. Microsoft has contributed resources to help the Mozilla team improve Vista compatibility in Firefox, and they chose to license Mozilla's RSS icon for use in IE7. IE7 certainly didn't fix all the bugs, but it was an evolutionary step. IE8 is even better; it passes ACID2 and they've finally fixed things like the "view source" command.
People bitched about shoddy security in XP; because so many applications were designed for Win98 which didn't have any concept of security, those apps require Administrator privileges on XP in order to work correctly, so for most people running as an unprivileged user is simply not practical. Running everything with Administrator privileges, of course, is part of the reason so many XP machines become infected with malware and turn into spambots. Another reason is, XP has a ton of useless services enabled by default, allowing non-firewalled PCs to become infected remotely over the Internet.
So, Microsoft added a software firewall, which they turned on by default in XPSP2. A few people complained because it broke things, but the world is a better place - we still have botnets, but most of the worms have stopped functioning (which is good for all of us, including Linux users; worms eat up our bandwidth too). Then they started fixing the privileges problem.
Microsoft can't force third-party vendors to fix their broken code. What they can do, though, is make it really annoying for users to run broken code. Vista's User Access Control feature was designed to be annoying: if your CD-burning application is designed so the GUI won't run without Administrator privileges, instead of using privilege separation so the unprivileged GUI communicates with a privileged daemon in the background, the user gets a warning every time they launch it. If your printer driver puts a little icon in the systray that needs Administrator privileges, UAC won't allow it to run unless the user explicitly enables it every single time they log in. If a malicious application tries to modify your system configuration, even if you're logged in with Administrator privileges, you get a warning and the option to cancel. That warning can't be automatically skipped by simulating a mouse click on the "Continue" button, because Windows switches to a secure desktop before displaying the dialog box.
Unfortunately, although Microsoft's intentions were good, their implementation left something to be desired (for one thing, the switch t
In the case of a school, they are not the police and do not have the authority of the police (despite some administrators thinking that they do).
You've got it backwards: as someone else pointed out, school administrators don't have the same legal restrictions that the police do. The police can't legally search your locker without a warrant, but a school administrator with "reasonable belief" (i.e. pretty much anything) can.
Frankly, if I was the parent of any of these teens, I would start filing suit against EVERY major media provider that influences children with their unavoidable crap selling sexuality to teenagers. You can destroy every TV, magazine and newspaper in the home and teens are STILL going to be at risk of influence from it. And yes, I know it is futile and stupid. But attention to the real problems will never be drawn until obvious clashes between culture and law are reconciled.
Relevant study: teens who watch TV shows with sexual content are more likely to have sex than those who don't.
What is up with all of the voyeurism lately? Are peoples' lives so pathetic that they have to spend inordinate amounts of time and effort to gawk at others'?
The girls can get even by messaging the pictures to prosecutors and the ratting teacher. Pedophile teachers have a hard time getting another teaching job.
Not only that, but you also have to choose a side: you can't oppose abortion AND warrantless wiretapping; you can't support universal health care AND the right to bear arms; you can't oppose gay marriage AND the invasion of Iraq. It doesn't matter that these are unrelated issues; they're a package deal, and if you don't choose one package or the other, you must be some sort of apathetic freak.
Common sense tells me that Dvorak would be a horrible choice. The layout is based on what letters are most common in english. Yay. For other languages, this doesn't make sense. Do you propose changing the layout completely between languages, or just enforcing the english ones in languages where it doesn't make sense?
There are alternate versions of QWERTY used in other countries, such as the AZERTY layout used in France and Belgium that has Q/A and W/Z swapped, M moved to the right of L, and all punctuation scattered randomly. People seem to be generally OK with this, so why should international versions of Dvorak work any differently?
Certainly Dvorak wouldn't be a good choice for all languages, but it should work pretty well for a lot of them. Keep in mind that most Americans are unilingual, and the most commonly used language other than English in this country is Spanish. The Dvorak layout should work pretty well for Spanish; a Spanish Dvorak layout swaps H/R and moves W to the left of P, with a few punctuation changes. Typing in Spanish on a US Dvorak keyboard would certainly be no more awkward than typing in Spanish on a US QWERTY keyboard (the Mac's Option key makes accents and punctuation much easier than on a PC).
Ever visit a foreign country and have to type a password for something? It's usually a very unpleasant experience. If you're lucky, the characters you used in your password all exist on the keyboard, it'll just take you a few minutes to find them. I don't think I ever did figure out how to type a ~ character on a Spanish keyboard; I believe pressing the ~ key followed by a space yields U+02DC rather than the desired U+007E. That makes typing certain URLs rather problematic as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I want Intel to get more experience designing GPUs that are competitive with nVidia and ATi. I want Intel to start offering PCIe graphics cards. Why?
Because Intel is committed to releasing open-source drivers. I want to support any company that does this, and currently if I'm in the market for a graphics card, I don't have the option at the moment.
Perhaps one could use Roman numerals: WiiII?
The registrar I use has dropped off the list. I no longer have any qualms about signing up for a reseller account with them. :-)
Ugh, I have this problem with clients' Windows desktop PCs. They should have sensible names so you can identify them on the network, but you can't use either the location or the user at all, because both will change when I'm not around to make adjustments (my clients are small businesses without full-time IT).
Except that before too long, somebody will decide that Webserver1 should also handle a few other services like FTP and DNS, and then when you upgrade your web site and need more processing power you decide to invest in new hardware, but you don't want to touch the DNS/FTP stuff because you don't want to complicate things, so pretty soon Webserver1 is no longer running an HTTP server at all, but you can't rename it without breaking a dozen scripts.
Sure, maybe this doesn't happen when you're a large enough operation that devoting an entire machine to each service makes sense. On a smaller scale, it's almost inevitable - needs change in ways you can't predict.
No, you are applying your requirements to everyone. For a typical Slashdot user, computers are a requirement. For John or Jane doe, they are optional as they use them to browse occasionally, and to send joke e-mails to their grandparents down in Florida. Most could get by just using a PC at work, and failing that, they would simply do without.
Given normal use, and no uncaptured power surges, they could easily expect their PC to work for 10 years or more with maybe a hard drive replacement at some point.
Yes, John and Jane Doe can certainly do without their computer for awhile, but even they aren't likely to go very long. If they're still on dialup, they might go six months before getting a replacement; if they're on broadband, they're not going to wait that long.
Most PCs don't last much longer than six years, and the ones that do can't handle modern usage requirements (YouTube just isn't going to work on a PC that old).
You suggested "maybe a hard drive replacement"; that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I said "the best solution is to buy a new PC." If John Doe has a six-year-old computer, he cannot simply replace the hard drive for less than the price of buying a new PC, because he has to pay someone to 1) diagnose the problem, 2) advise him that he needs to specifically ask for an IDE hard drive instead of SATA, and that it doesn't matter which one because the cheapest ones on the market today have an order of magnitude more storage capacity than what he's replacing, 3) attempt to retrieve the photos of his grandchildren off the bad hard drive, because nothing was backed up, 4) reinstall Windows on the new drive, and 5) reinstall as many of his applications as he can find the original media for.
If he's lucky, he has an OEM PC with the Windows XP CD key stuck to the case. Otherwise, add the price of a new copy of XP, if you can still find it. If he's VERY lucky, he still has his MS Office CDs with the CD key.
John and Jane Doe cannot do all of this themselves. They don't know how. They even don't know that their hard drive is the source of the problem. Chances are, they don't really fully grasp the concept of what a hard drive is.
I completely agree, Apple should not be pushing iTunes on people who just want to install QuickTime. In fact, they only do this for Windows users; if you go to the QuickTime Download page on a Mac, it does NOT offer a bundle with iTunes.
By the way, if you weren't aware, you can disable iTunes' Bonjour features by unchecking the various "Look for..." checkboxes in Preferences.
Personally, I like Bonjour for Windows because it makes it easier to set up a network printer.
One minor point that they haven't 'fixed'. The economy still sucks. I doubt seriously people are going to drop for new hardware or another $300 bucks for an OS that offers nothing substantial that isn't already do-able in XP.
Computers are no longer a luxury. When they stop working, they must be fixed or replaced, and it doesn't matter how much money you have. When the best solution is to buy a new PC (rather than fix the old one), guess what OS will come pre-installed?
Also note that, if the Vista beta/RC releases are any indication, when the final shipping version of Windows 7 is released and the beta expires, you will ONLY be able to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. Installing the final release of any other edition will require a clean install.
I agree, this isn't news. It had never even occurred to me that it might not work this way.
Windows 7 really is just Vista with bugfixes, performance optimizations, and the most important feature: a name other than "Vista". Now that most of the third-party compatibility issues have been worked out and people have upgraded to Vista-compatible hardware, people are going to LOVE Windows 7.
I don't really care about their tabs, 'Awesome Address and Search Bars,' privacy or really anything else while they still only score 20 on the Acid3 Web standards test. IE has historically been such a pain in the ass for the entire world because of poor adherence to standards. The article says Microsoft takes standards seriously but the test says otherwise.
They're working on it; they haven't gotten there yet. IE8 does not pass Acid3, but neither do the current shipping versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome. Most of these should pass Acid3 in their next major release, but Firefox won't pass Acid3 for awhile (probably not until 4.0).
IE8 does pass Acid2, which represents a major improvement in standards-compliance and compatibility over previous versions of IE.
Nobody's saying IE8 is a better browser than Firefox. If you're already running Firefox, that's great. Stick with that. Don't switch to IE. But for anyone currently running IE, this is a huge improvement (and, unlike the switch from IE6 to IE7, upgrading from IE7 to IE8 shouldn't break anything, because there's an IE7 compatibility mode for stupid broken web sites).
I assume you could, but then wouldn't it be the same as just taking a disk with one-time pads with you?
Yes, but then the disk could be intercepted between point A and point B. If it's a quantum thingie that happens simultaneously on both ends, there's no chance of interception.
*pssst* Verisign owns Network Solutions owns .com
That hasn't been true in years.
NSI originally operated the .com/net/org/edu registry and was the sole registrar; after they started allowing competing registrars, Verisign bought NSI, then Verisign spun off NSI as a registrar but kept the registry. NSI now competes on even footing with other registrars (except NSI's customer base dates back to before competition existed).
I'm tired, I'll let somebody else correct my oversimplifications and misstatements. :-)
Hmm.
Is there any way this could be used, not for sending FTL messages, but exchanging a cipher? You said you can't know which state you'll measure, but if you can measure some as-yet-unknown random state at one end and measure the corresponding state at the other end, then you should be able to use this random pattern of bits to encode a message, which would then be transferred through traditional (light speed or slower) means. The message could be intercepted in transmission, but the cipher couldn't be.
True.
That's incorrect. Photos on Facebook are not searchable, nor are the tags in them indexed.
Of course they're indexed. I keep getting an e-mail whenever somebody tags me in their photos, and the link in the e-mail takes me to a page where I can browse through all the photos that I'm tagged in, regardless of who took them.
You both are making me feel inadequate. I've never figured out how to stop receiving spam.
Best I can think of were:
But in practice, my users were still receiving junk mail, and I couldn't seem to do anything.
Any advice?
The list of blacklists I use to reject spam outright:
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
list.dsbl.org
bl.csma.biz
cn.ascc.dnsbl.bit.nl
korea.services.net
web.dnsbl.sorbs.net
I've pruned this list to eliminate false-positives, but if you need to receive legitimate mail from China or Korea you'll need to remove those lists.
Next, I use a lot of custom code I've written myself, which is executed by MIMEDefang. I've thrown all kinds of stuff in there.
Finally, I use ClamAV and SpamAssassin (also executed by MIMEDefang). ClamAV can detect certain known phishing scams; unfortunately I had to disable the feature that identifies misdirected links like phroggy.com because it was catching a ton of false-positives (including legitimate mail from BANKS! You'd think they'd know better...). I use a few rules from the SpamAssassin Rules Emporium; you'll have to pick and choose which ones work for you.
Or, if you don't want to do all of that work, there are commercial solutions such as Barracuda's firewall thingie. Or, just use GMail.
That's naive. Silverlight is their latest attempt to take over the web. IE is the only major browser that won't support SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), because they want to push proprietary solutions like Silverlight.
Alright, Silverlight is evil, I'll grant you that. I wouldn't say not supporting SVG is evil, however, nor am I sure that the lack of SVG support has anything to do with Silverlight.
I believe there are two reasons they haven't decided to start supporting SVG: first, they're working with a legacy codebase that doesn't support SVG, so they would have to create an implementation from scratch, or buy one. Either option would cost money and add complexity to the browser, and they have other priorities, such as improving CSS support. Second, the reason why SVG support isn't a high priority is a chicken-and-egg problem: very few sites currently use SVG, which of course is because IE doesn't support it.
OK, one side of the company has changed their ways; the other side is still evil. :-)
Maybe; just maybe, Microsoft isn't the evil machine some slashdotters make out.
How about, Microsoft isn't the evil machine any more. They used to be, but they've turned around. They're still encumbered by a legacy code base and compatibility requirements, but they're trying to do the right thing as best they can, which they certainly weren't a decade ago.
Microsoft realizes that a lot of their old code is complete crap, and is not maintainable. The only way to fix it is to rewrite it from scratch, using a modern language. They didn't have a modern language they liked, and they do still have issues with "Not Invented Here", so they created a new language (and associated dev tools) that they could start rewriting things in. Note that the company has been in the language business longer than they've been in the OS business.
Internet Explorer, up through IE6, was developed with the old evil monopoly mentality. They reached their goal of market domination, then terminated the project and scattered the team. Then Firefox started becoming popular, and they realized that IE would soon be forgotten if they didn't do something, so they started working on it again - but this time, they're operating in a competitive/cooperative environment, where they're trying to develop a better product than their competitors while adhering to web standards to ensure compatibility. This process began with a few minor enhancements they added to XPSP2, some of which (such as the information bar) have since been adopted by other browsers. Microsoft has contributed resources to help the Mozilla team improve Vista compatibility in Firefox, and they chose to license Mozilla's RSS icon for use in IE7. IE7 certainly didn't fix all the bugs, but it was an evolutionary step. IE8 is even better; it passes ACID2 and they've finally fixed things like the "view source" command.
People bitched about shoddy security in XP; because so many applications were designed for Win98 which didn't have any concept of security, those apps require Administrator privileges on XP in order to work correctly, so for most people running as an unprivileged user is simply not practical. Running everything with Administrator privileges, of course, is part of the reason so many XP machines become infected with malware and turn into spambots. Another reason is, XP has a ton of useless services enabled by default, allowing non-firewalled PCs to become infected remotely over the Internet.
So, Microsoft added a software firewall, which they turned on by default in XPSP2. A few people complained because it broke things, but the world is a better place - we still have botnets, but most of the worms have stopped functioning (which is good for all of us, including Linux users; worms eat up our bandwidth too). Then they started fixing the privileges problem.
Microsoft can't force third-party vendors to fix their broken code. What they can do, though, is make it really annoying for users to run broken code. Vista's User Access Control feature was designed to be annoying: if your CD-burning application is designed so the GUI won't run without Administrator privileges, instead of using privilege separation so the unprivileged GUI communicates with a privileged daemon in the background, the user gets a warning every time they launch it. If your printer driver puts a little icon in the systray that needs Administrator privileges, UAC won't allow it to run unless the user explicitly enables it every single time they log in. If a malicious application tries to modify your system configuration, even if you're logged in with Administrator privileges, you get a warning and the option to cancel. That warning can't be automatically skipped by simulating a mouse click on the "Continue" button, because Windows switches to a secure desktop before displaying the dialog box.
Unfortunately, although Microsoft's intentions were good, their implementation left something to be desired (for one thing, the switch t
In the case of a school, they are not the police and do not have the authority of the police (despite some administrators thinking that they do).
You've got it backwards: as someone else pointed out, school administrators don't have the same legal restrictions that the police do. The police can't legally search your locker without a warrant, but a school administrator with "reasonable belief" (i.e. pretty much anything) can.
Frankly, if I was the parent of any of these teens, I would start filing suit against EVERY major media provider that influences children with their unavoidable crap selling sexuality to teenagers. You can destroy every TV, magazine and newspaper in the home and teens are STILL going to be at risk of influence from it. And yes, I know it is futile and stupid. But attention to the real problems will never be drawn until obvious clashes between culture and law are reconciled.
Relevant study: teens who watch TV shows with sexual content are more likely to have sex than those who don't.
What is up with all of the voyeurism lately? Are peoples' lives so pathetic that they have to spend inordinate amounts of time and effort to gawk at others'?
What do you think blogging is?
The girls can get even by messaging the pictures to prosecutors and the ratting teacher. Pedophile teachers have a hard time getting another teaching job.
No reason the boys can't do the same.
Not only that, but you also have to choose a side: you can't oppose abortion AND warrantless wiretapping; you can't support universal health care AND the right to bear arms; you can't oppose gay marriage AND the invasion of Iraq. It doesn't matter that these are unrelated issues; they're a package deal, and if you don't choose one package or the other, you must be some sort of apathetic freak.
Common sense tells me that Dvorak would be a horrible choice. The layout is based on what letters are most common in english. Yay. For other languages, this doesn't make sense. Do you propose changing the layout completely between languages, or just enforcing the english ones in languages where it doesn't make sense?
There are alternate versions of QWERTY used in other countries, such as the AZERTY layout used in France and Belgium that has Q/A and W/Z swapped, M moved to the right of L, and all punctuation scattered randomly. People seem to be generally OK with this, so why should international versions of Dvorak work any differently?
Certainly Dvorak wouldn't be a good choice for all languages, but it should work pretty well for a lot of them. Keep in mind that most Americans are unilingual, and the most commonly used language other than English in this country is Spanish. The Dvorak layout should work pretty well for Spanish; a Spanish Dvorak layout swaps H/R and moves W to the left of P, with a few punctuation changes. Typing in Spanish on a US Dvorak keyboard would certainly be no more awkward than typing in Spanish on a US QWERTY keyboard (the Mac's Option key makes accents and punctuation much easier than on a PC).
Ever visit a foreign country and have to type a password for something? It's usually a very unpleasant experience. If you're lucky, the characters you used in your password all exist on the keyboard, it'll just take you a few minutes to find them. I don't think I ever did figure out how to type a ~ character on a Spanish keyboard; I believe pressing the ~ key followed by a space yields U+02DC rather than the desired U+007E. That makes typing certain URLs rather problematic as well.