Quite simple.
Do what countless users and corporations have done over the last decade: if the latest and greatest is not so much better than the existing system, do not buy it, and continue using the older system and games built for the older system. All threats from microsoft, as in the win XP case, will come to nought. not even Ballmer, who has proved his, ah, "determination", will try to stem the flow when content designers will say: "the installed base of 360 is X million consoles, and they continue to buy both older classic games and the new ones we design. If we target only the new console with this newfangled game, we'll be lucky to sell a couple hundred thousand. No contest, babe, it's either this or Sony."
Privatising the water boards might have been a "fantastically good deal" if you had lots of money to invest in the shares, before immediately selling them. Lots of people did this of course, as they did with gas, rail and all of the other things built with the people's money and then sold for knock-down prices to foreign coroporations.
However, even the most ardent capitalist could never argue that privatising water was rational. What meaning is there to a market with no competition? If I want to have water piped to my house (and sewerage taken away) I *have* to pay Wessex Water, a Malaysian company, to do it. There's no choice. Yes, what they can charge is limited by some formula, but who cares? Nothing they do has any bearing on who I buy water from.
Before privatisation water supply in the UK was provided on a non-profit basis by democratically-elected representatives. Now it's done by companies granted a monopoly, millions flow out of the UK as a result. Wessex Water made over 72 million pounds profit after tax in 2012, and probably close to that since. And has this resulted in lower prices for consumers due to the oh-so-efficient private sector? No. In fact, prices have been rising faster than inflation since privatisation.
Hurrah for the free market and neoliberal ideology!
Do excuse me for asking, but how old are you? I was fund manager responsible for UK equity investment at the time and I can swear on my kids that:
1. the amount you was entitled to buy was affordable, imagine 2.000 shares at less than one pound original outlay [the fully paid price was in the region of three pounds];
2. if you mean "knock down prices" that the shares went down after the initial public offering, take care to correct the error. since many people in the general public and customer offer who were entitled to priority distribution bought the shares, the financial investors (me) got much less than they asked for. and the yield on the partly paid was in the region of 9%;
3.for some baffling reason which I cannot for the life of me understand, some people are convinced that water can be privatised and/or that competition can be introduced.
"non profit" does not mean free, if I pad the water company with eight layers of management made out of political cronies, the end price of water will skyrocket. Granted, I'll subsidize the water company via general taxation to hush it up, and scream from the rooftops "water is a public good which must stay in public hands", but I am only a peculiar genre of common Ponzi schemer. AFAIK, water companies before Maggie worked on a "Cost plus" basis: whatever it costs to distribute water plus some aside for renewing the network. In what way does it guarantee that the end price will be lower? politicians generally are quite generous with other people's money. Most of the price increase in water or other utilities bills, and the biggest happen when you have to say to customers that the real job was not providing water, or electricity, but trasferring money: in Italy, electricity bills are a big medium for getting money out of small to midsize companies to solar producers, the general public, and energy intensive industries. In any "real privatization", these will win and the money getters will lose, but that has absolutely no bearing on the cost of production.
In other words she ushered in the era of zero accountability for the rich and corporations.
Sounds like she is partial author of the current turmoil.
Just for the sake of argument, and because I am decidedly grumpy these days, I'll let you search for the privatization prospectus for the water companies. Go check the limits . It was a painstakingly difficult formula built to ensure that companies would not increase prices if they could not account for them in investment in the water network and quality, and all capped at consumer price inflation minus 2%. The prospectus was big as a moderate size telephone book. the water authority had limited power, in that a company better managed would earn more, but that power was enough. To top it off, in the initial public offering the general public, and especially customers, got a fantastically good deal. Not only they had priority up to 2.000 shares each, but they were partly paid, i.e. in the first year they had a full dividend on half the capital.
So, sorry to shake your comfortable beliefs, but no, it was not dear old Maggie who "ushered in the era of zero accountability for the rich and corporations". for these you had to wait for the same Brussels Burocracy she railed against to no avail.
if you work a solid 8 hours a day and get your minimum wage you're still not going to beat chinese workers. so no, i don't think if i work 2 hours a week i deserve to get paid more than starving chinese people, but i still bargain for the best deal i can get.
That may not be true. It all depends on relative productivity and transport costs, even for quasi commodity product, and tyres are one such product: whilst the likes of Michelin and Pirelli are out in front in the production technology, the end product per se has been around since the late 1800. What I find galling is that the lesson of "dune" is lost on the French: if anything, Michelin has been the real factor in rendering that plant unable to go on, not the Chinese. They eat off the same plate.
Having said that, I must say that French economic policy has wavered between "Baffling" and "hopeless" this past 20 years, so I cannot blame Mr. Montebourg for continuing a noble tradition of expedience over realism. After all, here in Europe we have TWO seats of European government because the French Governments, since the beginning and continuing now, are constitutionally unable to say "Oui" to countless proposal of scrapping Strasbourg. One of the key issues here is this, and it is not a French problem, it is general: if you are working for a company that is able to make money competing on goods in international markets, and you are reasonably sure you earn your bread, you are rather safe. Otherwise not, you are in a sense a "welfare recipient", i.e. someone else is paying the piper for you. sooner or later, he will not be able to do it any more.
They were also made in the Central Pacific, to very good effect, while MacArthur leapfrogged in a predictable way from island to island north of Australia. To be fair, landmass dictated the strategy: the nuisance value of a Japanese garrison in a speck of land in central pacific was practically nil, while leaving for example the whole of Rabaul unscathed would have posed problems and risks best left to the enemy.
I am familiar with the Sicily campaign, and it was not the high note of Patton's career: a significant proportion of forces were allowed to repair to Calabria, since the Allies were unable to plug the small sea lane between Sicily and the continent.
Because the transponders on the planes on 9/11 in the US didn't get turned off. Who needs to track airplanes that don't identify themselves anyways? They might be able to track those drones flying over your country spying on the people.
the radar equivalent surface of a drone is a very small fraction of the radar cross section of a general aviation aircraft. moreover, most if not all the radar available are 2D, which means they do not provide the altitude of the target. that's one of the original reason for the use of transponders in general aviation: even if a Radar got an echo off an aircraft, it did not provide the altitude data, and so it would not serve to enforce vertical separation.
The main weakness of a "passive only" approach is that it provides with a single point of failure, i.e. the ability of the system managers of GPS, Galileo and Glonass to degrade the accuracy of the signal. radars instead could overlap. if you simply cut and paste a naval frigate system of the 90s, it usually had a 2D Radar and a 3D Radar. the only caveat is that the liberal upper crust would look askance at somebody microwave frying his pancakes from two miles away.
I have to concur... but nothing takes out of my mind that somebody would have smoked the move if the Spruance - Fletcher team had been there. Let's face it, that landing was not in character.
global warming has been proven and doesn't require belief... whether governments, government-controlled media, or fruitloops like you like it or not
sorry, I should have specified "man made".... fruitloops like us have been spoonfed stories about Maunders minimum, and temperature changes predating human impact on the ecology.
Really, the author of TFA had nothing better to write about than a science fiction battle happening in a movies from 30 years ago????
Ever read "Falkenberg's Legion" or other Scifi of mixed "sci fi / military" theme? they are actually quite good. and anyway, I am quite sure that the powers that be have wargamed scenario that would seem farfetched even to a preteen on a high from "battlestar galactica". It's cheap, it's outside the box, and it's effective. on a sidenote, I had a classical education at school, and please do remember that the basic ingredients of the classical epic story are the same. I always joke with my son about how his generation is basically fed good second hand scrap, simply because they do not know the real things. Xenofon is a nobody to them, no point screaming "thalassa! thalassa!" any more.
US=Empire
North Koreans=Rebels
South Korea=Echo Base
Harry S. Truman=Darth Vader
Except that a popular but absolutely mediocre general like Douglas MacArthur pulled the trick of a lifetime with the Inchon landing, neatly regaining control of the capital city/ transport node, cutting away supplies to the north Korean thrust, and giving the enemy the unpalatable choice between an hasty but long retreat or trying to basically fight a three front war against an enemy which could make good use of a reasonable ability to deny ground movement. they could have tried to leave a screen south, fight their way back to Seoul, pressure Seoul from the north as well and mass the army reserves in the region east of Seoul. In the end, they could not or would not.
Software solutions are all well and fine, but I find it highly ironic that the menace comes from the internet, an offspring of a DARPA grant that had reliability and redundancy at its core. Granted, the possibility of somebody lobbing H bombs has receded since the cold war, but a little physical investment would do a power of good, especially since it would cost a fraction of the subsidies sunk each year in renewable energy.
As you say, everything is high stakes gambling when you get down to it. Life is. I threw up a well paid job to be with a girl and a few years later was in a much better career, but I hardly knew that would be the outcome.
however, I disagree on one point: because greed and the propensity to violence exist, governments must be dirigiste to a degree if there is to be a stable society. Since economics is not much use for forecasting the effects of policy, they should forget economics and concentrate on policies designed to protect assets and encourage social cohesion, relying on human self-interest to mitigate any economic effects.
The word you are looking for is "Rule of Law", as applied also to government entities ( it was one of the first discovery in Civilization). It has nothing to do with predicting the future, or tweaking the economy in a manipulative way.
I have an anecdote for you all: in Italy, we've had an emergency government, primly named "governo dei tecnici" (mistranslated as technician's government, or experts' government). The Economic minister, in a press conference, was illustrating a tax law change. With great panache, he stated that the government was enacting the law from fiscal year 2009, in an "exception" to a law stating that fiscal law should be effective only on future fiscal years. Now, why an estimable public servant should debase the rule of law in this manner defies my mind.
[...]They're trying to predict weather. Climate in economics is much more predictable -- there is a strong correlation between economic freedom and wellbeing of the average citizen.[...]
Funny you should cite climate research. I remember a study that that ascertained, by profession, how much people believed in global warming. The first professional group that didn't think it was good science was oilmen. The second..... weather forecasters!!!!
investing in the stock market has become more like high stakes gambling.
everything is high stakes gambling. I've been married 21 years, all because I kissed a girl in front of her house. I finished my university the year the Italian government liberalized, after fifteen years, investing abroad, and I knew English, So I was hired as a fund manager. Economy is no different, except the collective feels a need to substitute something for "insufficient data", a noble tradition that continues on olden day shamanism. The big difference is that economist do not pierce their noses with animal bones, no matter how we'd like to perform that operation for them.
That's not to say that all of the establishment is unaware of the pitfalls: many distingushed scholars, like Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Taleb and others, preach the right gospel about our inability to evaluate economic forecasts correctly. Karl Otto Pöhl, the ex president of the German Bundesbank, was once quoted as saying, in response on a question on the future movement of the Dollar-Dmark exchange rate: " the central bank does not make forecasts, and above all not on the future." This is obviously a witticism, but it betrays a keen awareness of the pitfalls of economics as a forecasting tool. The variables are too many, non linearity is the norm, and if you have to utter the phrase "all else being equal", you can throw all the other words to the dogs.
The push to try to forecast the economy, tough, does not come in reality from the instinctive need of humanity to dispel uncertainty: it comes from governments who have to justify dirigistic policies, Tax incentives etc. It's quite hard to impose for example a carbon tax, if the honest answer to the (legitimate) question if it will be a drag or a push on the economy is: "How in hell would I know?"
I actually like the ribbon. Basically all it is, is a pictorial, long text menu. The dialog boxes it brings up are the exact same ones found from the menus. If you weren't a power user(like 95% of Office users for the first year or so of use ) you could find features faster with the ribbon.
Metro on the other hand works poorly,(try installing an old game where they put 12 shortcuts for everything in their menu). touch is an important part of all future interfaces. However Metro isn't user friendly.
This. Someone needs to tell this "David Pogue" about blackboards. Somehow we managed with them for centuries without this so-called "gorilla arm" mumbo jumbo ever being a factor. The real problem is that people (I'm looking at you Americans) have gotten fat and lazy
We never did depend on the blackboard as much as we do now on computers, and for most of the things we use the computers for, we used other things like the Abacus, and most if not all of them are used by placing them flat on an horizontal surface...you know, like a Surface Tablet.
Truecrypt archive, in a folder where only you have the permission. Then again, if he can enter that, grownup or not, he'll land a job at the NSA, let alone watch X rated content on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Do excuse me, but did you ever read the book?
Quite simple.
Do what countless users and corporations have done over the last decade: if the latest and greatest is not so much better than the existing system, do not buy it, and continue using the older system and games built for the older system.
All threats from microsoft, as in the win XP case, will come to nought. not even Ballmer, who has proved his, ah, "determination", will try to stem the flow when content designers will say: "the installed base of 360 is X million consoles, and they continue to buy both older classic games and the new ones we design. If we target only the new console with this newfangled game, we'll be lucky to sell a couple hundred thousand. No contest, babe, it's either this or Sony."
"Scientists claim Europe must surrender to the European Commission or starve."
To surrender to a corporate tyrant is just as bad as to surrender to any other sort of tyrant.
There, fixed it for you.
Privatising the water boards might have been a "fantastically good deal" if you had lots of money to invest in the shares, before immediately selling them. Lots of people did this of course, as they did with gas, rail and all of the other things built with the people's money and then sold for knock-down prices to foreign coroporations.
However, even the most ardent capitalist could never argue that privatising water was rational. What meaning is there to a market with no competition? If I want to have water piped to my house (and sewerage taken away) I *have* to pay Wessex Water, a Malaysian company, to do it. There's no choice. Yes, what they can charge is limited by some formula, but who cares? Nothing they do has any bearing on who I buy water from.
Before privatisation water supply in the UK was provided on a non-profit basis by democratically-elected representatives. Now it's done by companies granted a monopoly, millions flow out of the UK as a result. Wessex Water made over 72 million pounds profit after tax in 2012, and probably close to that since. And has this resulted in lower prices for consumers due to the oh-so-efficient private sector? No. In fact, prices have been rising faster than inflation since privatisation.
Hurrah for the free market and neoliberal ideology!
Do excuse me for asking, but how old are you? I was fund manager responsible for UK equity investment at the time and I can swear on my kids that:
1. the amount you was entitled to buy was affordable, imagine 2.000 shares at less than one pound original outlay [the fully paid price was in the region of three pounds];
2. if you mean "knock down prices" that the shares went down after the initial public offering, take care to correct the error. since many people in the general public and customer offer who were entitled to priority distribution bought the shares, the financial investors (me) got much less than they asked for. and the yield on the partly paid was in the region of 9%;
3.for some baffling reason which I cannot for the life of me understand, some people are convinced that water can be privatised and/or that competition can be introduced.
"non profit" does not mean free, if I pad the water company with eight layers of management made out of political cronies, the end price of water will skyrocket. Granted, I'll subsidize the water company via general taxation to hush it up, and scream from the rooftops "water is a public good which must stay in public hands", but I am only a peculiar genre of common Ponzi schemer.
AFAIK, water companies before Maggie worked on a "Cost plus" basis: whatever it costs to distribute water plus some aside for renewing the network. In what way does it guarantee that the end price will be lower? politicians generally are quite generous with other people's money. Most of the price increase in water or other utilities bills, and the biggest happen when you have to say to customers that the real job was not providing water, or electricity, but trasferring money: in Italy, electricity bills are a big medium for getting money out of small to midsize companies to solar producers, the general public, and energy intensive industries. In any "real privatization", these will win and the money getters will lose, but that has absolutely no bearing on the cost of production.
In other words she ushered in the era of zero accountability for the rich and corporations.
Sounds like she is partial author of the current turmoil.
Just for the sake of argument, and because I am decidedly grumpy these days, I'll let you search for the privatization prospectus for the water companies. Go check the limits . It was a painstakingly difficult formula built to ensure that companies would not increase prices if they could not account for them in investment in the water network and quality, and all capped at consumer price inflation minus 2%. The prospectus was big as a moderate size telephone book. the water authority had limited power, in that a company better managed would earn more, but that power was enough. To top it off, in the initial public offering the general public, and especially customers, got a fantastically good deal. Not only they had priority up to 2.000 shares each, but they were partly paid, i.e. in the first year they had a full dividend on half the capital.
So, sorry to shake your comfortable beliefs, but no, it was not dear old Maggie who "ushered in the era of zero accountability for the rich and corporations". for these you had to wait for the same Brussels Burocracy she railed against to no avail.
She was full of common sense. contrary to public perceptions, she maintained rather strict regulations on the economy. Only, laws were fewer.
"dusty starburst galaxies"
Did anyone else misread the headline as ESA Hershey Mission
No, I read: extra Herschey mission
if you work a solid 8 hours a day and get your minimum wage you're still not going to beat chinese workers. so no, i don't think if i work 2 hours a week i deserve to get paid more than starving chinese people, but i still bargain for the best deal i can get.
That may not be true. It all depends on relative productivity and transport costs, even for quasi commodity product, and tyres are one such product: whilst the likes of Michelin and Pirelli are out in front in the production technology, the end product per se has been around since the late 1800. What I find galling is that the lesson of "dune" is lost on the French: if anything, Michelin has been the real factor in rendering that plant unable to go on, not the Chinese. They eat off the same plate.
Having said that, I must say that French economic policy has wavered between "Baffling" and "hopeless" this past 20 years, so I cannot blame Mr. Montebourg for continuing a noble tradition of expedience over realism. After all, here in Europe we have TWO seats of European government because the French Governments, since the beginning and continuing now, are constitutionally unable to say "Oui" to countless proposal of scrapping Strasbourg.
One of the key issues here is this, and it is not a French problem, it is general: if you are working for a company that is able to make money competing on goods in international markets, and you are reasonably sure you earn your bread, you are rather safe. Otherwise not, you are in a sense a "welfare recipient", i.e. someone else is paying the piper for you. sooner or later, he will not be able to do it any more.
They were also made in the Central Pacific, to very good effect, while MacArthur leapfrogged in a predictable way from island to island north of Australia. To be fair, landmass dictated the strategy: the nuisance value of a Japanese garrison in a speck of land in central pacific was practically nil, while leaving for example the whole of Rabaul unscathed would have posed problems and risks best left to the enemy.
I am familiar with the Sicily campaign, and it was not the high note of Patton's career: a significant proportion of forces were allowed to repair to Calabria, since the Allies were unable to plug the small sea lane between Sicily and the continent.
Because the transponders on the planes on 9/11 in the US didn't get turned off. Who needs to track airplanes that don't identify themselves anyways? They might be able to track those drones flying over your country spying on the people.
the radar equivalent surface of a drone is a very small fraction of the radar cross section of a general aviation aircraft. moreover, most if not all the radar available are 2D, which means they do not provide the altitude of the target. that's one of the original reason for the use of transponders in general aviation: even if a Radar got an echo off an aircraft, it did not provide the altitude data, and so it would not serve to enforce vertical separation.
The main weakness of a "passive only" approach is that it provides with a single point of failure, i.e. the ability of the system managers of GPS, Galileo and Glonass to degrade the accuracy of the signal. radars instead could overlap. if you simply cut and paste a naval frigate system of the 90s, it usually had a 2D Radar and a 3D Radar. the only caveat is that the liberal upper crust would look askance at somebody microwave frying his pancakes from two miles away.
I have to concur... but nothing takes out of my mind that somebody would have smoked the move if the Spruance - Fletcher team had been there. Let's face it, that landing was not in character.
global warming has been proven and doesn't require belief... whether governments, government-controlled media, or fruitloops like you like it or not
sorry, I should have specified "man made".... fruitloops like us have been spoonfed stories about Maunders minimum, and temperature changes predating human impact on the ecology.
Really, the author of TFA had nothing better to write about than a science fiction battle happening in a movies from 30 years ago????
Ever read "Falkenberg's Legion" or other Scifi of mixed "sci fi / military" theme? they are actually quite good. and anyway, I am quite sure that the powers that be have wargamed scenario that would seem farfetched even to a preteen on a high from "battlestar galactica". It's cheap, it's outside the box, and it's effective.
on a sidenote, I had a classical education at school, and please do remember that the basic ingredients of the classical epic story are the same. I always joke with my son about how his generation is basically fed good second hand scrap, simply because they do not know the real things. Xenofon is a nobody to them, no point screaming "thalassa! thalassa!" any more.
US=Empire North Koreans=Rebels South Korea=Echo Base Harry S. Truman=Darth Vader
Except that a popular but absolutely mediocre general like Douglas MacArthur pulled the trick of a lifetime with the Inchon landing, neatly regaining control of the capital city/ transport node, cutting away supplies to the north Korean thrust, and giving the enemy the unpalatable choice between an hasty but long retreat or trying to basically fight a three front war against an enemy which could make good use of a reasonable ability to deny ground movement.
they could have tried to leave a screen south, fight their way back to Seoul, pressure Seoul from the north as well and mass the army reserves in the region east of Seoul. In the end, they could not or would not.
Software solutions are all well and fine, but I find it highly ironic that the menace comes from the internet, an offspring of a DARPA grant that had reliability and redundancy at its core. Granted, the possibility of somebody lobbing H bombs has receded since the cold war, but a little physical investment would do a power of good, especially since it would cost a fraction of the subsidies sunk each year in renewable energy.
As you say, everything is high stakes gambling when you get down to it. Life is. I threw up a well paid job to be with a girl and a few years later was in a much better career, but I hardly knew that would be the outcome.
however, I disagree on one point: because greed and the propensity to violence exist, governments must be dirigiste to a degree if there is to be a stable society. Since economics is not much use for forecasting the effects of policy, they should forget economics and concentrate on policies designed to protect assets and encourage social cohesion, relying on human self-interest to mitigate any economic effects.
The word you are looking for is "Rule of Law", as applied also to government entities ( it was one of the first discovery in Civilization). It has nothing to do with predicting the future, or tweaking the economy in a manipulative way.
I have an anecdote for you all: in Italy, we've had an emergency government, primly named "governo dei tecnici" (mistranslated as technician's government, or experts' government). The Economic minister, in a press conference, was illustrating a tax law change. With great panache, he stated that the government was enacting the law from fiscal year 2009, in an "exception" to a law stating that fiscal law should be effective only on future fiscal years.
Now, why an estimable public servant should debase the rule of law in this manner defies my mind.
I've been married 21 years, all because I kissed a girl in front of her house.
Wow, I've heard of common-law wives, but this is ridiculous.
I timeshare. :D
[...]They're trying to predict weather. Climate in economics is much more predictable -- there is a strong correlation between economic freedom and wellbeing of the average citizen.[...]
Funny you should cite climate research. I remember a study that that ascertained, by profession, how much people believed in global warming. The first professional group that didn't think it was good science was oilmen. The second..... weather forecasters!!!!
investing in the stock market has become more like high stakes gambling.
everything is high stakes gambling. I've been married 21 years, all because I kissed a girl in front of her house. I finished my university the year the Italian government liberalized, after fifteen years, investing abroad, and I knew English, So I was hired as a fund manager. Economy is no different, except the collective feels a need to substitute something for "insufficient data", a noble tradition that continues on olden day shamanism. The big difference is that economist do not pierce their noses with animal bones, no matter how we'd like to perform that operation for them.
That's not to say that all of the establishment is unaware of the pitfalls: many distingushed scholars, like Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Taleb and others, preach the right gospel about our inability to evaluate economic forecasts correctly. Karl Otto Pöhl, the ex president of the German Bundesbank, was once quoted as saying, in response on a question on the future movement of the Dollar-Dmark exchange rate: " the central bank does not make forecasts, and above all not on the future." This is obviously a witticism, but it betrays a keen awareness of the pitfalls of economics as a forecasting tool. The variables are too many, non linearity is the norm, and if you have to utter the phrase "all else being equal", you can throw all the other words to the dogs.
The push to try to forecast the economy, tough, does not come in reality from the instinctive need of humanity to dispel uncertainty: it comes from governments who have to justify dirigistic policies, Tax incentives etc. It's quite hard to impose for example a carbon tax, if the honest answer to the (legitimate) question if it will be a drag or a push on the economy is: "How in hell would I know?"
The mice are quite puzzled, why build a computer to simulate another one?
Perhaps if they stopped submitting nonsense responses there wouldn't be a need to submit nonsense petitions.
maybe it's because governments have too few employees, and sifting through people suggestion is a very time consuming activity. Tax returns, anyone?
Please, Lord, let me go through this!
I actually like the ribbon. Basically all it is, is a pictorial, long text menu. The dialog boxes it brings up are the exact same ones found from the menus. If you weren't a power user(like 95% of Office users for the first year or so of use ) you could find features faster with the ribbon.
Metro on the other hand works poorly,(try installing an old game where they put 12 shortcuts for everything in their menu). touch is an important part of all future interfaces. However Metro isn't user friendly.
There, fixed it for you.
This. Someone needs to tell this "David Pogue" about blackboards. Somehow we managed with them for centuries without this so-called "gorilla arm" mumbo jumbo ever being a factor. The real problem is that people (I'm looking at you Americans) have gotten fat and lazy
We never did depend on the blackboard as much as we do now on computers, and for most of the things we use the computers for, we used other things like the Abacus, and most if not all of them are used by placing them flat on an horizontal surface...you know, like a Surface Tablet.
Truecrypt archive, in a folder where only you have the permission. Then again, if he can enter that, grownup or not, he'll land a job at the NSA, let alone watch X rated content on the internet.