This is why not to buy Blu-Ray (yet). On Linux, or with VLC, or any number of other ways to allow you to fastforward, I don't know of a one of them that works without cracking CSS.
Speaking of which, I do agree with you about Linux, but VLC is cross-platform and does anything any other Linux player will do, even for Windows users.
If they were writing it from scratch, then sure. But good crypto techniques are fairly numerous, and they are well tested. For instance, SSH+AES+RSA authentication is about as secure as you can make a remote shell. Thus, you don't need a cryptographer to review this if you turn around and implement it in something else, like, say, PGP. All you need is someone with a basic understanding of how the original was implemented, and you need to make sure the code doesn't do anything stupid or malicious -- if it's a closed program, how do you know it's really doing AES, and not, say, a Clipper-like algorithm?
To me, being reviewed by a million non-cryptographers, and having it based on a system already reviewed by 100 cryptographers, makes it much more secure than some blackbox reviewed by 10 potentially corrupt cryptographers.
Re:WPA-supporting devices all but mandatory
on
Crypto Snake Oil
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· Score: 1
I would suggest that for a gaming device, you could provide a completely open network, but a completely facist firewall. For instance, send most HTTP traffic to "Please don't steal my bandwidth. If you really need to connect real quick just for email, come knock on my door at (your address)." Block most other connections. Set up laptops and such to go through a VPN to get around it. And allow your DS, Xbox360, and whatever else access, by Mac address, to just the ports they need.
I would also suggest that, for anyone who doesn't already have such a device... Do your research. Write Nintendo and tell them you didn't get a DS because it doesn't support WPA. Write whoever makes these games and tell them you didn't buy their game because the game doesn't support WPA. Anyone who doesn't say, write them with questions.
This is how consumers control corporations. It's time for a revolution -- replace the corporatocracy with a true republic again.
Yes, it should be offtopic. However, it's an interesting and insightful point. You make the point that religion is not always bad, and may in fact be helpful, but you have yet to actually counter the point.
Put it this way -- praying to, say, the TrueCrypt gods seems about as effective as praying to your own God.
But you and I are considerably more offtopic, anyway. If you'd like, we can take this to another forum. I am not anti-religion, but if you are offended by statements like "religion is superstition", you have a lot to learn. Oddly enough, the Unitarians seem the sanest, if the most schizophrenic.
Thanks for reminding me why I like LISCO. I'm told that individuals working there have done things like read email, snoop on customers, and so on, but they are big on net neutrality. As far as they're concerned, if you use more bandwidth, they'll charge more for your usage.
Also, their tech support, while entirely unhelpful, is at least friendly and willing to deal with people like me -- when I'm calling, I can pretty much guarantee the problem is not at this end, which makes it that much more of a pain for them, especially when I tell them.
Iowa Telecom sucks for numerous other reasons -- I've had them limit you to one Mac address per connection, you had to call tech support if you wanted to plug a different router in -- but I hadn't heard yet that they were actually anti-neutrality.
Anyone could always look through your trash and discover interesting things about you. This just makes it easier. Why is it suddenly more dangerous? What can someone do now that they couldn't do anyway?
This isn't a rhetorical question. I suspect that it is more dangerous, but I'd like to know why.
My suggestion would be to have the other job lined up first. Don't tell your current bosses, though -- some places, it's standard practice to throw you out on your ass at the first mention of quitting, to prevent you from having an opportunity to screw them over.
Unless you have stake, financial or otherwise, beyond just a paycheck, is it worth all the frustration and coming headaches? You know they will suffer a very bad event and want to blame you.
If there's enough of a paper trail, it shouldn't matter. I'd keep the paper trail ready, and try to line up another job first -- better than going without a paycheck for awhile.
My guess, Slashdot autodetects and adjusts itself for the IE6 bug suite, and that this adjustment also occurs for IE7. To make it work on IE7, we'll have to have yet another bug suite.
This is why the Acid2 test exists, folks. We are sick of having to do browser detection, especially for different versions of the same browser.
I'm not spreading misinformation and using my karma modifier to do it.
Spreading misinformation is not my intent, and I've earned my karma modifier. Here, where I'm wrong, I should be modded down, and I should lose karma, whereas if you're wrong, you just fade back into anonymity. There's a reason it's called "Anonymous Coward".
And this is my only Slashdot account.
YOU have failed miserably to convince me that it isn't. Comparing it to lifting up the play needle and moving it across the surface of the record? Are you fucking serious?
I was taking this to an extreme, but there are more recent examples. CD players have been able to do this for as long as I remember having a CD player.
In any case, back to WinAMP. Are patents at all like trademarks? That is, do you lose them if you don't protect them?
If you are, then the debate over whose retarded has just officially ended and you lost.
See, now you're just calling names, which is why I shouldn't be responding, but I'm just that bored.
There is no clear prior art. Your record analogy is like basically saying that a car is the natural evolution of the horse and buggy, so therefore, it's not really innovative.
I would say that you should not be able to hold a patent over a car. You can patent a specific implementation all you want -- if you've patented the internal combustion engine, it shouldn't apply to an electric car. But simply adding a generic motor? I'm not sure.
At what point does it become truly new? Do we really get to patent all the same inventions over again just because "this time it's with computers"? Or with your car example, "this time it's with motors"? Let's try something else -- can I walk all over anyone's software patents by doing it this time in AJAX?
He had and more importantly demoed, a working prototype of his idea. This means that he wasn't just an idea factory, he actually believed enough in his idea to implement and demo it.
That would tend to lend more credibility to this. But then, depends what a "demo" ends up being. I can demo quite a lot of things that don't actually work yet. And there are plenty of patent trolls which have working implementations that are entirely obvious and took ten seconds to implement.
Despite this, I also believe that if people are going to talk about a subject, they should make very basic efforts to make sure they are not taking part in the repetition of misinformation, and actually make an honest attempt to engage in objective thought.
True, my mistake. But if people are going to talk seriously about anything, I think we should avoid name-calling without cause. You still haven't clearly given a reason why I'm retarded for bringing up the idea of LPs.
It will not make a bad movie (on dvd) to be good (on hd), nor a good movie (hd) bad (dvd).
That's true. But that doesn't happen anyway -- Star Wars Kid would not be any better in HD than it is in horribly compressed mpeg. The actual Star Wars movies (if you like them), while they are significantly worse at very low bitrate/resolution, they are still good.
But, all else considered, I much prefer a DVD to a 700 meg mpeg. And, all things considered, without DVD Jon, it would be either the 700 meg mpeg or nothing. And that's not about piracy, that's about control -- I'd really rather not be forced to sit through unskippable previews, logos, menu animations, and so on.
Besides, superbit(tm) would improve the DVD too. Hopefully this will become standard.
I would hope superbit becomes standard for existing DVDs. After all, I only ever watch maybe 10-20% of the special features, and most of it just isn't that interesting. Since many DVDs use a separate disc for that anyway, superbit makes sense, if it is what I think it is.
However, even h.264 at the same resolution and bitrate is noticeably better. If it weren't for the DRM, I'd probably be buying a blu-ray drive right now.
Their patent isn't any more retarded than people who don't know how to use basic math to determine which came first. Since you obviously don't know, go RESEARCH WTF you are talking about, starting with when WinAMP and XMMS even came into existence,
Ok, let's talk about selecting an item from a playlist. This particular feature has been around for much longer than CDs, even. This page mentions vinyl LPs in the 1930's, and LPs do come with a track listing and the ability to skip to a chosen song by picking up and moving the needle -- kind of like how we do it today by moving a mouse.
NOTE - I'm not defending patents like this, I personally think they're ridiculous, but if you're talk about a subject like a bigshot expert throwing around words like "retarded", don't be a retard yourself. Make sure you know WTF you are talking about. Too many slashtards are pulling this shit. This site has gone way the f*** down hill.
What a lovely rant, from someone claiming everyone else is going downhill. But this particular debate about who's retarded and who's a "slashtard" should end now, it's making us both look bad.
Tell me one thing, though: Am I wrong? Is this particular patent at all valid? Would it be reasonable to entertain the idea that it might be valid for long enough to actually do the research?
It's one thing to tell me you disagree with my (admittedly lazy) research techniques, but it's quite another to actually say you disagree with me, and you haven't said that yet. It looks like you actually agree with me, but you're just that desperate to find something to hate about Slashdot.
Is it more evil than suing someone for copying "look and feel"?
I'll change my language, if that makes you feel better: Apple even bothering to acklowledge these guys is somewhat evil, but the act of patent-trolling is even more evil. Other evil things that Apple or others have done is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Of the visible comments at my thresholds, I see absolutely no one defending Apple. The closest I see are people explaining why this might have been a smart move for Apple.
Or do you mean this small company is showing prior art for these retarded patents? Problem there is, it was in common use in WinAMP and XMMS before then -- but no one was evil enough to patent the idea. Thus, Apple even bothering to acknowledge these guys is somewhat evil -- but the guys who have these "patents" are even more evil.
Something like Squid or Polipo. It's no solution, but it can often take less time for you to implement a worplace-wide caching proxy to squeeze just a bit more speed out of it than to wait for the ISP to actually fix the problem.
According to Wikipedia, Marathon invented this. It's taken as a given now, and I can understand people forgetting, but... Doom didn't have this. In Doom, you had to have keys set to look up, look down, and center your view.
Yet, even Marathon didn't quite do it.
I can understand that, say, a flight sim kind of game (Descent?) might be more fully 3D, but I don't really start feeling cramped playing an FPS until it becomes 2.5D, either with the control scheme or the mapping. That would make Quake a big one for me, and not just because it was popular. (Also, I don't like flight sims.)
In all fairness, I believe you can, in fact, download and run the HURD, and have been able to do so for years. It just sucks royally when compared to any useful OS.
I am sick of hearing people talk about how underwhelming the difference is. Double the framerate, quadruple the resolution. If you've got a good video, it shows.
I do agree with you on one point, though: It is not worth the headache of the DRM.
Tossing out current DVD player and TV: Not a problem, my computer monitor is my TV, and it already makes high def look damn good. Format rivalry: Not a problem in the long run. This will eventually become irrelevant, either in the VHS/Betamax sense (one dies), or in the DVD-R/DVD+R sense (both are well supported by everything, so no one knows the difference or cares). So, they would seem to be on the right track here.
But the DRM is the real problem. They have set this up so that they have an insane amount of power and control over any high def living room. There are entirely too many things that they could do, which they should not be able to do -- blacklisting comes to mind.
And for the record, I would not have been an early adopter for DVD, either -- unskippable ads are a deal-breaker for me. I would still not be buying or renting DVDs if it wasn't for DVD Jon.
Both sides make me say that. Wasting too much time on IM and MySpace? Cell phones can do that, and so can passing notes. A halfway decent network admin could, with a couple of simple firewall rules, at least force them to learn a bit about networking (proxies) in order to IM and MySpace.
having a laptop has encouraged her thirteen-year-old son to spend more time dazzling up presentations with fancy fonts instead of digging through library books. "They need to be able to learn to research beyond what is accomplished by Googling a word or phrase," she says.
This is not the laptop causing the problem, it's really two things. The curriculum sucks if you get points for dazzling fonts. But that last sentence suggests that the parent has an obsolete view of research. Web searches are a major part of research these days.
And in the other corner:
Anne Carson, a 49-year-old parent in Glen Allen, Va., says the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation. "He's really picking up on a lot of opportunities I don't think he would have gotten without the laptop," she says.
Compiling a PowerPoint presentation is not a critical professional skill, and it's laughable to think that it creates opportunities.
But hey, I'd rather have a clueless but supportive parent than a nazi:
"What she learned was how to play games and email her friends," says Ms. Adam. "School was one big happy gabfest."
Welcome back to high school. You may not have noticed last time around, but that's what school is, especially at that age. The only reason I can imagine anyone spending a significant amount of time trying for grades is because expectations are so insanely low at that level -- which is why college is such a shock for a lot of people, by the way.
So give up the idea that they're really learning anything doing classwork -- school is all about building social skills. This is a primary reason I'm a geek, by the way -- one year of homeschool, the other 11 years were at a segregated private school. I learned more academic stuff (higher expectations), but I have no social skills.
A spokesman for the Henrico School district says middle-school laptops will be outfitted with more robust filters in a month or so and encourages parents to keep their children in line by checking their computers' logs of sites visited.
Nazi parents again. Shame.
I understand that they are not full citizens in any sense, but this is a severe invasion of privacy. Worse, it will have the opposite effect as intended, which means it's a huge pain for students, but still doesn't do what parents wanted. Kind of like prohibition.
Basically, someone like me would customize logs in return for a little popularity.
Oh, and this just gets better and better -- look at the image caption:
Some parents are concerned that school laptops could be used inappropriately by kids.
Anything can be used inappropriately, especially by kids. We're back to that old argument about Son of Sam and the dog. Look, as a parent, it's your right to ban computers from your house, but this is taking it too far:
An effort to give 63,000 computers to students in Cobb County, Ga., was recently scrapped in response to a lawsuit over a proposal to divert special sales-tax funds to the program.
Still, the other side is sounding just as retarded:
The companies supply and configure the laptops, often loading them with expensive software like Microsoft Office or Adobe PhotoShop.
Not to mention the OS. If you're that concerned with cutting costs, try Linux, OpenOffice.org, and the Gimp.
Oh wait, they're laptops, nevermind. In that case, you're most likely stuck with getting an OS anyway, so Li
Frankly, that's BS, and only because it relies on IE. It's entirely possible to "store" cookies purely in RAM, and to prevent them from ever hitting swap. That's what Knoppix does.
If you aren't going to use gender against them -- say, by flirting -- just treat it like any other clique. To a certain extent, by approaching it with "They're leaving me out because I'm a girl", you're creating that reality. Don't be shy, they won't bite, and you always have that mace and that HR department to slap them with sexual harassment if they try anything. I'm not encouraging you to use that, just remember that you can.
Don't be afraid to tell off-color jokes, and don't take any such jokes personally.
Remember, you asked a question about "how can boys be more welcoming"... Well, I'm sure there are plenty of ways, and you probably know them better than we do, but that's not going to help you. You cannot change the guys, you can only change yourself and the way you act towards them. That's not to say that you're in the wrong, just the practical reality of how to change any kind of relationship.
Maybe try walking up to one and asking the same questions. You may be surprised.
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What if your free beer comes with an RFID tag and a GPS link?
This is why not to buy Blu-Ray (yet). On Linux, or with VLC, or any number of other ways to allow you to fastforward, I don't know of a one of them that works without cracking CSS.
Speaking of which, I do agree with you about Linux, but VLC is cross-platform and does anything any other Linux player will do, even for Windows users.
Until when, exactly?
And is the MythTV interface that bad? I thought it had won all sorts of awards...
If they were writing it from scratch, then sure. But good crypto techniques are fairly numerous, and they are well tested. For instance, SSH+AES+RSA authentication is about as secure as you can make a remote shell. Thus, you don't need a cryptographer to review this if you turn around and implement it in something else, like, say, PGP. All you need is someone with a basic understanding of how the original was implemented, and you need to make sure the code doesn't do anything stupid or malicious -- if it's a closed program, how do you know it's really doing AES, and not, say, a Clipper-like algorithm?
To me, being reviewed by a million non-cryptographers, and having it based on a system already reviewed by 100 cryptographers, makes it much more secure than some blackbox reviewed by 10 potentially corrupt cryptographers.
I would suggest that for a gaming device, you could provide a completely open network, but a completely facist firewall. For instance, send most HTTP traffic to "Please don't steal my bandwidth. If you really need to connect real quick just for email, come knock on my door at (your address)." Block most other connections. Set up laptops and such to go through a VPN to get around it. And allow your DS, Xbox360, and whatever else access, by Mac address, to just the ports they need.
I would also suggest that, for anyone who doesn't already have such a device... Do your research. Write Nintendo and tell them you didn't get a DS because it doesn't support WPA. Write whoever makes these games and tell them you didn't buy their game because the game doesn't support WPA. Anyone who doesn't say, write them with questions.
This is how consumers control corporations. It's time for a revolution -- replace the corporatocracy with a true republic again.
Yes, it should be offtopic. However, it's an interesting and insightful point. You make the point that religion is not always bad, and may in fact be helpful, but you have yet to actually counter the point.
Put it this way -- praying to, say, the TrueCrypt gods seems about as effective as praying to your own God.
But you and I are considerably more offtopic, anyway. If you'd like, we can take this to another forum. I am not anti-religion, but if you are offended by statements like "religion is superstition", you have a lot to learn. Oddly enough, the Unitarians seem the sanest, if the most schizophrenic.
Thanks for reminding me why I like LISCO. I'm told that individuals working there have done things like read email, snoop on customers, and so on, but they are big on net neutrality. As far as they're concerned, if you use more bandwidth, they'll charge more for your usage.
Also, their tech support, while entirely unhelpful, is at least friendly and willing to deal with people like me -- when I'm calling, I can pretty much guarantee the problem is not at this end, which makes it that much more of a pain for them, especially when I tell them.
Iowa Telecom sucks for numerous other reasons -- I've had them limit you to one Mac address per connection, you had to call tech support if you wanted to plug a different router in -- but I hadn't heard yet that they were actually anti-neutrality.
Anyone could always look through your trash and discover interesting things about you. This just makes it easier. Why is it suddenly more dangerous? What can someone do now that they couldn't do anyway?
This isn't a rhetorical question. I suspect that it is more dangerous, but I'd like to know why.
My suggestion would be to have the other job lined up first. Don't tell your current bosses, though -- some places, it's standard practice to throw you out on your ass at the first mention of quitting, to prevent you from having an opportunity to screw them over.
If there's enough of a paper trail, it shouldn't matter. I'd keep the paper trail ready, and try to line up another job first -- better than going without a paycheck for awhile.
My guess, Slashdot autodetects and adjusts itself for the IE6 bug suite, and that this adjustment also occurs for IE7. To make it work on IE7, we'll have to have yet another bug suite.
This is why the Acid2 test exists, folks. We are sick of having to do browser detection, especially for different versions of the same browser.
Spreading misinformation is not my intent, and I've earned my karma modifier. Here, where I'm wrong, I should be modded down, and I should lose karma, whereas if you're wrong, you just fade back into anonymity. There's a reason it's called "Anonymous Coward".
And this is my only Slashdot account.
I was taking this to an extreme, but there are more recent examples. CD players have been able to do this for as long as I remember having a CD player.
In any case, back to WinAMP. Are patents at all like trademarks? That is, do you lose them if you don't protect them?
See, now you're just calling names, which is why I shouldn't be responding, but I'm just that bored.
I would say that you should not be able to hold a patent over a car. You can patent a specific implementation all you want -- if you've patented the internal combustion engine, it shouldn't apply to an electric car. But simply adding a generic motor? I'm not sure.
At what point does it become truly new? Do we really get to patent all the same inventions over again just because "this time it's with computers"? Or with your car example, "this time it's with motors"? Let's try something else -- can I walk all over anyone's software patents by doing it this time in AJAX?
That would tend to lend more credibility to this. But then, depends what a "demo" ends up being. I can demo quite a lot of things that don't actually work yet. And there are plenty of patent trolls which have working implementations that are entirely obvious and took ten seconds to implement.
True, my mistake. But if people are going to talk seriously about anything, I think we should avoid name-calling without cause. You still haven't clearly given a reason why I'm retarded for bringing up the idea of LPs.
That's true. But that doesn't happen anyway -- Star Wars Kid would not be any better in HD than it is in horribly compressed mpeg. The actual Star Wars movies (if you like them), while they are significantly worse at very low bitrate/resolution, they are still good.
But, all else considered, I much prefer a DVD to a 700 meg mpeg. And, all things considered, without DVD Jon, it would be either the 700 meg mpeg or nothing. And that's not about piracy, that's about control -- I'd really rather not be forced to sit through unskippable previews, logos, menu animations, and so on.
I would hope superbit becomes standard for existing DVDs. After all, I only ever watch maybe 10-20% of the special features, and most of it just isn't that interesting. Since many DVDs use a separate disc for that anyway, superbit makes sense, if it is what I think it is.
However, even h.264 at the same resolution and bitrate is noticeably better. If it weren't for the DRM, I'd probably be buying a blu-ray drive right now.
Ok, let's talk about selecting an item from a playlist. This particular feature has been around for much longer than CDs, even. This page mentions vinyl LPs in the 1930's, and LPs do come with a track listing and the ability to skip to a chosen song by picking up and moving the needle -- kind of like how we do it today by moving a mouse.
What a lovely rant, from someone claiming everyone else is going downhill. But this particular debate about who's retarded and who's a "slashtard" should end now, it's making us both look bad.
Tell me one thing, though: Am I wrong? Is this particular patent at all valid? Would it be reasonable to entertain the idea that it might be valid for long enough to actually do the research?
It's one thing to tell me you disagree with my (admittedly lazy) research techniques, but it's quite another to actually say you disagree with me, and you haven't said that yet. It looks like you actually agree with me, but you're just that desperate to find something to hate about Slashdot.
I'll change my language, if that makes you feel better: Apple even bothering to acklowledge these guys is somewhat evil, but the act of patent-trolling is even more evil. Other evil things that Apple or others have done is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
You know very well what I meant.
Of the visible comments at my thresholds, I see absolutely no one defending Apple. The closest I see are people explaining why this might have been a smart move for Apple.
Or do you mean this small company is showing prior art for these retarded patents? Problem there is, it was in common use in WinAMP and XMMS before then -- but no one was evil enough to patent the idea. Thus, Apple even bothering to acknowledge these guys is somewhat evil -- but the guys who have these "patents" are even more evil.
Something like Squid or Polipo. It's no solution, but it can often take less time for you to implement a worplace-wide caching proxy to squeeze just a bit more speed out of it than to wait for the ISP to actually fix the problem.
I am saying that just like any other job, you have to do good work or you don't get paid.
According to Wikipedia, Marathon invented this. It's taken as a given now, and I can understand people forgetting, but... Doom didn't have this. In Doom, you had to have keys set to look up, look down, and center your view.
Yet, even Marathon didn't quite do it.
I can understand that, say, a flight sim kind of game (Descent?) might be more fully 3D, but I don't really start feeling cramped playing an FPS until it becomes 2.5D, either with the control scheme or the mapping. That would make Quake a big one for me, and not just because it was popular. (Also, I don't like flight sims.)
In all fairness, I believe you can, in fact, download and run the HURD, and have been able to do so for years. It just sucks royally when compared to any useful OS.
I am sick of hearing people talk about how underwhelming the difference is. Double the framerate, quadruple the resolution. If you've got a good video, it shows.
I do agree with you on one point, though: It is not worth the headache of the DRM.
Tossing out current DVD player and TV: Not a problem, my computer monitor is my TV, and it already makes high def look damn good. Format rivalry: Not a problem in the long run. This will eventually become irrelevant, either in the VHS/Betamax sense (one dies), or in the DVD-R/DVD+R sense (both are well supported by everything, so no one knows the difference or cares). So, they would seem to be on the right track here.
But the DRM is the real problem. They have set this up so that they have an insane amount of power and control over any high def living room. There are entirely too many things that they could do, which they should not be able to do -- blacklisting comes to mind.
And for the record, I would not have been an early adopter for DVD, either -- unskippable ads are a deal-breaker for me. I would still not be buying or renting DVDs if it wasn't for DVD Jon.
Both sides make me say that. Wasting too much time on IM and MySpace? Cell phones can do that, and so can passing notes. A halfway decent network admin could, with a couple of simple firewall rules, at least force them to learn a bit about networking (proxies) in order to IM and MySpace.
This is not the laptop causing the problem, it's really two things. The curriculum sucks if you get points for dazzling fonts. But that last sentence suggests that the parent has an obsolete view of research. Web searches are a major part of research these days.
And in the other corner:
Compiling a PowerPoint presentation is not a critical professional skill, and it's laughable to think that it creates opportunities.
But hey, I'd rather have a clueless but supportive parent than a nazi:
Welcome back to high school. You may not have noticed last time around, but that's what school is, especially at that age. The only reason I can imagine anyone spending a significant amount of time trying for grades is because expectations are so insanely low at that level -- which is why college is such a shock for a lot of people, by the way.
So give up the idea that they're really learning anything doing classwork -- school is all about building social skills. This is a primary reason I'm a geek, by the way -- one year of homeschool, the other 11 years were at a segregated private school. I learned more academic stuff (higher expectations), but I have no social skills.
Nazi parents again. Shame.
I understand that they are not full citizens in any sense, but this is a severe invasion of privacy. Worse, it will have the opposite effect as intended, which means it's a huge pain for students, but still doesn't do what parents wanted. Kind of like prohibition.
Basically, someone like me would customize logs in return for a little popularity.
Oh, and this just gets better and better -- look at the image caption:
Anything can be used inappropriately, especially by kids. We're back to that old argument about Son of Sam and the dog. Look, as a parent, it's your right to ban computers from your house, but this is taking it too far:
Still, the other side is sounding just as retarded:
Not to mention the OS. If you're that concerned with cutting costs, try Linux, OpenOffice.org, and the Gimp.
Oh wait, they're laptops, nevermind. In that case, you're most likely stuck with getting an OS anyway, so Li
Fear another thing:
Arbitrary line
breaks or lack thereof confuse
Frankly, that's BS, and only because it relies on IE. It's entirely possible to "store" cookies purely in RAM, and to prevent them from ever hitting swap. That's what Knoppix does.
Why are you hiding it from a girlfriend? Wife, parents, children, house guests, these I can understand. But girlfriend?
If you aren't going to use gender against them -- say, by flirting -- just treat it like any other clique. To a certain extent, by approaching it with "They're leaving me out because I'm a girl", you're creating that reality. Don't be shy, they won't bite, and you always have that mace and that HR department to slap them with sexual harassment if they try anything. I'm not encouraging you to use that, just remember that you can.
Don't be afraid to tell off-color jokes, and don't take any such jokes personally.
Remember, you asked a question about "how can boys be more welcoming"... Well, I'm sure there are plenty of ways, and you probably know them better than we do, but that's not going to help you. You cannot change the guys, you can only change yourself and the way you act towards them. That's not to say that you're in the wrong, just the practical reality of how to change any kind of relationship.
Maybe try walking up to one and asking the same questions. You may be surprised.