No, but I just snorted tea through my nose at that, and my gf asked me what was so funny...
"Well dear, this guy mentioned 'girlfriend' like 'g-f' and this other guy said he thought it said GIF and... what? ah, GIF's an image format, so... an image format, like JPEG..."
She's now looking at me funny. Another love-life ruined by the shameless geekhood of me and/.
It's not just an MS-Office compatibility layer, it lets you run any Windows app you want (well, most, with varying degrees of success), just like regular WINE does - only it adds a nice GUI frontend so people aren't unnerved by the 'complexities' of stock WINE.
Please don't be confused by the name and think CrossOver Office is just an MS-Office thing - try some of your other Windows apps that *DONT* have an OS X equivalent and see how you get on.
Should be, isnt. That's why, in the age of IE dominance and your average webmin not giving two short sh*ts about other browsers, FF/Safari/$OWN_BROWSER compatibility is a feature.
How many huge corporate sites (banks, I'm looking at you) fail to work in those browsers? Plenty. I hate AOL as much as the next self-respecting geek, but give them kudos here.
Lycos, the popular (sort of) internet portal, once tried this, launching a screensaver that would, when activated, essentially DDoS spamming/phishing sites and other such nasties. It got pulled pretty quickly because of, amongst other things, fear that the network could get hacked (or the phishers pointing their DNS records back to Lycos, essentially reflecting the DDoS back onto them) and doubts over the legality of such an attack, especially with someone with as deep pockets as Lycos to sue if it all came out on top - it was a hacker's and a lawyer's wet dream and it was duly pulled.
Remember, a DDoS is a DDoS is a DDoS, no matter how unsavoury the target. (though if you're feeling mischevious, you could try the LadVampire site, which pretty much does the same thing, only it's on the web rather than on your computer.
It was Franklin. However, if my mod points hadn't expired, I'd have modded this up. Despite how many times that quote gets repeated here, it still applies, and it should be mentioned at least once in every thread on topics like this.
Hell, if 'In Soviet Russia' jokes still battle it out with Beowulf Cluster gags for +5 Funnies in every single topic, this deserves a +5, Insightful every few threads.
Full Disclosure: I'm writing this in Internet Explorer on a Windows XP box, but I do it under protest. My employer is clearly not in the sensible half of the Windows business userbase.
I'm a Linux user and I still give Windows 2000 props, not even grudgingly. A lot of people I recommend to just aren't willing to make the switch to Linux, and if they come to me with Windows 2000 machines asking what they should upgrade to, I tell them not to - Windows 2000 is what Windows should have been from the start. It's not worth dropping £240 on an inferior operating system (XP), and if they really want the eyecandy I ask them to consider buying a copy of WindowBlinds.
I have a Windows 2000 Server box running as (surprise!) a fileserver, I'm not planning on putting Linux on it even though I'm a huge fan of Debian and was looking forward to having a computer to put Sarge on when it was finally released, not because Windows 2000 is better or because Sarge lacks features, but simply because they are equal to each other - Windows 2000 is as good an OS to use as Linux and, coming from a Linux user who's lost a few friends through berating them for refusing to try The Penguin, that's pretty high praise.
Unless Redmond really pull their fingers out of their asses for Longhorn (and from the screenshots and numerous dropped projects for it, it doesn't look like they will) then there is, still, 6 years on, no genuine Microsoft upgrade path from Windows 2000. When Microsoft really does finally EoL it, I for one will be wearing a black armband the next day.
Windows has drivers for DVORAK keyboard layouts, add support the same way you would any other keyboard layout (been so long since I've done it I don't really remember, though) - support for DVORAK layouts are also in the 'Peripherals > Keyboard' menu of the KDE Control Center.
Using Gnome, Apple or Zeta? Sorry, can't help you,but they're bound to have support, too, just poke around in the Keyboard options.
How else would you market your OS? Unless you're bundling with hardware like Apple do (and even they've switched, as you said) you have no choice but to market yourself to the majority, that being x86 users - did you really think that with no mass-produced consumer computer being produced that's not x86 after Apple make the switch, YellowTab were really going to stick with PPC unto the death?
Of course not, they want their product to sell, and if they're going to sell, it's got to be marketed to the majority.
A very fair point, allow me to elaborate on the nature of the British political climate for all you Slashdotters across the pond on either side who maybe aren't quite up to speed;
Not that it means we shouldn't try and get Labour to see some sense, but given that they've been deeply unpopular for several years but still got voted in for another four years (on the basis that they might be bad, but the competition is even worse)
This is exactly the problem with British politics. For all the braying and neighing about US elections being a two-horse race, at least those across the pond have a large party they can vote for if the Republicans got *too* insane (yeah, yeah, they won again, but was pretty close, wasn't it? Any madder and they'd lose that 1% or 2% and the Democrats would be in in 2008)
Over here we don't have that. We have Labour, who are busy raping the country as it is now because they know they can get away with it, spending hundreds of millions assisting Bush's wars which very few people in the UK supported, agreeing to the EU constitution despite the concerns of a large majority of the British public, and everything else - one in three children leaving primary school cannot read or write properly, while Labour's idea of improving the education system is to get a 'celebrity chef' to tell school canteens to stock more vegetables. Why do they get away with it? Because here's the competition:
The Conservatives: I voted for the Conservatives in the last election, but many people are put off by the fact they were led into that election by Michael Howard, who many people remember as the man responsible for ruining the country when he was Secretary of State for Employment and, later, Home Secretary in the last Conservative government, which left many people still bitter (admittedly they were awful, but the scare-stories get a little out of hand now - and Blair telling us not to vote Conservative 'for the sake of our children' 2 days before the election was taking it too far).
The Liberal Democrats: These guys know they'll never win an election and concentrated on taking over as the '2nd place party' from the Conservatives in the last election, failing miserably. They get very little publicity except in the footnotes and in the media-obsessed British culture this equates to almost 0 votes except from the diminishing party faithful and those few making a protest vote against the two main parties. Seen by many as too far left because of their stance towards open immigration, in my entire lifetime they have never been more than also-rans.
The British National Party: Party leader Nick Griffin has been arrested for Race Hate crimes, the party has purported links to the extremist group the National Front and the party's own policies site states they want to bring back corporal punishment for petty crimes. They have gained a few votes in areas surrounding cities such as Bradford and Birmingham due to the approaching ethnic majorities in the central areas of those cities, but otherwise stay off the actual voting radar (mostly due to the damning BBC investigation that led to Griffin's arrest).
Nobody wants to vote for either of these three, so they settle for the 'better the devil you know' option (the actual phrase used by at least three people I asked why they were voting Labour) and re-elect Blair, despite the fact almost all of his policies have been misguided, America-based or complete failures to the detriment of the British people. He knows that because of the nature of British politics, he essentially has a Job for Life unless he decides to step down, and so has licence to do whatever he damn well pleases safe in the knowledge that he has no real opposition.
Spend another $26, and buy a real airconditioner for $50 at CostCo.
It's $99.99 with an instant $50 off rebate at the register.
Less work too.....
Yeah, and if Linus Torvalds had dropped some cash for UNIX, he wouldn't have had to write his own. Less work there, too.
I have to ask if you've ever built anything yourself, because there's a real pride to be enjoyed in knowing that what's working for you was built by you that seems to have passed you by - I'm writing this message on a computer I built myself on a desk I made and listening to music on media player software that I wrote - sure I could have saved time and effort buying an off-the-shelf eMachine, a desk from Office World and a copy of WinAMP5, but I didn't want to - I wanted to build it for myself because solving problems is what we geeks like to do.
In short, dude, we're geeks, we like to flex our geek thought-muscles and build things ourselves - 'less work'? the work is fun. This guy isn't stupid, if he wanted to go out and buy an air conditioner, he would have done. He just felt like, in the traditional geek spirit, building his own.
Anyone want to stop the flames now, please?
It sounds like you're not from the UK, and haven't visited in the last four or five years.
You're ignoring the 'chav' mentality amongst many British youths, where the idea of fun of a Saturday night is to go out in a pack of about 30 and find actual humans to beat and hospitalize. If you've any spent any time in any reasonably large town in Britain after about 9PM, you'll know what I mean, and know that exhibiting pain is likely to draw more vandalism than it deters.
Sad state of affairs, I know, but that's what it's like here - any other UK Slashdotters want to back me up on this?
Waay ahead of you - at my old college they had an overhead projector in my Media Studies class and my Media teacher had a love for putting everything in PowerPoint slideshows and a very weak password.
A 10x10ft Goatse on the far wall 30 seconds into the first presentation of monday morning was a sight to behold, as were the reactions of my classmates. Maybe it was my maniacal laughter while the rest of the class was trying not to vomit that gave me away and got me frogmarched down to the principal's office, I don't know...
Still, I got a week's holid... suspension out of it, so it wasn't too bad.
Well, given the infinite diversity borne of having infinite planets and infinite possibilities, somewhere there will be a race of creatures with twelve, thirteen, even fourteen fingers on each hand.
Dude, if you've got to the point of carrying around a dead guy's fingers to get your alcohol-sensitive car to start, I think you're going to have bigger legal problems than a simple case of DUI...
I'd pay the RIAA $5 a month just to piss them off. I think it's a bit of a utopian idea though.
How about, as a sort of build-up to the big one, you could start paying me $5 a month to pull angry faces at you? Anyone else want to play my new Cuban-endorsed Yahoo!/RIAA sim?
Ahh, is that what rice bubbles are supposed to be? If so, then I guess its for copyright reasons?
Rice Bubbles is also the name of a cereal in Australia, much the same as Rice Krispies. As the article is from ZDNet Australia, I'm inclined to think the article means those rather than anything else.
Also, what the hell are flake bars? Sounds like a bar where people with dandruff hang out
A Flake bar is a Cadbury's confectionary consisting of a long stick of flaky chocolate that crumbles slightly when you bite into it (Flake bar on Wikipedia).
They're very popular here in Britain, and apparently in Australia too. You probably have something similar wherever you are, but they are beasts to get out of keyboards, especially if your keys are non-detachable.
Indeed, why are you wasting your time reading this?
Lighten up, it's humour - granted,/. should probably have a Humour section (perhaps with Python-style cartoon banner instead of the usual logo) so you can disable it in your preferences, but personally, I'd much rather read this than another story about RFID, Google or Steve Jobs scratching his ass in a particular way.
Just because you don't want to read it doesn't mean others don't - some of us are slogging through the early hours of cube life and want a little comic relief about how Johnny Slashdotter once destroyed his computer with a kiwi fruit.
Shame on Slashdot for not having a humour section you can block in your Preferences, but shame on you for not only assuming that an article titled The Worst Foods to Eat Over a Keyboard was going to be an accurately-calculated technological critique, but for then wasting even more of your time by bothering to post a comment about "who cares?". I'm here, in a cube-farm, being bored to tears by the most tedious job you can possibly imagine and I'd like to thank/. for bringing a little smile to my Monday morning - trust me, some of us need the humour fix.
Of course, SPEWS are also pretty bad things to get on a keyboard too - the chunks of carrot gum the keys right up, and the acid does horrible things to the lettering.
Breasts are often the worst option to do anything with over a keyboard - the woman they're attached to tends to get pretty pissed you won't quit posting to/. long enough to play with them properly!
Right, a basic fact: The human body is biologically designed to be attracted to anyone who is past the age of puberty.
Sorry, but that's the way it is - we're designed to start breeding as soon as we hit puberty so we can further the species - this comes from the days when humans barely made it past 25 if they lived to their old age, and babies and such were likely to die before they got anywhere near double-figures, thus it was important to pump out as many kids as you possibly could in the short space of time there was availible. It was biologically neccessary and thus it occurred.
Therefore, I wouldn't call it 'sick' to be attracted to someone who was 14, 15, etc, especially if they *act* like adults - can you tell me an accurate way to differentiate between a 14-year-old who is physically mature and acts like an adult and an actual adult, short of asking their age? I'll give you a clue: there isn't one.
The real 'sickos', as you say it, are the ones that are attracted to kids *because* they're kids - 'paedophile' means 'lover of children'; they are sexually drawn to the innocence of children, the overt prepubescency - I'll cede to you, anyone who lusted after Emma Watson when she was 12 (either prepubescent or at the very early stages of it) may just fall into this category. Not so now she's 15. I had my first sexual experience when I was that age, and my girlfriend of the time was a year older - legal in Britain. Do you think she should have been arrested for child molestation? If you do, you're either against base humanity or simply incredibly naive. Just because the age of consent is 18 where you are, that doesn't mean that any girl under 18 is an innocent little girl and any man attracted to a girl under 18 is a steaming paedophile.
Law and your so-called 'morality' are simply conveniently ignoring reality, and while I agree perfectly with laws to keep middle-aged perverts apart from early-teen girls (as any decent person would), I would also argue they are too strict and fail to take nature into account - what sort of law or society would say that two 15-year-olds making love are raping each other, or that a 16-year-old lusting after a 15-year-old is a vile pervert? Sorry to jump into this interesting debate, but to my mind you're both equally wrong.
Is it really that unexpected, when you take into account the droves of people flocking away from Gnome because of the spatial browsing that so many people took a dislike to? (not knocking Gnome or the spatial browsing concept, merely putting forth a suggestion).
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else read that as GIF?
/.
No, but I just snorted tea through my nose at that, and my gf asked me what was so funny...
"Well dear, this guy mentioned 'girlfriend' like 'g-f' and this other guy said he thought it said GIF and... what? ah, GIF's an image format, so... an image format, like JPEG..."
She's now looking at me funny. Another love-life ruined by the shameless geekhood of me and
It's not just an MS-Office compatibility layer, it lets you run any Windows app you want (well, most, with varying degrees of success), just like regular WINE does - only it adds a nice GUI frontend so people aren't unnerved by the 'complexities' of stock WINE.
Please don't be confused by the name and think CrossOver Office is just an MS-Office thing - try some of your other Windows apps that *DONT* have an OS X equivalent and see how you get on.
Should be, isnt. That's why, in the age of IE dominance and your average webmin not giving two short sh*ts about other browsers, FF/Safari/$OWN_BROWSER compatibility is a feature.
How many huge corporate sites (banks, I'm looking at you) fail to work in those browsers? Plenty. I hate AOL as much as the next self-respecting geek, but give them kudos here.
Lycos, the popular (sort of) internet portal, once tried this, launching a screensaver that would, when activated, essentially DDoS spamming/phishing sites and other such nasties. It got pulled pretty quickly because of, amongst other things, fear that the network could get hacked (or the phishers pointing their DNS records back to Lycos, essentially reflecting the DDoS back onto them) and doubts over the legality of such an attack, especially with someone with as deep pockets as Lycos to sue if it all came out on top - it was a hacker's and a lawyer's wet dream and it was duly pulled.
Remember, a DDoS is a DDoS is a DDoS, no matter how unsavoury the target. (though if you're feeling mischevious, you could try the LadVampire site, which pretty much does the same thing, only it's on the web rather than on your computer.
(I think George Washington said that...)
It was Franklin. However, if my mod points hadn't expired, I'd have modded this up. Despite how many times that quote gets repeated here, it still applies, and it should be mentioned at least once in every thread on topics like this.
Hell, if 'In Soviet Russia' jokes still battle it out with Beowulf Cluster gags for +5 Funnies in every single topic, this deserves a +5, Insightful every few threads.
Full Disclosure: I'm writing this in Internet Explorer on a Windows XP box, but I do it under protest. My employer is clearly not in the sensible half of the Windows business userbase.
I'm a Linux user and I still give Windows 2000 props, not even grudgingly. A lot of people I recommend to just aren't willing to make the switch to Linux, and if they come to me with Windows 2000 machines asking what they should upgrade to, I tell them not to - Windows 2000 is what Windows should have been from the start. It's not worth dropping £240 on an inferior operating system (XP), and if they really want the eyecandy I ask them to consider buying a copy of WindowBlinds.
I have a Windows 2000 Server box running as (surprise!) a fileserver, I'm not planning on putting Linux on it even though I'm a huge fan of Debian and was looking forward to having a computer to put Sarge on when it was finally released, not because Windows 2000 is better or because Sarge lacks features, but simply because they are equal to each other - Windows 2000 is as good an OS to use as Linux and, coming from a Linux user who's lost a few friends through berating them for refusing to try The Penguin, that's pretty high praise.
Unless Redmond really pull their fingers out of their asses for Longhorn (and from the screenshots and numerous dropped projects for it, it doesn't look like they will) then there is, still, 6 years on, no genuine Microsoft upgrade path from Windows 2000. When Microsoft really does finally EoL it, I for one will be wearing a black armband the next day.
Windows has drivers for DVORAK keyboard layouts, add support the same way you would any other keyboard layout (been so long since I've done it I don't really remember, though) - support for DVORAK layouts are also in the 'Peripherals > Keyboard' menu of the KDE Control Center.
Using Gnome, Apple or Zeta? Sorry, can't help you,but they're bound to have support, too, just poke around in the Keyboard options.
How else would you market your OS? Unless you're bundling with hardware like Apple do (and even they've switched, as you said) you have no choice but to market yourself to the majority, that being x86 users - did you really think that with no mass-produced consumer computer being produced that's not x86 after Apple make the switch, YellowTab were really going to stick with PPC unto the death?
Of course not, they want their product to sell, and if they're going to sell, it's got to be marketed to the majority.
A very fair point, allow me to elaborate on the nature of the British political climate for all you Slashdotters across the pond on either side who maybe aren't quite up to speed;
Not that it means we shouldn't try and get Labour to see some sense, but given that they've been deeply unpopular for several years but still got voted in for another four years (on the basis that they might be bad, but the competition is even worse)
This is exactly the problem with British politics. For all the braying and neighing about US elections being a two-horse race, at least those across the pond have a large party they can vote for if the Republicans got *too* insane (yeah, yeah, they won again, but was pretty close, wasn't it? Any madder and they'd lose that 1% or 2% and the Democrats would be in in 2008)
Over here we don't have that. We have Labour, who are busy raping the country as it is now because they know they can get away with it, spending hundreds of millions assisting Bush's wars which very few people in the UK supported, agreeing to the EU constitution despite the concerns of a large majority of the British public, and everything else - one in three children leaving primary school cannot read or write properly, while Labour's idea of improving the education system is to get a 'celebrity chef' to tell school canteens to stock more vegetables.
Why do they get away with it? Because here's the competition:
The Conservatives: I voted for the Conservatives in the last election, but many people are put off by the fact they were led into that election by Michael Howard, who many people remember as the man responsible for ruining the country when he was Secretary of State for Employment and, later, Home Secretary in the last Conservative government, which left many people still bitter (admittedly they were awful, but the scare-stories get a little out of hand now - and Blair telling us not to vote Conservative 'for the sake of our children' 2 days before the election was taking it too far).
The Liberal Democrats: These guys know they'll never win an election and concentrated on taking over as the '2nd place party' from the Conservatives in the last election, failing miserably. They get very little publicity except in the footnotes and in the media-obsessed British culture this equates to almost 0 votes except from the diminishing party faithful and those few making a protest vote against the two main parties. Seen by many as too far left because of their stance towards open immigration, in my entire lifetime they have never been more than also-rans.
The British National Party: Party leader Nick Griffin has been arrested for Race Hate crimes, the party has purported links to the extremist group the National Front and the party's own policies site states they want to bring back corporal punishment for petty crimes. They have gained a few votes in areas surrounding cities such as Bradford and Birmingham due to the approaching ethnic majorities in the central areas of those cities, but otherwise stay off the actual voting radar (mostly due to the damning BBC investigation that led to Griffin's arrest).
Nobody wants to vote for either of these three, so they settle for the 'better the devil you know' option (the actual phrase used by at least three people I asked why they were voting Labour) and re-elect Blair, despite the fact almost all of his policies have been misguided, America-based or complete failures to the detriment of the British people. He knows that because of the nature of British politics, he essentially has a Job for Life unless he decides to step down, and so has licence to do whatever he damn well pleases safe in the knowledge that he has no real opposition.
Spend another $26, and buy a real airconditioner for $50 at CostCo. It's $99.99 with an instant $50 off rebate at the register. Less work too.....
Yeah, and if Linus Torvalds had dropped some cash for UNIX, he wouldn't have had to write his own. Less work there, too.
I have to ask if you've ever built anything yourself, because there's a real pride to be enjoyed in knowing that what's working for you was built by you that seems to have passed you by - I'm writing this message on a computer I built myself on a desk I made and listening to music on media player software that I wrote - sure I could have saved time and effort buying an off-the-shelf eMachine, a desk from Office World and a copy of WinAMP5, but I didn't want to - I wanted to build it for myself because solving problems is what we geeks like to do.
In short, dude, we're geeks, we like to flex our geek thought-muscles and build things ourselves - 'less work'? the work is fun. This guy isn't stupid, if he wanted to go out and buy an air conditioner, he would have done. He just felt like, in the traditional geek spirit, building his own.
Anyone want to stop the flames now, please?
It sounds like you're not from the UK, and haven't visited in the last four or five years.
You're ignoring the 'chav' mentality amongst many British youths, where the idea of fun of a Saturday night is to go out in a pack of about 30 and find actual humans to beat and hospitalize. If you've any spent any time in any reasonably large town in Britain after about 9PM, you'll know what I mean, and know that exhibiting pain is likely to draw more vandalism than it deters.
Sad state of affairs, I know, but that's what it's like here - any other UK Slashdotters want to back me up on this?
Waay ahead of you - at my old college they had an overhead projector in my Media Studies class and my Media teacher had a love for putting everything in PowerPoint slideshows and a very weak password.
A 10x10ft Goatse on the far wall 30 seconds into the first presentation of monday morning was a sight to behold, as were the reactions of my classmates. Maybe it was my maniacal laughter while the rest of the class was trying not to vomit that gave me away and got me frogmarched down to the principal's office, I don't know...
Still, I got a week's holid... suspension out of it, so it wasn't too bad.
This is a pretty far cry from getting something all the way through Congress.
Really? I bet you $20 it passes.
If it doesn't, I'll bet you double or nothing they tack it on the end of another 'Support the Troops' bill and force it through that way.
And I got laid! We're all fucked!
:(
You might be, but I'm still waiting... bastard
Well, given the infinite diversity borne of having infinite planets and infinite possibilities, somewhere there will be a race of creatures with twelve, thirteen, even fourteen fingers on each hand.
And these creatures will use Emacs.
Dude, if you've got to the point of carrying around a dead guy's fingers to get your alcohol-sensitive car to start, I think you're going to have bigger legal problems than a simple case of DUI...
I'd pay the RIAA $5 a month just to piss them off. I think it's a bit of a utopian idea though.
How about, as a sort of build-up to the big one, you could start paying me $5 a month to pull angry faces at you? Anyone else want to play my new Cuban-endorsed Yahoo!/RIAA sim?
Ahh, is that what rice bubbles are supposed to be? If so, then I guess its for copyright reasons?
Rice Bubbles is also the name of a cereal in Australia, much the same as Rice Krispies. As the article is from ZDNet Australia, I'm inclined to think the article means those rather than anything else. Also, what the hell are flake bars? Sounds like a bar where people with dandruff hang out
A Flake bar is a Cadbury's confectionary consisting of a long stick of flaky chocolate that crumbles slightly when you bite into it (Flake bar on Wikipedia).
They're very popular here in Britain, and apparently in Australia too. You probably have something similar wherever you are, but they are beasts to get out of keyboards, especially if your keys are non-detachable.
Indeed, why are you wasting your time reading this?
/. should probably have a Humour section (perhaps with Python-style cartoon banner instead of the usual logo) so you can disable it in your preferences, but personally, I'd much rather read this than another story about RFID, Google or Steve Jobs scratching his ass in a particular way.
/. for bringing a little smile to my Monday morning - trust me, some of us need the humour fix.
Lighten up, it's humour - granted,
You want serious 'News for Nerds'? There's plenty of other stories on the front page - you could try; - NASA's Plans for the Future,
- Open Source Java? or even
- ASIMO and Research Celebrated in Brussels -
hey, how about that?
Just because you don't want to read it doesn't mean others don't - some of us are slogging through the early hours of cube life and want a little comic relief about how Johnny Slashdotter once destroyed his computer with a kiwi fruit.
Shame on Slashdot for not having a humour section you can block in your Preferences, but shame on you for not only assuming that an article titled The Worst Foods to Eat Over a Keyboard was going to be an accurately-calculated technological critique, but for then wasting even more of your time by bothering to post a comment about "who cares?". I'm here, in a cube-farm, being bored to tears by the most tedious job you can possibly imagine and I'd like to thank
Of course, SPEWS are also pretty bad things to get on a keyboard too - the chunks of carrot gum the keys right up, and the acid does horrible things to the lettering.
Breasts are often the worst option to do anything with over a keyboard - the woman they're attached to tends to get pretty pissed you won't quit posting to /. long enough to play with them properly!
Is Slashdot down?
Uhh... anyone want to answer that?
Anyone?
Guys...
NOOO!!!
For the record, I'm no dirty old man, I'm 17.
Right, a basic fact: The human body is biologically designed to be attracted to anyone who is past the age of puberty.
Sorry, but that's the way it is - we're designed to start breeding as soon as we hit puberty so we can further the species - this comes from the days when humans barely made it past 25 if they lived to their old age, and babies and such were likely to die before they got anywhere near double-figures, thus it was important to pump out as many kids as you possibly could in the short space of time there was availible. It was biologically neccessary and thus it occurred.
Therefore, I wouldn't call it 'sick' to be attracted to someone who was 14, 15, etc, especially if they *act* like adults - can you tell me an accurate way to differentiate between a 14-year-old who is physically mature and acts like an adult and an actual adult, short of asking their age? I'll give you a clue: there isn't one.
The real 'sickos', as you say it, are the ones that are attracted to kids *because* they're kids - 'paedophile' means 'lover of children'; they are sexually drawn to the innocence of children, the overt prepubescency - I'll cede to you, anyone who lusted after Emma Watson when she was 12 (either prepubescent or at the very early stages of it) may just fall into this category. Not so now she's 15. I had my first sexual experience when I was that age, and my girlfriend of the time was a year older - legal in Britain. Do you think she should have been arrested for child molestation? If you do, you're either against base humanity or simply incredibly naive. Just because the age of consent is 18 where you are, that doesn't mean that any girl under 18 is an innocent little girl and any man attracted to a girl under 18 is a steaming paedophile.
Law and your so-called 'morality' are simply conveniently ignoring reality, and while I agree perfectly with laws to keep middle-aged perverts apart from early-teen girls (as any decent person would), I would also argue they are too strict and fail to take nature into account - what sort of law or society would say that two 15-year-olds making love are raping each other, or that a 16-year-old lusting after a 15-year-old is a vile pervert? Sorry to jump into this interesting debate, but to my mind you're both equally wrong.
No, the real question is what sort of incompetent admin is doing application screening by *filename*, for Chrissake?
Is it really that unexpected, when you take into account the droves of people flocking away from Gnome because of the spatial browsing that so many people took a dislike to? (not knocking Gnome or the spatial browsing concept, merely putting forth a suggestion).