Come on I've played monopoly games that lasted for many LONG hours. If someone steals a few thousand dollars from my pile while I'm taking a leak then they are cheaters not criminals. What they took involved hours of investment. The only difference is a matter of degrees. In one case someone wasted 4 hours playing monopoly with a cheater and in the other someone wasted hundreds of hours geeking out online and got pwnd! Maybe he should waste hundreds more hours crusading for reform and a working justice system in his mmorpg... OR maybe he should get out into the real world and get laid.
Can't your character be killed in these games? Would the killer be a murderer?
Fell for a ponzi scheme!! HA! Well maybe the poor sucker learned his lesson and won't fall for one in the real world! HAHAHAHHAHHhahhahahahAHAHAHAH!!!!
If you do things right, and hear out the users, eventually you will have a much more solid product.
AND HEAR OUT THE USERS. Any time linux and useability comes up as a topic here or in the ubuntu forums or anywhere else I read the same issues come up EVERY time DVDs and MP3s. I just keep waiting for someone to offer the real and legal solution. If someone out there wants to license the codecs sell a package which runs seamlessly I'll pay $$ to get them (I'll be able to afford to since I won't be buying an OS or an office suite or any other software)
I have decided that I will NOT get MSVista. That leaves me with two choices for my next pc. Since I like to build my own PCs I'd prefer linux, but linux is worst at the things I use most on a computer: dvds, mp3s, digital camera, editing my digital camera home movies with quicktime... It would suck to have to pay the premium for apple hardware that I don't get to build myself, but hey that OS is pretty swwet. It just works.
It's not enough that they be non-profit. They could simply pay employees much more and not make a profit, or buy realestate etc. This is a public utility and should be regulated as such. If the electric company wants to charge more they have to apply to the a regulatory agency. They are allowed a certain fixed profit and are tightly controlled. This works and in fact during the period of regulation of utilities they were very safe growth investments.
------------
Why? Becauase ICANN!
Recently the Supreme Court has made several rulings about prisoner detention in guantanamo and torture that firmly establish that the administration violated the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions. These offences would easily rise to the level of a "high crime" and are impeachable.
The congress unfortunately is utterly corrupt and has failed for 6 years to meet it's oversight responsibilities. There is zero chance that the current congress will impeach. Vote and pray for the Democrats in 2006. Then there will be a small but real chance that the Criminal in Chief will be held accountable for his may crimes.
Perhaps you would like some cheap Walmart cheese to go with your cheap Walmart whine?
If your 5 mintues of time is soooo valuable that you feel you shouldn't have to wait in line like everyone else then perhaps you should try this time saving measure... Go to the grocery store 1 time a week for 45 min instead of 7 times a week for 15 min each.
The ACLU has taken the Specter bill and has modified the FISA act (using "track changes") to show how the law would be changed by this bill. It is available here:
This is not a compromise and it has no additional restriction on the power of the executive. Every change this bill would make gives more power to the executive. This is potentially more far reaching the PATRIOT act.
It redefines electronic surveillance to exclude routing, addressing, dialing, or signaling which would take the kind of eavesdropping they've admitted to with the phone companies out of the jurisdiction of FISA or any other law. So the gov't would legally and without a warrant be able to constantly track who is talking to whom.
It redefines "Attorney General" to include anyone authorized by the A.G. This is important because it also allows the A.G. to authorized a wide variety of surveillance and allows the A.G. to order electronic communications companies, landlords, and other private parties to aid in the gathering of intel and that private party will have no recourse or right to disclose that the surveillance is taking place. In other words this takes the controversial power that the PATRIOT act authorized to get library records and then gag order the librarians and extends it to your ISP, phone company, and landlord! This power would be held by anyone that the A.G. designates!
So it would allow the A.G. to designate Special-Agents-In-Charge in each FBI office to issue their own warrants for domestic surveillance without ever even mentioning it to the FISA court.
It would allow the A.G. to move all lawsuits challenging the legality of surveillance to the FISA court and would allow the feds to introduce secret evidence to prove that the cases should be dropped. The FISA court would be allowed to dismiss such cases "for any reason."
It would give the administration the OPTION (not requirement) to submit entire programs past and present to the FISA court for approval. Note that since it is optional it could potentially give the administration an out for creating domestic spying programs and submit them to no court for approval.
It removes the prohibition against surveilling communications that might include US citizens.
It removes the 15 day limit for unlimited domestic surveillance and physical searches during time of war.
It removes the requirement that the administration tell the FISA court what they are looking for when requesting a warrant, so now they just have to say who, when, and where. Not why or what. How could a judge make a competent decision in a case like this?
It changes the 72 hour emergency grace period to 7 days.
I discovered the usenet in 1988. There was a time when googling my name turned up several pages of old usenet postings I had made. Luckily there a lots more people with my last name online these days and some of them are prominent for one reason or another. It takes a pretty well informed person do dig up much of my old dirt but it is there. I kept a journal when I was about 12 to about 16 years old. I cannot express how mortifying it would be to have what I wrote then, be available to all at any time.
Until very recently I knew a grand total of three people who had used linux on their own PCs. Two were programmers and the third was talked into redhat by one of the programmers (he didn't stick with it for long). In the last 6 months, I know 3 additional people (and myself) that have started using linux. 2 are using it on rescued ex-win98 machines (like me) and one on an older winXP machine. Of course MS not supporting win98 had nothing to do with it in any of these cases. In my case the PC was simply unusable. After a few hours fiddling around with it I remembered how much I hate the whole win9x family and I said "@%^#$!$#^$ it's $&*!*&%!*# time #@$^@^$ to try @#$^@# linux!" I have observed that since exorcising win98 from my home and bringing in the benevolent spirit of unbuntu, my cursing has been much reduced.
Of course this isn't necessarily good news for linux. One way to look at it is that linux is finally good enough that it is better than a broken down, dog slow, crashy install of win98. And I have had nothing but trouble with the "new" linux box but I'll save all that for the next "is linux finally ready?" type thread.
AOL Customer Service: AOL how can I help you? AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please. AOLCS: I'm sorry what part of our service were you unhappy with? AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please. AOLCS: But you logged Umpteenzillion hours on your accounts last month... AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please. AOLCS: Do you know we'll be hosting a live chat with Lionel Ritchie for paying users only next month? AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please. AOLCS: Why won't you tell us why you are unhappy? AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please. [three weeks later] AOLCS: Please pretty please with sugar on top don't go! AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please. AOLCS: Fine!! you can just have the whole d@mn thing for free!! We'll figure out some other way to fleece you! AOL users: We'd STILL like to cancel our accounts please.
my website is benefield dot net. when I do a search on "benefield" my site is the third in the list. benefield dot org which is an elementary school website is first and debbiebenefield dot org is second. She is a US congresswoman. Granted my last name is uncommon but I also know that there are precious few links to my website. Regardless I expect a search on the string of letters "benefield" will turn up a high ranked listing of my site just because it makes sense.
If you do a search on "phouebarre" and there were a site called phoubarre.com it had better appear on the first page of any half competent search engine, period. kinderstart.com appears on the fourth page of a search of the work "kinderstart" after a few dozen sites with stories about the lawsuit.
It seems suspicious, but maybe it is innocent. It is a bit bothersome that searching on such a specific string of letters like "kinderstart" would not turn up a website named exactly that on the first page. Either google's usefulness is heading downhill or they really are picking on the little guy.
BTW in the initial press release they say they were seeking to be recognized as a class (as in class action suit) so there are others with similar complaints.
They say you should open the original document in Word and EDIT the document by replacing the redacted text with a bunch of X's then print it to a PDF. That's a fundamentally different process than redacting. It's editing, and the temptation to ALTER the document would be huge. Also what would you do if you don't have the original Word document?
Doing it right isn't so hard. You want to end up with a graphical only PDF of the document that has been redacted. (I can't believe I'm about to give the NSA good advise on how to keep secrets!)
Use acrobat to mark out all of the evidence of your wrongdoing (oops I meant mark out anything classified...) Save it. Open it in a third party pdf program like FoxitPDF reader. Print it to a new pdf file using you PDFwriter of PDFdistiller print driver. You should now have a completely graphical pdf with no embedded text in the file. This is just as good as printing it, redacting it, then scanning it (which would be another good procedure.)
It may look all blocky and pixelated but redacted documents from the government always look like crap.
Work with the Russians to contiune support of the ISS.
Pour all new research money into developing the technologies to build the space elevator. This is the only way in our reach that can make space cost effective. We'll need much longer carbon nanotubes, a good solution for climbing the cable, and a way to bring an appropriate anchor into orbit. Get to it guys I'm getting old fast and I want a ride once you've finnished.
I agree that you cannot support old hardware indefinately. At some point you've got to say that this new version of the kernal just isn't going to run on a 486 or a pentium 1 computer.
BUT
That should be a decision that is made not just the result of accumulated bugs. That way when the decision is made code specific to the old hardware can be scrapped. Also people will know that kernal fu.bar.fu must have this minimum hardware to run, instead of learning by installing it and running into endless instabilities.
Dark Passage (1947) with Humphrey Bogart voicing the unseen character until about an hour into the film. It's about a man who escapes from San Quinten into 1940's San Francisco in an attempt to prove his innocense.
Being a noob to linux I read this part of the thread with interest. I'd love to see that list of e-books and resources. I love learning. So I followed the above link to:
That's pretty funny. Not the best place for a newbie. I want to make a sandwich and you send me to a lab to genetically engineer my own special franken-wheat with which to make bread!
On the other hand I posted a similar comment here recently and got two helpful tips. One explained in very fine and incomprehensible detail what I should do and the other gave me a link to something that would do it for me.
The REAL barrier to widespread adoption of linux is that the divide between the geeks and the rest of the world is far deeper than anyone cares to admit. With linux I am a noob, but I've had a computer since I was 9 (1979) and I've been on the internet since 1988. Everyone I know comes to ME for tech support. I find myself saying... "right click on the... uh well there are two buttons on your mouse put the cursor... yeh the pointer on the icon... you know the picture of the folder. that's right and right click on it. see the context menu? select properties and then read it to me" Those people will never install linux on anything. "Download the iso and burn the image to a CD" might as well be in greek, and THAT's trivial compared to, "You need to install libdvdcss2 and may need to use hdparm to enable dma (hdparm -d 1/dev/dvd)."
I inherited a neat IBM PC with the CPU is in the base of the LCD screen. It had win98 was nightmarishly slow with some problem that caused it to access the HD every 10 seconds even when idling. I decided to do my first Linux install. I got Ubuntu, and wow it runs so smoothly and is nicely designed. Of course the machine's main purpose is to play DVDs for my son. Who would have thought that would be such a problem. Now I've been pouring over wikis trying to figure out what a package is, which one to download just to do something really simple. So it's a dual booter and we still use win98 because the DVD player program works.
I'm not some fuzzy brained highschool drop out. I'm an engineer, I built my last PC, and I hate paying for software. I'm the natural market for a "user linux," and I'm telling you it's getting close but it ain't there yet!
On a positive note, the IBM machine is more like a laptop, in terms of the gear inside and Ubuntu installed flawlessly and runs much better than the OS it shipped with.
>I keep waiting for a virus based on genetic algorithms. I'm certain that it's only a matter of time.
Those have been around for ages. I've got one now. Excuse me while I go blow my nose...
My boy (2.5 years) knows...
If you push the reset button Daddy gets angry. If you push the button under the slot a dvd comes out, the movie stops, and Daddy gets angry. If you poke randomly at the keyboard and mouse things happen on the screen and Daddy gets angry. If you turn nobs on the sound card interface loud popping noises happen and Daddy gets angry. Poor kid'll probably be traumatized.
Doesn't stop him from trying. He also knows that if you put Thomas Choochoo (or 'tar Wars, Potter, Nemo, Woody-Buzz) DVD in the right slot you get to watch a movie. He knows that in general turning nobs and pushing buttons make things happen and frequently Daddy says, "No that's hot." He learned lots about hot last week when he touched the waffle iron at his Mom's house. He knows that when things stop working or get really slow they need new babas (batteries.)
Over a year ago I was desperately searching for a DVD that was due back. I asked him, "Where's the DVD?" He went to the PC and pointed at the DVD drive. I pushed the button and it wasn't in there. I searched for a long time and then asked him again. Again he pointed at the computer, but his finger was pointing at the bottom edge of the DVD player. He had shoved the disk into the slight gap between the DVD and the CD Burner. I had to disassemble the PC to get it out but sure enough, there it was.
Slashdot Mirror
Are World of Warcrafters more than just nerds?
IT'S A GAME!
Come on I've played monopoly games that lasted for many LONG hours. If someone steals a few thousand dollars from my pile while I'm taking a leak then they are cheaters not criminals. What they took involved hours of investment. The only difference is a matter of degrees. In one case someone wasted 4 hours playing monopoly with a cheater and in the other someone wasted hundreds of hours geeking out online and got pwnd! Maybe he should waste hundreds more hours crusading for reform and a working justice system in his mmorpg... OR maybe he should get out into the real world and get laid.
Can't your character be killed in these games? Would the killer be a murderer?
Fell for a ponzi scheme!! HA! Well maybe the poor sucker learned his lesson and won't fall for one in the real world! HAHAHAHHAHHhahhahahahAHAHAHAH!!!!
AND HEAR OUT THE USERS. Any time linux and useability comes up as a topic here or in the ubuntu forums or anywhere else I read the same issues come up EVERY time DVDs and MP3s. I just keep waiting for someone to offer the real and legal solution. If someone out there wants to license the codecs sell a package which runs seamlessly I'll pay $$ to get them (I'll be able to afford to since I won't be buying an OS or an office suite or any other software)
I have decided that I will NOT get MSVista. That leaves me with two choices for my next pc. Since I like to build my own PCs I'd prefer linux, but linux is worst at the things I use most on a computer: dvds, mp3s, digital camera, editing my digital camera home movies with quicktime... It would suck to have to pay the premium for apple hardware that I don't get to build myself, but hey that OS is pretty swwet. It just works.
It's not enough that they be non-profit. They could simply pay employees much more and not make a profit, or buy realestate etc. This is a public utility and should be regulated as such. If the electric company wants to charge more they have to apply to the a regulatory agency. They are allowed a certain fixed profit and are tightly controlled. This works and in fact during the period of regulation of utilities they were very safe growth investments. ------------ Why? Becauase ICANN!
Recently the Supreme Court has made several rulings about prisoner detention in guantanamo and torture that firmly establish that the administration violated the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions. These offences would easily rise to the level of a "high crime" and are impeachable.
The congress unfortunately is utterly corrupt and has failed for 6 years to meet it's oversight responsibilities. There is zero chance that the current congress will impeach. Vote and pray for the Democrats in 2006. Then there will be a small but real chance that the Criminal in Chief will be held accountable for his may crimes.
and if beetles battle beetles in a puddle in a bottle and the beetle battle bottle's on a poodle eating noodles.... -Theodore Giesel
How long before he gets a cease and desist order from Lucas?
Perhaps you would like some cheap Walmart cheese to go with your cheap Walmart whine? If your 5 mintues of time is soooo valuable that you feel you shouldn't have to wait in line like everyone else then perhaps you should try this time saving measure... Go to the grocery store 1 time a week for 45 min instead of 7 times a week for 15 min each.
The ACLU has taken the Specter bill and has modified the FISA act (using "track changes") to show how the law would be changed by this bill. It is available here:
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/FISA.redline.doc
This is not a compromise and it has no additional restriction on the power of the executive. Every change this bill would make gives more power to the executive. This is potentially more far reaching the PATRIOT act.
It redefines electronic surveillance to exclude routing, addressing, dialing, or signaling which would take the kind of eavesdropping they've admitted to with the phone companies out of the jurisdiction of FISA or any other law. So the gov't would legally and without a warrant be able to constantly track who is talking to whom.
It redefines "Attorney General" to include anyone authorized by the A.G. This is important because it also allows the A.G. to authorized a wide variety of surveillance and allows the A.G. to order electronic communications companies, landlords, and other private parties to aid in the gathering of intel and that private party will have no recourse or right to disclose that the surveillance is taking place. In other words this takes the controversial power that the PATRIOT act authorized to get library records and then gag order the librarians and extends it to your ISP, phone company, and landlord! This power would be held by anyone that the A.G. designates! So it would allow the A.G. to designate Special-Agents-In-Charge in each FBI office to issue their own warrants for domestic surveillance without ever even mentioning it to the FISA court.
It would allow the A.G. to move all lawsuits challenging the legality of surveillance to the FISA court and would allow the feds to introduce secret evidence to prove that the cases should be dropped. The FISA court would be allowed to dismiss such cases "for any reason."
It would give the administration the OPTION (not requirement) to submit entire programs past and present to the FISA court for approval. Note that since it is optional it could potentially give the administration an out for creating domestic spying programs and submit them to no court for approval.
It removes the prohibition against surveilling communications that might include US citizens.
It removes the 15 day limit for unlimited domestic surveillance and physical searches during time of war.
It removes the requirement that the administration tell the FISA court what they are looking for when requesting a warrant, so now they just have to say who, when, and where. Not why or what. How could a judge make a competent decision in a case like this?
It changes the 72 hour emergency grace period to 7 days.
I discovered the usenet in 1988. There was a time when googling my name turned up several pages of old usenet postings I had made. Luckily there a lots more people with my last name online these days and some of them are prominent for one reason or another. It takes a pretty well informed person do dig up much of my old dirt but it is there. I kept a journal when I was about 12 to about 16 years old. I cannot express how mortifying it would be to have what I wrote then, be available to all at any time.
Until very recently I knew a grand total of three people who had used linux on their own PCs. Two were programmers and the third was talked into redhat by one of the programmers (he didn't stick with it for long). In the last 6 months, I know 3 additional people (and myself) that have started using linux. 2 are using it on rescued ex-win98 machines (like me) and one on an older winXP machine. Of course MS not supporting win98 had nothing to do with it in any of these cases. In my case the PC was simply unusable. After a few hours fiddling around with it I remembered how much I hate the whole win9x family and I said "@%^#$!$#^$ it's $&*!*&%!*# time #@$^@^$ to try @#$^@# linux!" I have observed that since exorcising win98 from my home and bringing in the benevolent spirit of unbuntu, my cursing has been much reduced.
Of course this isn't necessarily good news for linux. One way to look at it is that linux is finally good enough that it is better than a broken down, dog slow, crashy install of win98. And I have had nothing but trouble with the "new" linux box but I'll save all that for the next "is linux finally ready?" type thread.
AOL Customer Service: AOL how can I help you?
AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please.
AOLCS: I'm sorry what part of our service were you unhappy with?
AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please.
AOLCS: But you logged Umpteenzillion hours on your accounts last month...
AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please.
AOLCS: Do you know we'll be hosting a live chat with Lionel Ritchie for paying users only next month?
AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please.
AOLCS: Why won't you tell us why you are unhappy?
AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please.
[three weeks later]
AOLCS: Please pretty please with sugar on top don't go!
AOL users: We'd like to cancel our accounts please.
AOLCS: Fine!! you can just have the whole d@mn thing for free!! We'll figure out some other way to fleece you!
AOL users: We'd STILL like to cancel our accounts please.
my website is benefield dot net. when I do a search on "benefield" my site is the third in the list. benefield dot org which is an elementary school website is first and debbiebenefield dot org is second. She is a US congresswoman. Granted my last name is uncommon but I also know that there are precious few links to my website. Regardless I expect a search on the string of letters "benefield" will turn up a high ranked listing of my site just because it makes sense.
If you do a search on "phouebarre" and there were a site called phoubarre.com it had better appear on the first page of any half competent search engine, period. kinderstart.com appears on the fourth page of a search of the work "kinderstart" after a few dozen sites with stories about the lawsuit.
It seems suspicious, but maybe it is innocent. It is a bit bothersome that searching on such a specific string of letters like "kinderstart" would not turn up a website named exactly that on the first page. Either google's usefulness is heading downhill or they really are picking on the little guy.
BTW in the initial press release they say they were seeking to be recognized as a class (as in class action suit) so there are others with similar complaints.
There is a way you can re-experience the joys of childhood (and they are many) while maintaining the rich experience of adulthood.
Become a parent. Then spend lots of time with your children.
They say you should open the original document in Word and EDIT the document by replacing the redacted text with a bunch of X's then print it to a PDF. That's a fundamentally different process than redacting. It's editing, and the temptation to ALTER the document would be huge. Also what would you do if you don't have the original Word document?
Doing it right isn't so hard. You want to end up with a graphical only PDF of the document that has been redacted. (I can't believe I'm about to give the NSA good advise on how to keep secrets!)
Use acrobat to mark out all of the evidence of your wrongdoing (oops I meant mark out anything classified...) Save it. Open it in a third party pdf program like FoxitPDF reader. Print it to a new pdf file using you PDFwriter of PDFdistiller print driver. You should now have a completely graphical pdf with no embedded text in the file. This is just as good as printing it, redacting it, then scanning it (which would be another good procedure.)
It may look all blocky and pixelated but redacted documents from the government always look like crap.
Gives a whole new meaning to DVD BURNER!!
Put the shuttles in museums, I'd pay for a tour.
Work with the Russians to contiune support of the ISS.
Pour all new research money into developing the technologies to build the space elevator. This is the only way in our reach that can make space cost effective. We'll need much longer carbon nanotubes, a good solution for climbing the cable, and a way to bring an appropriate anchor into orbit. Get to it guys I'm getting old fast and I want a ride once you've finnished.
I agree that you cannot support old hardware indefinately. At some point you've got to say that this new version of the kernal just isn't going to run on a 486 or a pentium 1 computer.
BUT
That should be a decision that is made not just the result of accumulated bugs. That way when the decision is made code specific to the old hardware can be scrapped. Also people will know that kernal fu.bar.fu must have this minimum hardware to run, instead of learning by installing it and running into endless instabilities.
But meesa goin to the Tashi station to getsa some bombad power converters!
Dark Passage (1947) with Humphrey Bogart voicing the unseen character until about an hour into the film. It's about a man who escapes from San Quinten into 1940's San Francisco in an attempt to prove his innocense.
Being a noob to linux I read this part of the thread with interest. I'd love to see that list of e-books and resources. I love learning. So I followed the above link to:
/dev/dvd)."
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
That's pretty funny. Not the best place for a newbie. I want to make a sandwich and you send me to a lab to genetically engineer my own special franken-wheat with which to make bread!
On the other hand I posted a similar comment here recently and got two helpful tips. One explained in very fine and incomprehensible detail what I should do and the other gave me a link to something that would do it for me.
The REAL barrier to widespread adoption of linux is that the divide between the geeks and the rest of the world is far deeper than anyone cares to admit. With linux I am a noob, but I've had a computer since I was 9 (1979) and I've been on the internet since 1988. Everyone I know comes to ME for tech support. I find myself saying... "right click on the... uh well there are two buttons on your mouse put the cursor... yeh the pointer on the icon... you know the picture of the folder. that's right and right click on it. see the context menu? select properties and then read it to me" Those people will never install linux on anything. "Download the iso and burn the image to a CD" might as well be in greek, and THAT's trivial compared to, "You need to install libdvdcss2 and may need to use hdparm to enable dma (hdparm -d 1
It sounds a bit like the /. moderation system.
I inherited a neat IBM PC with the CPU is in the base of the LCD screen. It had win98 was nightmarishly slow with some problem that caused it to access the HD every 10 seconds even when idling. I decided to do my first Linux install. I got Ubuntu, and wow it runs so smoothly and is nicely designed. Of course the machine's main purpose is to play DVDs for my son. Who would have thought that would be such a problem. Now I've been pouring over wikis trying to figure out what a package is, which one to download just to do something really simple. So it's a dual booter and we still use win98 because the DVD player program works. I'm not some fuzzy brained highschool drop out. I'm an engineer, I built my last PC, and I hate paying for software. I'm the natural market for a "user linux," and I'm telling you it's getting close but it ain't there yet! On a positive note, the IBM machine is more like a laptop, in terms of the gear inside and Ubuntu installed flawlessly and runs much better than the OS it shipped with.
>I keep waiting for a virus based on genetic algorithms. I'm certain that it's only a matter of time. Those have been around for ages. I've got one now. Excuse me while I go blow my nose...
My boy (2.5 years) knows... If you push the reset button Daddy gets angry. If you push the button under the slot a dvd comes out, the movie stops, and Daddy gets angry. If you poke randomly at the keyboard and mouse things happen on the screen and Daddy gets angry. If you turn nobs on the sound card interface loud popping noises happen and Daddy gets angry. Poor kid'll probably be traumatized. Doesn't stop him from trying. He also knows that if you put Thomas Choochoo (or 'tar Wars, Potter, Nemo, Woody-Buzz) DVD in the right slot you get to watch a movie. He knows that in general turning nobs and pushing buttons make things happen and frequently Daddy says, "No that's hot." He learned lots about hot last week when he touched the waffle iron at his Mom's house. He knows that when things stop working or get really slow they need new babas (batteries.) Over a year ago I was desperately searching for a DVD that was due back. I asked him, "Where's the DVD?" He went to the PC and pointed at the DVD drive. I pushed the button and it wasn't in there. I searched for a long time and then asked him again. Again he pointed at the computer, but his finger was pointing at the bottom edge of the DVD player. He had shoved the disk into the slight gap between the DVD and the CD Burner. I had to disassemble the PC to get it out but sure enough, there it was.