A few years ago, at the highschool I went to, the guys who were supposed to be in charge of the computers/network for the school couldn't figure out how to block certain features and services from the computers. As a result, punishments were given out to any student who tried to use these things. Use of the Microsoft command prompt was specifically forbidden, after a student 'net send'ed a message to his friend on the computer next to him. At the same school, it is required that students take a semester of 'computer concepts,' a course that introduces students to the most rudimentary elements of Word, Excel, and (maybe) Powerpoint. Although this course might have been useful six or seven years ago (in this geographic region, at least), I would say that a high school student now who doesn't know how to use a word processor is a rarity. Then comes a semester of 'Keyboarding,' another requirement. After these two courses, students are allowed to take a class on Visual Basic. Unfotunately, by this time, most students think of computer courses as boring and repetitive. It's a shame.
I thought that perhaps the italicized letters weren't the actual letters of the code, but markers for where to find the actual letters. Some ideas that I came up with for the words containing the italicized letters, that would seem reasonable for someone to implement as a code, were:
+only the first letter of the words
+only the last letter of the words
+the two letters directly to the left and right
+the first or last letter of the sentence
The latter choice I can't possibly see working out, since most of the sentences begin with a T. However, I tried the first three and ran them through some Caesar and Vigenere programs, but didn't get any real results. I did spot the words 'shit' and 'nato', a few times, though.
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A few years ago, at the highschool I went to, the guys who were supposed to be in charge of the computers/network for the school couldn't figure out how to block certain features and services from the computers. As a result, punishments were given out to any student who tried to use these things. Use of the Microsoft command prompt was specifically forbidden, after a student 'net send'ed a message to his friend on the computer next to him.
At the same school, it is required that students take a semester of 'computer concepts,' a course that introduces students to the most rudimentary elements of Word, Excel, and (maybe) Powerpoint. Although this course might have been useful six or seven years ago (in this geographic region, at least), I would say that a high school student now who doesn't know how to use a word processor is a rarity. Then comes a semester of 'Keyboarding,' another requirement. After these two courses, students are allowed to take a class on Visual Basic. Unfotunately, by this time, most students think of computer courses as boring and repetitive. It's a shame.
I thought that perhaps the italicized letters weren't the actual letters of the code, but markers for where to find the actual letters. Some ideas that I came up with for the words containing the italicized letters, that would seem reasonable for someone to implement as a code, were:
+only the first letter of the words
+only the last letter of the words
+the two letters directly to the left and right
+the first or last letter of the sentence
The latter choice I can't possibly see working out, since most of the sentences begin with a T. However, I tried the first three and ran them through some Caesar and Vigenere programs, but didn't get any real results. I did spot the words 'shit' and 'nato', a few times, though.