thus something invented by us is more likely to cause serious trouble for our metabolism than something that bees or trees invented millions of years ago.

I've got some foxglove growing out in my yard if you want to test that theory.. And if you survive that, there's a local amanita variant I can probably find without too much trouble if I go looking for it.

While I think the statutory damages here sound excessive, if it really gets to be a problem the legislative branch can easily pass an amended statute correcting that. Meanwhile it does seem to be desirable to have some disincentive in place to prevent manufacturers from claiming the protection of expired patents. A better system might require a company be served with notice to stop claiming the patents, giving them a reasonable amount of time thereafter (30 days?) to correct their manufacturing; any devices produced after the grace period would be subject to penalties if patent protection continued to be falsely claimed.

It probably wouldn't be such a problem if we hadn't gone absolutely patent crazy in the past fifty years. I made a ludicrous discovery the other day while replenishing my toilet paper supply. The brand of TP I had purchased claims no fewer than 36 patents on the packaging, and I believe that's not even counting the additional design patents (or at least I presume that's what the series designated D########## represented.) C'mon, really -- 36 patentable innovations? It's toilet paper.

Some of the responses so far seem to be based on the assumption that this is an information technology class for students who intend to specialize in the field. I'm assuming, rather, that this is intended to be a basic primer class offered to everyone and intended to give a general grounding in the subject.

My suggestion is that you start by talking to adults to find out what they do and don't understand about the technology they use. In my experience (20-some years' worth of dealing with end users in various capacities) many, probably most, adults have an extremely limited idea how the technology they are using really works in the physical world and deal only with it as an abstract unit. And some of the assumptions they make based on the mental model they have built up lead to really bad decisions because they don't understand very basic concepts that the rest of us take for granted.

To give an example: perhaps the single most misunderstood concept I encounter is the notion of storage. A great number of people seem to have no idea what actually happens on a computer when they save something. Generally they don't understand the difference between various types of memory (i.e. the difference between temporary short-term storage in RAM and long-term storage on a file system on some sort of disc or flash device. They have a very limited understanding, if any, of the filesystem and the concept of hierarchical organization. They are generally unable to distinguish between the various components of their system (e.g. display, CPU, input devices, file storage.) These are things that seem idiotically simple to most of us because we have completely internalized the knowledge, but deal with people who don't have the same underlying framework and you will soon see how it affects their reasoning about their computer.

People with this sort of limited understanding of the computer as one abstracted whole, a magic box that they interact with, generally get along adequately as long as everything is working the way they expect but as soon as they run into any sort of exceptional circumstance they have virtually no recourse because they have no real understanding from which to base hypotheses about a possible cause for the problem or method for proceeding. Their ability to use their systems is therefore fragile and subject to disruption from virtually any sort of unusual situation.

If you've worked in the field you've seen this over and over and over again and you can probably call to mind some of the unfortunate results of this kind of shallow understanding and "magical box" mindset.

I think the best thing you can do for kids just getting started (though I think 9th grade is pretty late to be getting started) is to help them understand that computers are not magical and that their behavior is not arbitrary, that with the proper basic understanding of what's happening most of what follows can be predicted by fairly straightforward logic.

The proposed rate (depending how you read the write-up either 6% total, or 6% plus 2%) has either been set by someone who has no understanding of the math behind gambling or by someone who is looking to deliberately kill on-line wagering while not appearing to do so.

I should have allowed for a third possibility -- that the write-up summary was egregiously inaccurate in its description of the proposed tax. The sad thing is that here on Slashdot that would have been the smart money bet..

The proposed rate (depending how you read the write-up either 6% total, or 6% plus 2%) has either been set by someone who has no understanding of the math behind gambling or by someone who is looking to deliberately kill on-line wagering while not appearing to do so. A 6% (or 8%) government rake on top of the the existing house edge (or house rake for games where you don't play against the house) will crush players, making virtually every gambler a short-term loser.

Baking bread is not easy; baking store-bought bread is even less easy. The problem is that when you stop making failbread, the barely-tolerable product coming out of your oven is a thousand times better than the garbage you get from the store.

Baking truly great bread requires some real skill. Baking surprisingly decent bread can actually be very simple and require no skill at all. I realize we're seriously off-topic, but posted for other DIYers here on Slashdot who (like me) don't necessarily live within convenient traveling distance of a great bakery. Go to your library, check it out, give it a try..

I was intrigued by the ./ posting, which claimed that the tutorial would show how to exploit any NULL pointer dereference. The actual article, however, requires a CALL to the NULL pointer.

For further context, see my whitepaper on how to turn any kdawson-posted Slashdot story into a NULL issue.

you missed the w it seems

You think he's expecting more kids on the guy's LAN?

The idea of wearing a helmet made of a material hard enough to efficiently transmit blows directly to your skull, soft enough to deform under impact, ductile enough to stay deformed, and a sufficiently good conductor of heat to making cutting its deformed remains off of your head without burning you; but before you bleed out, a specialized operation makes me very nervous.

That's exactly what They want you to think.

This represents a tremendous step forward in aluminum hat technology.

So what do people with piercings do now?

Work at Starbucks.

Which involves java, no? So what's the problem?

0x01 can not a domain name be, 0x01.(com|net|org|etc...) can.

You're describing a "fully qualified domain name", not a "domain name".

A whole brand tarnished on one product out of hundreds (if not thousands)?! You're harsh man!

Well, here's the thing. I spent most of the years of my career living in a university town with excellent booksellers. I now live in a comparatively tiny island community a long way from the nearest tech center and if I want tech books I can't just pop into a store that has them in stock and browse, I have to order them and have them shipped.

I've previously bought quite a few O'Reilly titles and while not every one of them was brilliant, they were reliably pretty decent; this one was affirmatively the worst, to the point where in the future when I want a tutorial or reference work on a new technology I won't just call up and order the O'Reilly book on the subject because I don't feel like I can rely on their quality and I don't need any more $40 door stops.

It doesn't mean I'll never order another O'Reilly tome, but it does mean that I felt let down enough to stop automatically trusting their quality by default.

I'll chime in as another who found a previous edition of this work to be flawed -- enough so to tarnish the O'Reilly brand for me. While it's possible the newest edition is better it sounds (from the review) more like an update than a re-write.

Quoted in the write-up:

"That's far too young to be thrown into an environment with college students who are about 18 to 23 years old."

Nobody's talking about "throwing" anybody who isn't ready, just about making it an option for students who are. Options are good, no?

who for some unfathomable reason decided to call themselves "Acretive Solutions," or something. I mean, aside from the impossibility of being able to tell if it's "Acretive" or "Acrative" just by listening to it, what the hell is that supposed to mean?

Not to imply that it's a good name, but it sounds as though you're not aware that "accretive" is a genuine word with an established meaning (it's an adjectival form of "accretion".)