Hmm... Interesting indeed. I have to say I've learnt something new and should have a think about things, thank you. I only suggested extra caution in the context that some reports seemed to suggest that some adults would engage in abuse if they could get away with it. I agree that the same could apply to virtually anything though.

I understand that human sexuality has a huge amount of diversity and mal-imprinting, childhood trauma and so many other unique circumstances specific to an individual can shape the outcome and I in no way intend to be judgmental. I'd be interested in hearing your own story and analysis.

Thank you. This was very revealing and I must confess to being completely taken aback by these numbers. My personal understanding was always based on natural psychological tendencies to care for and love children. I'm truly surprised to hear that a fairly significant proportion of males would find children aged 4-10 in any way arousing.

However, as you've noted, such responses do not mandate hyper-sexuality. Nevertheless, perhaps it's time for me to consider extra caution as justified.

This is a good example of a world gone mad. Since when is every individual a suspected pedophile? Pedophiles are an absolute, absolute minority. Most adults actually have a natural instinct to be protective of children, this is known psychology. Somehow, the assumption seems to be that the norm is to abuse children and the exception is to care for them.

I find it even more amusing that there is no worry about the privacy of adults. Isn't their privacy being abused by these full-body scanners? Won't 99.99% of cases be that guards screening this would get a kick out of seeing an adult nude and not give two hoots about naked children? Does anyone have statistics on what percentage of the population are pedophiles? I'm willing to bet that it's a pretty low number.

A few comments on the points you've raised.

1. Keep both shift keys pressed when inserting your CD. Autorun will not be executed. Turn on "Show protected operating system files" and autorun.inf will be made visible. You can then delete it.

2. I'm not really sure whether there's a way to enable this. One workaround though is to type in the network path to say C$ directly and access it.

3. Yes, sucks that there's no official support. You can use BartPE though.

4. Hasn't happened to me but good to know, thanks.

4. How often (if at all) does the average user use SSH or even know what it is?

5. This appears to be a matter of personal choice. Never really missed this feature. 3rd party products available to add this on.

6. Can't really comment except to say that there's always a driver available for windows which can give access to printer specific features. I would suspect that most Linux printer drivers are generic (Haven't done enough printing on Linux to know). Not really the fault of Linux since manufacturers don't seem to make proper drivers for Linux. Then again, when the user base is less than 1%, it's hard to blame them either. Linux has to somehow gain that critical mass to force manufacturers to provide support.

While I'd essentially agree that "I can do X in windows that Linux can't do" isn't valid (in fact, I think most low level things are done much easier in Linux) it's still probably a valid critique to ask whether things can be done as easily as in Windows. My personal opinion is that, for the average user, Windows is still way ahead in the user-friendliness department - less options (paradox of choice), less complications, more things working out of the box etc. Linux is much better than it was 5 years ago, but it's still got a long journey ahead. I sincerely hope it eventually kicks MS ass in terms of desktop market share (it's doing quite well in the server dept. isn't it?), sort of like what Firefox did.

Yes, but I could find audio pronunciation guides only for "ginormous", which was the first thing I checked also as it's directly linked to by the article.

Most others don't seem to have them. Frankly, even if you learn the pronunciation keys (gibberish is indeed a more appropriate word for it), it's still not comparable to actually hearing the word spoken out loud by a native speaker. (And I'm not a native speaker)

Of course. But Google is my default search engine. And the direct link to the word definition from search results is what I normally use. My point is, google has unlinked answers.com to provide an inferior service themselves. What exactly is the point?

I for one am very unhappy about answers.com being removed.

For one thing, it had audio pronunciation guides. Google doesn't.
Thesaurus, antonyms etc. are integrated. Google doesn't have any of these.

Seems more of a downgrade really. What does google offer that answers.com doesn't?

Having taken a fair amount of classes as well as having taught a couple of years myself, I can definitely agree with the parent's post.

Neither chalk, power point nor even 3D animations can magically transform a boring lecturer into a fascinating one, if he/she simply does not perceive how receptive the audience is.

It really isn't that hard to tell. If everything is whooshing over their heads, their confused faces will tell you that you need to change your tack.
If they are yawning, then you're droning.
If they aren't interacting with you, then you haven't made them comfortable or interested enough.

The first step to becoming better is to actually notice that there's a problem.

Sadly, too many teachers seem oblivious to how their students receive them. Worse, they seem to have no intention to improve or to quit, much to the detriment of the hapless individuals who have to endure their classes.

Exactly. This is why I don't use any AV product at all. As long as you're reasonably careful not to download and install unknown programs, there's no way to justify incurring a huge performance hit on a daily basis. For example, I once "fixed" a friend's PC in which she had installed two AV programs - Avira and McAfee - for additional protection and security as I heard. File copying had dropped to something like 150Kb/sec between two hard drives because both anti-viruses were scanning it. Disabling one increased the speed to about 1.5Mb/Sec. Disabling both improved it to about 6Mb/Sec (figures according to rough recollection, to be taken with a pinch of salt). I eventually left one on since she wasn't an experienced user and needed some anti-virus program, "just-in-case".

But experiences like these over the years have convinced me that the wisdom about adjusting your process is far more valid than having an army of products. I haven't had a single virus infection for as long as I can recall and if I did, that was because I'd been careless and run some program off the net without finding out what it was. Also, I don't think AV programs offer any meaningful protection against things like browser flaws. If someone decides to exploit say a buffer overflow vulnerability in your browser and you simultaneously decide to browse to that very site which does so, well, so sad, too bad. Might as well wait for the browser vendor to release a patch which fixes that flaw and use a more secure browser like Chrome to browse dodgy sites, rather than pray an ineffective AV magically detects it with its "heuristics". Most often, all that DLL injection and the like result in an unstable browser, rather than providing any real protection.

Having said all that, I do see the utility in being able to do an occasional on-demand scan on an executable. I also see why AV vendors are going for the nanny philosophy to deal with the armies of inexperienced users who have no idea about the "process" behind security. But for those with a reasonable idea of it, it's probably better to suffer the rare virus infection than endure a crawling system on a daily basis thanks to some overzealous AV product.

I agree. I don't understand the need to invoke an elaborate quantum theory based model to explain this behaviour either.

All animals (including humans) are overloaded with information from their environment. They cannot take into account all relevant information when coming to decisions. Necessity dictates that we take quick reactionary decisions by short-circuiting our logic and/or giving in to primitive emotional mechanisms. Most animals (including humans) simply respond to stimuli and there's not much logic involved at all. Most likely, the explanation for this illogical behaviour is a misfiring of some primitive impulse.

I don't understand the need to analyze only human decision making at such a complex quantum mechanical level when Occam's razor would imply a simpler explanation. Or did I miss something?

Frak
Sanitized swear word from Battlestar Galactica. Used to replace the word Fuck.
Eg: Frak you! Frak off! You've got be frakking kidding me
Definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=smeg

Frell
An unofficial swear word used in place of pretty much any actual swear word. used on the "Farscape" tv series.
Eg: you frelling piece of.... go to frell Frell!! We are so frelled.
Definition: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Frell

Smeg
From the tv show Red Dwarf, it is a commonly used insult, derived from Smegma.
Eg: Oh Smeg! What the smeggin' smeg's he smeggin' done?!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Smeg

Gorram
A homonymstic conjuction of the words "God" and "damn." Popular from the Joss Whedon television series "Firefly."
Eg: "Those gorram feds are after us."
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gorram

Tanj
Expletive. Acronym for "There Ain't No Justice." Used like "damn"
Eg: TANJ! I left the oven on!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tanj

Belgium
According to Douglas Adams in his HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series, the worst possible curse word in the universe. Its use is inexcusably rude.
Eg: Baby, I love you. You make my...what? What do you mean you're my sister? Belgium!!!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Belgium

Laen Yobwoc
Reserved for use by Cowboy Neal, not to be uttered by normal humans. Can be read with grave risk to sanity using mirror.