It should be the car that is disabled (or your license taken away)

Exactly - as they do already in the UK: get caught driving while using a mobile phone, you get 3 penalty points. That puts your insurance premiums up in itself, and if you reach a total of 12 points, no more driving for a few years. The penalty may be increased to 6 - in which case, get caught driving on the phone twice, you're in the passenger seat for several years. If someone's been caught driving on the phone (whether texting, talking or reading Slashdot), why let them continue driving at all? Will disabling the phone stop them driving while fiddling with the radio, eating, shaving etc? Of course not - so get them away from the wheel and let them text all they like as passengers.

Where the books aren't licensed?! I didn't know there was such a thing.

It is against the law pretty much everywhere. However that law is enforced pretty much nowhere. It is just simply too difficult to enforce it, as a police officer has to catch the person in the act to even write a ticket. And then the ticket is so laughably small in terms of the monetary penalty as to be pointless to even write.

Here in the UK, the penalty is that you get one-quarter of the way to no longer driving (3 penalty points, where 12 means a driving ban); the government announced earlier this year they were considering doubling that to halfway, i.e. get caught doing it twice (within 3 years) and you won't be driving again. However small the risk, I suspect that's a big enough deterrent to scare many - particularly since it would often mean losing their job too. You don't have to be caught red-handed, either, just suspected enough for the police to investigate, then they check the network usage logs and confirm you were using the handset at the time in question. (Or get seen on a traffic camera, of which there are many.)

The idea in the article is just silly, though.

WTF is this? Religious people not just claiming a factually facist souverenity of all things moral but now also claiming the same about passion, poetry and emotion? WTF, dudes?

Just because I believe in science and reason, in the scientific method and in moral values by what Dawkins calls "intelligent design" - i.e. debating, weighing and reasoning - doesn't mean I'm not passionate. I have a diploma in performing arts, love poetry and music, am pratically addicted to dancing tango (i.e. holding hot cuties in my arms while moving to passionate music ... you'd get addicted too, trust me ...) and indulge in stoic philosophy and mysticisim and enjoy studiing and debating religious philosophy and architecture.

I just don't like some religious facist telling me - or anybody else for that matter - what they are supposed to believe, think, advocate, pray, meditate, celebrate or otherwise do due to some invisible dictator in the sky or some ancient bronce-age myth written in a book most people are to dumb to interpret correctly anyway! Or telling others that they will burn in hell if they don't chop of certain parts of their penis or will go to heaven if they wear certain clothes of blow themselves up with some unbelievers!

If anything I'd say that my likes - I like to call them 'free thinkers' - are *more* passionate about most things than 'religious' people, who simply have found a sad and sorry reason to turn off their brains when it comes to difficult questions.

I'm starting to believe we need a more outspoken movement for reason and gotta go out into the street standing right next to the Salafist handing out free Qurans and the J-Wittnesses with their watchtowers and hand out free copies of Hitchens' 'God is not great' and copies of Seneca and Spinoza.

Religious factions made up of losers are starting to claim to much space in public attention, imho. This is getting out of hand and needs a little counter-action, don't you think?

Yet animationmentor.com works just fine. Why? They offer specific training to a specific field, they teach all around the world, they have scheduled online classes using videochat technology, a tight curriculum with deadlines, they have scheduled mentor sessions with the best exerts in the field and they have anual student meetups and regional group meetups.

What's the lesson?
Don't just throw a bunch of material online and expect magic to happen. You have to take care of your courses and student either way. The only thing that's different is that you can save considerable operation costs on buildings, facilities ans such and can inlcude students from all around the planet without them having to relocate to your school.

My 2 cents.

Too bad on the subscriptions. :( I'd be happy to give you a page view--if it were possible--for you to never use, and thus enjoy the subscription.

It's also neat that you just let them have the address. Let's hope they remember you when they become world famous. :)

I also have a few names that i want to use but am too lazy to. Maybe we can get another site: LDNHA (Lazy Domain Name Holders Anonymous). Um, and is HTM really a tag?

FYI: Was posted on a tablet with flaky response. Sorry about the typos.

Most teenagers I know wouldn't touch old computers.

These days you can easily find Core2Duo and AMD64 class machines in dumpters, and from what I see, nobody wants them. I used to refurbish them for those who wanted and I ended up with a huge pile of decent machines looking for a good home. No takers. I trashed them all.

I guess they have old PC-s.

I have a few machines, all of them run exclusively Linux, all of them can (and have) run Minecraft. Let's see, my desktop replacement is a i7-2630QM with 16GB RAM, my Ultrabook is i5-3357U with 4GB RAM and my desktop is a A8-3850 with 16GB RAM. (I'm excluding my servers here, as they have different use-cases.) Are these machines "old" now? Sure, they aren't brand-new, but I'd say they're all adequate. Surely not enough to run Crysis, but they're no slouches.

Apple is solidifing their fashion brand appeal, no doubt about it. This is their single largest feat within the last 1,5 decades: They've managed to become the only tech company in the world that factually is a fashion brand in broad perception and a tech brand with a professional reputation. Brilliant, that's what.

Sad thing they've been pissing of us opinion leaders with golden cages and lock-in in recent years. I just bought my first non-apple device in 8 years - a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad. Couldn't say I'd by an Apple computer again. They're still good, Maveriks, hw integration and all, but having to sigh up just to get the FOSS compilers and all just doesn't scrub the right way with me.

My 2 cents.

OpenBSD truly adheres to "KISS", especially regarding simple configuration files. Exactly of what systemd isn't. It may have (and I'm still not convinced) nice features, but for my uses what is presently being used suffices, both on Linux and especially on OpenBSD.

Perl is pretty bizar in a hilarious sort of way - almost every aspect of it. PHP, being Perls former template engine, sheds most of that just to add in it's own featureset from wonderland. Both get the job done, PHP a little more so.

Coulnd't say that for Lingo though. As far as regular usage PLs go, Lingo is about as shitty as it gets. 'Please' is an actual Lingo keyword - with no effect other than to make the sourcecode more polite. No joke. And seriously - that is not even its crappiest feature. If you want to kill braincells and a mixture of crystal meth and crack isn't fast enough, check out Lingo. Gladly it's basically gone extinct since the demise of Director, its platform.

Transcript is simular to lingo, without the outlandish crappyness - but still pretty bizar.

TypoScript is Typo3s configuration language. Think of a total programmer n00b learning just enough PHP4 to do turing complete stuff then inmediately trying to implement Basic for his CMS with it and failing one 3rd it but keeping the ruins as main means of configuration. Typoscript is what happens when a guy who can't programm takes psychoactive drugs and then takes a shot at it.... Luckyly there are some good oreillys on it, which makes it bearable. Sort of.

Perhaps the language with the most bizar appearance is Lisp./eLisp. How anyone could come up with that syntax is totally beyond me. It must be realy powerfull if it is still around. ... Then again, emacs is a very strange programmin itself, so no supprise here.

... things that are basically common senseor at least have been for about a century are 'discovered'?

Everything said here reads exactly like a bona fide copy of what alternative educational - i.e. non-mainstream one-dimensional eductation - methods have been preaching since the dawn of broad public schooling, right down to the insights into the development and function of the human brain. So diversity in education helps the brain and soul develop better? Wow, what an insight. ... No wonder our culture is in such a sad state.

The difference is that phones are small and you only need to stock a dozen models to serve most clients.

Only a dozen? Let's see... within the iPhone 5S range in the US, we have 3 different storage capacities (16, 32, 64 Gb) in 3 different colour schemes, with 4 different network setups (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile/unlocked). That's 27. 40 more for the iPhone 5c (5 colours, 2 sizes, 4 networks). The iPhone 4S is still for sale, but "only" 8 options there because it's 8 Gb only now - except the 3 larger ones are still under warranty, so make that another 32. Then we get the 4 and 3GS - but I'll stop there, because we're already at 99 different handsets for the iPhone alone, before we get into Android handsets! Call them $333 each on average, that's $33k of handsets you're mandated to store but not sell. That's insane - just to avoid a 24 hour wait to Fedex a replacement handset to you!? (Not to mention I'd rather have the replacement shipped to me next-day anyway rather than spend hours travelling just to collect it myself.)

Also, I seem to recall some of the Apple fan sites actually monitor stock levels in Apple's own stores - it usually takes a while for stores to have stock on hand after a launch (while customers buy up stock as soon as it arrives), then once a model is old they start running down stocks to avoid being left holding old kit. So, even Apple themselves don't actually carry stock on the scale the poster seems to be demanding, let alone 3rd party repair shops/vendors!

A few years ago, my MacBook Pro's Superdrive failed. Standard part they'd been using for years ... the Store would have a spare in stock surely? No, I had to wait a week for them to get one shipped from Panasonic ... then I was told I'd have to leave the MBP with them for up to another a week to fit it. Of course, by the time I add up the travel costs alone for 3 visits, I'd have spent the price of a brand new external drive, even before factoring in the c 10 hours of my time spent going to and from the Apple Store, so I told them to install the replacement drive somewhere it wouldn't fit easily and bought an external drive.

So, this legislation would be a hugely expensive "solution" to a trivial problem - and, of course, there's no guarantee that on the day your pink 32 Gb iPhone Verizon 5c happens to need replacing, someone else won't already have claimed that one replacement unit, so you can't have it anyway. Would the legislation somehow guarantee a quick replacement of the replacement by Apple, too? Or it would have to mandate everywhere having two of every handset, in case the first one's already taken ...