A friend of mine uses Caps Lock instead of shift, but he also types insanely fast. He sees it as inserting commands into the input stream, and claims it is faster for him.

To be fair though, putting power and sleep buttons on the keyboard was a monumentally stupid idea. It's far too easy to accidentally hit them.

Some keyboards do have small caps lock keys. Japanese layouts for example, but even in the west... I seem to recall some 80s computers had caps lock keys of "normal" size, i.e. the same as letter keys.

Software developed for governments perhaps? I seem to recall some countries mandated that software written for government departments had to be open source. They paid an external developer to write and maintain the software, but the source code was available.

Perhaps that will come to pass, but likely not for a couple generations.

Basically, for people to ignore all that stuff, you'll need the "people in power" to be okay with it. Most of the people in power are middle-aged or older. Social media stuff has only been the norm for about a decade, so I'd say we'll need to wait at least 20-30 years before most of the "people in power" will have grown up with it.

And then, guess what -- there's a filtering process for the "people in power" where the old "people in power" decide who the new ones will be. And so there will be an even greater lag, where the first generation of "social media natives" will still be shamed as they try to build careers, so in 20-30 years, the "people in power" will be "social media natives," but they'll mostly be selected by the previous generation and thus will hold a "higher standard" -- i.e., the kids who didn't do most of the "nasty stuff" when they where kids.

Maybe when you get about 40-50 years from now, you'll get a true transformation like you describe, assuming current trends continue (which, well... who would have predicted this current world 50 years ago?).

By the way, you can look for this sort of morality issue in various political campaigns, etc. What most of the "cool kids" were doing in the 60s (in terms of drugs, sexual practices, etc.) was definitely not acceptable even when that generation came to power in the 80s and 90s. Maybe in the past few years, we've finally started to see a majority of the public okay with some drugs, etc., but that's been a really slow transformation, as I described above.

Neither could most 6-year-old boys... or 10-year-old girls. Or boys. And even many teenage girls would have difficulty fighting off a dedicated kidnapper.

But all of that is a bit irrelevant, because what really needs to be considered here is prevalence of stranger kidnappings... which is ridiculously low. Something like 0.01% of all kids reported missing are abducted and murdered by strangers. Something less than 1% of all kids who are actually abducted (as opposed to reported missing because they got lost or ran away or whatever) are abducted by strangers.

We're talking about ~100 kids per year in the U.S. who are abducted and killed. And the majority of those kids are abducted and killed by family members or other people they know well, not be random strangers. (Most kids abducted by a stranger are returned relatively unharmed.) Am I saying we shouldn't be concerned about it? Of course we should be concerned about it. But the risks are blown completely out of proportion.

Kids are about 50 times more likely to be killed in a motor vehicle than by an abductor. Kids are about 10 times more likely to drown or suffocate, 8 times more likely to take poison accidentally, 4 times more likely to die in a fire, etc., etc.

You're vastly more likely to cause your child to die because you got into a motor vehicle accident while not paying attention (or didn't get enough sleep, or were distracted by a phone or texting or whatever) than you are by letting them wander the streets alone.

And even if you are worried about your kid getting abducted and abused or killed, you should be MUCH more worried about the kid's uncle or brother or father or teacher than some random stranger grabbing them off the street.

If you aren't supervising your kids around people they know out of fear of abuse and abduction (where the VAST majority of abuse occurs), worrying about random strangers shouldn't be on your list.

It's much more likely that a child of that age will encounter some other random problem -- accidental injury, getting lost, etc. -- than being kidnapped. Those are the primary fears parents should be evaluating for kids. All kids are different, and parents should pay use judgment to determine when kids are ready to be out alone. I've read stories of police questioning parents for letting a 6-year-old play alone in his own fenced-in backyard!

Anyhow, I don't know the details of the case you're discussing or the maturity of the kid in question. Regardless, though, we should be concerned about this kid because young kids often need supervision in general -- not because of some (likely non-existent) "bad guy" grabbing her on the street.

Child abduction rates in the U.S. have been declining steadily for at least 40 years. Kids are safer than ever. The hysteria needs to stop.

The references on the GamerGate wiki are compete crap. Let's take one of the most important ones. The wiki claims:

"Grayson first wrote a favourable article about game developer Zoe Quinn on 5 September 2012, which highlights her games and includes a link to her products.[31]"

The reference goes to an article titled "Green For Greenlight: Valve Now Charging $100 Fee" and which includes a bit about Quinn but also other affected developers. A journalist speaking to their established contacts, what a scandal.

Face it, the GG wiki is a steaming pile of shit designed solely to slander GG's opponents and give it a veneer of legitimacy, as a cover for harassment.

Even if it were proven that the drone was being operated by a perv looking to oogle his daughters, firing into the air in a residential area because of a drone is inexcusable. Let's see where the shot that missed the drone would have/did land.

No no, the N version is the one you want! Who actually uses Windows Media Player? No more being annoyed because the default file association opened WMP and now it's asking you if you want to use the default settings. Just install your media player of choice (I prefer Media Player Classic Home Cinema) and enjoy.

If the KN version is available in English it might be even better.

I heard it won't let you set the brightness below 3000%. When you shut it down you feel like you have just wasted 137 hours of your life.

Sure you have a right to privacy, but that doesn't make shooting at the drone a good idea. It's a dumb idea... Apart from the bits of drone raining down on you, the shot that misses the drone is going to come down somewhere too. Somewhere in a residential area. With luck it will hit someone's house.

The article is about things did before they were 18. Also, your argument is flawed anyway because it's possible people shouldn't be allowed to join the army or vote at 18.

What do you want me to link to? A 404 error on Kotaku where the non-existent review is?

And by the way, having a relationship with someone after they wrote about something you do (and 49 other things you didn't do) isn't unethical. What is ethical is that the journalist in question didn't write about Quinn after their relationship began.

You need to provide proof if you dispute their account. So far GamerGate has provided nothing. Well, the jilted boyfriend was unable to find any evidence to submit to the court and avoid getting a restraining order. Well done for failing to help him out with your 100% proven facts.

You are not alone. Look at the game modding community, for example. Those guys do a lot of scripting with simply syntax or high level editor tools to reprogram parts of the game, but I doubt they could actually write the game themselves. It's the knowledge of things like the Open GL API, or how 3D scenes are built up and rendered that holds them back.

A lot of people write software in Excel too. Mostly formula and simple logic based, perhaps with some simple BASIC code behind it. Where many of us would just write a little app in C or Perl in ten minutes, they will use Excel and some copy/paste to avoid learning how to load and parse text files.