Really, from what you say they're so "illiterate" that putting them in front of a computer can only get damages. If their only need is e-mail, maybe they should use other forms of messaging, even SMS could be better. Otherwise, give them a computer with a very limited interface, email only, like e.g. those kiosks in the shops that allow you to print your photos.

Should read: "We want everyone to use Chrome. We even try to install it surreptitiously to your machine when you download other programs."

You just described the present!

Does someone know a trapezoid?

Please, stop those mantras "copying is not depriving the other of its copy, etc, etc". We're talking about not paying for something you must, and something that cost a lot of money to produce (movies, videogames). Period. Stallman's phylosophical nuances do not apply.

Mind you, I'm as "pirate" as average you, but people here costantly trying to *defend* it, I can't tolerate. And I'm a big fan of free software and Stallman's doctrine (a little less of himself), but I see lot of people trying to read it as the bible, and especially trying to extend it to totally unrelated fields.

Well, "thief" sounds worse... I'll stick with "pirate".

In Italy we had a civil plane shot down in 1980 (look for "Ustica"), the most likely reason being it was mistaken for a lybian military plane, in the not-openly-declared USA-Lybia war. It was not even officially a dangerous zone, but Italy happened to be in the middle of that shit. You know what? In 2014 we still have no "official" truth, and I'm afraid that will be the same here.

Yes, apart that I still have to undertand what those "portals" were, other than a so-called "web site".

I feel for what you and your wife suffered, by how can you conceive "charges against the employer" as well? As someone already said, law is there to be respected, police is there to punish the criminals, and an employer is not a sheriff. I would not have been surprised if the employer had reported charges against you as well, for falsely being accused of being a criminal himself.

In the article it's stated that it started working in 2008. Is a supercomputer's life so short, given the huge investment it surely needed to be built?

I was thinking, today that could be easily done by the GPU in the video card, even cheaper, integrated ones. Considering that audio con be output digitally through HDMI, maybe for some setups the analog circuitry does not even belong to the computer anymore.

Is it even possible to physically overwrite sectors in a flash memory embedded on the device board? Is a software enough, or are there hardware drivers sitting between you and the physical sectors? For example, SD cards perform automatic remapping of sectors to not write too often on the same ones. Raw flashes should be more direct, but I'm not sure of the whole hardware chain in a system-on-chip.

Some theoretical models seem to work by admitting that there are extra dimensions hidden to our senses, like superstring theory (it has something like 11 dimensions). Very extreme, but some observed results can actually be derived by their equations. Nothing is to be discarded as too odd, I guess.

Sorry, as a non-american It always sounds strange to me that they're still called "Sheriff", it reminds me of western movies every time! Do they make duels when facing a criminal?

Yeah, nice argument: "I'm right, so stop talking". Classic Slashdot, usually rewarded with good karma.