But what you want, and what is going to happen are two different things. IMO, the -only- robust thing you can do is teach your kids well, and keep communications lines open so that they can talk about what happens to them.

I'm also curious as to what other things you are worried about. I've been fairly exploratory, and I can't think of anything I've come across that I consider to be so horrible that I would lay up at nights worrying about it. What am I not thinking of? I have thought of warez sites, execution sites, pro-ana sites, hate groups, and religious cults. Please educate me if I'm being too naive.

On a side note, I am of the opinion that the risk associated with the internet and kids is overstated. The data is overwhelming that the vast majority of pedophilic encounters are via friends, family, teachers, and youth activities. Kids that are enticed via the internet are already at risk.

Not competing for dollars, but for eyeballs. The army wants to be able to get people to play the game and be influenced by it. Making all of thier strategy available to everyone could allow private gaming companies to beat them to it. That would mean less eyeballs and wow factor when they finally do release a product.

I’m similar, though not employed in that sort of field.

My code has to be bullet-proof, or I’m not satisfied with it. I basically ask at every step, “what could possibly happen here” (particularly when it comes to user interaction with the program). My answer to that question is as exhaustive as practical.

In fact, one of the first programs I ever played with was a BASIC program which started off by asking for a number. If you entered a non-number, the program crashed. The first thing I did to it was get the BASIC reference manual and figure out how to keep it from crashing, and have it repeat its query if you answered with a non-number.

Something along the lines of this, IIRC:

10 INPUT "Enter an integer: ", A$ : A = INT(VAL(A$))
20 B$ = STR$(A) : IF LEFT$(B$, 1) = " " THEN B$ = MID$(B$, 2)
30 IF A$ <> B$ THEN PRINT "That is not an integer." : GOTO 10

The VAL function finds as much as it can before giving up, but never crashes the program... VAL("A") = 0, VAL("1b") = 1, VAL("3.2 inches") = 3.2, etc. The STR$ function uses a space character in place of the plus sign, which is why I stripped it.

This is going to Kindle a debate about the merits and demerits of the cloud.

But we don't have "healthy skepticism". We have unquestioning belief of opinion that people want to believe in the face of enormous evidence to the contrary.

Even here on Slashdot, that I thought would be mainly visited by science trained people, we get countless posts along the lines of "I don't believe in global warming" or "I don't believe CO2 can cause global warming".

There was some confusion over the role of CO2 in our atmosphere. Around the turn of the 20th Century Arrhenius realized that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere would cause temperatures to rise. A few years later Angstrom did some unfortunate experiments that were misleading but compelling and the vast majority of scientists decided that Arrhenius was wrong. Around the 20s or 30s we had the understanding to realize that Arrhenius must have been right which would have caused people to redo and reevaluate Angstrom's experiments and find the flaw. Unfortuately, that didn't happen and it wasn't until the 1940s and high altitude bombers that there was experimental evidence to directly contradict Angstrom. Since then the role of CO2 in our atmosphere is settled and adding CO2 will cause temperatures to rise. All that is left is to determine what the sensitivity is. And yet, 60+ years later we still see the same tired old arguments "CO2 absorption bands are saturated" and "CO2 is a trace gas so cannot affect climate."

Repeating these soundbites and others isn't healthy scepticism, it's spouting nonsense from a base of ignorance.

There are valid arguments that "business as usual" is the best way forwards. I happen to disagree - IMO the costs of mitigation will be miniscule in comparison to the costs of adapting regardless of the precise value of climate sensitivity - but denying the facts of science isn't valid or even intelligent, let alone healthy scepticism.

Tim.

As an example, say you are presented with an ad image from the http://spamareus.com/ads/ad1234.jpg URL. When you invoke the Adblock dialog, the preselected regular expression will be http://spamareus.com/ads/* , meaning that everything from the ads folder will be blocked, which is usually what you want.

That's exactly NOT what I want.

I want to block ads based on the *content's* URL, not the URL the ad is being served from. I don't know why this is so hard to explain... you do realize that ads are served from a different domain than the content domain?

DoubleClick and Atlas are used both by reasonable sites, and abusive sites. Thus, I want to block content from doubleclick.net when the page being viewed is abusivesite.com, but I *don't* want to block content from doubleclick.net when the page is from imokwiththissite.com. Get it?

AdBlock is technically capable of this-- it's whitelists work this way already. I just need the inverse functionality. Your suggestion doesn't help at all.

TFA actually said “Zynga’s Cafe World and Playfish’s Restaurant City, the two most popular restaurant sims on Facebook.”

All I can say is that I loved Ewoks: The Battle for Endor as a kid.

Well it seems one large glass of milk and/or one small portion of turkey. For 100g roasted light turkey meat you get 340mg of tryptophan, 100g of cow's milk has 75mg. So you need 4.5 times the weight of milk to get the same amount, 2% milk only has 40mg per 100g.

When user's stage a revolt, much like this Slashdot posting is doing, they typically listen to the users and make some changes. All it takes a group or two with a few hundred thousand users (the site has 350 million) and they take notice.

My only complain would be if Facebook listed me in the search engine results, which they currently allow me to disallow this. The reason being is I prefer my person website to rank 1st in Google over all these other sites I'm on.

I had an issue with font rendering in Photoshop 4 and called Adobe support. Other than having a licensed version of Photoshop I didn't have a support contract, the support rep spent a couple hours on the phone and we got the problem resolved.. Of course that was ~10 years ago.