A friend of mine was recently (summer of this year) a juror in Michigan where one of the charges was accessing someone else's e-mail. She was found guilty of this charge despite the fact that she was given the password previously. I would love to put the links in for the exact law and the court case, but I'm lazy.

The thing that got me about the law is that it is perfectly legal to draw funds from someone's bank account via a debit card if you know the PIN. Just by knowing the PIN, the law considers it consent to access the funds (obviously assuming you were given the PIN and didn't get it through nefarious means). I would think the same goes for e-mail, but it doesn't.

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach".

I hold a BS and MS in CS. The problem is that everyone I met during my college years had no desire to teach. CS isn't a field where you get a degree in so that you can teach (at least not at the HS level).

I had a mixed experience in HS. The first two classes taught qBasic and then Visual Basic (5.0 I think). These gave me a very good foundation for beginner concepts. The higher level class was updating the website for the HS using Front Page. The problem was that the teacher's knowledge was based on reading a teacher's book instead of real world experiences. To him, it was much harder to get the web pages to look good then it was to write an IF-THEN-ELSE statement, so he made that class the higher level class.

To me, the real key to getting people into CS is to show them that it's not rocket science. If you tell the computer to do something, the computer does it. Start with decision graphs and flow charts, then teach them how to implement those in a language.

It also helped get people into the classes in my HS by telling them there was no homework since all work had to be done at the few licensed machines we had.

I'm guessing that they are using the random bits about literal latency ranges and what band is used to give them an idea that could get a patent. Since companies could not get a patent on the representation of the human body, the original GI Joe had the right thumbnail on the underside of the thumb. Put random information into a patent, get patent, sue anyone that uses any bit of information in your patent, and hope for the best.

This has been true recently, but not in the past. The Gamecube was a more powerful N64, the N64 was a more powerful SNES, and the SNES was a more powerful NES. If anything, they were the trend setters for the next console is just "more powerful".

Someone go get Samuel Jackson and let him know that he's got a movie to be in.

It's good to know that science can definitively prove why I'm a freak. Father - 6'0", Mother - 6'0", Me - 6'10"...

I personally can't wait to see Google seizure between every word I type in. Great idea guys... How annoying would it be if someone tried to answer a question that you were asking after every word you said?