The energy surrounding computers was very different then. I remember seeing moms dressed like Tootsie typing at Ataris and Apples at computers fairs. Everyone was having some fun. Manuals came with the programming language explained full-on from page one, with programming examples. Opening your computer and tinkering was encouraged, and people congregated at computer shops to chat, meet others, exchange solutions.

Today, teaching how to use Firefox to my parents is difficult. Windows/MacOS/Linux are too complicated to be enjoyable if you know little and they will never experience the joy of understanding the whole computer, programming it, solving problems, plotting the orbit of the moon, playing a hangman or a lunar lander programmed by them. I doubt that 'programming by dragging' in Visual Studio can communicate the same sense of wonder. A smart person will ask how things work underneath, and no one can answer. Having fun is crucial.

Today manuals say "dear customer, don't eat this manual".

Sad.

Thanks, I asked for a citation and got one. Reading it shows that it seems to be the usual microsoft blunder programming too much cleverness into standards implementations. I also hate this but it's in no way a domination attempt to break the Internet. It's unlikely that a company with much power over the idiots in the IT world would go so subtly about world domination, burying a little subversive broadcast flag in its DHCP implementation. It's more likely that they tried to fix some brokenness in obscure appliances that didn't follow spec in the first place and then put a way to disable the fix somewhere in the registry. I see no serious attempt at bending the rules for their benefit, and Vista is a flop anyway (the posts are from 2008). Microsoft knows they cannot play these tricks and win, specially in Europe and other civilised places.

On a related line, I don't know about others but I'm responsible for an IT department. Therefore I have the last word about what gets installed. This is how history is written and battles are won, little by little. I use my freedom. I don't have to buckle to corporate pressure, I don't see the problem. Others are afraid to speak their mind to ignorant management but I'm not. It works.

Wow, hey, I like the golden era as much as you but get the history right. The PC was crap when I was enjoying an ST, or playing fantastic Mac games at friend's places or at Uni. I agree.

But a Mac, or an Indigo with a color display or accelerated 3d hardware cost as much as two cars. Almost no one could afford a high end Mac and graphical workstations were in CS departments and professors hogged them. Yesterday I set up a quad core machine with 12 GB or RAM and I will virtualise the heck out of it to have fun and learn things meanwhile. To do this then would have cost around the high end of 5 figures. Today it's less than Eur 1000.

Nobody forces you to like what the masses like. Use your freedom. What if the ignoramuses buy shiny crap? It allows innovation to happen, just not at the ivory towers of our youth, but at mundane places where wage slaves with three degrees crank out products. Some of them are very good. This machine will stop when its(1) fuel runs out.

(1) Notice how its is used(2).
(2) Educating slashdotters at no charge!

I agree with you generally but WTF is this FUD you spread about 'crippled OS'? Citation needed.

Last week I made a Win 3.11 VM for fun. To transfer Netscape I installed TCP/IP for Win 3.11 and the FTP client worked well with BSD relesase 9.

Comments from the third world are interesting in the way it's interesting to watch an extinct animal in a museum.

Please read about where Hollywood comes from and what they did with Edison's patents a century ago. I applaud that China is able to get up on its feet faster than all the other stupid countries in the third world that had golden opportunities and failed miserably, their incommensurable material wealth only bringing them corruption, war and misery. Look up Africa and South America somewhere. I only hope Chinese people are less adept at war than the US is.

So when no one has been able to make a safe OS, you cry foul and turn to the law. My, my, how adorable.

> by hiring people that can't quite afford the product they're producing

Oh here comes another uneducated amurrican repeating what they believe will buy them intellectual credit among their peers.

One data point that is not in agreement with your theory: Workers at NASA produce something that they are 'unable to afford'. Moreover, they seem to be qute happy working there and proud of their product. Many smart people are also proud of what NASA produces. Now fit this observation into your theory, citizen. Or ignore it ank keep thinking you have the solution to this mess. Yessir!

You have a gun and a dog. A gun I don't care about because you can't use it in Europe. About the dog, congratulations little bastard, now you have a son of a bitch barking dog that annoys the whole neighborhood because it misses you, or is bored, or scared. I'd love to live in your fucking neighborhood.

I'll tell you how easy it is to neutralize a dog. I like to take walks. With a pepper spray. Where I live there are lots of walled places with the corresponding loud, loose dog that loves barking at people. So macho. So safe, isn't it. The funny thing is they bark at me like mad from behind the fence; the fence works both ways, isn't it wonderful? An inch away is just as good as a mile away. Now the barking can be fixed: An application of the pepper spray one inch from their eyes and nose is so easy and painless (for me, anyway). The stupid beast then backs away instantly, stops barking and looks at me with a puzzled look, half fear, half shock and the last half disappointment. It looks like it's asking me 'why, why did you do this to me? I'm just doing my job. Why are you not running away scared and disgusted?'. It's priceless. They cannot decide what to do next: run away, timidly begin barking again, or tend to their itchy eyes and nose. I then humiliate them further. I put my hand through the bars, so they see the spray. They feel the urge to chase that adventurous hand away from their domain, the place they must protect, but somehow their will is rendered powerless and they cannot move. It's interesting to look at what goes through their little minds: they look away, hoping I'm not there when they look back at me again, they look back briefly as if asking for reassurance from the owner, but the owner is not there. Then back at me again, not daring to cover that two meters from the fence, not daring to chase the intruder away. Then they learn. Some of the bigger ones sit down and take their time sneezing away. They occasionally look at me imploring me to go away, to stop whatever it is that I'm doing to them. I walk away in wonderful silence. Very rarely they come again to bark at me some other day. So much for your dog, idiot. After some weeks the owner may think 'Hmm Sergeant might be getting a little old, when did he start to like his shack so much? He wanders around the wifey's part of the garden smelling the lillies and the roses, wtf, his aggresive, obnoxious, endless barking used to remind me of my long-lost potency and reassure me that I was safe in my home while watching games in my 797 inch TV. Hmm maybe it's time to dump this sissy of a dog and get a BadAss(TM) new one. I'll be humane and take it to my mother's house, she needs one anyway. Hell yeah'.

And here I was thinking my collection of pirated books had typos because of sloppy idiots not loving them enough but someday... someday I'd find a torrent with Kindle or B&N editions, perfectly formatted and proofread like the paper ones I've had the audacity to become used to.

Then you shatter my bubble and Google quickly confirms that editions people pay money for have more than a fair share of errors, formatting extravaganzas and strange ASCII combinations whenever an accent or, say, finnish letter were.

At least I was right in what I do: if the author is alive I buy a real book, have it cut, scan it at 300 dpi, 1 bit depth, every page is about 2-3 KB and perfect. If the author is dead, I do the same but torrent it afterwards. I am astonished that people would pay for mistakes. Why do they do it?

Don't bother (or do, if you must). These books exploit the stupidity, the covardice of the masses revelling in violence because they are afraid of a society without it. Throw some 'wisdom' into it to give the text a resemblance of an intellectual edge and 95% of the rest can be violence, latent or explicit, which is what they understand, what they think they can manage. These poor excuses for a human being are the same who love the crap of Ayn Rand, or think The art of war or The prince are the pinnacles of human wisdom. Kierkegaard noted that men die for freedom of speech but happily forgo freedom of thought. Let them suffer if they cannot stand social pressure. I think everyone can agree on the effect time has on this garbage: not quite the same as it has on Aristotle, Democrit, Schopenhauer or -to name a contemporary- Einstein. But let the poor souls have their armchair violence, anything to appease the mildly horrifying feeling of having to be alive.

It seems to me that both of you (parent and grandparent) are trying to follow a beautiful and necessary impulse of being human: find and represent relevant information; say more with less. Unfortunately, this phrase is all about context, like 'easy'. What's easy for a man is difficult for another. What's good enough for one is unacceptable for another. Context, context, context. And now is when I realize one of you is an idiot and the other is someone who knows his language and can use it well. I'll leave it to you to decide who's the cromulent one.

And gentlemen, you are so funny: "ooohh booh hoo where are the ethical ISPs??? ohhh runs around ohhh *faints*"

I have four words for ya: I love these darknets YEEEAAHHHH

and developers :)

That is all.

If anyone wondered how VIPs, rich saudis and celebrities would skip TSA scanners, this is it. The $100 bit is just icing on the indignity cake.

On somewhat related news, the TSA has, after years of hard labor in the name of scientific advancement, succesfully performed an amazing feat of entanglement between the moral misery commonly found in South American countries and the dehumanizing indignity more commonly experienced by North Korea residents. The physical distance between the two local minima of human dignity is on the order of 14,000 Km, thus proving without a trace of doubt that advances in fundamental science are the sure way to the bright future that awaits those who understand how to pull human beings down to the level of animals, thus proving that the direction in which societies have been moving in the last, oh, twenty centuries, was WRONG. As proof of our sentiment, we reproduce (with permission) two paragraphs from TFA that surely convey our proud sentiment of the scientific feat:

"""
TSA says Precheck members are selected randomly for regular screening to enhance security. But that unpredictability irks frequent travelers. The agency doesn't make travelers go to the end of the regular screening line, however, but instead slips them into the front of the regular queue.

"I like Precheck, but it would be much more valuable to me if I were able to know before leaving for the airport whether or not I had Precheck approval for that day's flights," said Beth Allen, a University of Minnesota economist and frequent traveler.
"""

With the genuine, sincere and warm feeling that accompanies a job well done, we now leave the delightful news behind us, fully expecting the new developments in the field that shall bring americans rewarding and enriching experiences at the airport, while at the same time showing the path forward to other good-willed nations of the first world where the values of freedom reigns supreme. Good night, all good men of the Earth.

This article can't be about a real weapon. Microwaves, no matter how powerful, penetrate a few millimeters into the skin. In a crowd this can burn someone immobile but what about the other 9,999 'terrorists'? It's microwaves! A plank of wood would be an effective armor against this radiation. I don't understand.

Off topic but I very much agree with you on video. It's too big, inefficient, slow and overall stupid but it suits slackers. We leapt forward when we invented writing. Before that it was hand-waving and storytelling around the fire, which is what these morons with podcasts try to pass as 'new'. I don't watch video that could be transcripted and read in one tenth of the time. If something is video only, I pass. My time is for written material, thus avoiding the worst crap.

Even more offtopic: These last three weeks I've been working with video. I use avisynth because it has scripts: the 'program' is saved on disk and repeatable. If I was forced to use a UI and a mouse every little tweak and filter should be remembered and automation could not exist unless it was programmed into every tool used, which is unfeasible and the results of one step could be fed to the next which is even more unfeasible.