There is no comparison. Google Chrome is slow and badly behaved and Firefox is not. I don't understand all these reports that say "Chrome is so much faster than Firefox" when I routinely see a Chrome install with zero add-ons on a particular machine with recently cleared history and caches consistently slow down during use worse than a fresh Firefox install with ad blocking add-ons on the exact same machine.

There was also no dishonesty in my statements--I stated that I did not know if the option existed which is not the same as "other browsers don't have that." I do not use non-Firefox browsers on a regular basis.

I have no such experience. Neither do any of the people I install Firefox + Adblock {Plus,Edge} for. If Firefox doesn't work right today, it's rarely Firefox that is the problem. Firefox runs fine even on AMD C-50 and AMD V120 laptops. It is often Flash garbage on websites that ruin things in all browsers; using the "Ask to activate" option on the Flash plugin permanently solves that problem. I don't know that such an option exists in non-Firefox browsers.

The irony of an act with "secrecy" in the title that forces someone to proactively spout information...they've been doublespeaking for a long damn time in the government, eh?

It's possible that you have misunderstood what "public key" means. It does not mean that it is published for everyone in the world to see. In asymmetric encryption, each key consists of two parts: a public key and a private key. The public key is allowed to be known by anyone and can be used by anyone to encrypt something for the owner of the private key, or to decrypt something that was encrypted by the owner of the private key. That's why it is the "public key." Mere knowledge of what it is allows a person to securely encrypt what it sends to the private key holder and allows that person to validate that the person sending something to them IS the private key holder. It does not offer security in one direction (since one decryption key is "public") but it does offer validation in the direction that data security is not offered. Related: look up Diffie-Hellman key exchange for info on how asymmetric key pairs are used to initiate symmetrically encrypted secure data streams between hosts. Also look up how PGP keys are used to validate that an email was sent by a specific person and/or that the contents of the email were not changed by a "man in the middle."

If you were considering the "published" part, "published" also doesn't necessarily mean that the services are in a nice easy list on some server somewhere for the FBI to download. Of course, the Tor directory servers obviously handle .onion domain name resolution and that makes them a huge problem. You know the garbled names that .onion sites use? My suggestion was to make that the public key and to do away with directory servers, using something like DHT instead.

tl;dr: "Public key" doesn't mean "published key" and "published" doesn't necessarily mean "in an easy-to-read directory somewhere."

The simple fact that it uses "directory servers" for Tor stuff (including hidden services) means that there is centralization in the network. Centralization of control is the enemy of anonymous communications because it vastly shrinks the target surface area required to damage or intercept that communications. This is just another hole in the bottom of the anonymity boat for Tor users. A better system would publish services using the public key of a strong asymmetric encryption algorithm such that the only valid responses could be encrypted with the private key; flooding the network with bad information to turn yourself into the correct node for a given "hidden service" name simply wouldn't work.

Terrible behavior of children saw a meteoric rise over the last two decades combined with total neutering of teachers' ability to control behavior in the classroom for fear of being promptly fired. If a child wishes to be defiant and ignore all authority, the teacher has no options but to run to the principal's office.

That's the irony of it all: women shame women into suppressing their own desires and conforming to predefined female roles. Men have very little (or nothing at all) to do with it. Subtle reinforcements by women for what women should be are everywhere. Where were the men to ruin everything when this all-female business consumed itself in cattiness? "The venomous women were supposedly the talented employees I had headhunted to achieve my utopian dream - a female-only company with happy, harmonious workers benefiting from an absence of men."

The effects of the encryption export bans from the 1990s haunts us today in the form of the "logjam" vulnerability. Those stupid "export-grade" ciphers for HTTPS are still around and can potentially be cracked with a big enough box of GPUs. Worse yet is that a heap of browsers and servers will go for the garbage ciphers first. In light of this reality, one must wonder how this kind of authoritarian bullshit will swat us all in the digital testicles 10-20 years from now.

Actually, it's a rather good Japanese drama.

Actually, Asus makes some of the best PC laptops in existence if you ignore the cheap ass stuff that all manufacturers make. The last two new laptops I purchased were Asus laptops. The build quality is on par with Apple's laptops. They don't lock down the BIOS so you can't use Windows 7 - the ACPI 5.0-only age is upon us so that even if you kill Secure Boot and try to install Win7 as UEFI it'll BSOD and say your machine is not ACPI compiant, but I have seen zero brand new Asus laptops that do this crap and plenty of cheap new Acer boxes that do. They're engineered quite well compared to many other manufacturers who will take your $1000 and sell you a crummy plastic laptop with hot palmrests and screws that easily back out and fall out of the computer over time. Same deal with their motherboards: if you don't buy the absolute $40 bargain basement junker boards that no manufacturer really seems to get right, you always seem to get a solid board with a BIOS that lets you change and re-clock and tune everything under the sun to your liking if you so desire.

The real problem is that lots of people buy cheap shit computer hardware and they get exactly what they pay for when they do. All manufacturers come out with duds too (that's just how it goes in the manufacturing game) so reading reviews before purchasing is far more important than the name stamped or painted on the item's casing. Branding isn't as important today as it used to be. In the end Foxconn, Quanta, and Compal actually manufacture almost all of this stuff, so the quality often comes down to the engineering of the specific model of board or laptop and who it was made for.

I picked up an Asus Q551LN recently and despite it being a "convertible" laptop (which I will never "convert" but the only other i7-4xxx 15" options were a junky plastic HP and a "Republic of Gamers" cinder block) it has a proper cooling system in the hinge area similar to an older MacBook Pro (though not nearly as poor). It's a Core i7 ULV; it's not noisy but it's pretty darn fast. Admittedly, it's half the PassMark score of a 4710MQ, but the low TDP (it barely gets warm) and the fact that I don't have to lug around one of those absurdly fat gaming laptops totally offset the performance drop.

Someone give this coward some insightful points. Well said.

It's not a good idea to generalize so strongly about an entire demographic like that, or at least not without providing some sources to back up some of the assertions so we can read them and achieve a better understanding of what you're saying.

I disagree with lumping Gen Y in with millennials. The definition of the term is just stretched way too wide in most cases. You can't tell me that someone born in 1980 is going to approach the world the same way as someone born in 1995. Gen Y (the "early" millennials) grew up on BBSes, Commodore 64s, Apple //e computers with Oregon Trail, and NES consoles, while "late" millennials never knew a time that the Internet wasn't ubiquitous in society. To the early side modern technology is amazing; to the late side, it *just is*.

Were the sexual comments directed towards the person in the article? Is this an individual teenager complaining or are there others who can corroborate this view of the behavior is a reasonable one? What facts exist that point to the Lena image being the exclusive cause of the "boys' sexual comments?"

The whole thing is written by a teen (not exactly a demographic known for mental and emotional maturity, stability, or experience) and the comments contain many instances of previous students of the same program in the same school that express the opposite view of the program as a whole and the choice of Lena's image in particular. Unless there is more evidence, it seems this isolated individual is the only one who has a problem with anything. There is no logical or rational reason to change anything to suit one emotional teen's vague public whinging.