To what government are you referring? The U.S. government has made strong moves toward Open Source, and the military barely glances at Windows anymore (with a few notable exceptions).

Many other governments (and I do mean MANY) won't touch Windows at all. They feel (in my opinion rightly): if it ain't Open, it ain't suitable for public agencies.

Eh... that's pretty thin. I don't think the relevant court cases agree with you. At least in most states.

In general, courts have ruled that pornography is only pornography because of its content. Even when it's sexually explicit (generally speaking), it's only "obscenity" if it has ZERO social or artistic merit other than pornography.

Granted, child pornography is different in that the only requirement for being "obscene" is anything sexual explicit. It doesn't matter if it's "artistic".

Even so, that's why taking a picture of your kid in the bathtub is not "child pornography". There's nothing sexual about it.

I am pretty sure that in most states, now matter how it was marketed, even if there was cover art of porn stars, an innocent video clip of a kid splashing around in the tub would not be ruled child pornography. There are standards and there are reasons for them. It's not just someone's arbitrary opinion, and it doesn't matter what label is slapped on it. Probably the worst it would get is a charge for fraud because it wasn't pornography after all.

THAT part I agree with, but "she needs to go to jail", I do not. Necessarily. OP was vague on the details.

But I think a lot of what was exposed in OP's article is that these are teenagers being prosecuted for doing your average dumb teenage things. Hell... in a lot of states it is legal to actually have sex for 2 or more years before you're even legally allowed to give someone a nude picture of yourself. And I think that says there's something seriously wrong with the "sexting" laws.

You're doing it wrong.

Not wrong as in "that's wrong to do", but wrong as in "you'll do better with people you interact with in the real world."

If, of course, you can put the cellphone/iPad/keyboard down for enough minutes to interact with the people around you.

Online profiles are far more "crafted" than real-world interactions, and real-world interactions provide far more clues when someone is gaming you.

Sure, but it also includes virtual memory that is paged out (for example, a page that was touched once long ago, and not used since), so it's still not a useful metric in a sense that GP means.

Didn't you read my comment that started this thread? Your individual rights are stolen from you by the government that has no authority to take those rights away from you but it still does, so it is not the parents that are required to provide permission or consent, it is the government that took away the power to dictate / set the standard for what the kids are allowed / not allowed to do.

Why?

Edit: nevermind, I found it: "[they were deleted] primarily because they violate our blanket “no personal information / raids / calls to invasion” rule." Seems reasonable.

The obvious solution is to ensure that everyone has (or can get) an ID. It's not rocket science: most European countries do require an ID to vote, and no-one considers it discriminatory there, because the procedure of obtaining the ID is not.

And putting young people in prison and making them register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives does not?

If you think about it, it's actually the inevitable consequence of trying (successfully) to shoehorn Windows onto ARM tablets and phones. Now that both the kernel and the huge chunk of userspace are identical on all three, this means it had to be optimized a lot for both perf and size. But while those optimizations were a necessity for tablets and especially phones, the desktop also benefits, and the "freeze" of the minimum specs is the user-visible consequence.

(in practice, Win7 actually ran better than Vista on those minimal specs, and Win8.1 runs better still - again, a direct consequence of moving further towards the "one OS" goal)

You do realize that Windows uses free RAM for filesystem cache since Vista, right (just like Linux has been doing for many years before)? The amount of RAM "used", as reported in Task Manager, is basically meaningless.

The stupid far left people are usually also young. We basically assume that they're going to grow up eventually (I'll grant you that not all do, though...).

The stupid far right people tend to be significantly older, so they don't get the same leniency.

You don't actually use a decimal to measure outdoor temperature. You do use it to measure body temperature, where it actually matters (but then Fahrenheit is also not sufficiently precise to avoid it).