Should laptops be banned? Yes. But let's ban them because writing offers better recall and less personal distractions. Frankly the argument that someone else reading facebook is distracting is almost laughable. I fail to see how facebook or slashdot are any more distracting on someone else's laptop than for example a word document or OneNote.

But as a sidebar I just want to point out how lame "college" has become. It used to be for those serious about their education or the academic subjects, but now it is just another mandatory level of education with the same behavioural problems from those who really have no wish to be in attendance. The fact that we're talking about treating 19 to 24 year olds like small children should tell you how silly the situation is becoming.

I love how computer crimes are measured on an entirely different scale to all other crimes. While I think her crime was serious, when you look at the prison sentence relative to other things it seem disproportionate. If she had done the same thing without a computer I bet she would see less than 1/2 the jail time.

I bet the Secret Service would have LOVED that. :)

I like Obama and love Mythbusters (or used to). What a lame duck of a Myth. That Myth wasn't even very exciting the first time they did it, let alone the second, and now a third time?! If they're going to have Obama on it then why can't we see him getting his hands dirty? What better way to get people excited about science by showing a man a lot of people respect excited about it?

London for all intense and purposes does exactly the same thing. You cannot take "professional" pictures without a licence (which costs money) and if you have a DSLR you are presumed to be a professional - thus if you're lucky harassed by the police, and worst given a summons to turn up at court (or VERY unlucky arrested under vague anti-terrorism laws).

Either that or cats just don't give a shit, and have absolutely no interest in being trained. Cats are highly intelligent from what I've observed both in terms of how they interact with their environment and also how easily they manipulate us...

Here is a list of a things a cat enjoys:
- Sleeping
- Eating
- Hunting/exploring/monitoring its territory
- Sunbathing

You won't find fetching a stick or licking your hand on that list because cats have little to no interest in that. I have seen some trained up to a fairly high level but frankly cats - like humans, have far too much free will to be easily manipulated.

Here is what will happen:
1) People will "game" the system to get cheaper quotes (e.g. fake browser history, fake cookies, etc).
2) Some insurance company which doesn't really understand technology will either sue a client, or try and withhold a payout
3) A 70 year old judge will agree that fake browser history (or "privacy" as I like to call it) is fraud
4) A law will be passed making it illegal to tamper with or destroy your browsing history, or to attempt to avoid tracking while online

Can anyone explain how the bash script / commands work? I know a fair bit about Linux but frankly this goes into device mappings at a level I've rarely had to deal with.

Frankly I'm a little surprised - since in my experience employees are more or less slaves in the US. The entire legal structure seems set up for whatever is easiest and cheapest for employers to do whatever they wish. Employees can sue, and that is often the de-facto suggestion whenever anyone in the US has a problem, but frankly a lot of situations could be avoided if they had a strong legal framework like every other developed country.

No holiday time, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no restrictions on hours worked, no mandated breaks, few health and safety regulations, can be fired without notice or reason, can legally discriminate, etc. It is like working in the third world. Between this and health care the US is low on my list of places I wish to work.

Just to clarify in case you didn't RTFA this isn't a cure for all forms of blindness. Unfortunately we still aren't at the point of being able to clip a camera on to people and having their brains understand that input directly. But it does somewhat mitigate forms of blindness which are directly associated with the eye (as opposed to the image processing centre which is a common form of blindness). But that being said, this is HUGE. We can cure several kinds of blindness or at least mitigate it. The quality of life increase to the people who receive this new medical technology will simply be like night and day.

I love how "computer crimes" are punished on an entirely different scale to regular crimes. You can go bottle someone (break a glass bottle over their head) and you get an average of zero days in jail (suspended for two years). You can go mug someone and get only a week of "hard time" with a year of parole. I mean heck you can go run someone down in your car and still get a lighter sentence than 18 weeks...

There is no level of rationality to computer crime sentences because the "old people" on both sides of the bench are simply too ignorant and out of touch to really know what the crime involved or how serious it was. This case should never have wasted the UK's courts time and public money let alone the cost of keeping him in jail for any period at all.

Frankly I have a VERY low opinion of the police, judge, and state for this one. I want a million pounds spent on arrested serious criminals and keeping them locked away. Give the mugger, violent thug, or drug dealers 18 week sentences instead of saving them for the "omg computer terrurist?! he uses microsoft and word to send deadly communications of doom!"

What's more - he wasn't even punished for threatening people. It is one thing to make threats and to scare people. It is another thing entirely to offend or upset them. While I think the things he said were extremely rude and offensive - nobody felt in fear for their security.

I keep reading these articles about "cyber-warfare" and sometimes I forget that they're talking about my field of expertise. The things they talk about are more akin to some kind of real life battlefield, and they seem to want to push that as the methodology to "fight it." Which seems to involve counter-attacks which make no sense and has little to do with patching and best practices.

Frankly I feel as if you have a bunch of Generals and politicians who have seen Operating Swordfish, Hackers, and similar Hollywood blockbusters - and think that hacking (and security) is this glamorous little battle rather than a spotty nerd installing patches, changing configuration files, and others looking for human mistakes in those configurations/networks.

But that all being said, what do I care if some General has a boner for cyber security and wants to invest a few million in a industry I happen to profit from. Go right ahead I say. I just want them to quit attempting to alarm the general public with nonsense threads about hackers setting off a nuclear bomb, shutting down power, and otherwise ending the world.

The complexities of the situation are that Apple would spend money so Sun/Oracle could make money. You will also note that Microsoft doesn't maintain Java for Windows. But really I'm not arguing for any particular party being "right" or "wrong" all I'm saying is that a lot of people entirely misunderstand what is being discussed.

To be honest I think this is just a random issue the anti-Apple haters have decided to pick up on in their never ending quest to convince everyone else that the company sucks. The only thing more annoying than Apple fanboys are Apple haters. Both sides are morons.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread so let me make this as clear as I can - Apple isn't blocking Sun/Oracle's ability to ship Java for the OS X platform, what they're doing is dropping internal maintenance for the platform from within Apple themselves. Up until now Apple has been porting Java to the OS X platform, and they're now discontinuing that and consequently removing it from their update system.

If someone else, including Sun/Oracle want to start maintaining a Java for OS X release they absolutely can - it just won't be available via OS X's automatic update scheme any longer (and won't be something Apple is paying for).

What the heck is Drupal? Are we meant to know? I've never even heard of it?