Anyone else reminded of Splinter Cell, where Sam can track people's "life signs" through his googles?

I had a PowerBook charger nearly catch fire back in the day. Had I not caught the burning smell, I might have lost my whole house.

I'm always a little cagey about leaving laptops plugged in unattended nowadays.

Seriously. Just get a refurbished iMac and put it in there.

I converted my parents a few years back and was so happy when I could finally stop cleaning up virus and malware laden crap. Even better, when I came to visit, I wasn't scared shitless that there were any key loggers or other unpleasantry installed. Yes, I know OS X isn't malware-proof, but it "feels" less vulnerable than what they had. The OS is set to automatically update along with their apps and everything is automagically backed up with Time Machine. My Dad still likes to play games in Windows; running Boot Camp and Deep Freeze keeps things happy there and when they want to surf, they just boot back into OS X.

Except you're missing out on ABE and some of the more advanced features of NoScript. ScriptSafe also hasn't been updated in over five months. The last time I used it, it had some pretty frustrating bugs that made me go back to Firefox and NoScript. Maybe as it improves, I'll give it another shot, but not now...

Until Chrome gets a solid NoScript-ish plugin, I'm sticking with Firefox. ABE and a few other NoScript features keep me happy.

Simple. Archive mail by the year as it gets too big. Use mutt's search for the basic searching and maildir-utils for the heavy lifting.

To those saying keeping email forever is hoarding: not if it's done right. You'd be surprised how useful it is to go back and find an email from four years ago.

When are people going to learn that they have no privacy on their employer's computer systems? Geeks and IT folks seem to have the biggest problem with this. If you really need that privacy, go out to your car on your lunch hour and use your smartphone. At the end of the day, it's your employer's power, bandwidth, space, and equipment. If they want to monitor their systems, they have every right to do so. Now obviously, some monitoring is a huge gray area when it comes to moral and ethical issues. So why not simply side step the issue by using your own person accounts, devices, and access?

I went to college when technologies like Blackboard were just beginning to come to fruition. The problem I've always had with online courses is that they give you no added incentive to do to the work. Motivation may be its own reward for some people, but I still need that subtle "mental push" to succeed. A class set in an actual classroom gives my brain some reason to be there and do the work. Online courses just makes me think they're available "whenever." The concept of deadlines and necessity quickly goes out the window, usually along with my grades.

People don't drop these courses, because they don't remember them and/or don't think about them. The same goes for "hybrid" online courses, where you still spend some class time in a physical classroom. You're not getting enough cues to actually realize you're doing poorly. The instructor is also poorly interfaced with the class that they don't match a student's online progress with their physical presence.

Maybe working on your day's assignment in your PJs at 3 a.m. appeals to you. I still want to see and talk to the instructor. I need that "meat space" interaction.

Whatever happened to good ol' fashioned attendance? Back when I was going to school, it was done with Scantron forms. The teacher took attendance and sent a runner to deliver the form(s) to the attendance office where they were processed. Once it was determined that a kid was out that shouldn't have been, that office called the parent to ascertain where the kid was. Simple, effective, and hardly Orwellian.

Don't get me started on taking attendance in college courses, though...

I sort of think he should have kept a better eye on his properties, but that's neither here nor there.

Fundamentally, I think this is why we need some form of authentication that "only you know," but everyone can verify/authenticate against. Most places -foolishly- usually social security numbers here in the 'states. I think that's a terrible idea as the protections surrounding them are incredibly weak. I was going to suggest this fellow have some sort of PGP/GPG setup, but if the criminals got into his email, they'd probably have his passphrase(s) and key(s), too.

Sigh...

Annoyingly, I can think of two devices that can't cope without TKIP under WPA2. The older Apple Airport Express and a Linksys wireless bridge.

Without TKIP, these two devices have effectively become expensive (when they were purchased, at least) door stops. It's aggravating, because they both advertised support for WPA2-AES!