And conversely, they have no clue what obstacles we face or why we claim our jobs are difficult. "So, yeah, can you also have it map each email address to the sender's DNA and use the link to record their conversations at home and send them to me sorted by topic? I'll need that by Thursday, or if you can get to it earlier that would be even better. I realize this was just intended to generate order confirmation emails, but it could be so much more if you'd only be willing to put some thought into it!"

This. With apologies to Heinlein, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Zero-Emission Lunch. Your state can switch from coal to all-solar? Great! Good luck on finding zero-emission sources for the components, all of which I'm sure are made from renewable resources. Ditto for wind, and that's our LEAST problematic alternative energy source.

I would dearly love to get the planet, or at least the major consumers, off nonrenewable, polluting energy sources... but we don't have the magic bullet yet. Nothing even comes close to meeting the needs of a major city (by which I arbitrarily choose to mean > 1 million people), much less an entire state or country.

So, they could accurately differentiate the emotions conveyed by "I love you" vs. "I would love to wring your neck"? And can they detect sarcasm? Oh, that's a real useful invention...

^This.

TFS (and, if I were to read it, I suppose TFA) make it sound like there's a one-size-fits-all global identity model for all websites. If HuffPo or Facebook or even gmail decide to eliminate trolls by requiring proof of real identity, then it must follow that SecretKinkySex.com must also do the same.

No.

I actually agree that mainstream news sites have good reason for reducing anonymity for exactly the reasons stated -- to eliminate, or at least reduce to a manageable level, trolls. They could even argue that it is in their best interests to do so.

Sites where just your presence on the site may cause irreparable damage to your personal life, your job, etc. -- not so much. It is in THEIR best interests to provide anonymity to the best of their ability.

So, yeah. If you are willing to have your name associated with your inflammatory posts, give your real name to the sites that require it. If not, avoid those sites and stick with places that allow anonimity; they will always do so or they will go out of business (even if "business" is just selling ad space). Problem solved.

Remembering three English words is only useful if there was some descriptive value to the words tying them uniquely to that place. So you tell me to meet you at foo.bar.baz. Where the hell is that? How do I get there from plugh.plover.frobozz?

Well, that's not always the case.. And when hindsight reveals that a killer had joked or made facebook posts or otherwise gave warning signs about the destruction to come, and police write it off as just some kid harmlessly blowing off steam, the public invariably crucifies them for failing to follow up on the warning signs.

So... they're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Yes, in retrospect it's easy to see which ones really were just harmless sarcastic jokes and which ones were obvious warning signs, because we know how the story turned out.

Was the jail sentence an overreaction? Perhaps. By the time they got to that point they had probably sorted out whether he had a real problem or if he was just sarcastically responding to someone else's comment. But in a world where school shootings are entirely too common and too real, he's got to learn that you can't say stuff like that and not have any consequences. This isn't punishment for a crime he didn't commit; this is ensuring that he doesn't create panic and waste police time with more idiotic statements in the future.

I'm not saying that they did the right thing. I'm just saying, it isn't so black-and-white. They can be too slow to respond and risk finding out the hard way that those "jokes" were a cry for help, or they can be too quick to respond and crack down on somebody for making an innocent, if tasteless, comment. I'm sure glad I never have to make that decision!

Seriously? Why on earth would anybody consider those an intrinsic part of the operating system? If I want to access mail from my computer, I either pull up an application that handles mail (for POP3) or a web browser. If I want to play or edit or do whatever with music, I install an application designed to do those things.

How about if my operating system just sticks to the job of system operations?

Were all editors killed in the cultural revolution? Forward is a direction. Foreword is a word that comes before other words.

This. My state U had two different paths to a CS degree, BSc and BBA. The former required calculus, which I tried three times and failed three times before I realized it just wasn't going to happen*. Switched to the BBA which required a couple of accounting and marketing courses I never used, but at least I was able to get that piece of paper saying I know how to write computer programs.

Sadly, they were still pushing COBOL as the pinnacle of software development and by the time I was out looking for a job, it was all PCs.

* It may have turned out differently if I actually read the lessons and did the homework and stayed awake in class, but at 19 I was an idiot.

Sounds like my story, idontgno. I picked up a copy of Ahl's "BASIC Computer Games" at the library and entered them all into the TRS-80 demo model at the mall's Radio Shack over the course of a summer. When they started throwing me out there, I hung around Foley's where they had that IMSAI alongside the original Commodore PET, which is the one I eventually bought.

The sales dude at Foley's was always my best programming teacher. I'd go in and he'd show me some cool hack he had figured out and say "I bet you can't do THIS"... so I played around with the program until I figured out how he did whatever it was.

Yup, exactly. {grumble, grumble} so why does yours get +4 insightful and mine was modded down as a troll? Oh, you fickle moderators... I wan't trolling; I was seriously expressing concerns that Firefox is no longer just trying to be the best browser but has become encumbered with a ton of cruft like "social provider" nonsense.

Remember when Firefox used to be a web browser? I liked it when it was a web browser.

I am *so* stealing that warning. It's a far more concise explanation than I have been trying to convey to friends and relatives for nigh-on 25 years without success. I tell them over and over, TANSTAAFL, and they say "But it's free! It says so!" And don't even get me started about my son, now 21, who still hasn't made the connection between all the pirated games he downloads (or is that "gamez he downloadz"?) and the rampant viruses constantly breaking his system.

It's not necessarily friends directly posting crap on your page. A lot of fraud/spam on Facebook comes from these pages set up specifically to attract followers so the page can be sold for huge advertising bucks. They'll post exploitative pictures of injured animals, maimed soldiers, etc. with captions like "1 SHARE = 1 RESPECT". No matter how often I've warned my friends against forwarding this stuff, they'll do exactly what they are told because they don't want to be accused of not caring about puppies or war heroes or orphans or Jesus or whatever.

The end result is, no matter how hard I try to avoid it and how careful I am to restrict my account only to friends and colleagues I personally know, I still get spam from these phony accounts plastered all over my news feed.

I have about the cheapest camera you can get, a Kodak® EasyShare® I got at Walmart® three or four years ago for maybe $40 (it was their Black Friday special). Sometimes the lens won't go in and out all the way because it got sand in it. And yet... there has never been any problem with the software. Delete random photos out of a bunch directly on the camera, no problem.

So... if a couple of folks on here say that deleting files has caused file system corruption and a couple of other folks have stated they never saw such problems, who's to say which viewpoint is more common? We'd need a slightly bigger sample size than 5 or 10 self-selected nerds before we could draw any larger scope conclusions from the bit of anecdotal evidence presented here from both sides.