A while back I signed up for a MOOC in a subject that I find very interesting. The structure of the "learning" environment, with no way to engage in any kind of discussion without first navigating the colossal trainwreck of a message board cluttered with hundreds (thousands?) of introductory messages that no human being could possibly sort through, was such a huge turn-off that I can't imagine why I'd ever want to look at one of them again. They actually recommended Twitter - the most superficial, badly-threaded "communication" method since shouting to strangers at riots - to use as a discussion tool. A podcast that didn't try to be interactive would've been better, because at least it wouldn't have had "first day at a new high school" front-loaded onto it. Or give me a book to read rather than making me listen to a stilted one-way lecture that I can't skim as needed. For someone who went to a small college, in part to avoid those god-awful 100-student lecture classes, it was the most pedagogically hostile environment I've ever seen passed off as "education".

No, it's like how convicted pedophiles are not allowed to live or hang out near schools.

Obviously one has to draw a line somewhere, but comparing a computer to food is obviously not a rational comparison.

(And FYI, the analogy would be "People accused of lock picking are not allowed to have lockpicks". Which should be obvious.)

First off, £350 is probably not particularly out of line for the cost to process the records. If we were talking £350000 pounds, yeah, that would look like an attempt at censorship. But there's nothing pecular about £350. Secondly, if anyone in the media had felt it was even remotely newsworthy, they would have paid it. The media pays processing costs for records all the time. All that this means is that most news agencies consider Warg a non-story.

Warg's restrictions are special specifically because the crime his charged with is hacking. Banning a graphing calculator is probably overreach, but it's understandable why they'd want to keep him away from computers.

Sort of like the last leak, the "Kissinger Cables", that were publicly accessible data that journalists and historians have been making use of for years, which he downloaded, reformatted, and set on the Wikileaks site.

New slogan suggestion: Wikileaks: We Open Governments (by taking the data they've already released, running it through a couple python scripts, putting it on our site, and calling it something new)

If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation.

Then you have not learned anything, padawan. It may be commonly true of your peers, but it is not true of most humans in middle age or later, especially those of less tech-friendly varieties.

I actually did very well in school, despite being a social misfit of sorts: a fairly typical smart kid who'd rather make stuff in his room than play with the other kids. Great GPA, test scores in the 99th percentile, etc. But it hasn't correlated with my professional and financial success, which has been ... limited. Which may just mean that success in school isn't always dependent on the attributes that make one successful in later life. Or maybe I've just been screwed over more than statistically average.

For those hesitant to google it, but curious what this is: it involves refashioning the end of the forearm into pincers, using each of the bones as a "finger".

Yeah, this is a textbook example* of how relying on an outside "cloud" service – especially one that you have no contractual control over – to store your data is a really dumb idea.

*OK, maybe it's just in the teacher's edition.

"Do you really expect me to disconnect an employee computer, hull it up to my office, and reinstall there - just so I can have a standard local root password the other admins also know?"

That'd be a more appropriate place to do an OS install, but no: I expect you to lift your head and look around before typing, to see if anyone is staring at the screen. Because if there are other people in the room, and you're really that concerned that they'll be snooping at your root password, they can just as easily look at your hands on the keyboard.

The practice of masking passwords in all circumstances is a perfect example of unthinking That's How We've Always Done It Syndrome. It dates back to the days of printing terminals, where everything you typed was dot-matrixed onto a roll of paper as you went. It was a very good idea and very important that those passwords not be echoed back to the user, because they'd be preserved on greenbar paper for someone else in the terminal room or computer lab to find.

But most password entry isn't done in that context anymore. With password-saving features on web browsers and smartphones, it's often done once, then left alone; people can easily take a quick look around to make sure no one's looking when they tap their e-mail password into their smartphone during initial setup. A login screen that doesn't echo the password as you type it, but has "remember my password" checkbox... makes no sense whatsoever. But they're programmed that way, because That's How We've Always Done It. Not masking the password when you initially set the password is a good idea because it's really not that difficult to make the same typo twice in a row, and once you've done that with the root password on a new system, you're screwed.

I work in an IT office, and every day I get multiple calls from users who've locked themselves out of their accounts because they couldn't see what they were typing. Caps-Lock is a frequent culprit, and if I had a dollar for every time I've asked a user to check that and try again (and it worked), I'd be able to buy pizza for the whole department every Friday.

There are certainly circumstances where masking the password is a good idea. Kiosks where the user is likely to have strangers standing in line behind her, portable devices that are likely to be used on coffee shop tables, and high-security environments of various kinds. But not all password entry requires that level of looking-over-your-shoulder-but-not-really-because-you-can't-be-bothered-to paranoia to applied. If I'm logging in to Netflix.com to add a movie to my queue, I don't need the kind of password-masking secrecy needed to log in to the medical-records software used where I work. And it's high time someone had the critical thinking skills to start making this judgment call on a case-by-case basis.

Ideologues don't allow the possibility that there are ever valid exceptions to their dogma.

Please read the second half of my reply. That is what's wrong with "enforcing the laws we have".

"What is wrong with enforcing the laws we have?" Aside from the fact that some of the laws we have are wrong-headed and counterproductive (e.g. copyright terms that not only outlive the creators, but also their children, and even their grandchildren, thus stifling independent creative appropriation), there's the fact that the laws we have don't make any sense (as in "I have no idea what this means", not just merely misguided) in the context of modern technology.

Don't forget the low-cost dumb terminals – I'm sorry: "thin clients" – which are incapable of doing anything at all independently of the centrally-adminstered silicon. The computing environment I work in today is architecturally very similar to the one I started working in back in the mid-1980s.

This is the government we're talking about.....there are all sorts of compliance laws. It needs to wide enough for a wheelchair, have hand railings, be at a shallow enough slope, be made to withstand at last 1000lbs, be sourced from an approved lumber mill, be transported by union workers, etc.