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It's the fundamental problem with being institutionalized in America: it's all about vengeance, not social rehabilitation.

TFA is dated 24 April, 2007 -- I'm pretty sure that this is old news.

it may be more difficult for Adeona to gain traction with non-technical law enforcement officers.

"So who do I call to confirm that this laptop is stolen?"
"Umm, me. You see, there's this free software called Adeona that anyone can set up to track their own laptop."
"Never heard of it..."

In previous threads about stolen laptops (like the AskSlashdot thread on how best to recover a stolen laptop) I read some anecdotes where people were in a similar situation with similarly-purposed software that they rolled themselves. Perhaps the software having a common face (same name and features) will be enough to solve this problem.

This is hardly an objective review. Then again the Slashdot submitter is also the author of the blog...

When you read comments like "if it wasn't for the logo at the top left you wouldn't even know it was owned and operated by Google. The page is blend with no much color or style" it really makes you wonder. Does it matter that Google didn't brand it everywhere they could like other companies? In classical Google fashion, they took a simplified approach, which itself is a form of Google branding (just look at google.com)

Then the reviewer goes on "It is 100% centered around the mouse, this for me is a horrible defect that must be solved immediately. I happen to know every keyboard shortcut known to man kind (sic) and I absolutely hate the mouse. I am sure there are many people like me out there. " Well good for you buddy. And great research you've done there in assuming that everyone else is just like you.

Finally he concludes with saying he found "several Sex oriented rooms". A quick glance through the room index shows maybe a dozen of the 1000+ rooms that are listed there have a sexual theme. Seems like a pretty good ratio considering the amount of porn to be found on the internet and people's computers in relationship to the rest of the content on the web.

But then again, remember this blog is from "The Random thoughts of a Christian IT Professional."

Anne McCaffery has some good ones, but they are generally dragon & space oriented. Pretty good reads, and there's quite a few in the series.

Orson Scott Card has Ender's Game (and several more in that series). These are definately classic.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, and the follow-ups are all very well written, though some of the deeper themes might be a bit above your kids depending on how sharp they are.

CS Lewis' Space Trilogy is excellent, though it gets pretty violent, and might be a bit advanced for pre-teens.

Terry Pratchett's books are funny, but they tend to spoof the politics and happenings of the US and the UK, so your kids might not grasp all the jokes. Much better would be Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the (increasingly misnamed) Hitchhiker's Trilogy (there are five books there).

If you like, you might even start them on JRR Tolkien, which is more fantasy than sci-fi, but definitely a classic. You also have the advantage of the movies once they're done with the books. (Books are better though.)

Those are my picks, and that should be enough reading for at least this summer, if not longer. You can also walk into your local Borders and ask someone. There's tons of great kids books in Sci-Fi...

It is, after all, just a video game.

It is a video game where you can regenerate health with the services of a prostitute, kill her when she gets out of the car, take your money back, kill a cop and steal his cop car, kill national guard members and steal their tank, and these people are worried about a little bit of clothed dry humping?

So while you may dismiss this as the painfully obvious, at least I'll have something to shut down the baseless claims that a lot of good useful tools today "make us stupid." It's still possible for something to make us both more productive and stupid but at least there's some evidence supporting instant messaging in the workplace.

i no xactly wat u meen! pholks sa i'm stewpid for it an 4 posteing on sashdot! i haf to go bac and rite my web pag

*sigh*

I gave both Photoshop 6 running very stable under Wine and The GIMP (sans Gimpshop) to my wife, who is a semi-professional photographer but has never used any photo editing applications and is a complete computer n00b.

I said pick the one that looks the easiest to you.

She picked The GIMP.

She's still had some learning curve, but she's also tried learning Photoshop, and that one seems just as hard to her.

Photoshop only seems easier to use because you've used it for a long time. Photoshop is difficult to work with, especially for a n00b.

Facebook is free, and it's not mandatory.

It should be obvious to anyone with a level of intelligence higher then a chimp that Facebook shares information, it's an information sharing site!

If you don't like it, don't use it.

It's obviously Woodstock. He's telling Snoopy about encryption.

JJMacey writes "Hi All, I follow /. for the news. I'm not a real geek, but do run Linux, open source applications, do web sites, blogs, etc. This is really a global question — what are the RSS feeds that you follow? The world is a big place, and I'd like to stay informed about all the goodness out there. JJMacey Phoenix, Arizona"
http://www.jjmacey.net/

A major KDE overhaul gives of one of the two prevailing Linux user interfaces a new look and new applications. Some features will be familiar Windows and Mac OS X users.
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9849110-39.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Many users wrote to alert us that KDE 4.0 has been released. Here's Computerworld Australia's take on the release KDE 4.0 is based on the Qt4 toolkit, which brings significant enhancements in the way memory is used. "So it ends up making KDE less resource intensive than KDE 3, which is quite an improvement," according to Australian KDE developer Hamish Rodda, who calls the new architecture "future-proof." Computerworld notes that developers are already at work porting the new environment to Windows and the Mac.

time961 writes "In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives."