It is jarring for me to realize that pages are being taken down because they merely *offend* others. These aren't kiddie porn or drug dealer pages, it's just people talking about stuff. They talk about their friends, their enemies, their schools, their governments. It's not all flowers and happiness. If they want real people on facebook, they need to realize that some people are going to say unpleasant things.

Maybe have a counter at the top of the pages that says "this page has received N complaints" but leave the content there so all can judge for themselves.

i'm having a difficult time getting past the 70's porn mustache.

I was going to trash talk Mr. Dziuba, just like everyone else, but you know what, he didn't actually submit this to slashdot. He ranted on his own blog own his own private website. Someone ELSE submitted it to slashdot, not Ted. Someone ELSE approved it and posted it, not Ted.

He's probably laughing his ass off that everyone's got their panties in a wad over something he probably wrote in less than 15 minutes and has already worked around all by himself already.

possibly, the most productive workers are rewarded with an extra monitor.

It's possible that the judge wants sony to find a good, solid reason to keep it in CA, so that he can rule against them later on. If he shines it on to NJ, he loses control of the case.

(a) you are factually incorrect: population percentage doesn't have anything to do with normal. would you call black children abnormal? in many school districts the percentage of blacks and gays is about the same.
(b) you are factually incorrect: yes, some kids are gay at age 6 and know it, and it's dreadfully common for kids to realize by then that if adults lie about santa claus they are probably also lying about god.
(c) you got this one right, yes the BSA is the worst offender, and many youth organizations go to great lengths to distance themselves from their 16th century nonsense
(d) you are factually incorrect: the prohibitions indeed apply to children. the court cases they've fought have been over adult members. they have a history of settling the kid's cases out of court because they know a jury will side with a kid no matter what.

Troll alert. My failure to respond to any future messages by you is is no way to be presumed to be an admission the BSA's policies are acceptable.

it seems reasonable to take as axiomatic that one should not discriminate against *anyone* when it comes to what should be an enriching childhood experience.

seriously, how messed up do you have to be to tell perfectly normal kids they can't have merit badges because they are gay? wtf.

The institutional homophobia and anti-atheism of some of those organizations is not exactly an ethical or moral high ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_membership_controversies

I won't touch the debate on students' rights or cell phone policies, but it seems odd that teachers would be allowed to delete items. It puts them in a very precarious position, in a couple of ways.

Basically, if something is offensive enough to be deleted, it should be instead preserved as evidence for disciplinary action. Once the evidence is deleted it's going to be very difficult to sanction the child at all and I can just imagine parents' exasperation when informed. How can they yell at their kid about something when the only "proof" was supposedly deleted?

And if a picture or text message wasn't merely offensive but was evidence of an illegal act, the teacher will have committed destruction of evidence. And what if the teacher finds pictures of 12 year old students not fully clothed? Viewing stuff like that in class is likely to be a termination offence. Displaying it to other children could conceivably lead to a criminal conviction.

Also, it seems naive to pretend that students won't adapt by just syncing/backing up their phones more often or downloading the offensive content again. And what if the offensive content was a web page? They can just bring it up again any time they want.

sounds like you probably have a 40 watt grow light you could press into service.

the bit depth is interesting, but the largest improvement would come from simply not using lossy compression. one hopes that TFA glossed over this and that nobody is seriously considering 24-bit MP3's.

Just speaking to your last point: while it has no gyroscope, you can steer iPad games well enough using the iPad's build-in accelerometer.

Is there some epidemic of compulsive gaming going on? Honestly, there's nothing wrong with playing some games at home on a PC or console, then stopping that and doing something else for a while.

Go for a walk, hang out with friends, get something to eat, heck, even do homework or (gasp!) talk to your parents about life. It's okay, and possibly even healthy, to do non-twitch, non-adrenaline things while out and about each day.

At this point, anything that has no recurring subscription costs sounds like a good deal to me. The wifi-only iPad is $500, which seems like a lot compared to a $149 smart phone, but the phone may have a 2-year contract that brings it closer to $2000.

it seems like this would only benefit protocols that load evenly between send and receive. maybe skype?

but if you're watching a movie on netflix or surfing the web or probably a lot of other things, you'll be doing so much more receiving than sending that it's not really worth it to have another antenna.