You really should be communicating with your profs during class, not dinking around on your laptop. Unless you type quite a bit faster than most hunt and peckers, you're going to take better notes with pen and paper anyway, and there are relatively few situations where you really need a computer during class as a tool.

What really should be banned is the use of PowerPoint lectures. You know the ones..... where your prof essentially scanned all the relevant sections of the textbook and then cruises through 200 screens of unreadable shrunken slides at light speed while staring at his laptop. Most folks use it as a crutch rather than a visual aid to get a handful of important points across visually, or provide a persistent framework for discussion. It's irritating. I'd much rather see the chalk board in use, screeching and all... at least then the instructor is forced to cover the material at the speed it takes him/her to think through it, giving you enough time to grok it during the lecture.

Lame. Not enforcing net neutrality allows, and encourages service providers and media companies to selectively censor whatever they want; they can without violating any legal requirements simply make it too expensive for anyone else to voice their opinion publicly or provide competing content. Heck, you don't even have to actively censor things... you just make the performance and cost of everything that isn't your content slightly more expensive, and economics will make sure that your message is seen more than the 2nd class citizen content.

There is too much danger of these huge corporations manipulating free speech and culture to allow anyone to do that. It will quite rapidly devolve into the same environment as TV... only the rich and big companies can afford to publish.

The internet is a communications media. You don't let the phone company tell you what you can talk about on your phone. Why should you let your ISP tell you what you can see on the internet? It's the same garbage where the TV corporations want to control your internet the same way they control what shows get made. Hint: the shows that get made aren't the shows the people want to see; they are the shows the corporate executives think will sell to advertisers best.

Layer your firewalls like the design of a medieval keep. Exterior curtain wall, plus defensible keep.

You don't know whether threats come from inside or outside; therefore when in doubt firewall everywhere.

For most applications where CPU power matters, hyperthreading actually hurts performance, because the scheduler assumes that the hyper cores are real cores, when in fact they are not. A hyperthreaded core is not a full core, and will bottleneck waiting for the bits it doesn't have on the real core. I prefer not even having hyperthreaded cores unless the os and applications are aware that some cores are gimpy hyperthread cores and takes that into account; i.e does not schedule on them, or only schedules tasks that are not actually crippled by dependency on the real cores on the hyper cores.

Try running a database on hyperthreaded cores....it blows chunks. It's better if you just disable them in BIOS.

Yep. I have dental implants (titanium/ceramic composite teeth screwed into the skull) and a titanium plate with six screws in my arm. It may not be electronic, but I do have artificial replacement parts.

So there. Cyborg.

Whoever designed the system is terrible at computer science.

These are home users, using a government provider scanner, and id card, and a key.

Would be pretty easy to build a rootkit filter driver that steals the data off the card during legitimate transactions, along with a keylogger. At that point, you can pretty much remotely impersonate anyone whom you've rootkitted. Doesn't matter how secure the back end is because you can easily dupe the scanner side.

Terrible, terrible design by idiots....you can't trust home user systems to be clean of rootkits.

#1 You teach people that software is usually deterministic; if I follow known sequence of steps A, result B will occur. If not, something is usually wrong and its time to ask an expert for assistance.

#2 The way to learn technology is to play with it before crunch time. That means that when you get a new application in front of you, you should explore the menus, see what they can do and how the software behaves so that you can later on be creative when using it under pressure.

#3 Basic computer architecture; e.g. RAM is temporary working space, the hard disk is where your files are saved, etc. How to identify which part of the computer needs to upgrade; e.g. when to add RAM, when to replace the video card, when to get a new machine. How to navigate directories so you actually know where you saved your files (people over 40 have issues with this).

#4 Basic networking. What a NAT is, how to hook up a broadband router. How to determine how fast it really is and reason about whether you are getting what you pay for.

#5 Basics of what kind of problems are done well by computers and what kind of problems computers suck at. Basics of why some algorithms are faster than others at doing the same job. One of the biggest problems with business using computers is that people do not understand anything that does not scale linearly. Examples of applications used for various common types of tasks.

#6 How incredibly complex the stuff is under the hood....that when something is actually wrong with the software, it's extremely difficult to track it down.

#7 Algebra. No, really.

Duh, the extra whitespace helps you parse each sentence seperately.

It's much more mentally taxing to read a singlespaced block of mooshed together text. Also, typography concerns are nowadays about how to wrap text around oddly shaped illustrations in magazines and advertisements without strange gaps, not making actual text readable. The typography nerds may claim that the original standard before the advent of typewriters and modern computers is "more correct", but I rather think it's not due to objectiveness in analyzing which one is actually better.