And the fix is... Linux! Before you mod me funny, hear me out.

Pick a good Linux distro and install it dual-boot alongside whatever version of Windows you're running. In the installation of most distros you can add a separate partition; do so.

Alternately, you can run FDisk (which will wipe out all data) and make three partitions. Install your current version of Windows in one of them, then W8 on a second, and then install Linux on the third.

When you boot your machine you'll get a menu giving you a choice of (e.g.) Win 7, Win 8, and Linux. Use Win 7 or Linux for normal computing and Win 8 for the W8-only games.

I had an incident with a black SUV with large, armed men a few years ago. All I did wrong was park in front of the wrong house. Scared the hell out of me, afterwards it just pissed me off that my 4th amendment rights were violated when they searched me and my car with no warrant. They didn't bother asking, they just pointed their tasers at me. Coats read SPD, FBI, and the guy in the ski mask (in July!) had a coat that read DEA. And I'm an old white guy, imagine if I was 20 and black.

Really lessened my respect for cops. No, fuck calling them cops, here's a handle from my youth - PIGS.

OT (or maybe not considering we're discussing our loss of civil rights), but considering PRISM your sig is a little backwards. In Soviet USSA, internet logs on to you.

Come to think of it, it is on-topic. The kid wouldn't have been arrested if the Texas KGB hadn't been trolling Facebook for illegal free speech.

I have a cousin who spent ten years in prison for posession; not sure what drug or what amount, but considering your username I'd move to Colorado or Washington State if I were you (possession of small amounts is a civil offense with a small fine here in Springfield). Texas is the closest thing to Singapore the US has when it comes to laws.

Seriously, you should stay out of Texas. Ever heard Uneasy Rider?

There's no way he'll be convicted unless he uses a public defender. He should be able to easily recoup the legal fees once he files suit against the entity that arrested him.

If he plays his cards right he can retire before he's 20. As you noted, this was a gross violation of his civil rights. With the right lawyer, he'll be a rich man when he's grown.

Why would they need wait for you to be online then risk detection by using a backdoor when they can just make a call to facebook, your ISP or your mobile phone network and probably get far more valuable information?

Neither Facebook nor your ISP has any information about your network that you didn't volunteer. Unless you're not smart enough to put a hardware firewall between your modem and router (as well as other measures) they're not going to easily get your private data. Data you give your ISP, facebook, or any other cloud entity isn't private.

If you're putting, say, trade secrets in the cloud you're a fool.

Having the source to your firewall's OS and software is far more important than internal OSes, but code in your OS can "phone home" and let the attacker in to your network, so a closed source OS with network access is still dangerous.

By the time Google cars get here I'll probably really need one; I'm not getting any younger. I'm looking forward to them, too.

The "humanities" in modern American academia are so fucking orthodox they might as well be called the "government worship department."

Wow, that's sad. It's a complete 180 from how college was in the late seventies. Of course, we'd just gotten out of a very unpopular war, the previous President had resigned in disgrace, and we had recession and inflation at the same time.

However, a few humanities courses wouldn't hurt some slashdotters. I haven't seen any in this thread yet, but some comments make me think the commenter is a high school dropout. "i thought those dog's would loose there mind's." You can't write like that and be taken seriously by anyone with an education.

I also agree with another poster in this thread who said humanities majors should take more math and science. If you haven't gotten a well-rounded education, you're not really educated.

From your link: "At 05:38 GMT on Thursday 23rd May, Ecuadorâ(TM)s first and only satellite collided with the fuel tank of an S14 Soviet rocket, which was launched in 1985."

Yes, there was a collision between Ecuador's satellite (TFA doesn't say how big) but the satellite wasn't the debris, it was the discarded fuel tank that when jettisoned should have been thrown so that it would have come back down that was the debris. But the space junk problem hadn't really come up a quarter century ago. The rest of the article just showed the naming conventions of various satellite sizes.

Give me a link where two functional devices that were actually being used at the time collided. Space junk is a problem, but these de-orbit at EOL, unlike Russian fuel tanks.

LEO can still be hazardous.

Something that small can't, at least after it reaches the atmosphere. These things are, if I read right, about the size of a Rubic Cube. Skylab was just a little bigger. They'll vaporize instantly.

+1 funny, though, and that was a great link.