Thank you. Thank you. As an educator, this phenomena has been at the forefront of my mind for a long time. Every day, I go into school, and pull kids away from the computers, 4chan, google chat, Icanhascheeseburger, youtube. I confiscate cellphones and ipods. Last year, I caught a kid bluetoothing porn from his phone to his friends laptop. Keep in mind, these kids are in middle school. [/BEGIN /i/ kids these days /i/ STATEMENT/] Kids these days are compelled to text. Attention spans have dropped drastically. They do not know how to use a library or a dictionary- they are more likely to use dictionary.com. All scholarship is informed by wikipedia. Anything longer than three sentences MUST be written on M$FT word. Food (even that provided by the school) is supplied by Kraft, McDonalds, and Coca Cola. Our curriculum is Neutered by political correctness and censorship, guided by fear of litigation. Luckily, gym class is still mandatory. Language Arts is not. (English is not politically correct so it has been excised from the curriculum.) My colleagues and I take mandatory, government funded seminars on self-defense against children. They smuggle nips of alcohol and take shots in the bathroom to get through the boredom of the conferences. We received thousands of dollars for a new smartboard this year. It sits in the corner, especially when the teachers don't feel like teaching and declare a free period so that they can catch up on their grading. (they don't get paid to work after school, and so they don't plan the curriculum or grade after school) God help you if you make it to the High School, which just lost a million bucks due to no child left behind, because tenth grade science is taught at a sixth grade level. Our IT department is in charge of the IT for the six other schools in our district. Our sensitive documents are shredded by the special ed. kids, who often skim over the forms when they notice their friends or families names, prescriptions, therapy, etc. We keep all of this under wraps. The parents have no idea. They visit our glossy, WEB 2.0 webpage and see flash video of their children, hard at work. As for after school entertainment, we have movies with built in corporate advertising, Miley Cyrus, and American Idol. Yeah, one genre isn't inherently better than another. Our culture is evolving. Change isn't inherently bad, it's just change. Embrace it. Such progress we have made. [/END /i/ kids these days /i/ STATEMENT/] If you want to know why /i/ kids these days /i/ are like this, turn your gaze upon the parents, the teachers, and our society. The only culture that they know is the one that we have handed down to them.

I'm glad that someone here is finally admitting the moral complexity of suicide. Slasdot, while incredibly smart about some things, is sometimes lacking. Slashdotters don't like grey areas. Often, the impulse is either to condemn something as entirely right, or entirely wrong. I suppose this isn't much different from the rest of society- I just expect more out of my beloved /. In January of this past year, I was VERY close to suicide. How close, you might ask? Well, long story short, I had the rope fastened to a coathook in my closet, looped around my neck, but my closet wasn't tall enough to provide enough height for an instant death, and so I didn't go through with it. There was no epiphany. I didn't "see the light." It was a simple logistical problem. That is the level that a suicidal person's thought has reached. There are no moral judgements. There is no more fear. There are no desires except one- to be free of the pain. Looking back on it, I can see that, at that time in my life, I was almost reduced to an animalistic level of thought. (not animalistic in terms of survival instinct, but in terms of consciousness) I had no thoughts to spare about other people- in fact, I hated them for not being there for me. I still wanted to commit suicide later. Eventually though, I realized that, having lost my fear of death, I was free to do anything. As Edmund Burke said, pain is only the introduction to the grandest of terrors: death. Nowadays, I feel great. I still sometimes get sad about things that happened in the past... but I am free from fear. Once you face death, the fear of pain, and all other fears seem insignificant in comparison. But I won't universally condemn euthanasia or the struggle to live. Universal condemnations are usually made by people who are not intimately acquainted with the complex nature of suicide. The only thing I will say is- if you are going to kill yourself, you are obviously free from the fear of death. Why not take advantage of that fact to live a life of free action? Of course- if things get really bad, and I'm in a coma, or not strong/sentient enough to choose to die, lying there, withering away, I would hope that someone would pull my plug. Until that day though, I am going to live free, do everything I feel like doing, and never hold back.

Where are you getting this 99.9% figure? Virus detectors most certainly don't prevent 99.9% of attacks. Have you ever used windows? I will admit, most malware is detectable by antivirus, but the job of a security researcher is to pay attention to ALL malware. It is easy to get a virus through a detector if you write your own code. Even if the malware is detected, certain circumstances can allow it to pass as a valid service, and the user will allow it. Security researchers are paid to pay attention to possible future threats and make recommendations to immunize our current systems BEFORE they are damaged. Even if we could stop the vast majority, it still pays to make provisions for a possible catastrophic failure in the event something does get through. Just look at what happened with conficker.

use rsync. It only uploads the changes between folders or directories, to use the least amount of bandwidth. You can also tell it to preserve user privs, etc. It was designed to be able to deal with an intermittent or broken connection. Anyway, why copy your ENTIRE drive? Doesn't make much sense to me. A great deal of it should be replaceable.

It's pretty cool if you ask me. I just invoke the script, and it automatically rsyncs a few directories with a local mirror. rsync is very nice because it only copies the changes from the folders that it's syncing. It's very efficient. while the local mirror is being updated with all of the latest changes, the script uses ssh to create a newly timestamped copy of the last mirror I uploaded to my server. The script then compares the local mirror and the remote mirror, and only sends the changes. This way I can back up all of my important files locally and remotely while using as little bandwidth and local processing power as possible.