I tend to worry more about microphones, for which there is seldom an indicator light, and which cannot be shut down by a piece of tape, than cameras. Cameras are visible and you need to be in front of them. Microphones are sneakier and one microphone can record a lot of people at once.

Many security cameras (e.g. in public transport) now have the capability to record sound as well as video.

Are laptops with microphone hardware switches available?

Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing this afternoon. The absence of physical switches for wifi/microphone/camera is probably due to a mix of lowering manufacturing cost and cutting on "my computer no work" maintenance calls, but I really would feel somewhat safer if I had them.

Fun fact: when I bought a hard drive for my computer (one of those old MFM 20 MB drives, it was the late eighties), I found it very noisy. The hard drive was internal, so I engineered a physical on-off switch by routing its power input through the otherwise unused turbo switch (remember those?) that was on my computer case. When I wanted to write in peace, I would turn the drive off, before turning the computer on, and boot from a floppy disk. I just had to be careful not to turn the drive off when it was already spinning, and I never did.

The Turbo switch! I had forgotten all about those. Did those actually ever have any function?

Yes! Years ago, processor speeds evolved slowly enough that it was practical for game developers to write all animation delays in their games something like this:

    for (i=0; i<400; i++) ;

They would test their delay value and then increase their loop count as necessary. This was a lot easier than doing clock-based delays. I'm not sure how it was on Windows/DOS at the time, but around the same era on MacOS, you couldn't even get millisecond accuracy without a lot of effort. The standard time unit on a Mac then was the tick, or 1/60th of a second, and some things didn't look too nice at tick granularity.

So this kind of time delay in games and other software was common practice. When processors did start getting significantly faster, some games became unplayable or bugged out altogether.

Along came the turbo button: it didn't actually make your computer faster, it made it slower. Because of the confusing name, the turbo button was usually rigged so that you would leave it on by default -- using your processor's manufactured clock speed -- but if you wanted to play an older game that relied on processor speed for delay timing, you would deactivate the turbo, slowing your system clock speed down to something that matched older hardware.

I suspect an example of these is the old xlander game. That's where you simulate landing a spacecraft on the moon using keyboard controls for thrusters.

Back in the 1990s I could run that on my Pentium 180 Mhz system.

Trying again ~10 years later I found that lunar gravity had increased markedly since ;-)

Absolutely, it did change the clock speed of the processor (back then measured lower double-digit MHz/Megahertz).

Pretty useful to play games designed for the 8086 on a 286 or 386. Alley cat with the turbo was more like alley cat on meth.

Holy shit. I did not expect this to ever happen, but I am mighty glad it did.

And thank you for C&H, Mr. Watterson.

I'm getting tired of young designers who use things like "this feels so 2004" as an insult, and then proceed to reinvent the mistakes of the past.

Google+ made it just a little too clear that Google is in the business of remembering everything about those who interact with it.

The attitude of "Google knows best what's good for you, and doesn't have to justify itself or even acknowledge your objections" also doesn't mesh with what a social network should be, in the minds of many.

It was a common quip a few years ago to say: "Apple mice have three buttons, just like PC mice. It's just that two of them are on the keyboard".

Usenet never stood a chance. It was invented in the days when net access was something of a privilege that could be revoked if a user did not behave in a socially acceptable way. As such, it was acutely vulnerable to spam and abuse. What proportion of Usenet traffic consisted of porn and pirated binaries in the late nineties? Is it any surprise that ISPs ,fearing they might be held accountable for distributing such material, started cutting off their Usenet service?

The good news are: Usenet still exists. There are free NNTP servers that host most non-binaries groups. Many groups are abandoned, but some are quite lively. Every time I visit, I am struck by the fact that no website forum approaches the ease of use of a good threaded newsreader, and I am amused when I see each new generation of coders, ignorant of the past, trying to re-implement an incomplete, flawed replica of what once existed.

For French, he's probably referring to the word "émail", which means "enamel". To my knowledge, the word "email" without an accent does not exist in French.

email is the word used in french for electronic mail. I rarely see people writing e-mail, and more often see people writing mail or email.

When I teach calculus 1, I usually put a "high discrimination" question at the beginning of every exam. Student performance on that question is usually very well correlated with the exam grade. It helps me quickly assess class performance right at the start of the grading process.

Examples of such questions:

Draw the graph of a function f, continuous on the reals, such that: f(x) > 0 always, f'(x) < 0 always, and f''(x) always has the same sign as x.

The line y=3x-2 is tangent to the graph of y=f(x) at x=4. What is f'(4)?

A terrorist would have to put a single bomb on a single train to drastically change things. The TSA would then step in and do all the heavy lifting for them, creating terror and removing freedom.