Thanks, I've actually been wondering for quite some time why a lot of people in the US think it's perfectly normal to block/filter Internet access in schools.
When I went to high school here in Sweden the school only filtered "dangerous" ports and ran a transparent http proxy that did some basic logging. When I got to the university world it seemed pretty common for universities to adopt various policies that basically allowed anything, I still remember the introduction to the computer labs we got, we were told that the school did not ban anything that was legal but that it would be appreciated if we didn't browse porn in the middle of a crowded computer lab...
So wait, you're saying that this is somehow some unique "failing" on Apple's part that if the following two conditions are met then the files on the filesystem can be read?
Device is running
Device is unlocked
There exists some exploit that allows the user/holder of the phone to bypass the sandboxing
So basically "don't unlock your computer/device and hand it over to people who want the data on it or run software from these people"? I'm just not seeing how this is a failing of the technological measures put in place (except the sandboxing but there are plenty of sandboxing solutions out there for a variety of platforms that have had their share of holes but not handing an unlocked device over to someone you don't want to give access to the device to seems to be a very basic security precaution).
I was actually going to mention the whole thing with the meaning of the term "hacker" in my previous post to avoid you replying with a reference to it. Oh well, too late for that.
Thing is, the media's use of the description "Ecstasy-like" (extremely common in the media here in Sweden, at least) shows that their definition of "Ecstasy" is completely irrelevant, they'll call any new drug "Ecstasy-like" to ride on the coat-tails of the "ZOMG ECSTASY MAEK HOLES IN UR BRAINS!!1" scare even if the drug is nothing like MDMA (I've seen opioids, synthetic cannabinoids and hallucinogens all called "Ecstasy-like" by the media even though no one the reporter writing the story interviewed made any such claims).
As for most people, the average person thinks "Ecstasy" is the compound. They also tend to think Marijuana and Hash are two completely different substances. So to the average person there really is only one kind of Ecstasy, Ecstasy. They just don't know what it is.
That leaves drug users and dealers. Most people I've met who use drugs know at the very least that there is "real Ecstasy" and "not Ecstasy but sold by dealers as Ecstasy because real Ecstasy is hard to come by", although many are aware that MDMA is Ecstasy. Then finally, the dealers. I'd say most dealers I've come into contact with have been well aware of the fact that Ecstasy really means MDMA but will happily try to tell their customers that all manner of different substances also qualify as "Ecstasy" because they want to sell what they've got in stock.
And I'll be damned if I'm going to let sensationalist reporters and dealers who are both looking to distort the truth to make money redefine the meaning of a well-defined term. This is also where the term differs from "hacker", "hacker" has multiple meanings in different contexts and more importantly is a label people attach to themselves, some people using the term not fitting the original definition but still self-identifying as "hackers". With Ecstasy the people trying to change the meaning are those who wish to make money off changing the meaning of the term.
Ecstasy is still just MDMA. However, dealers will happily tell you their pills are "Ecstasy", "Molly", "Rolls" or any other slang term for MDMA regardless of what is actually in the pills (and a lot of times they may themselves believe it's real MDMA, it's not like the average dealer bothers with reagent tests).
The definition hasn't changed, it's just widely abused.
The problem here is that you're looking at it the wrong way. It's like saying that since most car crashes involve serious injuries or deaths then getting in a car is more likely than not to result in you becoming seriously injured or dying. Or that since 95% of heroin users used cannabis before heroin that must mean if you use cannabis it will almost certainly result in heroin use.
Of course, what these numbers say isn't anything of the sort (despite the heroin one being a favorite with governments, including the Swedish one). All they really show is that in a car crash you are likely to get hurt and that heroin users generally started with some softer drug. In the same vein, that the majority of shootings in a city are drug-related does not prove that drug wars are common, merely that when shootings occur they are generally drug-related.
And another important thing to think about, why do these people resort to gunplay? Well, consider that they have no legal course of action if someone else attacks them in one way or another (violent or not). Do you really think a hypothetical company named Svenska Cannabisbolaget AB would start a turf war against another hypothetical company named SkÃnt och GrÃnt AB if SoG AB could just call the cops and say "Hey, SC AB just firebombed our growhouse, we have security footage of three of their employees doing it"?
Ecstasy is slang for MDMA and nothing else. The fact that unscrupolous drug dealers and people who know as much about drugs as the average person knows about physics doesn't make it slang for anything else.
Yes, your dealer who just bought a cheap batch of pills with 2C-B + caffeine + amphetamine will tell you otherwise but that's because he's trying to sell his crappy pills. It's sort of like how if alcoholic beverages were illegal, you can bet there would be people trying to sell all sorts of crap as "whiskey", "chardonnay" and other beverages.
Ecstasy isn't "Various euphoric and stimulant drugs these days but originally MDMA", it's just slang for MDMA and nothing else. The problem is that in a lot of places demand for MDMA is a lot higher than supply and dealers will try their best to confuse customers to sell whatever they have in stock. Hell, I've heard rumors of dealers trying to push benzos as "ecstasy" when MDMA has been hard to find...
Ah, but as I mentioned, I tried the crazy "eat tiny little meals every couple of hours" way of scheduling my meals and it drove me insane precisely because I never felt the least bit full, neither in terms of my stomach being full or my body's energy reserves being replenished. I just walked around all day (for months, mind you, not just a day or two) alternating between "not really hungry", "hungry" and "oh shit, I'm hungry". With intermittent fasting I've had no such issues. And I know I'm not alone about this and that there is some supporting science (rather than go looking for all the sources myself I'll suggest you browse Leangains, plenty of references over there).
Also, there's a difference between the feeling of hunger you get from an empty stomach and the feeling of hunger you get when you simply need to eat because your body needs energy. When eating lots of small meals it felt like I was always feeling one or the other a little, or both at the same time. And that gets really tiresome after a while...
I'm not sure if you're serious here. Console FPS games almost always use some sort of auto-aim to help players out and sales figures are not the same as quality, if they were then Windows 95 would've been an amazing operating system....
If you're going to the gym four times per week and you're having problems keeping fat off (not gonna say weight, most guys at the gym want to gain weight, just not fat weight) then I'd suggest you check what you're eating.
One "trick" to avoid overeating is to make sure you're getting enough protein, aim for 2 grams per kg of bodyweight. Throw in some fiber and chances are you're going to feel a lot more full.
Then there's meal scheduling, I used to try following the typical "bodybuilder diet" that was all the rage for a long time. The basic idea being that you eat lots of small meals to "keep the fires of metabolism burning" and all that. Of course, I never felt full, I mostly always felt half-hungry, like driving around in a car that's got half a gallon in the tank and trying to remember to fill it up (with another half gallon) all the time. Then I stumbled across intermittent fasting. Turns out that the supposed benefits of eating lots of tiny meals have been vastly overstated, there's little risk of your body going into a catabolic state unless you're fasting for days and your metabolism doesn't just magically shut down because you haven't eaten in a couple of hours (unless of course you were already on the brink of starvation). So, with IF you eat one or two "meals" per day with a 16-18 hour period of not eating. In my case I really only eat "dinner" which is for a few hours after I've been to the gym, then I don't eat until I get back from the gym the next day.
Of course there are exceptions, but this requires the developer to know both design and development and this is pretty rare. Hell, in my experience most designers who work a lot with the web may have a decent understanding of HTML and CSS but server-side scripting and JS are generally not something they have any knowledge in. And in a similar fashion most developers I've met know pretty much nothing about design, in fact a lot of them seem to take some kind of pride in being ignorant of design.
So while I'm not saying it doesn't happen, in most cases the designer is a designer and the developer is a developer with a bit of overlap when it comes to the markup (although I've seen some scary combinations, designer being the only one who even knew there was such a thing as standard HTML, the developers working on that project kept cranking out HTML and CSS that looked like it came straight out of some "Become a webmaster in 24 hours" book from 1997 while the designers kept trying to get them to correct it).
Website design is almost always separate from the development (coding).
And the topic was WYSIWYG tools for website design (Dreamweaver at al) not WYSIWYG tools in general. Of course everyone uses WYSIWYG tools to some degree.
In my experience most designers who work a lot with the web will not be using Dreamweaver, Frontpage or some other WYSIWYG "webpage creation tool". They'll be using Photoshop, Illustrator and if they have some experience they'll probably also be able to produce mockup HTML + CSS, it may not be perfect but it will still be better than what the likes of Dreamweaver produce.
What the designer has created is then handed over to the developers (or single developer for that matter) who make the design into a working website complete with server-side and client-side code required to make it work.
I can't remember the last time I met a (professional) web designer who used a WYSIWYG web page design tool. Photoshop and Illustrator? Yeah, they use those extensively, some just produce mockups that way and let the developers handle all the markup, others are skilled enough that at most you just have to tweak their markup a little to make it work with whatever CMS you're using.
Why would I put argon gas between the panes? Isn't it easier to have a three pane window that seals tight with air between the panes that can be opened and cleaned? At least that seems to work for us in northern Sweden, keeps noise and the cold out...
In Europe if it's a left-wing nutjob you get the random extremist right-wingers creating a dozen new fake accounts on every newspaper's website so they can create a right-wing echo chamber denouncing the "reds" and their wicked ways. Obviously there would also be a ton of comments about how this is a pro-islamist action.
You'd also have the majority of the media demanding the entire left immediately distance themselves from the nutjob (since most of the media is right-wing).
Oh, and you'd also have a bunch of crackpots ranting about how the left-wing media was trying to cover the whole thing up (even if every major paper was running it as headline news).
As an addendum, imagine the benefits if more effort was put into developing a safe and effective mystatin inhibitor/blocker.
Not only would it be useful for professional athletes and those suffering from muscular dystrophy, if it was safe it could also be used by "regular people". It probably wouldn't be a "wonder drug" to make everyone fit, not by a long shot, but it would help the average guy who can't quite find time to work out as often as he wants put on more muscle mass, it could help someone who's overweight store more energy as muscle rather than fat.
Obviously I'm speculating but there are definitely interesting applications once you look beyond "all changes to the human body that enhance performance are evil".
As a European I'm going to have to show a bit of prejudice here and say that you really shouldn't encourage the Germans. It's still a running joke around here that any day now all those German tourists that show up every summer are going to pull out machine guns and start annexing stuff again.
I do think it's important to distinguish between Joe Sixpack thinking something is ugly because it doesn't have dancing kittens and lots of colors and someone with knowledge of design and user interfaces saying something is ugly because it's needlessly complex and is confusing to anyone who hasn't memorized the entire 217-page manual (the UI manual that is, the actual back-end processing daemon obviously has its own 831-page manual with references to important 3rd party documentation explaining just what it is that the back-end processing daemon processes).
A lot of times I do hear geeky "CS people" dismiss both of the above opinions with blanket statements about how "non-CS people" just want "graphics popping out everywhere" (I'm not saying you're one of them, I'm just using your words because they do fit quite nicely into how some of these people justify not caring about user interfaces).
And the manual bit, well I've actually come across "enterprise" software like that a few times. The kind of software entirely designed by business people and developers with a UI so complex (and backwards) that it actually required its own manual to be usable (even though the target user was someone who already understood what the software was supposed to be doing and the terminology used by the software).
Re:Perhaps it is not broken and horrible
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The PHP Singularity
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Thanks, but I'll stick to C#. Sure, it may take me 30 more keystrokes than one of these open source languages to write a super-simple program, but when I'm not around in 2 years and someone else has to look at it, they'll understand exactly what it's supposed to do and know unambiguously how it works.
Clearly someone has never inherited a web application built in C#.NET by someone with a CS degree who still failed to understand basic things like code formatting, "god classes are bad" and that there is such a thing as character encoding. Also, this project included those wonderful chains of method calls where it would feed data into one function which would call another function which would call another function which would call another function until finally another function would do some minor change and return the result encapsulated in a brand new spiffy object containing a ton of other unnecessary crap that would be discarded (and this type of object was of course only used for this particular purpose).
The whole project was a total mess and the core functionality barely worked on a very narrow subset of web browsers (specific versions of IE due to various HTML and JS screwups). In the end the entire thing had to be scrapped and rewritten because it was such a garbled mess of code.
That project was to me a great example of how it's not just that a good developer can write good code in most environments but also that a bad developer can produce horrible code in any environment.
The funny part is that people would probably not think a guy living in a van down by the river was all that shady if the van had a good paintjob, was clean and any personal belongings surrounding the van were all in good condition (as opposed to a dirty van with a 20 year old paintjob and rust and a bunch of broken lawn chairs and the like strewn around it).
I'd be suspicious as well except that a conspiracy theory like this would require a few unlikely things.
First of all, even if Silk Road itself was trying to gather user info all they could really catch would be usernames, passwords, delivery addresses and BC addresses that they received BC from, none of which are very useful in a trial if the user has taken the basic recommended security precautions. It's not like they're asking for a whole bunch of private personal info, they want their users to supply them with a username + password for authentication and sellers obviously need a delivery address. On top of this, BC must be sent from somewhere but this can be obfuscated very easily (not to mention that the history of a BC doesn't say "Transferred from Joe Schmoe, 123 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield", it simply states which wallet it used to be in, and if you want to you can create tons of wallets that aren't connected to you in any discernible way.
If Tor was broken it would require that the security research community at large didn't know about it but that somehow the police did, I find this highly unlikely.
And finally, I've seen several articles by those who vehemently hate drugs that boil down to "See? I TOLD YOU! THIS IS PROOF! WE NEED TO BAN TEH INTARWEBZ BECAUSE MY ADVISORS SAY WE CAN'T STOP THIS SITE!!1". This, combined with the above, indicates to me that it's very unlikely that Tor or Silk Road are compromised in any serious way.
If you're talking about Silk Road then I'm sure the authorities are pretty annoyed by it since at least here in Sweden they can't really do much if they somehow intercept a package containing drugs, weapons or some other contraband at the border and they can't follow the money or otherwise tie it to you (and it being addressed to you doesn't count since if it did you could just mail a few illegal items to anyone you wanted and tell the cops those people were expecting packages containing said illegal items).
iTunes only has movies and those were only added very recently, and a poor selection at that.
Oh yeah, this is the Swedish iTunes store btw. I know the situation is different in other countries but to be honest I feel like ranting about the poor legal options for streaming and downloading TV shows here in Sweden.
The most useful choice tends to be TV network websites but those don't feature nearly all the shows (a lot of times foreign shows are either unavailable due to licensing issues or they are removed within a week or so of airing (and they air long after the show aired in its country of origin)).
Of course, as far as the TV producers are concerned we're all evil if we don't go along with their plan which includes waiting a couple of months after a show originally airs before gratefully watching the ad-supported TV broadcast followed by us purchasing the DVD set that comes out a few weeks after the season ends here in.se and finally we should buy the Bluray version when they release that...
Well, when it comes to products breaking that doesn't really mirror the experience I've had. The only issue I've had there has been with my iPhone 4 which had to be replaced to due hardware defects (broken headphone jack out of the box the first time, didn't notice until after a few days, broken touchscreen on the second one, experienced "ghost clicks" after just a few days). But compared to other cellphones I've owned this is nothing, I've owned a "rugged" phone that was supposed to also be waterproof, within six months of buying it several parts were quite literally falling off (so much for waterproof). I've also owned a couple of Nokia smartphones which had some pretty major issues (one that I had to restart every few days or it would complain about running out of RAM when receiving incoming calls).
As for the retina MBP, yeah, that one is clearly not for everyone. I'm personally on the fence about it. I wouldn't buy one as a "toy" machine but as my main workstation I just might. I rarely upgrade my main machine anyway and high resolution plus portability is a huge plus. Not sure I'd say it's worse than your run-of-the-mill Ultrabook though.
And I'd rather take a single Apple logo on my laptop over the the mass of branding that comes with a lot of other laptops. My current work laptop has two Dell logos and "Dell Precision M4400" written on it. It also came with an impressive amount of stickers that I spent around 30 minutes carefully peeling off. The same is true of other laptops as well, my "secure" netbook (Lenovo Ideapad with an encrypted Debian install) had the same issue when I received it, so many stickers (that you need to carefully remove with a razor since they clearly don't intend for you to remove them)...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I've actually been wondering for quite some time why a lot of people in the US think it's perfectly normal to block/filter Internet access in schools.
When I went to high school here in Sweden the school only filtered "dangerous" ports and ran a transparent http proxy that did some basic logging. When I got to the university world it seemed pretty common for universities to adopt various policies that basically allowed anything, I still remember the introduction to the computer labs we got, we were told that the school did not ban anything that was legal but that it would be appreciated if we didn't browse porn in the middle of a crowded computer lab...
So wait, you're saying that this is somehow some unique "failing" on Apple's part that if the following two conditions are met then the files on the filesystem can be read?
So basically "don't unlock your computer/device and hand it over to people who want the data on it or run software from these people"? I'm just not seeing how this is a failing of the technological measures put in place (except the sandboxing but there are plenty of sandboxing solutions out there for a variety of platforms that have had their share of holes but not handing an unlocked device over to someone you don't want to give access to the device to seems to be a very basic security precaution).
I was actually going to mention the whole thing with the meaning of the term "hacker" in my previous post to avoid you replying with a reference to it. Oh well, too late for that.
Thing is, the media's use of the description "Ecstasy-like" (extremely common in the media here in Sweden, at least) shows that their definition of "Ecstasy" is completely irrelevant, they'll call any new drug "Ecstasy-like" to ride on the coat-tails of the "ZOMG ECSTASY MAEK HOLES IN UR BRAINS!!1" scare even if the drug is nothing like MDMA (I've seen opioids, synthetic cannabinoids and hallucinogens all called "Ecstasy-like" by the media even though no one the reporter writing the story interviewed made any such claims).
As for most people, the average person thinks "Ecstasy" is the compound. They also tend to think Marijuana and Hash are two completely different substances. So to the average person there really is only one kind of Ecstasy, Ecstasy. They just don't know what it is.
That leaves drug users and dealers. Most people I've met who use drugs know at the very least that there is "real Ecstasy" and "not Ecstasy but sold by dealers as Ecstasy because real Ecstasy is hard to come by", although many are aware that MDMA is Ecstasy. Then finally, the dealers. I'd say most dealers I've come into contact with have been well aware of the fact that Ecstasy really means MDMA but will happily try to tell their customers that all manner of different substances also qualify as "Ecstasy" because they want to sell what they've got in stock.
And I'll be damned if I'm going to let sensationalist reporters and dealers who are both looking to distort the truth to make money redefine the meaning of a well-defined term. This is also where the term differs from "hacker", "hacker" has multiple meanings in different contexts and more importantly is a label people attach to themselves, some people using the term not fitting the original definition but still self-identifying as "hackers". With Ecstasy the people trying to change the meaning are those who wish to make money off changing the meaning of the term.
Ecstasy is still just MDMA. However, dealers will happily tell you their pills are "Ecstasy", "Molly", "Rolls" or any other slang term for MDMA regardless of what is actually in the pills (and a lot of times they may themselves believe it's real MDMA, it's not like the average dealer bothers with reagent tests).
The definition hasn't changed, it's just widely abused.
The problem here is that you're looking at it the wrong way. It's like saying that since most car crashes involve serious injuries or deaths then getting in a car is more likely than not to result in you becoming seriously injured or dying. Or that since 95% of heroin users used cannabis before heroin that must mean if you use cannabis it will almost certainly result in heroin use.
Of course, what these numbers say isn't anything of the sort (despite the heroin one being a favorite with governments, including the Swedish one). All they really show is that in a car crash you are likely to get hurt and that heroin users generally started with some softer drug. In the same vein, that the majority of shootings in a city are drug-related does not prove that drug wars are common, merely that when shootings occur they are generally drug-related.
And another important thing to think about, why do these people resort to gunplay? Well, consider that they have no legal course of action if someone else attacks them in one way or another (violent or not). Do you really think a hypothetical company named Svenska Cannabisbolaget AB would start a turf war against another hypothetical company named SkÃnt och GrÃnt AB if SoG AB could just call the cops and say "Hey, SC AB just firebombed our growhouse, we have security footage of three of their employees doing it"?
Ecstasy is slang for MDMA and nothing else. The fact that unscrupolous drug dealers and people who know as much about drugs as the average person knows about physics doesn't make it slang for anything else.
Yes, your dealer who just bought a cheap batch of pills with 2C-B + caffeine + amphetamine will tell you otherwise but that's because he's trying to sell his crappy pills. It's sort of like how if alcoholic beverages were illegal, you can bet there would be people trying to sell all sorts of crap as "whiskey", "chardonnay" and other beverages.
Ecstasy isn't "Various euphoric and stimulant drugs these days but originally MDMA", it's just slang for MDMA and nothing else. The problem is that in a lot of places demand for MDMA is a lot higher than supply and dealers will try their best to confuse customers to sell whatever they have in stock. Hell, I've heard rumors of dealers trying to push benzos as "ecstasy" when MDMA has been hard to find...
Ah, but as I mentioned, I tried the crazy "eat tiny little meals every couple of hours" way of scheduling my meals and it drove me insane precisely because I never felt the least bit full, neither in terms of my stomach being full or my body's energy reserves being replenished. I just walked around all day (for months, mind you, not just a day or two) alternating between "not really hungry", "hungry" and "oh shit, I'm hungry". With intermittent fasting I've had no such issues. And I know I'm not alone about this and that there is some supporting science (rather than go looking for all the sources myself I'll suggest you browse Leangains, plenty of references over there).
Also, there's a difference between the feeling of hunger you get from an empty stomach and the feeling of hunger you get when you simply need to eat because your body needs energy. When eating lots of small meals it felt like I was always feeling one or the other a little, or both at the same time. And that gets really tiresome after a while...
I'm not sure if you're serious here. Console FPS games almost always use some sort of auto-aim to help players out and sales figures are not the same as quality, if they were then Windows 95 would've been an amazing operating system....
If you're going to the gym four times per week and you're having problems keeping fat off (not gonna say weight, most guys at the gym want to gain weight, just not fat weight) then I'd suggest you check what you're eating.
One "trick" to avoid overeating is to make sure you're getting enough protein, aim for 2 grams per kg of bodyweight. Throw in some fiber and chances are you're going to feel a lot more full.
Then there's meal scheduling, I used to try following the typical "bodybuilder diet" that was all the rage for a long time. The basic idea being that you eat lots of small meals to "keep the fires of metabolism burning" and all that. Of course, I never felt full, I mostly always felt half-hungry, like driving around in a car that's got half a gallon in the tank and trying to remember to fill it up (with another half gallon) all the time. Then I stumbled across intermittent fasting. Turns out that the supposed benefits of eating lots of tiny meals have been vastly overstated, there's little risk of your body going into a catabolic state unless you're fasting for days and your metabolism doesn't just magically shut down because you haven't eaten in a couple of hours (unless of course you were already on the brink of starvation). So, with IF you eat one or two "meals" per day with a 16-18 hour period of not eating. In my case I really only eat "dinner" which is for a few hours after I've been to the gym, then I don't eat until I get back from the gym the next day.
Of course there are exceptions, but this requires the developer to know both design and development and this is pretty rare. Hell, in my experience most designers who work a lot with the web may have a decent understanding of HTML and CSS but server-side scripting and JS are generally not something they have any knowledge in. And in a similar fashion most developers I've met know pretty much nothing about design, in fact a lot of them seem to take some kind of pride in being ignorant of design.
So while I'm not saying it doesn't happen, in most cases the designer is a designer and the developer is a developer with a bit of overlap when it comes to the markup (although I've seen some scary combinations, designer being the only one who even knew there was such a thing as standard HTML, the developers working on that project kept cranking out HTML and CSS that looked like it came straight out of some "Become a webmaster in 24 hours" book from 1997 while the designers kept trying to get them to correct it).
Website design is almost always separate from the development (coding).
And the topic was WYSIWYG tools for website design (Dreamweaver at al) not WYSIWYG tools in general. Of course everyone uses WYSIWYG tools to some degree.
In my experience most designers who work a lot with the web will not be using Dreamweaver, Frontpage or some other WYSIWYG "webpage creation tool". They'll be using Photoshop, Illustrator and if they have some experience they'll probably also be able to produce mockup HTML + CSS, it may not be perfect but it will still be better than what the likes of Dreamweaver produce.
What the designer has created is then handed over to the developers (or single developer for that matter) who make the design into a working website complete with server-side and client-side code required to make it work.
I can't remember the last time I met a (professional) web designer who used a WYSIWYG web page design tool. Photoshop and Illustrator? Yeah, they use those extensively, some just produce mockups that way and let the developers handle all the markup, others are skilled enough that at most you just have to tweak their markup a little to make it work with whatever CMS you're using.
Why would I put argon gas between the panes? Isn't it easier to have a three pane window that seals tight with air between the panes that can be opened and cleaned? At least that seems to work for us in northern Sweden, keeps noise and the cold out...
There are plenty of Linux "on phones and tablets" fanboys. They are sometimes derisively called "fandroids". And some of them are quite obnoxious...
You're clearly not European.
In Europe if it's a left-wing nutjob you get the random extremist right-wingers creating a dozen new fake accounts on every newspaper's website so they can create a right-wing echo chamber denouncing the "reds" and their wicked ways. Obviously there would also be a ton of comments about how this is a pro-islamist action.
You'd also have the majority of the media demanding the entire left immediately distance themselves from the nutjob (since most of the media is right-wing).
Oh, and you'd also have a bunch of crackpots ranting about how the left-wing media was trying to cover the whole thing up (even if every major paper was running it as headline news).
As an addendum, imagine the benefits if more effort was put into developing a safe and effective mystatin inhibitor/blocker.
Not only would it be useful for professional athletes and those suffering from muscular dystrophy, if it was safe it could also be used by "regular people". It probably wouldn't be a "wonder drug" to make everyone fit, not by a long shot, but it would help the average guy who can't quite find time to work out as often as he wants put on more muscle mass, it could help someone who's overweight store more energy as muscle rather than fat.
Obviously I'm speculating but there are definitely interesting applications once you look beyond "all changes to the human body that enhance performance are evil".
While that may be true for most of us when it comes to the absolutely peak performers it's more about how far you can push the human body.
And it would be interesting to see someone with the right genetics, training and "supplements" and what they could achieve.
As a European I'm going to have to show a bit of prejudice here and say that you really shouldn't encourage the Germans. It's still a running joke around here that any day now all those German tourists that show up every summer are going to pull out machine guns and start annexing stuff again.
I do think it's important to distinguish between Joe Sixpack thinking something is ugly because it doesn't have dancing kittens and lots of colors and someone with knowledge of design and user interfaces saying something is ugly because it's needlessly complex and is confusing to anyone who hasn't memorized the entire 217-page manual (the UI manual that is, the actual back-end processing daemon obviously has its own 831-page manual with references to important 3rd party documentation explaining just what it is that the back-end processing daemon processes).
A lot of times I do hear geeky "CS people" dismiss both of the above opinions with blanket statements about how "non-CS people" just want "graphics popping out everywhere" (I'm not saying you're one of them, I'm just using your words because they do fit quite nicely into how some of these people justify not caring about user interfaces).
And the manual bit, well I've actually come across "enterprise" software like that a few times. The kind of software entirely designed by business people and developers with a UI so complex (and backwards) that it actually required its own manual to be usable (even though the target user was someone who already understood what the software was supposed to be doing and the terminology used by the software).
Thanks, but I'll stick to C#. Sure, it may take me 30 more keystrokes than one of these open source languages to write a super-simple program, but when I'm not around in 2 years and someone else has to look at it, they'll understand exactly what it's supposed to do and know unambiguously how it works.
Clearly someone has never inherited a web application built in C#.NET by someone with a CS degree who still failed to understand basic things like code formatting, "god classes are bad" and that there is such a thing as character encoding. Also, this project included those wonderful chains of method calls where it would feed data into one function which would call another function which would call another function which would call another function until finally another function would do some minor change and return the result encapsulated in a brand new spiffy object containing a ton of other unnecessary crap that would be discarded (and this type of object was of course only used for this particular purpose).
The whole project was a total mess and the core functionality barely worked on a very narrow subset of web browsers (specific versions of IE due to various HTML and JS screwups). In the end the entire thing had to be scrapped and rewritten because it was such a garbled mess of code.
That project was to me a great example of how it's not just that a good developer can write good code in most environments but also that a bad developer can produce horrible code in any environment.
The funny part is that people would probably not think a guy living in a van down by the river was all that shady if the van had a good paintjob, was clean and any personal belongings surrounding the van were all in good condition (as opposed to a dirty van with a 20 year old paintjob and rust and a bunch of broken lawn chairs and the like strewn around it).
I'd be suspicious as well except that a conspiracy theory like this would require a few unlikely things.
First of all, even if Silk Road itself was trying to gather user info all they could really catch would be usernames, passwords, delivery addresses and BC addresses that they received BC from, none of which are very useful in a trial if the user has taken the basic recommended security precautions. It's not like they're asking for a whole bunch of private personal info, they want their users to supply them with a username + password for authentication and sellers obviously need a delivery address. On top of this, BC must be sent from somewhere but this can be obfuscated very easily (not to mention that the history of a BC doesn't say "Transferred from Joe Schmoe, 123 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield", it simply states which wallet it used to be in, and if you want to you can create tons of wallets that aren't connected to you in any discernible way.
If Tor was broken it would require that the security research community at large didn't know about it but that somehow the police did, I find this highly unlikely.
And finally, I've seen several articles by those who vehemently hate drugs that boil down to "See? I TOLD YOU! THIS IS PROOF! WE NEED TO BAN TEH INTARWEBZ BECAUSE MY ADVISORS SAY WE CAN'T STOP THIS SITE!!1". This, combined with the above, indicates to me that it's very unlikely that Tor or Silk Road are compromised in any serious way.
If you're talking about Silk Road then I'm sure the authorities are pretty annoyed by it since at least here in Sweden they can't really do much if they somehow intercept a package containing drugs, weapons or some other contraband at the border and they can't follow the money or otherwise tie it to you (and it being addressed to you doesn't count since if it did you could just mail a few illegal items to anyone you wanted and tell the cops those people were expecting packages containing said illegal items).
iTunes only has movies and those were only added very recently, and a poor selection at that.
Oh yeah, this is the Swedish iTunes store btw. I know the situation is different in other countries but to be honest I feel like ranting about the poor legal options for streaming and downloading TV shows here in Sweden.
The most useful choice tends to be TV network websites but those don't feature nearly all the shows (a lot of times foreign shows are either unavailable due to licensing issues or they are removed within a week or so of airing (and they air long after the show aired in its country of origin)).
Of course, as far as the TV producers are concerned we're all evil if we don't go along with their plan which includes waiting a couple of months after a show originally airs before gratefully watching the ad-supported TV broadcast followed by us purchasing the DVD set that comes out a few weeks after the season ends here in .se and finally we should buy the Bluray version when they release that...
Well, when it comes to products breaking that doesn't really mirror the experience I've had. The only issue I've had there has been with my iPhone 4 which had to be replaced to due hardware defects (broken headphone jack out of the box the first time, didn't notice until after a few days, broken touchscreen on the second one, experienced "ghost clicks" after just a few days). But compared to other cellphones I've owned this is nothing, I've owned a "rugged" phone that was supposed to also be waterproof, within six months of buying it several parts were quite literally falling off (so much for waterproof). I've also owned a couple of Nokia smartphones which had some pretty major issues (one that I had to restart every few days or it would complain about running out of RAM when receiving incoming calls).
As for the retina MBP, yeah, that one is clearly not for everyone. I'm personally on the fence about it. I wouldn't buy one as a "toy" machine but as my main workstation I just might. I rarely upgrade my main machine anyway and high resolution plus portability is a huge plus. Not sure I'd say it's worse than your run-of-the-mill Ultrabook though.
And I'd rather take a single Apple logo on my laptop over the the mass of branding that comes with a lot of other laptops. My current work laptop has two Dell logos and "Dell Precision M4400" written on it. It also came with an impressive amount of stickers that I spent around 30 minutes carefully peeling off. The same is true of other laptops as well, my "secure" netbook (Lenovo Ideapad with an encrypted Debian install) had the same issue when I received it, so many stickers (that you need to carefully remove with a razor since they clearly don't intend for you to remove them)...