That's funny, because your excerpt reminds me of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.:)
Re:Can ARC4 be used properly at all?
on
WEP Broken Even Worse
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Wireless encryption is (often) implemented in hardware because encryption is expensive to perform. This is especially true on embedded platforms like the DS.
However, you can apparently upgrade your DS to support WPA with a hacked firmware. It's not clear from the page, but I am fairly sure that it only supports TKIP encryption and not AES since, like WEP, TKIP uses RC4 so does not require a hardware upgrade. It does, however, solve the initialization vector problems of WEP that another poster mentioned; as far as I know, TKIP has not been broken.
Moral? If you're still using WEP, update your drivers and firmware and you may be able to get TKIP WPA and get those pesky neighbors off of your connection.
Right. Everyone at the big, profitable corporation is confused, including their well-educated legal team with years of legal training and experience. If only they'd hired a few Slashdotters to point out that they're a big evil company, and therefore may not oppose the incorruptible and infallible big brother that is Massachusetts.
That is absolutely not true, and would be madness if it were. From the specification, section 4.5.5:
The sequence of filtered scanlines in the pass or passes of the PNG image is compressed (see figure 4.10) by one of the defined compression methods. The concatenated filtered scanlines form the input to the compression stage. The output from the compression stage is a single compressed datastream.
So an article about hacking into insecure software is hosted on a site that displays information about its internals whenever there's high load... Fantastic.
Boy, that sure does sound great. XRI promises global context symbols, peer-to-peer addressing, decentralization, delegation, federation, persistence, human-friendly formats, machine-friendly formats, lightweight resolution, trusted resolution, and transport independence! Amazing!
Too bad it's all a bunch of complicated bullshit. We don't need it, and we don't want it. Want to know why? Seven different special symbols (@, +, =, !, $,/,.), all with meaning (they "provide a simple, human-friendly way to indicate the global context of an i-name or i-number.") Hah!). HTTP requests and XML parsing to determine the real location of anything ("lightweight resolution"); this means at least 2 HTTP GET requests to resolve the location of a resource. Wow, persistence with numbers! Couldn't have done that with a simple UUID scheme! And what's with having a machine-friendly format and a human-friendly format? If every machine has to be able to parse them both, then why bother with the bloat?
I fail to see how any of this will allow you to develop anything you've mentioned. If anything technological is holding us back from general programmatic contracts, it's not a resource identification scheme.
Luckily, this will never catch on. XRIs have no use cases. Why would I want xri://@example.org*blah=Bob/ when http://blah.example.org/Bob/ already works with my existing software without any problems? My only fear is that OpenID 2.0 will require that all software understand XRIs. So much for lightweight software.
Actually, the problem is that the OpenID specification is very poorly written and is extremely complicated. It's as though a couple of kids wanted to put together an RFC but didn't really understand how to express a specification is a logical form. If you don't believe me, just take a look; you'll see what I mean just by glancing through it: http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-1_1. txt
Anyway, then, as kids are wont to do, they have followed it up with a series of new specifications, each one more complicated than the last. There are five specifications in draft form right now, each to cover some different aspect of what should be a fairly simple protocol. They reference and make use of HTTP, HTML, XHTML, XML, XRIs, XRDS, S/MIME, XSLT, and some other, similar ID specification called Yadis. Implementing all this thing requires gobs of software libraries (each with security holes and bugs) and expertise (and who has time to learn the latest X??? spec?). And we're supposed to believe that it's possible to do this securely? We can barely make secure web servers, much less SSI systems which require almost 100 pages of specifications, plus thousands of pages of supporting specifications!
What's sad is that the authors are not just a couple of kids that discovered XML and had a field day. The authors are associated with companies. The primary author works for VeriSign. Presumably, he should know better than to make such a jumbled mess.
But I think we all know what's really going on here. These idiots put together an incomprehensible specification. It is poorly defined, ambigious, and relies on lots of supporting technologies. It is impossible to implement securely, completely, and correctly. Security holes and interoperability issues will be the only real standard. And guess whose jobs are secure? Guess who gets lots of contracting jobs? Guess who is needed to write new specifications so that they can get it Right the next time?
It's too late to turn this one around. Hopefully OpenID will die a horrible death and we'll never hear of it again. But please, please, if anyone else reading this feels compelled to write a specification in the future, learn from OpenID's mistakes and keep it simple, stupid. Because OpenID is setting itself up for disaster.
You know, it's really cute that you can parrot back examples of big bad monopolies you learned in middle school. I know, those were simpler times, and you thought that if you received enough gold stars from your teacher then maybe, just maybe, Jenny from math class would let you sneak a peak behind the bleachers at recess. But here in the real world, you can't just regurgitate nonsense and get a pat on the back and $20 for an A on your report card.
With that in mind, let's take a look at your list of examples of the failure of the free market.
Standard Oil - breakup was largely for political reasons. Debate continues among economists.
Carnegie Steel - never broken up, sold to US Steel in 1901. Care to go into more detail?
Ma Bell - also known as AT&T, who obtained monopoly status directly due to government regulation. Can't really blame the free market for the problems of a regulated entity.
Microsoft - was never regulated. Market got over it. What's your point?
But let's say we give you the benefit of the doubt. Four dubious examples of monoplies in 100 years. Uh oh, boys! The free market might work for those wild west frontier types, but not for us! Protect us, Daddy Government, protect us!
Give me a break. Enjoy your +5, enjoy your self righteous condemnation of commerce. But please, don't vote. In fact, just move to Canada. We don't need your kind in America. You need us, but we don't need you.
1. Script kiddies may already know about the vulnerability. There is no reason to believe that you are the first to discover the exploit.
2. The webmaster might not fix the issue before harm is done to the users. If the script kiddies already know about the vulnerability, they will likely exploit it before the webmaster has time to react.
As a user, I want to know immediately when a vulnerability is discovered. It gives me an opportunity to stop doing business with a website before my credit card number is stolen. It also gives me the opportunity to double-check credit card statements and the like; if a security hole is covered up, I may never notice the $200 charge.
Since we can never be sure who knows about a vulnerability, it is best to let the users know about it as soon as possible.
There exists a community of underground hackers (crackers?) who search for exploits. They find them, trade them, sell them, and use them to steal data and resources. Gone are the days where script kiddies just hack for fun; there is a serious black market involved, since resource and identity theft can be very lucrative.
When an exploit is discovered by a researcher, it is likely that the black hats have already discovered it. The software's users are already being harmed, although they may not realize it: smart hackers are good at covering their tracks.
In this scenario, "responsible disclosure" is anything but responsible. By waiting until the vendor has patched the software, users are being harmed. On the other hand, immediate full disclosure has three important effects:
One, it eliminates the black market for the exploit. If everyone knows about it, nobody will pay for it. This reduces the overall market for exploits and, compounded over many exploits, will drive hackers out of the market. If it is not profitable to find exploits, fewer people will do it.
Two, it gives the users an opportunity to take action. If, through full disclosure, I find out that Internet Explorer has a serious security risk, I can switch to Firefox. If my Cisco router has a problem, I may be able to work around it with an alternate configuration. On the other hand, if a researcher reports the exploits to Microsoft and Cisco directly, black hats are free to exploit my computer and my router until patches are released (if they ever are).
Three, it provides an incentive for vendors to write better software. If every software bug meant a black eye and angry users, you can be sure that there would be better software. On the other hand, the occasional well-timed patch looks like software "maintenance", a concept that shouldn't exist but sounds reasonable to the layman (after all, he has to have his car tuned up every so often, so why not his software?) The result of full disclosure, on the other hand, is more akin to an emergency recall; the producer has clearly made a mistake.
The concern, of course, is that the black hats don't already have the exploit, and that full disclosure gives it to them. Yes, this is the risk of full disclosure. However, given that black hats have an economic incentive to find exploits, while researchers rarely do, we can expect the probability of this to be low. And even if they don't have the exploit, releasing it still shrinks the exploit market (why pay for exploit B when you can get exploit A for free), it still notifies users of a potential problem, and it still incents vendors to write better software.
I think you'll find that being smart, working hard in school, and learning valuable job skills is hardly risk-taking behavior. Most Slashdotters are anything but risk takers.
You may be thinking too narrowly. Look at some of the modern functional languages such as SML or Haskell. In those languages, symbols like +, -, and * are all just function calls semantically, but syntactically they are operators (as is any sequence of non-alphanumeric characters, approximately). You can actually define the operator precedence at compile time, and the parser will adjust accordingly. You can still define these functions however you like, just like in Smalltalk. (Of course, these languages do not have runtime function dispatch or anything like that, but this is orthogonal to parsing issues).
In other words, SML does not impose mathematical parsing, but it allows you to specify it for operators of your choice.
That's absurd. You are confusing parsing and evaluation. I don't care how Smalltalk evaluates the expression [2 + 3], I just want the text "2 + 3 * 5" to be parsed as [2 + (3 * 5)] rather than [(2 + 3) * 5]. Either way, Smalltalk can then internally send some messages around to actually perform the computation.
Yes, this would make the parser more complicated. Hey! I don't care! Parsers are designed for humans, not the other way around.
You'll have to excuse me. As I get older, I find myself having less and less patience for the style of comment that gets moderated up here, which, as a rule, make bold, unjustified claims against Republicans, Microsoft, or other villian of the day. Your post looked to be the latest in this frustrating pattern.
I don't think you're an idiot. And you're right, you had more context in which to come to a conclusion. However, since you failed to provide that context, your post came off as standard political BS. This made it difficult to engage in any kind of discourse other than to point out, if somewhat disrespectfully, that your quoted material did not justify your conclusions.
In general, any time you conclude that some person is a closed-minded fanatic, I think you will find that someone will respond similarly, if at all. If you avoid that, well, "you might find yourself having more interesting conversations.":)
First of all, I find it amusing that you compare a natural science like climatology to an academic pursuit (loosely a social science, if there is such a thing to begin with) and a profession. I find it even more amusing that you think that Bono is behaving like a sociologist and that Jolie is behaving like a social worker. They're not.
Gore, on the other hand, is behaving like the politician that he is, like it or not. I don't care whether the movie presents legitimate science or not. It is not science. It is politics. It is a "cause." The title tells you that. It's not "A Truth" or "The Truth" or "Science at Work!". It's "An Inconvenient Truth". Science does not term things as inconvenient. Science does not make value judgements. Science terms things as testable, falsifiable hypotheses, makes predictions, and tests them.
You don't have to be a scientist to be credible. You don't have to be a scientist to tell people about "real facts." But you should certainly not be a politician playing a political game for a pet cause. Science and politics don't mix.
Just to play devil's advocate here, where DO your fundamental human rights come from, if there is no creator? Why are any rights fundamental at all? A common idea is that our laws and rights and morals are justified by some kind of social contract, but it seems hard to justify calling any right fundamental in that case. That is, if rights are formed by a social contract, then there is nothing special about free speech -- if tomorrow society decided to remove it from the contract, then it is no longer a human right.
Like I said, though, devil's advocate. You could argue about this all day. My point is that you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Newt's comment with such a flippant comment. It's not obvious that the alternative view is any better.
The very concept of America is under assault. The traditional notion of our country as a union of one people, American peoples, has been assaulted with multicultural, situation ethics, and values neutral model where Western values and American civilization are ignored, minimized or ridiculed.The bottom line is pluralism acts as a brake on fanaticism. Newt is a fanatic. He wants all of us to recieve "patriotic education". He has no room in his worldview for different cultures, nuance, or values that differ from his values. He has all the answers, so why on earth would we need free speech? We don't have anything to talk about.I'm confused. Your comment does not follow from your quotation of Newt. He essentially says that moral relativism is bunk: a view held by many. I certainly wouldn't call it fanatical. I don't see him calling for blowing up abortion clinics or SUV dealerships. In fact, based on your reaction to this rather innocuous quotation, I would say that you are the one who has no room in your worldview for values different from your own.
Frankly, I don't think you even read the statement you quoted. You might as well have simply quoted "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit..." and continued with your tirade.
No, not really. MySQL [Community Server] is a database server that supports SQL. Oracle [Database] is a database server that supports SQL. MSSQL [Microsoft SQL Server] is a database server that supports SQL. The latter is often known simply as SQL Server.
The English speaking world now uses the short scale, i.e. billion = 1,000 ^ (1 + 2) = 1,000,000,000, trillion = 1,000 ^ (1 + 3). Britain has used these conventions in government since 1974.
Although Singapore's laws are somewhat draconian in areas, you are exaggerating:
Homosexuality is NOT punishable by death. Apparently it is punishable with life imprisonment, but I get the impression (via Wikipedia) that this is not often done.
Marijuana USE is NOT punishable by death. However, drug trafficking is punishable by death, and you can be convicted of drug trafficking by carrying a large amount of drugs.
Yes, there are some restrictions on freedom of the press (e.g. you can't publicly write about religion or race, apparently), but not all media is state-controlled.
Slashdot Mirror
You may want to consider looking at a globe. The southern tip of Africa is about as far from the equator as mid/north Texas.
A better comparison would be southern South America. Does anyone know how dark the indigenous people's skin is there?
That's funny, because your excerpt reminds me of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. :)
Wireless encryption is (often) implemented in hardware because encryption is expensive to perform. This is especially true on embedded platforms like the DS.
However, you can apparently upgrade your DS to support WPA with a hacked firmware. It's not clear from the page, but I am fairly sure that it only supports TKIP encryption and not AES since, like WEP, TKIP uses RC4 so does not require a hardware upgrade. It does, however, solve the initialization vector problems of WEP that another poster mentioned; as far as I know, TKIP has not been broken.
Moral? If you're still using WEP, update your drivers and firmware and you may be able to get TKIP WPA and get those pesky neighbors off of your connection.
You're right. We should be using joules per second.
Right. Everyone at the big, profitable corporation is confused, including their well-educated legal team with years of legal training and experience. If only they'd hired a few Slashdotters to point out that they're a big evil company, and therefore may not oppose the incorruptible and infallible big brother that is Massachusetts.
"PNG restarts the compression on each row"
That is absolutely not true, and would be madness if it were. From the specification, section 4.5.5:
The rest of your post is suspect now, of course.So an article about hacking into insecure software is hosted on a site that displays information about its internals whenever there's high load... Fantastic.
Boy, that sure does sound great. XRI promises global context symbols, peer-to-peer addressing, decentralization, delegation, federation, persistence, human-friendly formats, machine-friendly formats, lightweight resolution, trusted resolution, and transport independence! Amazing!
/, .), all with meaning (they "provide a simple, human-friendly way to indicate the global context of an i-name or i-number.") Hah!). HTTP requests and XML parsing to determine the real location of anything ("lightweight resolution"); this means at least 2 HTTP GET requests to resolve the location of a resource. Wow, persistence with numbers! Couldn't have done that with a simple UUID scheme! And what's with having a machine-friendly format and a human-friendly format? If every machine has to be able to parse them both, then why bother with the bloat?
Too bad it's all a bunch of complicated bullshit. We don't need it, and we don't want it. Want to know why? Seven different special symbols (@, +, =, !, $,
I fail to see how any of this will allow you to develop anything you've mentioned. If anything technological is holding us back from general programmatic contracts, it's not a resource identification scheme.
Luckily, this will never catch on. XRIs have no use cases. Why would I want xri://@example.org*blah=Bob/ when http://blah.example.org/Bob/ already works with my existing software without any problems? My only fear is that OpenID 2.0 will require that all software understand XRIs. So much for lightweight software.
Actually, the problem is that the OpenID specification is very poorly written and is extremely complicated. It's as though a couple of kids wanted to put together an RFC but didn't really understand how to express a specification is a logical form. If you don't believe me, just take a look; you'll see what I mean just by glancing through it: http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-1_1. txt
Anyway, then, as kids are wont to do, they have followed it up with a series of new specifications, each one more complicated than the last. There are five specifications in draft form right now, each to cover some different aspect of what should be a fairly simple protocol. They reference and make use of HTTP, HTML, XHTML, XML, XRIs, XRDS, S/MIME, XSLT, and some other, similar ID specification called Yadis. Implementing all this thing requires gobs of software libraries (each with security holes and bugs) and expertise (and who has time to learn the latest X??? spec?). And we're supposed to believe that it's possible to do this securely? We can barely make secure web servers, much less SSI systems which require almost 100 pages of specifications, plus thousands of pages of supporting specifications!
What's sad is that the authors are not just a couple of kids that discovered XML and had a field day. The authors are associated with companies. The primary author works for VeriSign. Presumably, he should know better than to make such a jumbled mess.
But I think we all know what's really going on here. These idiots put together an incomprehensible specification. It is poorly defined, ambigious, and relies on lots of supporting technologies. It is impossible to implement securely, completely, and correctly. Security holes and interoperability issues will be the only real standard. And guess whose jobs are secure? Guess who gets lots of contracting jobs? Guess who is needed to write new specifications so that they can get it Right the next time?
It's too late to turn this one around. Hopefully OpenID will die a horrible death and we'll never hear of it again. But please, please, if anyone else reading this feels compelled to write a specification in the future, learn from OpenID's mistakes and keep it simple, stupid. Because OpenID is setting itself up for disaster.
You know, it's really cute that you can parrot back examples of big bad monopolies you learned in middle school. I know, those were simpler times, and you thought that if you received enough gold stars from your teacher then maybe, just maybe, Jenny from math class would let you sneak a peak behind the bleachers at recess. But here in the real world, you can't just regurgitate nonsense and get a pat on the back and $20 for an A on your report card.
With that in mind, let's take a look at your list of examples of the failure of the free market.
Standard Oil - breakup was largely for political reasons. Debate continues among economists.
Carnegie Steel - never broken up, sold to US Steel in 1901. Care to go into more detail?
Ma Bell - also known as AT&T, who obtained monopoly status directly due to government regulation. Can't really blame the free market for the problems of a regulated entity.
Microsoft - was never regulated. Market got over it. What's your point?
But let's say we give you the benefit of the doubt. Four dubious examples of monoplies in 100 years. Uh oh, boys! The free market might work for those wild west frontier types, but not for us! Protect us, Daddy Government, protect us!
Give me a break. Enjoy your +5, enjoy your self righteous condemnation of commerce. But please, don't vote. In fact, just move to Canada. We don't need your kind in America. You need us, but we don't need you.
You assume too much. Consider:
1. Script kiddies may already know about the vulnerability. There is no reason to believe that you are the first to discover the exploit.
2. The webmaster might not fix the issue before harm is done to the users. If the script kiddies already know about the vulnerability, they will likely exploit it before the webmaster has time to react.
As a user, I want to know immediately when a vulnerability is discovered. It gives me an opportunity to stop doing business with a website before my credit card number is stolen. It also gives me the opportunity to double-check credit card statements and the like; if a security hole is covered up, I may never notice the $200 charge.
Since we can never be sure who knows about a vulnerability, it is best to let the users know about it as soon as possible.
You are operating under false assumptions.
There exists a community of underground hackers (crackers?) who search for exploits. They find them, trade them, sell them, and use them to steal data and resources. Gone are the days where script kiddies just hack for fun; there is a serious black market involved, since resource and identity theft can be very lucrative.
When an exploit is discovered by a researcher, it is likely that the black hats have already discovered it. The software's users are already being harmed, although they may not realize it: smart hackers are good at covering their tracks.
In this scenario, "responsible disclosure" is anything but responsible. By waiting until the vendor has patched the software, users are being harmed. On the other hand, immediate full disclosure has three important effects:
One, it eliminates the black market for the exploit. If everyone knows about it, nobody will pay for it. This reduces the overall market for exploits and, compounded over many exploits, will drive hackers out of the market. If it is not profitable to find exploits, fewer people will do it.
Two, it gives the users an opportunity to take action. If, through full disclosure, I find out that Internet Explorer has a serious security risk, I can switch to Firefox. If my Cisco router has a problem, I may be able to work around it with an alternate configuration. On the other hand, if a researcher reports the exploits to Microsoft and Cisco directly, black hats are free to exploit my computer and my router until patches are released (if they ever are).
Three, it provides an incentive for vendors to write better software. If every software bug meant a black eye and angry users, you can be sure that there would be better software. On the other hand, the occasional well-timed patch looks like software "maintenance", a concept that shouldn't exist but sounds reasonable to the layman (after all, he has to have his car tuned up every so often, so why not his software?) The result of full disclosure, on the other hand, is more akin to an emergency recall; the producer has clearly made a mistake.
The concern, of course, is that the black hats don't already have the exploit, and that full disclosure gives it to them. Yes, this is the risk of full disclosure. However, given that black hats have an economic incentive to find exploits, while researchers rarely do, we can expect the probability of this to be low. And even if they don't have the exploit, releasing it still shrinks the exploit market (why pay for exploit B when you can get exploit A for free), it still notifies users of a potential problem, and it still incents vendors to write better software.
Full disclosure is responsible disclosure.
I think you'll find that being smart, working hard in school, and learning valuable job skills is hardly risk-taking behavior. Most Slashdotters are anything but risk takers.
Oh my God! That graph clearly has an upward trend! Who cares what the units are? We're doomed!
You may be thinking too narrowly. Look at some of the modern functional languages such as SML or Haskell. In those languages, symbols like +, -, and * are all just function calls semantically, but syntactically they are operators (as is any sequence of non-alphanumeric characters, approximately). You can actually define the operator precedence at compile time, and the parser will adjust accordingly. You can still define these functions however you like, just like in Smalltalk. (Of course, these languages do not have runtime function dispatch or anything like that, but this is orthogonal to parsing issues).
In other words, SML does not impose mathematical parsing, but it allows you to specify it for operators of your choice.
That's absurd. You are confusing parsing and evaluation. I don't care how Smalltalk evaluates the expression [2 + 3], I just want the text "2 + 3 * 5" to be parsed as [2 + (3 * 5)] rather than [(2 + 3) * 5]. Either way, Smalltalk can then internally send some messages around to actually perform the computation.
Yes, this would make the parser more complicated. Hey! I don't care! Parsers are designed for humans, not the other way around.
You'll have to excuse me. As I get older, I find myself having less and less patience for the style of comment that gets moderated up here, which, as a rule, make bold, unjustified claims against Republicans, Microsoft, or other villian of the day. Your post looked to be the latest in this frustrating pattern.
:)
I don't think you're an idiot. And you're right, you had more context in which to come to a conclusion. However, since you failed to provide that context, your post came off as standard political BS. This made it difficult to engage in any kind of discourse other than to point out, if somewhat disrespectfully, that your quoted material did not justify your conclusions.
In general, any time you conclude that some person is a closed-minded fanatic, I think you will find that someone will respond similarly, if at all. If you avoid that, well, "you might find yourself having more interesting conversations."
First of all, I find it amusing that you compare a natural science like climatology to an academic pursuit (loosely a social science, if there is such a thing to begin with) and a profession. I find it even more amusing that you think that Bono is behaving like a sociologist and that Jolie is behaving like a social worker. They're not.
Gore, on the other hand, is behaving like the politician that he is, like it or not. I don't care whether the movie presents legitimate science or not. It is not science. It is politics. It is a "cause." The title tells you that. It's not "A Truth" or "The Truth" or "Science at Work!". It's "An Inconvenient Truth". Science does not term things as inconvenient. Science does not make value judgements. Science terms things as testable, falsifiable hypotheses, makes predictions, and tests them.
You don't have to be a scientist to be credible. You don't have to be a scientist to tell people about "real facts." But you should certainly not be a politician playing a political game for a pet cause. Science and politics don't mix.
Just to play devil's advocate here, where DO your fundamental human rights come from, if there is no creator? Why are any rights fundamental at all? A common idea is that our laws and rights and morals are justified by some kind of social contract, but it seems hard to justify calling any right fundamental in that case. That is, if rights are formed by a social contract, then there is nothing special about free speech -- if tomorrow society decided to remove it from the contract, then it is no longer a human right.
Like I said, though, devil's advocate. You could argue about this all day. My point is that you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Newt's comment with such a flippant comment. It's not obvious that the alternative view is any better.
The very concept of America is under assault. The traditional notion of our country as a union of one people, American peoples, has been assaulted with multicultural, situation ethics, and values neutral model where Western values and American civilization are ignored, minimized or ridiculed.The bottom line is pluralism acts as a brake on fanaticism. Newt is a fanatic. He wants all of us to recieve "patriotic education". He has no room in his worldview for different cultures, nuance, or values that differ from his values. He has all the answers, so why on earth would we need free speech? We don't have anything to talk about.I'm confused. Your comment does not follow from your quotation of Newt. He essentially says that moral relativism is bunk: a view held by many. I certainly wouldn't call it fanatical. I don't see him calling for blowing up abortion clinics or SUV dealerships. In fact, based on your reaction to this rather innocuous quotation, I would say that you are the one who has no room in your worldview for values different from your own.
Frankly, I don't think you even read the statement you quoted. You might as well have simply quoted "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit..." and continued with your tirade.
No, not really. MySQL [Community Server] is a database server that supports SQL. Oracle [Database] is a database server that supports SQL. MSSQL [Microsoft SQL Server] is a database server that supports SQL. The latter is often known simply as SQL Server.
The English speaking world now uses the short scale, i.e. billion = 1,000 ^ (1 + 2) = 1,000,000,000, trillion = 1,000 ^ (1 + 3). Britain has used these conventions in government since 1974.
There is no "-1, Heresy" mod despite what some moderators might think.
Wall Street values physicists very highly.