It's quite clear I think: If open source companies collude to agree not to launch suits against eachother, and protect their group against outside patentsuits by launching countersuits, it's a very defensive strategy which doesn't really mean much in the real world. Especially when anyone can go out of the group at any time, or sell off their patents.
This would mean those Open Source companies can't really enforce their patents against eachother, thus rendering them more impotent in the letter of the law, while being wide-open to backstabbers leaving the group.
I won't speculate what it might have been instead, however, it seems like a weak proposition as it was organized. This is just my guess though.
Neat. However, if those 481 patents can be bought up by another company, they were never the community's in the first place. Sounds like a crappy plan than backfired.
In those seven years, knowledge and usage of Linux is now more widespread than ever before. Even in certain banks, Linux is now being used or researched, they now have pretty good alternatives to Sun OS (Linux, BSD) and Oracle (Postgres), if not DB/2 and core systems.
It may never be the year of the Linux Desktop, but SCO did more for Linux than any Microsoft smear campaign could.
First they laugh at you. Then they ridicule you. Then they attack you. Then you win.
I'm not sure if you're pulling our legs, or if you really wonder about this.
If overnight, there are 6,000 billion dollars more, demand for dollars would diminish in relation to the increased supply. You know the supply-demand relationship, right?
Say, our candystore owner wants to buy something with his hard-earned dollar. However, with more money in the system, he would find prices going up as there is now less shortage of dollars, so in order to stay afloat, he'd need to up the price on his candies sooner or later, in order to pay for rent, decent food (not candies) and everything else he needs.
For money, this is true even more than for other goods, since money has no inherent value, but is just a social contract. It does follow the speed of information though, which is tremendous in this day and age.
Say those 6,000 billion dollars are used to buy up foreign stocks and companies. This will lower trust in dollars worldwide, and send the dollar-value down. Because people in other countries aren't as stupid as you think. Already, countries are starting to block money from outside, from buying up too much.
If USA "produces" 6,000,000,000 billion dollars overnight, they could potentially buy up the whole world (in theory). So it is nothing less than legalized theft of other countries' assets, nothing more or less than that.
Ironically, it will create even stronger bubbles than the ones we are in now though. More because money is being devalued, than anything of real value.
Those people with money in the bank will lose, unless they manage to time the market. But if money is being devalued, it might not be possible to time the market, only lose it or ride the wave.
If people are getting inconsistencies, they're not following good CS practices in the first place. Any proper course on the subject will teach algorithms and database-design, among other subjects that alleviate problems before they arise. This is nothing new, but has been maturing for the last 30-40 years.
I don't think people will automatically "get it", by just doing an exam on the subject. However, respect and a bit of dedication for such knowledge is required, to further refine one's skills.
I believe it's because people are _not_ trained properly, or their brains are unable to comprehend sound principles, they're getting inconsistencies in the first place. That, or the tight timelines which are expected to become tighter and tighter, until people are out of jobs..
"NoSQL"-practices has a place too, but not for most projects. If you're using NoSQL to "save time" not thinking about schemas, you're most probably inviting a world of hurt later, when inconsistencies, vertical scaling and immature support/reporting-tools catch up to you. The more value of the information in the system, the more hurt.
Of course, information on Facebook and its equivalent has almost 0 value, and don't really need to be that consistent or up-to-date. Although it has interesting scaling challenges, facebook is hardly the standard to meet for most serious projects out there.
This is coming from someone who has reviewed numerous "nosql" solutions, but not yet found something more compelling than RDBMs for general projects. I would very much like to use them for "fun" however, but seem unable to give up on so many sound practices, just to squeeze a bit more juice out of the system. Often, I find parallellizing the task gets the job done just as quick, with a "relational" solution, and with less headaches and support-nightmares later..
Just being able to use some mature support-tools is enough to make my decision. Hopefully, "nosql" will mature and become a viable alternative. Right tool for the right job and all that..
Heh, just wait until you try SugarCRM.. Reading your post made me realize there are other projects out there with the _exact_ same flaws / annoyances as Sugar, love it or hate it.
I'm sure Sugar is nice if you have the 6-12 months pouring over all the code and making design for new modules and layout / DB. But for _efficiency_ it's a mirage in the desert of hopeless "open source" projects, which in reality are paywalled spagghetti monsters.
Same with Typo3.
Don't get me wrong. It CAN work. I've been on successful projects with these. Just don't underestimate the complexity of already-written code, especially when they require you to commit to SO MUCH.. I mean who else uses Typoscript or that internal MVC templating engine? Yeah right, nobody. Guess why...
And if someone's having performance problems on Postgres, learn:
A) Indexes B) CLUSTER C) RTFM
Really, that's all there is to it! I'm sure more advanced setups can be made, but Postgres will scale fine for a small startup just using the basics. However, if you never CLUSTER or VACUUM (not preferable) Postgres, it can become a dog if you have alot of UPDATEs.
Basically, the poster should just RTFM. It is time spent educating yourself, and making it better next time.. Asking Slashdot a generic question such as this is a bit silly IMHO.
happen: Cut down the population of the earth down to, say, 5-10% of the 6 billion people living today. Earth will be able to sustain human life for almost indefinately, in human terms at least. Nature and wildlife may even flourish again with population growth in check.
With population growth following an exponential line, the crash will happen sooner than later, as it does with ALL species on earth.. No, it most probably won't happen by our free choice.. War, famine, natural disasters is our heritage to our children, but hardly new events anyways. This has happened many times before. However, we DONT need to go down with a crash.
We don't NEED cars, holidays abroad, junk food, and lots of other stuff that destroys the environment. Yeah, now it's kinda cool, but we've lost our heritage, we're like orphans, rootless and directionless. We don't sing, unless in a drunken stupor in a bad karaoke bar. We don't dance, unless high on some kind of drug. We don't relax, unless passified in front of the stare-box serving propaganda and lies.
I could go on and on. All of this are just "common" sense facts, but as long as we're immersed in life as it is now, we are unable to see how much better our lives would be without artificial foods, unnecessary junk gadgets and non-challenging lives.
Our best bet would be to start improving our lives now, and it might make it more interesting as well, instead of watching the 10.000th movie, with a plot similar to 100 other movies you've seen.
The rest of the post is left as an exercise to the sincere reader.
We can't prove a negative. Lots of studies funded by religious groups show that prayer does work in many cases. Lots of independent studies show that prayer has no effect whatsoever
Are you sure, or do you just relabel those positive findings to be "religious" and negative findings to be "independent". Honestly, I can see anyting sponsored by a following will of course have a bias in their results, however, maybe the "independent" studies are flawed in some ways also, and therefore unable to repeat the experiments?
My point is, if quality is really as lackluster as many of us have suspected, we can't really conclude anything right now.
Homeopathy studies have almost always shown no effect... one years old did show an effect, but you're going to get some that show effects by random chance occasionally.
Right, I'll buy that. Have never tried homeopathy, but its a relative newcomer, and a bit suspect. It may not be anything beyond the "placebo effect".
The placebo effect does not affect someone's illness, it affects how they feel about their illness. There is a big difference.
Are you sure? Often, when one life-partner / spouse dies, the other is sure to follow, days or a few months afterward. Are you sure outlook on life is to be disregarded entirely? What is the basis of your findings, and do you find it practical in your own life?
I personally believe the "placebo effect" is heavily underrated in today's medical climate. When we "have nothing to live for", that itself can be a catalyst for further serious decline of health, in one form or many forms.
All of those may make life more enjoyable... they do nothing to the actual disease in most cases though. Much as medical professionals would love to claim that a positive outlook helps, it doesn't. It's a myth to help the doctors and nurses with their jobs.
But the doctors don't care about this. They only treat the symptoms, not the patient, or their lives. We don't really want them encroaching on our lives either. Then we go to a healer, a therapist, a priest, a friend, a mate, family, or someone else.
From where do you draw the conclusion that common sense is garbage and to be disregarded?
If someone is aggressive their whole life, will not their bloodpressure rise to abnormal levels? Don't we suffer, even serious illnesses, due to stress?
Why not see the patient as an entire human being with a life, thought-processes and environment, rather than just a check-list of symptoms?
Ask any Chiropractor, Naturopath or Homoeopath and they will all tell you the same thing: MODERN MEDICINE IS POISON
That's when you turn to another chiropractor, naturopath or homeopath, and discover *oh shocks*, that they have a different opinion! Hell, some of them even works WITH a doctor, a hospital or physician!
The flaw is in our mind: Our prejudices and secret biases. We think we don't reveal them, but they are revealed in everything we speak and do, and it limits our understanding of reality as it really is, not like how we'd like it to be..
And exactly how are we to determine wether homeopathy or prayer doesn't work as well as the results found in medical journals / studies, if they are all flawed and biased in different sorts of ways.
I am glad I am not the only one who sighs every morning when reading a newspaper about some study claiming all sorts of stupid "facts" we: A) already know about, ie. common sense. Example: Your hygiene may affect how many mating partners you may get, or some other ridiculously subjective and unnecessary study. Just an example pulled up from the air, but in today's media, not entirely unlikely. B) can find no direct proof of causation, ie. correlation != causation. Example: Teenage pregnancy and video games. Study shows correlation, but if you give these "researchers" the task to find correlation between weather climate in Dakhar and teenage pregnancies in USA, their statistical short-curcuiting will "prove" correlations there also, and present it like it is a significant causation. Especially if you don't reveal where their datasets really come from... (just a hint) C) find littered with known prejudices, political biases and limited understanding, ie. bias. Example: Global cooling, global warming. One decade the first is the Truth And Only Truth, then another decade the latter one is the Truth And Only Truth.
Now I'm NOT saying all these studies are garbage, or that we can't derive anything meaningful from them. However, they are misrepresented in media, and when funding them, blown out of proportion and usually fails the "common sense check", ie. your reality check.
So when the quality of science today is so low, how can we REALLY know that prayer doesn't work (btw, lots of studies show that prayer DO work in many cases, ie. as a placebo effect or something similar), or homeopathy? If you're gonna present something "better" than existing cures, then you gotsa make sure the science is there, or your just falling into the same trap as we've fallen in for the last thousands of years of authorities making bad decision based on flawed data.
My personal opinion is that whatever works the best for you, will work. Western medicine is mostly based on herbalism, and works for fixing immediate damages to the body. While, sports, yoga, meditation, prayer, healing, good friends, smiles, laughter, will do wonders to prevent later ailments and make life more enjoyable.
What I find despicable, is people offering healing for dying patients, when there is no proof to support the cure, especially when offering money, which is illegal. However, other than that I think people should take responsibility for their own actions, and have freedom to choose what works the best for them.
Why not combine the best methods, or let people decide for themselves, and stop playing games once and for all?
Friendster? Neva tried, neva will. MySpace - yeah made 1 account. Failed the 5 minute-rule. Orkut? Is it like LinkedIn? Booooowing.
Facebook had find friends, invite friends and BRING UR REAL PICTURE. Somehow, they got people to do it.. If they paid staff / people to do it first, then it was genious.
The others I neva could stand. Now I cant stand Facebook. It generates too much spam and noise to be funny anymore.
Problem with warrior leaders is they live for the war. Any and all situation will be an call to arms, especially against "an axis of evil". Tell such a man of an intrusion, and he will go into fits and bouts.
Default Tor traffic, for normal websites like google.com, go through exitnodes. At the exitnodes, everything needs to be decrypted unless it's ssl or similarly encrypted at the application layer. Additionally the traffic is also directed to the REAL IP address. Combined with cleartext, it is quite a big risk actually.
Basically, an exitnode needs the decrypted data for usual http / decrypted traffic, and is a heaven for snoopers and adversaries wanting to do man in the middle-attacks. Even SSL becomes insecure, since such a node gets the power to present fake ssl-certificates, so unless you're careful, or running Firefox with its annoying warning pages, you can be bitten even when using internet bank accounts. It's also easier to snoop SSL at such exitnodes, since you can just harvest keys and do very deep packet inspection, unless keys are transferred in another medium (how it always should be).
Of course, since Tor is used by people seeking anonymity, the reward is higher for snoopers who want to find them. Besides, being an exitnode is a low barrier of entry to become a snooper as well, since every "shady character" is sending data your way. So do good research before using Tor, as care must be taken to preserve anonymity. Don't just run Tor and forget it.
When using hidden services, everything is encrypted along the whole route. The onionrouting will ensure high barrier of entry for adversaries and snoopers. So such hidden services is indeed more "secure" than using google.com (which you can bet is giving APIs to governments and highest bidders to snoop on us), and any other "normal" internet service, including your ISP..
What exitnodes and Tor is good at is this: Privacy: As in being one "dissident" among thousands of other voices. As long as you don't leak private information in any way, which excludes plugins, java and javascript (disable all such things now, even images can be "unsafe" unless you've anonymized your DNS requests). Speed: Snoopers of course wants to snoop on you with the utmost efficiency, so the exitnodes are blazing fast servers, which will be faster than relying on random nodes for reaching a "hidden service".
But privacy may quickly be offset by bad research, usage of Tor or even unreleased attacks. Security threats may leak private information in the blink of an eye, especially when using exitnodes. Don't use Tor unless you REALLY REALLY need it (like getting killed), and do good research and proper setup of the entire machine. Preferably use a prebuilt VM like JanusVM. Or use Tor if you don't really care and want to try a new thing, but don't act surprised when your identity is leaked..
Using this duck-search engine thingy is off limits, since it requires javascript. Forget it. You might as well use google.com or another hidden service which has no javascript requirements.
If you like anonymity, I like I2P better than Tor. It has a nice community and does have more safe defaults than Tor. In I2P, outproxies, another word for exitnodes, are heavily disencouraged. Instead they're trying to build an entire network of hidden services, to do anonymous search, email, bittorrent, irc, websites, etc. INSIDE the darknet itself. It is like this article, but everything else is built inside the network itself as well. It's a huge project, with lots of volunteers.
I recommend reading on their site how it works, you'll find they address much more issues than most other "darknets", and is open source and seems "honest" about what they know and don't know: http://www.i2p2.de/
Now, what should upset the American public is that 9-11 was probably engineers or supported by "allied" forces, in order to escalate conflict levels and justify wars.
Hear hear! It's good to see our blood in the streets haven't been for nothing.
Reminds me of the first days of Linux experience back in '95. Black terminals, dark caves, orcs that hit you for 37 hitpoints. Experience was hard to come by, but stuck with you until you died. Filled textures juat never had the same spark as a Two-Headed Silver Axe of Double Beheading, even with shading.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to Pong. Games these days. Still got something to learn from good'ol Pong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's quite clear I think: If open source companies collude to agree not to launch suits against eachother, and protect their group against outside patentsuits by launching countersuits, it's a very defensive strategy which doesn't really mean much in the real world. Especially when anyone can go out of the group at any time, or sell off their patents.
This would mean those Open Source companies can't really enforce their patents against eachother, thus rendering them more impotent in the letter of the law, while being wide-open to backstabbers leaving the group.
I won't speculate what it might have been instead, however, it seems like a weak proposition as it was organized. This is just my guess though.
A few years back, this was unheard of, at least in my country. Been a few years since I was into banking, so yes, things have definately changed.
Neat. However, if those 481 patents can be bought up by another company, they were never the community's in the first place. Sounds like a crappy plan than backfired.
In those seven years, knowledge and usage of Linux is now more widespread than ever before. Even in certain banks, Linux is now being used or researched, they now have pretty good alternatives to Sun OS (Linux, BSD) and Oracle (Postgres), if not DB/2 and core systems.
It may never be the year of the Linux Desktop, but SCO did more for Linux than any Microsoft smear campaign could.
First they laugh at you. Then they ridicule you. Then they attack you. Then you win.
I'm not sure if you're pulling our legs, or if you really wonder about this.
If overnight, there are 6,000 billion dollars more, demand for dollars would diminish in relation to the increased supply. You know the supply-demand relationship, right?
Say, our candystore owner wants to buy something with his hard-earned dollar. However, with more money in the system, he would find prices going up as there is now less shortage of dollars, so in order to stay afloat, he'd need to up the price on his candies sooner or later, in order to pay for rent, decent food (not candies) and everything else he needs.
For money, this is true even more than for other goods, since money has no inherent value, but is just a social contract. It does follow the speed of information though, which is tremendous in this day and age.
Say those 6,000 billion dollars are used to buy up foreign stocks and companies. This will lower trust in dollars worldwide, and send the dollar-value down. Because people in other countries aren't as stupid as you think. Already, countries are starting to block money from outside, from buying up too much.
If USA "produces" 6,000,000,000 billion dollars overnight, they could potentially buy up the whole world (in theory).
So it is nothing less than legalized theft of other countries' assets, nothing more or less than that.
Ironically, it will create even stronger bubbles than the ones we are in now though. More because money is being devalued, than anything of real value.
Those people with money in the bank will lose, unless they manage to time the market. But if money is being devalued, it might not be possible to time the market, only lose it or ride the wave.
Patents solve no problems today other than making lawyers rich and collusion of huge corporations to squash out creative competitors.
Come on! We'd never treat Native American Indians like that.
We'd buy the rights for some chips and mirrors, but not like that. No..
Bye bye karma...
If people are getting inconsistencies, they're not following good CS practices in the first place. Any proper course on the subject will teach algorithms and database-design, among other subjects that alleviate problems before they arise. This is nothing new, but has been maturing for the last 30-40 years.
I don't think people will automatically "get it", by just doing an exam on the subject. However, respect and a bit of dedication for such knowledge is required, to further refine one's skills.
I believe it's because people are _not_ trained properly, or their brains are unable to comprehend sound principles, they're getting inconsistencies in the first place. That, or the tight timelines which are expected to become tighter and tighter, until people are out of jobs..
"NoSQL"-practices has a place too, but not for most projects. If you're using NoSQL to "save time" not thinking about schemas, you're most probably inviting a world of hurt later, when inconsistencies, vertical scaling and immature support/reporting-tools catch up to you. The more value of the information in the system, the more hurt.
Of course, information on Facebook and its equivalent has almost 0 value, and don't really need to be that consistent or up-to-date. Although it has interesting scaling challenges, facebook is hardly the standard to meet for most serious projects out there.
This is coming from someone who has reviewed numerous "nosql" solutions, but not yet found something more compelling than RDBMs for general projects. I would very much like to use them for "fun" however, but seem unable to give up on so many sound practices, just to squeeze a bit more juice out of the system. Often, I find parallellizing the task gets the job done just as quick, with a "relational" solution, and with less headaches and support-nightmares later..
Just being able to use some mature support-tools is enough to make my decision. Hopefully, "nosql" will mature and become a viable alternative. Right tool for the right job and all that..
Heh, just wait until you try SugarCRM.. Reading your post made me realize there are other projects out there with the _exact_ same flaws / annoyances as Sugar, love it or hate it.
I'm sure Sugar is nice if you have the 6-12 months pouring over all the code and making design for new modules and layout / DB. But for _efficiency_ it's a mirage in the desert of hopeless "open source" projects, which in reality are paywalled spagghetti monsters.
Same with Typo3.
Don't get me wrong. It CAN work. I've been on successful projects with these. Just don't underestimate the complexity of already-written code, especially when they require you to commit to SO MUCH.. I mean who else uses Typoscript or that internal MVC templating engine? Yeah right, nobody. Guess why...
It's a nightmare.
Ditto on Postgres :-)
And if someone's having performance problems on Postgres, learn:
A) Indexes
B) CLUSTER
C) RTFM
Really, that's all there is to it! I'm sure more advanced setups can be made, but Postgres will scale fine for a small startup just using the basics. However, if you never CLUSTER or VACUUM (not preferable) Postgres, it can become a dog if you have alot of UPDATEs.
Basically, the poster should just RTFM. It is time spent educating yourself, and making it better next time.. Asking Slashdot a generic question such as this is a bit silly IMHO.
Erm, who are "they"?
Maybe there is some more magical thinking going on here, right in this forum?
I've trouble reading your posts for all those strawmens falling out of it..
happen: Cut down the population of the earth down to, say, 5-10% of the 6 billion people living today. Earth will be able to sustain human life for almost indefinately, in human terms at least. Nature and wildlife may even flourish again with population growth in check.
With population growth following an exponential line, the crash will happen sooner than later, as it does with ALL species on earth.. No, it most probably won't happen by our free choice.. War, famine, natural disasters is our heritage to our children, but hardly new events anyways. This has happened many times before. However, we DONT need to go down with a crash.
We don't NEED cars, holidays abroad, junk food, and lots of other stuff that destroys the environment. Yeah, now it's kinda cool, but we've lost our heritage, we're like orphans, rootless and directionless.
We don't sing, unless in a drunken stupor in a bad karaoke bar.
We don't dance, unless high on some kind of drug.
We don't relax, unless passified in front of the stare-box serving propaganda and lies.
I could go on and on. All of this are just "common" sense facts, but as long as we're immersed in life as it is now, we are unable to see how much better our lives would be without artificial foods, unnecessary junk gadgets and non-challenging lives.
Our best bet would be to start improving our lives now, and it might make it more interesting as well, instead of watching the 10.000th movie, with a plot similar to 100 other movies you've seen.
The rest of the post is left as an exercise to the sincere reader.
Changes will happen, with or without us..
We can't prove a negative. Lots of studies funded by religious groups show that prayer does work in many cases. Lots of independent studies show that prayer has no effect whatsoever
Are you sure, or do you just relabel those positive findings to be "religious" and negative findings to be "independent". Honestly, I can see anyting sponsored by a following will of course have a bias in their results, however, maybe the "independent" studies are flawed in some ways also, and therefore unable to repeat the experiments?
My point is, if quality is really as lackluster as many of us have suspected, we can't really conclude anything right now.
Homeopathy studies have almost always shown no effect... one years old did show an effect, but you're going to get some that show effects by random chance occasionally.
Right, I'll buy that. Have never tried homeopathy, but its a relative newcomer, and a bit suspect. It may not be anything beyond the "placebo effect".
The placebo effect does not affect someone's illness, it affects how they feel about their illness. There is a big difference.
Are you sure? Often, when one life-partner / spouse dies, the other is sure to follow, days or a few months afterward. Are you sure outlook on life is to be disregarded entirely? What is the basis of your findings, and do you find it practical in your own life?
I personally believe the "placebo effect" is heavily underrated in today's medical climate. When we "have nothing to live for", that itself can be a catalyst for further serious decline of health, in one form or many forms.
All of those may make life more enjoyable... they do nothing to the actual disease in most cases though. Much as medical professionals would love to claim that a positive outlook helps, it doesn't. It's a myth to help the doctors and nurses with their jobs.
But the doctors don't care about this. They only treat the symptoms, not the patient, or their lives. We don't really want them encroaching on our lives either. Then we go to a healer, a therapist, a priest, a friend, a mate, family, or someone else.
From where do you draw the conclusion that common sense is garbage and to be disregarded?
If someone is aggressive their whole life, will not their bloodpressure rise to abnormal levels? Don't we suffer, even serious illnesses, due to stress?
Why not see the patient as an entire human being with a life, thought-processes and environment, rather than just a check-list of symptoms?
Ask any Chiropractor, Naturopath or Homoeopath and they will all tell you the same thing: MODERN MEDICINE IS POISON
That's when you turn to another chiropractor, naturopath or homeopath, and discover *oh shocks*, that they have a different opinion! Hell, some of them even works WITH a doctor, a hospital or physician!
The flaw is in our mind: Our prejudices and secret biases. We think we don't reveal them, but they are revealed in everything we speak and do, and it limits our understanding of reality as it really is, not like how we'd like it to be..
And exactly how are we to determine wether homeopathy or prayer doesn't work as well as the results found in medical journals / studies, if they are all flawed and biased in different sorts of ways.
I am glad I am not the only one who sighs every morning when reading a newspaper about some study claiming all sorts of stupid "facts" we:
A) already know about, ie. common sense. Example: Your hygiene may affect how many mating partners you may get, or some other ridiculously subjective and unnecessary study. Just an example pulled up from the air, but in today's media, not entirely unlikely.
B) can find no direct proof of causation, ie. correlation != causation. Example: Teenage pregnancy and video games. Study shows correlation, but if you give these "researchers" the task to find correlation between weather climate in Dakhar and teenage pregnancies in USA, their statistical short-curcuiting will "prove" correlations there also, and present it like it is a significant causation. Especially if you don't reveal where their datasets really come from... (just a hint)
C) find littered with known prejudices, political biases and limited understanding, ie. bias. Example: Global cooling, global warming. One decade the first is the Truth And Only Truth, then another decade the latter one is the Truth And Only Truth.
Now I'm NOT saying all these studies are garbage, or that we can't derive anything meaningful from them. However, they are misrepresented in media, and when funding them, blown out of proportion and usually fails the "common sense check", ie. your reality check.
So when the quality of science today is so low, how can we REALLY know that prayer doesn't work (btw, lots of studies show that prayer DO work in many cases, ie. as a placebo effect or something similar), or homeopathy? If you're gonna present something "better" than existing cures, then you gotsa make sure the science is there, or your just falling into the same trap as we've fallen in for the last thousands of years of authorities making bad decision based on flawed data.
My personal opinion is that whatever works the best for you, will work. Western medicine is mostly based on herbalism, and works for fixing immediate damages to the body. While, sports, yoga, meditation, prayer, healing, good friends, smiles, laughter, will do wonders to prevent later ailments and make life more enjoyable.
What I find despicable, is people offering healing for dying patients, when there is no proof to support the cure, especially when offering money, which is illegal. However, other than that I think people should take responsibility for their own actions, and have freedom to choose what works the best for them.
Why not combine the best methods, or let people decide for themselves, and stop playing games once and for all?
We do... It is...
Friendster? Neva tried, neva will. MySpace - yeah made 1 account. Failed the 5 minute-rule. Orkut? Is it like LinkedIn? Booooowing.
Facebook had find friends, invite friends and BRING UR REAL PICTURE. Somehow, they got people to do it.. If they paid staff / people to do it first, then it was genious.
The others I neva could stand. Now I cant stand Facebook. It generates too much spam and noise to be funny anymore.
It's Thanksgiving?
Agggh, smartass!
You may be right.. I just installed Windows 7 on a server of mine..
Problem with warrior leaders is they live for the war. Any and all situation will be an call to arms, especially against "an axis of evil".
Tell such a man of an intrusion, and he will go into fits and bouts.
History lesson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Operations_Administration
Default Tor traffic, for normal websites like google.com, go through exitnodes. At the exitnodes, everything needs to be decrypted unless it's ssl or similarly encrypted at the application layer. Additionally the traffic is also directed to the REAL IP address. Combined with cleartext, it is quite a big risk actually.
Basically, an exitnode needs the decrypted data for usual http / decrypted traffic, and is a heaven for snoopers and adversaries wanting to do man in the middle-attacks. Even SSL becomes insecure, since such a node gets the power to present fake ssl-certificates, so unless you're careful, or running Firefox with its annoying warning pages, you can be bitten even when using internet bank accounts. It's also easier to snoop SSL at such exitnodes, since you can just harvest keys and do very deep packet inspection, unless keys are transferred in another medium (how it always should be).
Of course, since Tor is used by people seeking anonymity, the reward is higher for snoopers who want to find them. Besides, being an exitnode is a low barrier of entry to become a snooper as well, since every "shady character" is sending data your way. So do good research before using Tor, as care must be taken to preserve anonymity. Don't just run Tor and forget it.
When using hidden services, everything is encrypted along the whole route. The onionrouting will ensure high barrier of entry for adversaries and snoopers. So such hidden services is indeed more "secure" than using google.com (which you can bet is giving APIs to governments and highest bidders to snoop on us), and any other "normal" internet service, including your ISP..
What exitnodes and Tor is good at is this:
Privacy: As in being one "dissident" among thousands of other voices. As long as you don't leak private information in any way, which excludes plugins, java and javascript (disable all such things now, even images can be "unsafe" unless you've anonymized your DNS requests).
Speed: Snoopers of course wants to snoop on you with the utmost efficiency, so the exitnodes are blazing fast servers, which will be faster than relying on random nodes for reaching a "hidden service".
But privacy may quickly be offset by bad research, usage of Tor or even unreleased attacks. Security threats may leak private information in the blink of an eye, especially when using exitnodes.
Don't use Tor unless you REALLY REALLY need it (like getting killed), and do good research and proper setup of the entire machine. Preferably use a prebuilt VM like JanusVM.
Or use Tor if you don't really care and want to try a new thing, but don't act surprised when your identity is leaked..
Using this duck-search engine thingy is off limits, since it requires javascript. Forget it. You might as well use google.com or another hidden service which has no javascript requirements.
If you like anonymity, I like I2P better than Tor. It has a nice community and does have more safe defaults than Tor. In I2P, outproxies, another word for exitnodes, are heavily disencouraged. Instead they're trying to build an entire network of hidden services, to do anonymous search, email, bittorrent, irc, websites, etc. INSIDE the darknet itself. It is like this article, but everything else is built inside the network itself as well. It's a huge project, with lots of volunteers.
I recommend reading on their site how it works, you'll find they address much more issues than most other "darknets", and is open source and seems "honest" about what they know and don't know:
http://www.i2p2.de/
But you never know..
More like 1.5, and you don't want those bits on your computer... ever.
To be fair, fighting wars in secrecy has been going on for a long long time, way before 9-11, making it the proverbial drop in the ocean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions
Now, what should upset the American public is that 9-11 was probably engineers or supported by "allied" forces, in order to escalate conflict levels and justify wars.
Fuck off!
Creds. NOW!!!
Hear hear! It's good to see our blood in the streets haven't been for nothing.
Reminds me of the first days of Linux experience back in '95. Black terminals, dark caves, orcs that hit you for 37 hitpoints. Experience was hard to come by, but stuck with you until you died.
Filled textures juat never had the same spark as a Two-Headed Silver Axe of Double Beheading, even with shading.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to Pong. Games these days. Still got something to learn from good'ol Pong.