PythonicAlpha

Action is really needed. A system that can be breached just by any CA company that is more interested in money than in security (also at least one big CAs has a bad history concerning security) is plainly broken. There should at least be a kind of overseer that has the ability to intervene when bad behavior is reported.

In the current situation, it is impossible to trust this "system of trust". It just sounds similar as I shall give the keys to my house to the thieves guild to prevent burglaries.

Almost everybody I know, that was using KDE, did it because of the pure desktop and not because of the semantic Desktop. Every time, the discussion came to the later, it was how to disable it.

I think, it was a bold idea, but not well implemented. Maybe it also was to soon for such a bold move. With the advent of more cores and faster disks (eg. SSD) there might come the time for an other desktop to implement such thing. When you have eight or more cores, you don't have to worry when one is doing an indexing job all the time.

We can argue right and left here. Fact is, that there are multiple studies (somebody also cited some here) come to the result that ethanol when every effect is taken into account is worse than mineral oil for the environment -- and who says different, is most likely paid by the ethanol lobbies.

And to your "rain forests are destroyed anyway"-argument: You argue without any proof just by guessing. (BTW: rain forests where only one example, in fact, I don't know what areas are destroyed by fuel plants, but fact is, that there are areas destroyed and they are mono-cultures that grossly harm nature).

Thank you for making all the citations! I made my post (with similar subject, but without citations) before I saw yours.

The whole ethanol story is a weird one. In the EU ethanol was (and still is) promoted as "environment friendly".

Facts are against it. There are plenty of studies, that ethanol is doing more harm to environment than it helps. The reason is, that conventional thinking that "corn growing reduces CO2" is just to simple. You must take into account all factors and also damages that are made by the ethanol production. And it is a fact, that rain forests and other natural plants are displaced by corn farms for ethanol. So conventional thinking "great we have more plants and CO2 is reduced" is just plainly wrong. This thinking was misguiding and misused by the ethanol lobbies.

It would be better to stay on normal gasoline and at the same time reduce the gasoline usage of cars and factories in mid-term. In long term, we should go for better energy sources (preferably solar and wind energy).

So, the environment is no valid reason for the ethanol promotion. What is the only (valid) reason to do so?: To get less dependent from the oil-countries. (so politics again)

But the best way would be to get rid of this environment-costly energy source for real environment-friendly ones.

Thanks, yes, when this is the case, that would eliminate the cookie-less domain reason.

Serving from a cookie-less domain, still good?

I understand the points made about sharding and concatenating (and also the limits of the arguments), but the short article just mentions cookie-less domains and then just seem to forget about them. So this practice is still valid? Or is there some feature in HTTP2 that also obsoletes this?

But the Kernel is not the only reason, a system has to be restarted. What about changed dynamic libraries? It can be a mess to fiddle out, which processes has to be restarted, so a reboot is normally the best solution for critical patches (eg. in the glibc).

As much I understand, the service (not the device) is not generally available?

When will it be ready? When will it be possible to use it from other countries (other than US)?

The service as such is very interesting, for example, when I want to have quick access to a Linux/Windows desktop with a particular OS without the need to install on real iron.

Depends of course on the pricing. The idea sounds really neat!

The trouble with TPP and other such "advances":

Big corporations are pulling strings in the background, to annul democratic control. With bigger institutions (e.g. Washington, Brussels, ...) it becomes simpler and simpler to find people that are far enough from the voters and corrupted enough to support such endeavors. The result are secret proceedings and parliaments that become pressed to vote for big legislation where the effects for democracy and nations can not be foreseen.

In effect, those lobbies have their way (at least oftentimes in the last decades) and destroy democratic control and control of the big corporations. So it comes, that big corporations have a "free hand" to do what they want but are liable for nearly nothing.

The worst thing about this is, that when one "advance" is rejected by democracy -- no trouble, just give it a different name, make it a little different and give it an other 3 or 4 letters acronym ... and bring it back next year!

I also can not see universities as big heroes here, but I think the whole patent discussion is so twisted and biased with factions that cover their real intentions, that one must be very careful what to support or judge what is a good development.

Also in our country, we have a long list of "reforms" in different areas -- and "reform" sounds always positive, but in very few areas the so called "reforms" where directed in the right direction. I thus really got tired of "reforms". Oftentimes the word "reform" is used by factions that cover their real agenda ...

It is worth to note here, that the universities don't speak against patent reform as such, but against special parts of the current reform.

I am not familiar with the current reform, but problem is the fixation of so called "patent trolls". Many legitimate patent holders can be easily hurt by a reform that just is pleasing for the big corporations.

When (for example) patent trolls are identified by the notion "don't produce the invention", than small inventors (and universities) can be hurt extremely, since small inventors have to sell their inventions to big corporations, when the production is out of their reach. Of course, the big corporations will be happy, when they can just steal such inventions and accuse the inventor as "patent-troll".

If this is correct, this is really a big thing!

It seems, everybody on the internet isn't caring anymore about security or is totally ignorant. Comodo as certificate authority should care about internet security and should know better.

Who should trust certs anymore or trust the trust-chain, when even the certs don't care?

The result can be seen in Great Britain:

Former British prime minister Thatcher ("Iron Lady") decided, that the future is in the service sector. Also the most lucrative service sector was the finance sector. So it was fostered to a big extend and the finance sector of London is one of if not the biggest industries of GB.

In fact, it is all that is left of the former Empire. All other industries of GB are not competitive any more. Car industry is not and many of the well known car brands are already sold to other car corporations. Mini belongs to BMW, so does the renowned "Rolls-Royce" brand, Rover was sold and sold again, now belonging to Tata.

The concentration to the finance sector did the other industries of the British isle not well. All what is left, is finance and so Britain is struggling and fighting every time, when the EU wants to regulate the finance sector.

They are captives of their own system.

I think, part of the trouble comes from the situation that many people care (to much).

I don't think so. In my opinion, close-votes are the biggest problem. As I learned lately, 5 votes are enough to take a question down and then no new answers are possible, even from people that where just writing one.

I really hated it, when my questions (or questions, I wrote answers for) where closed down. You invest effort and time to write a question or answer -- but all is senseless as soon as 5 people kill the question. And also it takes forms that every question that is just a small degree beyond the "group norm" will be taken down in short time without that anybody can do something about it. 5 "Soup Nazis" (as somebody else named it) or just people that do not read carefully suffice (there is nearly no benefit, to do so -- there are some "attention" checks, but those mostly will guide you to adhere to group standards and less likely will force you to really understand the question).

I did not find out completely, but it even seems that when some moderators vote to leave questions open and 5 others vote to close, it is closed. That would be the most ridiculous thing!

BTW: I give you an upvoting, at least here, because the voting system should not only reflect opinions, but interesting views.

Is this only a font problem? Many sites serve jQuery and other files from Googles CDN. Aren't these the same problem? Also there are other widely used CDNs that could affect your privacy .... will this not get very far, when you want to avoid any of these??

Even when they disabled server side operations, the malicious root certificate very likely remains on thousands of computers -- and thus a high security risk for all owners of those computers!

In essence, a root certificate with known private key is as dangerous as a worm that infected your computer. Maybe even more dangerous.

One of the "Soup Nazis" here:

I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!).

The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system, to adhere to the "group standard".

I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers?

I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.

> Large software is typically built from many heterogeneous components.

That is just one of the reasons, why software is getting more and more unreliable (not the asynchronous implementation). Software stacks are getting more and more complex and implementors loose track of the complexity.

Throwing dirt on software with clear and less complex implementations, is not going to make things better.

Of course I would not argue, that asynchronous implementation is for any software and in particular with today's development tools, but just to compare it with different types of things to make it look bad, is no proper argumentation style.

I disagree.

It is not analogous to cooperative multitasking, since Windows 3.1 dealt with different applications -- but asynchronous programming is targeting only a single (server) application.

I also would add, that asynchronous implemented server applications are doing oftentimes better than systems that primarily rely on threading.

I do not know exactly, how the mining difficulty is set up, but to my understanding, more and more transactions are possible with not so fast growing energy effort. And the number that is really interesting is the number of transactions per energy unit.

The second argument is something that is independent from the energy problem. The danger always exists, that some entity is taking over the blockchain.

It does. The rate of transactions is growing faster than the Bitcoin price.

That is right, but does not take into account, that by construction, the system is becoming more efficient over time. The rise in computing power for every Bitcoin is reflecting that more transactions are done per Bitcoin over time. So, more and more efficient hardware is used and thus the relative energy needed per transaction is dropping.

More interesting than the CO2 release per Bitcoin is the CO2 release per transaction.

I guess this is still substantially higher than for normal bank transactions -- but how much? Normal money and living also releases CO2. When you use your big car to drive to the bakery 0.2 miles away, you release a lot of CO2 and all to buy some rolls worth 0.0...? Bitcoin.

When I understand the system right, the number of transactions possible per generated Bitcoin should also rise in the same speed (or higher?) as the CO2 release does.

I know that there is a continuing fight between US measurements (inch, ...) and European measurements (Metric system) -- but I really was shocked, when a printer wanted to have "US letter" pages. The advantage of the A-System is so big over the US letter system, that I don't understand that there are still countries that don't want to adopt it. Just ask your photo copier manufacturer!

It also can't be reasoned, that so many cars or traffic signs have to be changed ...

Same as in Germany: Every government invents new possibilities to "count people out" of the official statistics. So the numbers fall, but unemployment stays the same or even rises.

I think, there are some good spam-filters out there.

Gmail as replacement of FB is a little troublesome solution, I think. Gmail also has his privacy problems, though absolutely not as huge as Facebooks. I think, own (challenging) or paid Mail-providers should be preferred if you really want more privacy. Paid Mail-providers should be able to do the spam-filtering for you.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I am not familiar with the details of English language, so sometimes I just understand things wrong.

Yes, there are some interesting opcodes too, but I found their usage so limited, that it was not worthwhile to drop compatibility. Of course, with a fixed setting, where you need every byte .... but I must say, that for me today it is just academic, since I also do no embedded programming today. With computers of today, I still think, that optimizing is worthwhile, but not to that degree, that breaking compatibility makes sense.

Yea, that would be really a great idea. I have a friend, whom I ask for help some time, but he also has only limited time.

And I lack the time to really dive into automation stuff and that sort. So many interesting tools are available, but you always have to take time and learn it first.