Ah and then there are the *deliberate* security holes in proprietary stacks.

Well, it's better because at least you CAN notice bugs. How many security bugs have occurred in proprietary software (Apple, Microsoft) and stayed there without being fixed for months or years? And how many are there that you cannot know? Windows (to mention one) has security patches almost every week.

I think this should make us reflect upon how the most critical aspects of our lives (technologically speaking) are depending on pieces of code far from perfect.

Let me say that I love free-software and I develop free-software too, but this shows us that parts of it, even hyper-critical parts, are sometimes written by people doing it for "hobby" in their spare time, and lack proper review. And yet free-software is better than close software, especially security-related one.

So what's the solution? Maybe creating groups of community software reviewers, or using double-factor authentication in everything, like key+password, etc...

It's also incredible that nobody spotted it before. It must be something like that that was exploited in Matrix 2 to break ssh...

Ask the inhabitants of Fukushima and Japan in general, a country with the safest buildings in the world.

You may be right, but in my opinion what's wrong with extreme surveillance is that you can get flagged just for searching the internet for knowledge, or you avoid pursuing more knowledge in the fear of being flagged.

An example: you often see in movies that some criminal builds a pipe bomb with instructions found on the web. I've always been curious of knowing if that's really possible, but I never searched that on the web. Notice, I didn't want to build one, just to know if the average crazy man could really do that and be a danger for others.

Another example: whes studying nazism in history, or watching tv documetaries about that, I've always been curious about the book that Hitler wrote, just to know more about the state of mind that made such abomination possible. Again, never dared to search someting about it, not even on wikipedia.

Now my country hasn't got something like NSA, but I think it's only a matter of time, but I challenge any USA citizens to search for such things on the web just for their personal knowledge, without being afraid.

[Reposted because I mistakenly posted anonymously]

Solar panels are more efficient at lower temperatures, due to minor atomic "agitation" in silicon, so it may compensate the minor sun intensity.

"Does this field really exist... or did we invent it to make our equations work?"

I think that at those ultimate levels, this distinction is quite fuzzy for all the reality in general.

I'd suggest the real distribution Ubuntu is a subset of.

You spend 50$ a month? And you say that other countries' telcos are raping their customers? Here in Italy I pay 6 EUR a month and I have 120 minutes of calling, 120 SMS, and 2GB data. Not unlimited, but quite enough (for me). And even before I had a flat plan I did not pay all that much!

But openness and security depend on what server you connect to, not on what client you use, isn't it?

Try doing it against USA, and you'll hear bombs on your head.

Did everyone see some photos or videos of what the rover did in the first month, apart from the one photo of the rover when it first landed? From the beginning it seems impossible to find any bit of information about this mission. Was this a kind of secret mission, or what? I mean, not every day someone is walking around on the moon.

Jokes apart, 20% is really little, considering that (as genetists say) we have 95% in common with chimps.

Is there a reason many such videos are kept secret for decades?