"conspiracy theorist" is a term with two words, conspire and theory. If two people rob a bank and the bank manager calls the police then the police does not respond by saying "that's a stupid conspiracy theory", they actually look at the evidence. "conspiracy theorist" today means "person who thinks for himself" and it is used exclusively by people who don't.

I agree that one should question RedHat and a few other GNU/Linux distributions. Luckily we do not have to use RedHat if we choose to use GNU/Linux, there are many other variants. NSA may have a harder time getting their backdoors into Debian / Ubuntu than they have with RH, but there are questions there too. Anyone remember that "mistake" in Debians OpenSSL code which made it generate useless certificates for years without anyone noticing? As for the kernel itself.. I don't see it as likely that anyone would manage to put a backdoor in there. But it's open source, so you can I can and should take a look. Overall, I'd say you are much better off using Linux than Windows.

Don't expect this or other mainstream sites to tell the truth on this one ever. It will probably be like the gulf of tonkin incident 20 years from now, CIA admitted it was all fake and all fabricated 10 years ago yet local school history book still stick with the official story.

Actually, a lot of NATO countries covertly tortured people for telling the truth about 9/11. Surveillance and sabotage just wasn't enough for the intelligence services within NATO 10 years ago. Today everyone but the most naive and stupid have figured out that an official story which requires gravity to make massive steel beams fall up does not hold water. Yes, official 9/11 government story can only be true if gravity sometimes makes things fall up. Feel free to keep calling people who understand this "crackpots", I'm fine with it. Most people have figured it out by now and I don't see much hope for those who still don't get it.

I first noticed that some subjects and opinions are silently removed from Slashdot back in 2004. Glad you're finally catching on. Using a site with a high number of visitors? Expect this sort of thing.

It's interesting how the "revelations" from "former" CIA employee and short-term NSA external contractor are so ground-breaking and not just what people who don't own a TV have known for years. Bread and circus, knew the Roman Empire, keep people from revolt. Snowden is a circus. Putin said it best when he pointed out that FSB had no interest in Snowden, it would be like trying to skin a pig: Lots of screams but no wool.

Yeah, I know this is too true information even for slashdot, I'm guessing this will be modded down.

You're missing this: If you have an old Windows XP system and a old graphics card and your harddrive breaks but you want to keep using it and your friend gives you a new harddrive then you'll need graphics drivers.. but they are gone from AMDs website and now you're screwed. You have to use the not-exactly-perfect free drivers for old cards in Linux since support is removed from AMDs proprietary driver and it's hard/impossible to get old versions of it.

Make sure you buy an older card. The free software driver driver for 7000+ cards is a broken joke. Works well for older cards, though. Evil proprietary drivers does sort-of work alright with newer cards but doesn't support older cards. Also know that you can't use 1 old and 1 new card since free driver only works with old cards and proprietary only new.

Google is more and more moving towards controlling everyone who uses their services. I used Adsense for years, but I started getting more and more junk mail from Adsense saying I had 3 days to change pages with "Adult" content. The last case was a poem from the 18th century with the word "Lover" in it. That made me drop Adsense. Google changing their Blogger policy should come as no surprise. They simply want everyone to use Adsense and they do not want other advertisements on Blogger - or elsewhere. Adsense users know that Google now considers using other advertisement networks or even other ads in some cases is "against their policy". Expect Google to try to dictate more and more, they want to control what ads you show, what words you use (the word "Lover" is now against their terms..) and what you write. Google isn't gradually becoming more and more evil, they have a long history of scamming people (search on bing other other search engines to find dozens and dozens of examples of people who've got their adsense account closed the day before payouts).

You may not have noticed, and may be in denial, but the relevant part for the United States today is âoeSomeone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If virtue goes, the government fails. Are we choosing paths that are politically expedient and morally questionable? Are we in truth losing our virtue? . . . If so, we may be nearer the dustbin of history than we realize."

I've got a HD3300 IGP and that works alright with the open source driver. Not good, but alright. Then I bought a HD7850 and tried using the latest open source drivers. By latest I mean MESA snapsot from 20130619 and all the latest pieces. It is utterly broken and useless. Scrolling in applications cause artifacts. Starting some applications (like LibreOffice) just makes X hang. There is no usable open source drivers for the latest AMD cards. Yes there is something available, but it's a broken joke you can't actually use.

It is possible to use the open source driver to have one monitor on the HD3300 IGP and two monitors on the HD7850 without accelration on any of the monitors. Try the same setup with accelration and their driver segfaults.

I basically bought a HD7850 because AMD claims there's a open source driver for it. When you try it you'll find that there is no such thing as a functioning open source driver for this card and cards in this family.

The new kernel patches are probably a step in the right direction, but it won't help with the latest cards. AMD developers have in their wizdom decided to provide no 2D driver at all, instead they rely on 3D for 2D using MESA and "glamor". glamor is a buggy joke at this point and it will probably take years before that changes. I wish I could point to AMD and say "they've got great open source support" but the truth is that it's crappy at best. Intel is the only alternative if you want working free software drivers as of now.

Guy needs money. Guy sends BTC to MtGox and sells them netting about $25.000. Guy tries to withdraw said $25.000 on June 6th. MtGox lists the withdraw as "Processed". Money doesn't show up. Guy contacts customer service. They give him the runaround and BS him. Guy asks for said $25.000 to be reinstated into his account so he can buy bitcoins and send them to another exchange sell them there. MtGox says they can't do that because the withdraw is listed as "Processed". What "Processed" means is unclear since they have not initiated any wire transfer. Guy is _still_ waiting for his money. Note that this withdraw was initiated well before they stopped withdraws. And he's not the only one waiting for five figure amounts out of MtGox. So NO, you can't trade to BTC and withdraw it in many cases. Yes, you can - in theory - but not in real life. And EUR out of MtGox? That has always cost a 1% fee on the amount transfered (!) and it's always taken two-three weeks - sometimes longer. EUR out of Bitstamp, on the other hand, takes 1-2 days and costs a fixed 1 EUR fee.

You can believe it's easy to get money out of MtGox if you want. But please actually try and see how well it works before you make such claims.

The vast majority of USD and EUR are digital. Only a small percentage exist as cold hard cash. Bitcoin is just another digital currency, just like USD, EUR and JPY. Yes, USD and EUR and JPY also have non-digital versions - but the amount is insignificant.

^^^ THIS. People say that Bitcoin has deflation. This is currently NOT true, it is subject to inflation. If we assume that all new coins are sold then $388.800 new money needs to come in each and every day at current MtGox ticker price $108. Say $100 and that's still $360.000 new fiat money required each and every day.

As said in another comment above: A typical sign of a ponzi is that they start to limit withdraws when they start to collapse. The problems with withdraws isn't new, btw. There are several people I know who are still waiting for five figure USD withdraws initiated in the beginning of this month. Do they have the money? You'd think so, but nobody really knows how much DHS took from their Dwolla account. And then there is the coinbase debacle