Err - debit works in most places,

So that the bank can give you the big "fuck you" when you use your card on a machine that had a reader installed, and your bank account is subsequently drained?

Yeah, dibsout.

as far as I know bank-issued traveller's cheques work everywhere else.

Subject to theft. Not necessarily accepted everywhere. And if you run out, you gotta get new ones issued. It's an option, certainly, but hardly a full replacement for a credit card.

Meanwhile, renting a car or a hotel room w/o a credit card *can* be a serious PITA.

I'm glad the internet can prove me wrong. But try it. It's shocking how much energy you have.

Ironic you should cite your anecedotal claims, based on personal, subjective perception, in an article about the placebo effect...

I call bullshit on your bullshit. I also call bullshit on snopes.com

Of course you do. Like most people, you cling to your beliefs despite evidence they're wrong. It's not a terribly admirable trait, but it's hardly unique.

Fortunately, in this case, it's harmless, so you go ahead and drink your water. But the claim that "most people are dehydrated" is pure, unadulterated bullshit, unsupported by any credible evidence.

I thought the same way when I read the study, and you know what? It's a damned clever way of both a) informing the patient, b) dealing with the ethical issues associated with informed consent, and yet c) still managing to trigger the placebo effect by *telling people about the placebo effect*.

The sad thing is it took a damned BS alt-med institution to fund a truly interesting study like this.

Bullshit.

I've never seen NX perform as well as VNC

You're nuts.

No, seriously, you're fucking crazy.

NX over a low-bandwidth or high-latency link blows VNC clear out of the water. It's not even comparable. Combine that with the ability of NX to run rootless, and it's a *far* better solution than VNC will ever be.

The twats who modded you up have clearly never used NX before. And you, it seems, have only tried it over a large pipe, where NX will, of course, lose out to other technologies better suited for that usage model.

Like, oh I don't know... maybe revising the X windows protocol so it doesn't suck so hard it has its own event horizon?

Or we could just keep using the existing, already open NX codebase, fork, and move on with a perfectly usable technology, rather than starting from scratch under the naive belief that new == better?

Up next on the conservatives-excuse Hotline, that golden oldie, "Well Clinton did it!"

Fun fact: this specialized app is probably "thinner" (in terms of resource utilization, etc), than a web-based app.

Which brings me to a dispute I have: to my mind, the definition of "thin" client is that the display component is local, and all the work is done remotely. How is a magazine *display* app *not* a thin client?

I think that may be arrogance.

Oh, no no, I think you misunderstand what I said ('course, I did communicate it poorly).

What I meant was, it's trivial to identify any changes these people made. You are right in that any weaknesses or backdoors introduced may be challenging to spot. But at least the OBSD folks don't have to sift through the entire codebase to find them.

Actually... it is, assuming exponential growth continues.

Interesting, do you normally just ignore arguments that invalidate your ideas? Because it's a piss poor debating technique.

And in case you missed it: this is a *stupid assumption*. Even *if* exponential growth continued, the IPv6 address space is so insanely large that the *physically limitations of the planet earth* would prevent you from running out of addresses.

However, that's not the case... the population and number of connected devices will grow exponentially

Yeah, we're gonna hit the earth's physical capacity to store humans and devices before we hit the IPv6 address limit.

Seriously, just think for a moment or two (you can do it!). The surface area of the earth is 5.10072 × 10^20 square millimeters. A *single* /48 contains 2^80 addresses. A little basic math shows you can have 2,370 *unique* IPv6 addresses for *every square millimeter on the planet*. In just *one subnet*. And there's *hundreds of trillions of subnets*.

I think we'll be fine for a while.

plus, there's the fact that corporations are going to be expect multiple subnets

And they'll get one. One of those trillions and trillions of /48s. They can then break that down into 65535 /64's. And if they *really* need more than 65k subnets? Just give 'em another /48, it's not as if there aren't hundreds of trillions more.

Anyways, assuming the exponential growth goes unabated, some relatively straightforward math shows that it will only take *roughly* 4 times as long for IPv6 space to run out as it has for IPv4 space to be facing depletion, since the address space is 4 times as wide (even though it is 2^96 times as large).

Wow... epic math fail.

"4 times wider" != "4 times longer before exhaustion again". 2^96 is such a mindbogglingly huge number it's inconceivable. Certainly inconceivable for you, it seems.

As unlikely as it is that any backdoors have made it into OpenBSD, even an audit cannot conclusively prove that there are no backdoors in the code. Witness the Underhanded C Code Contest.

Except, of course, they know who these contributors were, and they have a source control system. Scrutinizing their changes would be trivial.

Of course, it's always possible they worked through third-party intermediates, or broke into the SCM, but if that's the case, the OpenBSD team has far bigger problems, IMO.

Mobile phones (OS) don't have any form of autorun

So?

You cannot run .exe/.cmd/.com/.lnk attachment from e-mail

Correct. On the iPhone, you just had to visit a *website*, ffs.

Seriously, this statement is beyond short-sighted. It's one zero-day vulnerability from being completely false.

A lot of users still ... don't ever install a single extra app

Again, who cares? All you need is a hole in one of the stock apps, and voila, users are hosed. Moreover, given how slow mobile phone operators are in updating the OSes on their network (the Android situation being the most obvious), a vulnerability like that could be a) near universal, and b) very slow to close.

Unless Apple/Google becomes careless it's hard to believe that malware authors can (frequently) penetrate their app stores

See above. This point is, well, pointless.

There is still some variety: iPhoneOS/Android/RIM/W7 so malware writers can hardly target all platforms at once - so outbreaks are hardly possible

Please... you need only target one of those platforms to hit millions and millions of people. That's by far lucrative enough to make it worthwhile.

Frankly, I think the only reason you haven't seen this yet is because most malware is directed at turning a machine into a zombie, something for which a mobile device isn't that useful. But the minute someone can, for example, break an iOS device or Android device and start snarfing passwords, it'll become a far more interesting target.

Albeit, Jailbroken iPhones are less Secure than... umm... whats the term for that? Non-jailbroken? Jailfixed? StillJailed? Anyways.

What??? I thought Apple's "Jail" was universally bad! That there was absolutely no benefit to it! That's it's evil evil evil!

Are you saying the Slashbots could be *wrong*??