> I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase food and crop yield.

Prove it. I don't believe this whatsoever.

There has been a growing of evidence showing that the overuse of pesticides has led to a *decline* in crop yields, not an increase.

See:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_5995.cfm
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/June/04060701.asp

Unless you are familiar with changes in farming techniques over time it's very very hard to have a substantive position on this. Since about 1960-1970 there has been a *huuuge* increase in the use of nitrogen fertilizers that essentially parallels the use of pesticides. Sadly there was a limit to how much nitrogen fixation can actually take place in the presence of pesticides. Keep in mind that nitrogen is required for plants to grow, nitrogen fixation is required for plants to use nitrogen and... research has now shown that pesticides interferes with nitrogen fixation.

I'm not making a broad claim one way or another, but the government clearly isn't researching the things they should be.

The idea that "It seems to me that the big sites should start by redirecting all non-ssl traffic to https automatically" is very shortsighted when you consider how social networking sites actually work.

Social networks by their very nature include cross posting of content found from around the internet. If a site is running in "SSL only" mode then you'd very quickly see intermixed SSL and non-SSL content living side by side, and this creates a disaster for the admins of any web service.

For those who aren't familiar, modern web browsers throw up warnings whenever you intermix SSL and non-SSL content - it's been this way for years, it's a problem for anyone who accepts user generated content cross-site content.

If someone like Facebook were to implement this policy they'd immediately get a flood of complaints about these warnings.

SSL isn't very good protection nowdays anyway - we need something better.

I run a fairly high profile drupal site - and this has always been a large concern for us.

Our solution was basically to disable user logins completely. An overwhelming number of the exploits require you to login, so by removing this prerequisite, we basically avoided the problem.

Security isn't exactly a priority for drupal either, it's almost added as an afterthought. To put things in perspective, their login page doesn't even support SSL by default in either drupal 5 or drupal 6. To me that's verging on pathetic.

We were lucky because user logins weren't a core part of our site concept when we implemented the site, but I am now thinking that it might be a good way to go in the future, but I'm mostly petrified of this problem.

On the bright side of things they include a large number of extensions, and things mostly work as advertised, so we found this to be our best option out of all the open source CMSes we tried.

I'm really curious if the various mechanisms for running homebrew applications still work.

I have an R4 chip from my regular DS - my guess is they've closed up whatever hole was opened and a new method will be found, but has anyone tested this so far?

I went to Postgres East last week and won an ASUS EEE PC 1000. It has the 40GB SSD, 1.6ghz Atom and Linux installed.

Unfortunately I can't install a raw install of OSX on it (like the mini9 can) so I'm looking to sell this one.

They opened it at the conference to show to other people, but it's unused and has never been turned on.

I'm asking for 375... email me if interested