"I would have loved for this concept to have been executed by a competent developer." - like yourself maybe? The tools are free, you can start today.

Yeah. People are up in arms over "oh the corporations are turning our children into zombies flouride in the groundwater supplies argle bargle" while ignoring that THE MEDICATION FUCKING WORKS. Now, it might be that the medicine has some unforseen long term effects (aside from easily-monitored effects on the cardiovascular system of some people which has worried me a bit), but so far it just doesn't seem to be so.

That reminds me, time for my filler-up pill...

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negativistic

Don't be so negativistic. If I've understood it correctly this surgery is still half-experimental, so it pays back in knowledge? Besides, how many people do you think would volunteer for having a dead persons face plastered over their own? Even seeing the "before" pics it's still ghoulish.

That'd be unthinkable here in sweden. Every school is required to have the same educational standards in order to insure that everyone (in theory) gets equal education and access to information. Homeschooling is not allowed. So for example, a deeply religious parent could not (legally) deny their child "inappropriate" views on contraception, religion, or in any other way restrict their mental freedom completely.

So parents should be able to dictate what their children are taught in school?

"... The pronounced Swedish inclination to keep order bore strange fruit. A German refugee who stayed in Norway in the 1930s, fled to Sweden when Norway was occupied in 1940. He was arrested in Sweden and the encounter with the police there differed a lot from what he was used to from the Norwegian police. "What I supposed was meant to be a routine series of questions and answers, ended with my being arrested. My declarations did not seem to satisfy the officers. The examination was repeated during the following days. (...) The cell was so clean, it shined. It literally smelled as if it had been sterilized..."

"... The aim of internment was to assimilate these people into a pattern that fit in with the ideal conception of a typical Swede, from the perspective of the Swedish authorities. There were two camps, the one at Långmora and another at Smedsbo, where different categories of deviates were placed. As Jörg Lindner (1994) has underscored in a path breaking article, the Swedish authorities were less concerned about the internee’s political viewpoint. What made internment necessary was that these people were homosexuals, kleptomaniacs, alcoholics, fathers who did not pay alimony and child support, or people who seemed to shy away from the work-world, etc. In addition to these deviances, many were either social democrats or communists. In fact, both camps were reformatories and the people who were interned in them were disciplined in order to adopt the Swedish norms and values. The camps were almost what Erving Goffman (1961) and Michel Foucault (1977) referred to as total institutions. They made use of four techniques in their efforts to change individual behaviour: 1. The rules of order in the camps deprived the internees of all distinguishing personal marks of identity. The individuality of internees was simply not allowed. As in all total institutions, the inmates had to wear uniforms and cut their hair to prescribed lengths and styles, etc. The German refugees who were interned in the Swedish camps felt that they were being treated unjustly by Swedish authorities. "We are punished, but we have not been informed about what we are accused of (). This is a form of treatment that even criminals are able to avoid." German refugees were systematically degraded, discriminated against, disciplined and punished. There were body searches, a ban on correspondence and visits, and the routine subjection to a degrading regimen. In addition to the camp leader and his staff, there were uniformed and armed guards patrolling the camp grounds. 2. Rigorous time schedules were enforced. The internees were to learn how to live an ordered life that was synchronised to ideal Swedish time patterns. 3. A work regime was established in order to habituate the internees to the (supposed) expectations found in the Swedish work-world. What we might identify as German eggheads were to be transformed into hard-working lumbermen, and this sometimes meant being required to cut wood at – 30oC. 4. Work behaviour and work results were keenly monitored and reported. The idea was to document the individual internee’s progression according to prescribed plans, and to correct unintended deviations from those plans by systematic observation and record-keeping. The internee’s progress in cutting wood was written down on paper designed for logarithmic calculations..."

A Comparative Look at Scandinavian Cultures: Denmark, Norway and Sweden and Their Encounters with German Refugees, 1933-1940

Probably. One of the nice things about living in a "welfare state" (sweden) is that the welfare isn't dependent upon the whimsy of any particular person. It helps break the bonds between individuals so that no one is dependent on anyone for base survival. Receiving monetary help (not loans) from a person in an emergency situation would feel creepy since I'd then be seriously indebted to that person in an unspecified way.

A system dependent on individual charity is also, well, unsystematic. People should receive help in a reliable manner and in proportion to their needs.

On the other hand there's the black-hat exploit kits you can buy for cash, but those seem as a class to be quite different in purpouse and function, namely that of being loaded onto a web page and spreading botnet binaries.

The structured framework approach seems to be the effort of the security/pen-test industry. Metasploit is basically a very structured approach to exploit code offering payloads in the form of shellcode (notably the meterpreter), crypters to go with that, and basic trojan/binder functionality. It also has a few auxillary modules for various stuff. There's also CANVAS and Core Impact but those are expensive and I've never played with them. Before and besides that exploits were and are written in the form of small programs in C/Perl/whatever like the ones you can find at http://www.exploit-db.com/.

Name wasn't Mordenkainen by any chance?

The problem with that line of reasoning is that hacking is basically just using programming/IT skills in a certain manner; the only "special knowledge" required beyond that is knowledge of specific exploits and methods. You'd obviously also need to spend time (and/or money) to establish a toolchain and a workflow of sorts and keep that up-to-date, which clearly must be eased by stuff like metasploit and nmap, but otherwise I've seen nothing to indicate that black hats aren't self-made.

Also, remember that penetration testing tools developed as a response to the "bad guy tools", not the other way around.