There is no real money. Its a trust system. You have only perception of value.

There is no real money. Its a trust system. You have only perception of value.

Gold has no intrinsic value by itself. Its a rare metal. Its not money. Its perceived value is not even stable across time. Again, its a rare metal in a trust system. Gold has value for you because you can exchange it for stuff you actually need. Other people accept it exactly because of the same motive. Oddly enough, if gold was rated at production cost, would probably be way cheaper today than it was 150 years ago (you know, before combustion engines and dynamite and TNT). Why people like gold so much? Its a noble metal, shiny and it doesn't oxidate. What's not to like?

You mean, the same governments that actually LEGISLATE about what and how the currency system works, and how, how much and how far transactions will be taxed?

It may be the case, but because even a 4th grader can dismantle your arguments, I'd take your opinion with a grain of salt.

Apparently you feel lonely. I'd suggest you'd start with the basics.

So. these sound like personal feelings and not a rational evaluation; I',m fine with that, but its not really a valid argument. And regarding Facebok, I'd be really surprised if Zuckerberg had any kind of real control over the company.

You realize that, without a centralized system, the social model would not exist, right?

Its not. It's more of a 2-way p2p messaging system. And I'd take skype proprietary encryption over any SIP-based hardware device. I'd really doubt that what you describe even exists. And even if it did, you could not prove it. You cannot prove security, you can only disprove it. You can demonstrate its secure by lack of proof otherwise, but it is a play with words. Having the source code adds almost nothing to this, except you get the "illusion of control". Do you really check every detail, every line of code? And I'm assuming you're aware of the algorithmic complexity of some of the crypto code out there; even fully transparent projects like openssh have bugs now and then.

Every system on the internet is potentially insecure. Your dedicated server may have hardware backdoors installed. Your crypto software may be leaking details. Your CPU may be flawed in specific computations. The fact is, you control very little on a modern stack. And don't even get me started on communication channels...

Well, you can do it easily with both SIP over VPN or IAX2, and Asterisk. And the available stack is fully opensource, and you can run it on your own server. Now you just need to convince people to use your server and install all the required software for it.

I understand that feeling. But its not based on facts or even objective... People often perceive big companies as "evil", and forget that, in that regard, all companies are evil in some way or another.

Well, I had a whatsapp account and a facebook account. While I tend to agree regarding the waste of time, it is also a way for me to connect with friends and colleagues from past companies, and often discuss technical stuff and what's happening in the world. Isolation is good often, but its not good always. And while you can connect in real life, is quite hard to keep track of friends when they're scattered a bit all over the world.

A tool is a tool. What matters which brand produces it? Again, the "big" company stigma... :)

Well, I'm no expert, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, but Whatsapp would never be profitable as a standalone company with their current business model. And what you call pretty limited, its not when cross-referenced with eg. your cellphone number (Facebook, Google and VK all "encourage" you to give this). For many people, a cellphone number is way more stable than a facebook profile. And whatsapp (either the app or the server) keeps full blown logs of all conversations, so its quite easy to mine them for keywords, phone numbers, places, urls and pictures.

A nice alternative to ZFS Dedup (or so I heard) is DragonFly's HammerFS. Matt uses a compromising approach that is less taxing on resources.

Larry, really? The guy from the same company who actually STARTED btrfs? That's right, btrfs *is* an Oracle project. Some other big names came onboard later on, but it started there... Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Not only the geeks, but also big corps. And everyone that actually cares about data integrity.

So, you're saying that would never happen if they stayed independent? Such innocence...

I'd add one for setting them apart dogma-style :D

Did you even read what I wrote? Aside from cmd.exe (which may or MAY NOT include some command.com funcionality - probably not, command.com source was a bit messy), everything else is not even remotely DOS-related, but an ABI. BTW, most of MSDOS 6.2 code is still assembly, and that makes it "unmaintainable" by today standards.

I would really doubt that, aside from cmd.exe. All real-mode interrupts are faked into protected mode (and until at least some versions ago, eg. int21h was also available in protected mode inside windows applications and command-line DPMI applications), and IRQ handlers are reflected by the emulation mechanism. Some bios interrupts (int10h, int16h) are completely emulated, instead of the eg. EMM386 mechanism of reflecting them to the original handlers. Most MsDos code is real-mode and completeley useless inside a "modern" windows context (since w95/nt at least).

You're hilarious, really. Most big labels do it the other way around - musicians are allowed performance licensing rights for their own work, while the work itself is property of the label.

Because age discrimination is illegal in most western countries. And no one would use a HR company that would do it explicitly, because they'd look bad.

Source doesn't help you in GUI applications. Imagine compiling a GTK application from 10 years ago, w/linking to a modern release. Do you think it would compile without errors? I'd doubt that. Now image you're able to compile the required dependencies for your application, but you still need to have everyting else in your system tolerating 10-year old obsolete versions of libraries. Even stuff like libssl has gone trough some major changes.

Most ATMs are built using COTS desktop parts, with some standardized controllers and a hardware crypto module. And since half of the work done is actually GUI-related, it makes sense using a desktop operating system.