You're right, most of those are not visible at first glance. Mostly because most them are things that were already there (I still use Firebug for development, for example) or because the changes are minimal (FF is right now using 2.2GB memory with 4 tabs open, I never noted any real increase in responsibility and FF still has a perchance to just randomly crash out, networking plain DOES NOT WORK if you use a proxy that overrides SSL certs etc etc).

I get that - but I still don't get the reasons behind your comparison. ;)

That's kind of a very dubious claim - and one that rests more on personal bias than anything proveable... I see the US in much less of a rosy light, given how they, you know, installed Saddam there in the first place. And then supplied him with WMDs so he could kill the very rebels the US proclaimed to now side with.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure that trying to help is going to be a real comfort to all those who died - or have to live in constant fear thanks to their country descending into civil war.
In short: given the absolute mess that Iraq became, I wouldn't care about the intentions of the US - even if I really believed they were doubtlessly altruistic to begin with...

Land theft is kind of a misnomer. There are very important navy bases in Crimea - ones which the Russian navy kept using after the USSR dissolved... and which they must've felt in danger after their puppet government got kicked out of Ukraine. Not that I approve of this move - had enough of Russia sitting around here for fifty years - just saying it's a whee bit more nuanced than you make it seem like.

As for reactions and fears... the world is only up in arms because we are reminded of the Cold War. If China decided to annex parts of Mongolia, I could tell you what would happen: a big, fat nothing. Ukraine is too close, and the bad memories with Russia are too recent. But this was really to be expected; after the NATO continously expanding east and losing Serbia, Iraq and now Ukraine... of course Russia would react in some way.

But Russia already controlled the overwhelming majority of the gas/oil. Most if that stuff going through Crimea/Ukraine is doing that - going through. They aren't produced locally; they ususally arrive from Russia and just get transported further west. I know because there were yearly disputes between Russia and Ukraine about the prices, and the continous Russian threats to stop the pumps made every damn country here build ludicrous amounts of reserves...
If Russia wanted to threaten W-EU with closing the tap, nothing stopped them from doing so already. I really think it was just their fear of losing the comfortable bases in Crimea that made them act; though I wouldn't be surprised if they now annexed more territory - to secure a land route there.

And I still don't get why is Crimea worse - the US would have happily made a puppet-state out of Iraq were it not for the civil war their continously naive (and short-sighted) decisions made. Sure, they wouldn't have annexed Iraq in name; but they would have still ran the show. Why - how - is that better?

Yeah, because anyone can sneakily launch something into orbit without the whole world watching! There are certainly no radar systems that are capable - and even purposefully designed - of tracking any larger missile being launched.

Oh wate...

You didn't find a few hundred thousands getting killed objectionable - while one (reportedly anyway) guy getting killed you did?

I'm sorry, but... what?

Small-time admins maybe. If one works as part of a larger team, automation and documentation is king - any such backdoors would get anyone into trouble, quick.

Just write them onto tape, and wait a few years until GPUs are even better at cracking or a bug has been found in TrueCrypt (remember, the first audit is only starting now).

Our business data is pretty darn sensitive. There is no way we could possibly trust a 3rd party to actually store it - and I'm pretty sure a lot of other business are that way too.

I also fail to see what's so good in "cloud" compared to a reliable off-site backup solution...

...with the company that specializes in data mining!

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Good for you. Me myself, I won't put that much more trust into the ability of looking at a source that's many thousands pages long and so utterly complicated it would take a team of experts to fully audit; also one that may or may not be the same software I wound up with. Theoretical possbilities I have no real means to use are that: theoretical possibilities.

If you are that paranoid, do what I do. Install a network filter at your endpoint and analyze your own traffic. That's the only way to be sure, unless the network filter/analyzer themselves are bugged. But that's a risk I'll live with.

(Now, I also value open source for some of its merits - long-term maintainabilitiy, the biggest among them. But that doesn't mean blind and exclusive faith, imho.)

You say let the user decide... but that's a ridicolously bankrupt concept. If some of the users weren't wanting to cheat, we wouldn't need VAC in the first place. By allowing the user to do the same poisonous behaviour they do today, you simply didn't change anything! Legit players will still need VAC, and VAC will still need underhanded methods to catch software that also operate unethically.

I agree on the OS part anyway; the OSes that are popular today were designed very, very long ago. But, that's something we'll have to live with for a good while. Designing an OS that would prohibit "super access" for any app by design... while nice in theory, would also require putting together completely new ones. And that's a lot of effort... so I guess we won't really get to see them for a while. Not to mention the inertia that - similarly to any other industry - is present in IT.

Anyway, permissions. You say you give those things permission. Fine. Permission for what? Scan you RAM? Your full HD? Basic requirements as far as antivirus softwares go... but that's way worse than browsing your DNS entries, right there! And some of those scan results will wind up in some global database, or else new virus definitions couldn't be made. So, how do you know what gets reported and how? Will you keep checking the source for all your antivirus apps? Every patch, every commit?

Ah, I think you misunderstood me; I was approaching from the other angle. My point was: since all desktop OSes today give apps free reign - stuff like VAC is neccesary. Just like anti-malware, anti-rootkit, etc softwares - all of them neccesary in the given environment, even if it'd nice not having them running in the background 24/7.

Even Android - a relatively secure linux with some seperation between processes - will gladly allow you to mess around with any process, once you are root. So if you want to alter a process (inject cheat into a game, say)... then it won't stop you.

I understand the theory of having a properly compartmentalized OS (hypervisor running only completely sandboxed apps, etc), and I wouldn't mind having one. But, the thing is: we don't. Not in a state where they could run the majority of the apps we need an OS for today, anyway. Even so, we still want to play games. And without cheaters ruining it for all us, if possible.

Interesting. So, out of curiosity... what do you use to keep your *nix box safe? Tripwire?

You could subtitue 98% of Linux and 100% of Windows systems and say the same. You say source - but we both know that if we're paranoid, just looking at the supposed does little good. Any binary you download could have been made from an altered source. So, how many OSes did you compile yourself? Which binary do you trust, and why?

Whether you use those things or not makes little difference as long as the underlying OS allows such things to happen. If people stayed away from VAC in protest, they would only give an absolutely free reign to cheaters who don't give a hoot about such ethical concerns.

This is a technical answer to a technical problem. Or do you have a better solution, short of no-one playing multiplayer on servers they don't host themselves?