Why exactly do you think that increases security? Most VPNs that I've seen use the AD domain password which means once the attacker gains access to the VPN, they can access all the network shares, terminal servers whatnot. You are equally f'ed in both cases. Also, the current RDP implementation uses TLS which is stronger than e.g. PPTP's RC4, still a widely used because it's so easy to set up.

I see this stupidity all the time: you are required to connect to a PPTP VPN, with access to the company LAN to boot, before you get to ssh to a linux box in the DMZ or wherever. Admins also often refuse to open the ssh ports based on some false belief about how it all works. They don't understand the differences between cryptographic algorithms, they don't really understand why firewalls are used and are good for, and they only have a superficial understanding of TCP/IP and the layers on top of it. They just blindly follow some "best practices" that someone somewhere put into a ppt, and cite meaningless shit like the OSI model, never actually taking the time to really understand.

There isn't really much there that will significantly improve security, except the suggestions to keep Apache up-to-date and maybe installing mod_security. For instance, hiding the Apache version number might actually decrease security since now you might miss yourself you are out of date. It's not going to prevent any attack from happening.

Have you visited the Bitcoin forums? Quite a few economists there. Also, high profile magazines, such as The Economist, have written about it from the point of view that Bitcoin is, in the very least, a highly interesting experiment. No mention of any built-in economic failures there.

I don't understand the knee-jerk reaction that everyone here gets each time Bitcoin is mentioned. Almost every time it's accompanied misconceptions about USD being backed or otherwise thinking that something which is currently valuable (such as gold) is somehow guaranteed to always be that way.

No, I don't have anything invested in Bitcoins, and I wouldn't want to store much value in it until it has stood the test of time, and the implementations are more robust. I was shocked when I found out the private keys are stored locally in an unencryped file - that's a f***ing travesty.

But I do find the concept fascinating.

Backing? How? I keep hearing this, but I don't understand what it means.

The way I see it, the value of money comes from the knowledge (or trust) that someone will accept a certain amount of it as an exchange for goods, or work, or whatever. How is any government "backing" that? I haven't seen any guarantees anywhere that my cash will be worth anything tomorrow.

Bitcoin is "backed" simply by the fact that there are enough people who will accept it as an exchange for goods, or work, or "other" currency (I'm still not sure it's correct to call it a currency).

39 years isn't exactly immediately.

You can't use a prepared statement to dynamically turn rows into columns. Or if you know how, by all means tell me.

Sounds like folklore to me. I suppose you could run into problems if you use, say, mysql_real_escape_string() to escape a string going to, I don't know, Pervasive SQL. But what can I say... just don't fucking do it! Or did you think sanitizing input means string.replaceAll("'","''") ? In that case you'd be the naive one, not me. Also, the database engine won't just change all by itself. Something like 99 % of apps work on a specific RDBMS, and for the most part they won't even begin to work on another one without major refactoring. You have the occasional small project which uses simple ANSI SQL, but anything in the least bit demanding usually only works on a specific system:

People like you think there is something mythical or mystical in programming. There isn't. Sanitizing user input is 100 % safe. It may not be the best way to do things most of the time, but there are times when it's the only way, like when the SQL statements are constructed from another SQL statement, which happens e.g. when pivoting a many-to-many relation.

The person who got scammed was Jussi Jaakonaho, who is male.

Her gender might still have something to do with it, though. Women are generally thought to have more social intelligence than men, which might make it a little easier for them to pose as someone else in an email.

If you are selling something, wouldn't you want what you sell be scarce so you get a better price?

I'd say it'd be in the interests of the oil industry to perpetually maintain an image of there always being a couple of decades of cheap oil left. You want a good profit, but you don't want your customers to move away from oil.

This is a naive way to look at it. In reality, so long as you use cheap energy (wind, solar, tidal) to extract oil, it will be profitable. The main reason oil is valuable is its high energy density.

Has this been proven?

Saying things like that seems unscientific. What a ghost is not exactly well defined. Also, you can't exactly prove whether someone's feelings are of an external source or not. I don't think we have 1/1000,000th of the understanding of the human brain that would be required to say something like that.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think ghosts exist, but pretending that the opposite is 100 % true seems intellectually dishonest. Which probably explains the arrogance such claims are often accompanied with, because there is really no substance to the argument, just personal belief.

The standard 'sceptic' method of studying alleged supernatural phenomena is to confirm that they have natural explanations. Mostly any weird light and sound is always explained by reflections, wind, insects, animals. When someone says, "I felt something pass through me", things start to get tricky, because then you need to prove that the person in question is FOS.

I disagree. International politics is analogous to a game of poker. No one wants to give away all information to the others. Now, what WikiLeaks is essentially doing, is they are publicizing not only some of the "cards" that the US holds, but also what they know about the others' "cards".

I'm all for openness and honesty, but it's not just the American voters who are getting the info. It's available to everyone now.

No you don't. That's just bad writing. The less you explain, the better.

A lot of sci-fi suffers from over-explaining things with awful, cringe-worthy, pseudo-scientific crap. It adds nothing to the story. "Midichlorians" is the obvious example, but even explanations somewhat based on real science are often completely unnecessary and just seem self-important.

"I've invented a time-machine" says all that is needed to move the story forward. In fact, I always thought that the whole flux capacitor/88 miles per hour schtick was there just to make fun of all the self-important sci-fi.

That's a stupid argument because the solution is obvious: use wind, hydro, solar or nuclear energy to charge the vehicle.

For gasoline engines, no clean solution exists at all.

Windows has shipped with an adequate firewall for that since XP SP3. If you aren't keeping your Windows system up to date, you are pretty much s-o-l anyways.