It's funny because the threat is EXACTLY how I think things should be done.
You can sure commit crimes shifting bits around, but most such deeds have to reflect IRL at some point. So let the cops follow the bad guys IRL. Strong encryption can't do much when I see what's on your screen. So by all means, spy on suspects instead of bulk-collecting false positives.

It's also quite ridiculous that international banking can keep doing transactions at the speed of light while the NSA and pals want to access to your data. I'd say follow the money first.

Bulk spying is not about preventing crime anyway. It's about control, it yields potential weaknesses for each one, regardless of his actual behavior.

I hereby announce slashdotplus. It's like slashdot but without stories. Nobody reads TFS anyway.

MBAs are the soldiers of the financial system and it doesn't matter one bit if they run their companies to the ground, because that does not hurt the system at all, in fact a failed company creates opportunities for the system to advance.

Exercise: get your measles/pre-vaccination era mortality rates, and crosscheck with your local community records of deaths by measles or complications. Statistically speaking, most of you should get acceptable matching and so keep believing in those rates. If you don't get acceptable results, we're on the same boat.

As someone who likes old cars, I second that. Noise as a security feature is ok, as an enhancement of the driving experience is a bit pathetic. Besides, the typical V8 muscle car has not really the best noise. I rate it a bit below the 4cyl double carb alfa's, well below the vintage Ferrari's, and really below the 6 carb countach with modded exhausts.

Hmm, this sounds like a false dichotomy.

The problem could be formulated like:

"I know how to use HTML and CSS and javascript too, but:
- translating my design to a complex CMS is time consuming, new versions might impose a lot of updating, and I must keep ahead of the plug ins that offer the functionality my site needs. Js widgets also need more work or attention to be succesfully integrated.
- static site doesn't cut it because I need dynamic features like user logins or have data that is better organized in a DB
- roll-your-own dynamic site with scripts requires a lot of attention to security and vulnerabilities"

An answer could be: use a lightweight framework that does not impose many restrictions on the structure. Radiant for rails is the classic one, but I prefer wolfcms because it is a bit easier to deploy and has no domain specific language for templating, you embed PHP. Radiant needs an extension to do that.

In such frameworks you could start with your hand crafted html and:

- Put your hand made html pages in the CMS tree. The advantage is that you can login to the server to edit and upload content without much fuss (watch out for upload limits in php.ini though)
- Separate design (using layouts) from content, so that less repetition and more consistency is achieved.
- Automate navigation so adding a page to the tree updates the links and the site map.
- Use either the DB or the page parts (they are like db fields, the page is like a record) to further separate content from presentation, so that even unskilled people can add content.
- Refactor functionality in plugins so they get reusable (if you're getting a pro)

If you're going to need app-like functionality, though, a full stack framework like web2py rails or the thousand others is where you'll likely end up, eventually.

I speak it all right but I can't read it. So what?

Don't forget traditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

I'll flip it and open it with "999".
Your move, atheists.

You say that as it were a bad thing.

Yes, and they have all the reasons to want that. Linux desktop is not coming until linux can undergo planned obsolescence like the other main OSes do (Android included, look at any 3 years old smartphone to see apps that joe user can't uninstall becoming bigger and the phone getting slower)

But I miss the reason why *any distro* should go that way. You don't integrate systemd in a distro, systemd is the distro.

> I wish these asshats would go work for Microsoft or Oracle.
You mean, if they don't already :)

What I wrote about art was indeed in response to the joke. The rest is my usual tirade.

Art is not about creation but filtering. The artists filters out what's uninteresting and keeps what is interesting (to the artist, absolutely speaking most art is rehashed crap).

But I strongly disagree with the notion that the human can't create.

Sure you don't know how to make a single particle come out of nothing (yes I know about the experiments but 1. they used energy, 2, the most fundamental: they could be made because of the laws of nature, an improper term for "the behavior of matter that we model with laws", and the concepts of matter and void. Well guess what, those concepts were there before us).

But, you can play with abstractions. Imagine a tic tac toe game. Play it in your mind or use pen and paper. The game does not belong to the universe. The mind, the pen, the paper do, but they are not the game. The game is about the meaning of what you wrote, you created it, you own it.

About the absence of free will, pls. A relatively simple computer designed to be predictable does all sorts of stuff by means of a simple race condition. The concept of free will vs predetermined will in the context of a billion processor evolutionarily programmed analog computer called the brain is a matter of grey shades. And all of this even if the universe were deterministic and without concepts like the soul.

I forgot the more exotic OrientDB, it's java based graph db, can enforce a schema (speaks sql too) or let documents bear whatever structure, has bindings for lots of languages, the db can act as app server.