momerath2003:

Then again, Science News also chooses to report a 9% growth in the arctic ice as "A near-record Arctic melting"

The article does not say what you want it to: it was not a 9% growth in ice volume, but a 9% growth in surface coverage.

Quoted article, further down:

First-year ice typically measures between 1 and 1.5 meters thick, whereas multiyear ice averages about 3 meters thick. That disparity, plus the near-record low sea ice extent this year, suggests that the total volume of ice floating atop the Arctic Ocean this summer dropped to a new record low.

If your $HOME dir is securely chmoded, the p2p app wont have privileges to browse it.

Of course, removing the read bit and disowning your $HOME will prevent `ls' and file managers like Midnight Commander from being able to list directory contents, but that's how we Unix users roll. We also like to use non-guessable subdirectory names.

Sure, there's some foreign investment, but it's going into crap like hotels and shopping centres, not infrastructure that's going to support a decent economy in the long term.

Are you sure? I motorcycled through Poland a few months ago, and I saw some massive spending on infrastructure, especially the A2 motorway. If you've used the roads of Poland, you'll agree that an upgrade is vitally important. In particular, roads leading to Berlin are important for transportation of goods.

Warszawa seemed modern in most regards (probably because it needed rebuilding after World War 2), and they have a very nice subway system under construction (already partly operational) as well as modern surface trams.

Still, most of the population live in thousands of small villages, and those people probably aren't noticing the economic growth too much.

Since joining the EU, costs of production have risen across the Polish economy leaving it less able to compete.

That's what happens when you become a developed nation, no?

It is bad because they don't want the compiler they've written for free to be exploited for profit by someone who's not willing to share their code. If you want to make proprietary software, don't use the hard work of someone who doesn't want to be a part of it.

I have no idea why you compared DRM to GPL. DRM is about restricting use otherwise allowed by copyright law. GPL is about allowing things otherwise disallowed by copyright law (if you don't accept the license, only copyright law applies).

Using random bits and not just zeros means whatever they pickup they cannot be sure really means anything.

This argument is flawed. Assume writing a 0 or writing a 1 does not eliminate the old information. Writing random data will not help you, because the random data you wrote will still be on the disk when the forensics get it. Hence they can be absolutely sure in which positions you replaced old data with 0, and in which positions you replaced old data with 1. This works for an arbitrary number of passes, if you recover one pass at a time.

You might argue that sequences of identical bits can be less capable of removing evidence of old data compared to random data. In this regard, it would be my guess that bit patterns like 1010 would be even more efficient than random data -- random data will be likely to make long runs of identical bits. For example 0.8% of all bytes will be either straight ones or straight zeros.

Henrik Andersen of Ibas (a disk recovery corporation) in Denmark has previously made the claim that a single overwrite is enough.