...you may want to rethink your motives. There are opportunities to help people all around you. Giving money is good when given wisely, but it's not the only way to help people. How about getting connected with your community and getting an idea of who can't afford a Christmas dinner and making it happen? Or grab a few friends and repair a widow's broken down home? If you want to do good in a way that's meaningful, it's more than just writing a check and sending it to some anonymous charity. Find a need and fill it.

Really - the Moon landings were also a political stunt and nothing more. The uppity-ups are not interested in science. Just in trophies. Titan, Europa and other moons of the outer planets are just too unknown by the average Leno Jay-Walking crowd who can barely tell you who the first president was but can tell you every word Snookie spouts out on a given episode. Mars, tho, is a viable trophy because even with the intelligence drain that is sucking the brains out of the average public citizen while they bake their buns in front of reruns of Jersey Shore or are rabidly following the antics of the Kardashians inbetween tweeting about every bowel movement, everyone knows about Mars. The Moon is so 39 years ago. Mars is the current fad. If future missions don't end in catastrophe, it too will be mostly forgotten as the Apollo missions have (except for Apollo 13 since most of what the average couch-potato knows of that came from the movie).

If your online participation is done with the idea that it is all public anyway, then what is the problem? If people value their privacy that much then they need to zip those loose lips to begin with. There is no privacy on the internet. Never was, never will be. The only way to be free from that is to turn your computer off and go do something useful. But wait - Visa knows every purchase you've made and can track you where ever you are - so you may as well give up your credit cards. Credit reporting agencies have an extensive profile on you as well that is worth money and that is exploited for money - so ditch the idea of having a car or house or school loans. There are databases of every check you've written so you may as well close your bank account and use cash only. Grocers have gone to tracking you with their discount cards, so get used to paying full price. Just where do you draw the line? In a mud hut out in the forest somewhere with foil lined walls and wearing a foil hat? Privacy loss is inevitable and unavoidable. The best you can do is be aware of that and make sure you act online in that dark room of yours as if you were in the middle of church with everyone looking over your shoulder. Being aware of the absolute lack of privacy gives you the opportunity to shape how you are perceived. While it is often the sign of impending dictatorships that say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about," for us a better solution is to make sure that what we do have to hide simply remains off-grid.

We also download gigabytes of data, mostly for free. ISO's of our favorite OS here and there, images, movies, music, etc etc. We are able to visually communicate with each other with pictures and videos as well as text and even live audio also largely for free. Did you really thing it was truly free. The other wise saying is alive and well here - "Nothing Is Free." What then is it worth to you? You can't stop it. Anonymous can't stop it. So - what are you going to do? Sit in a corner crying, or being smart with what you expose of yourself on what is essentially a very public and exploited network?

Authoritarian governments by definition rule people because they think the people cannot self-rule. As in, authoritarian governments think they are "saving" their people. With that in mind, balance this quote from Anonymouse: "Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria." ...with this one a few sentences down:

"One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you."

Sound familiar? Anonymouse are doing what those they claim to fight against are doing. Just another dictatorship that claims to be "rulers of the internet" that defends its "dictatorship" with petty DDoS attacks and makes outlandish and extremist claims that are on par with the "We will destroy America" claims we hear from the dits in the Mid-East. In the end, Anonymouse are nothing but wannabe digital terrorists and nothing they have done or will do matters. Their activities are as much a waste of time results-wise as the Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and all the years of ridiculous and resultsless claims, proclamations and violence had accomplished nothing, while one humble fella with a can of gasoline and a match set the dominoes falling, toppling governments in one simple act of self-immolation. And, interestingly, as much as they brag about being anonymous, a bunch of them are being rounded up by the Feds. So much for anarchistic intelligence.

How long did it take the Anonymouse script-kiddies to figure this out?
"When a service is "free," it really means they're making money off of you and your information.'"" Hello - that's been the model of free services for as long as services have been free. You guys need to get a refund for that pot you're smoking and go detox somewhere. People consider it an amicable trade. A few are inconvenienced - boo hoo. Grow a pair and move on.

I like being able to expand my windows for more acreage - and put them aside when I need to focus on other things. Just how does that complicate the UI? Two little buttons - is that too much to ask for?

GTX 470 is slower, but has 448 cores, and a 302-bit memory interface. Does more speed of the GTX 560 Ti make up for less cores and slower memory interface? I'm interested in experimenting with OpenCLI and getting three of these in SLI for some GPU raytrace rendering - something the 470 lends itself to pretty well. 560 seems like a few steps forward and a few steps backwards - hard to say if it's worth getting over the 470, unless I have grossly missed something.

Blender's interface is completely OpenGL - and it runs fine on Linux. If they can make it work, I'm sure the folks at Mozilla - albeit new to OpenGL programming obviously - can figure it out too. Definitely need to keep an open-standards browser based off open software rather than tying in to DirectX.

Since when is the media considered factual confirmation? "Hey, let's all go out and look at the Inquirer to get proof that aliens exist!" While it is almost certain that the attack did originate from the suspected nations, a better wording would be, "supporting /* speculation" rather than "confirming" seeing as NYT is certainly not the fount of truth and honesty in reporting and fact-finding. Now excuse me while I go study on Wikipedia...

No one sells Vista anymore or offers it pre-installed. Everyone is selling 7 now and offering it pre-installed. /. is acting like this is some sort of race. Windows 7 is winning!!!! Winning against what? Vista is dead. Being proud that 7 is winning against roadkill is pretty pathetic.

It's like assembling a committee to determine if water is dry.

The Texas Rancher's Association has applied to their board of regents in hopes of changing the name of "Cow Patties" to "Cow Flowers" in hopes that people will think their bovine droppings smells good. No input yet from the manure retail industry but word is they're gearing up to put pictures of flowers on their bags to help enhance the new aroma.

While sad, it's been a smart business tactic for Microsoft. Let someone else take the risk first and do the legwork, then if it works out, bomb the market with a copy - albeit usually inferior, but often much cheaper. Nearly, if not actually, everything Microsoft has comes to being that way. Sometimes it bombs, most times it succeeds with Microsoft laughing all the way to the bank, even tho their consumers end up often wishing they spent a little extra and bought Apple. Apple is about creating neat and new stuffs. Microsoft is about copying and leeching off anything that appears to be making money in the market. All IMHO, of course.

...after all, our butts are simply not wide enough. We've tried hard to hold down the couch, hold down our desk chair and stuff our faces, but that walk from the subway to the office was really hindering our butt-widening project. The advent of the remote control put us well on the butt-widening path but this will take us into new butt-widening levels. Now, if they could put a movable walkway between our couch or desk to the bathroom, we will be complete.

...all I can say is, welcome to space exploration. Where if it can go wrong, it typically will and where tomorrow's missions hopefully are made better by today's mistakes - mistakes even the exalted NASA isn't immune to. At least you got the probe back - after landing on a remote asteroid out in the middle of nowhere which is a major success in my book.