> Just try to listen to a 200 years old English recording

Name one, such recording, please. The oldest vocal recording I've heard was the Volta recording on an Edision audiograph: the first reliably known audio recordings are from the 1850's.

If your document is not in clear, precise language, then it can and will be re-interpreted by everyone who reads it. This can be vital for fiction or poetry, where the purpose is to engage the reader's imagination and create a full, vivid world with as little text as possible. But if there is no "right", then the interpretations are usually destined to be "wrong" because of the ambiguities. This is part of every language, including spoken English, written English, contracts, legal text, programming, and mathematics. If you do not have a well defined structure, you cannot define or handle exceptions.

One classic version of such ambiguity is dates. When you write "01/02/03", to You mean January 2nd, 2003, as Americans do? Or Febuaryy first, as the UK and some European nations do? Or do you follow the German convention, and mean the year February 2nd of 2001?

This kind of confusion is why we have "formal" English, so people can write 2001-02-03 and make it unambiguous, and so that speakers separated by age, time, or local history can communicate consistently. It's quite vital to a worldwide economy and political ecology, and it is _critical_ in engineering and computer science.

I could care less.

One of the first "homeopaths", cited extensively by modern practicioners, was Samuel Hanneman. And Samuel did _research_ in medicine. Rather than merely citing from leaned tracts, he investigated local practicioners and conducted experimented. Many of his his claims have turned to be misguided, such has his "law of similars". But his dedication to actual experimentation and verification of treatment was exceptional in his time. He was not, perhaps, a _great_ scientiest. But his claims about modest doses of dangerous substances being used to treat related illness was key to the development of vaccination for infectious diseases, and to desensitization for treating allergies. And his study of "miasms" was surprisingly close to the later discovered theories of infectious diseases: he lacked the microscopes and later, more sophisticated chemical tools to research it much further.

So please do give credit to the originator of the field, much as one gives credit to religious prophets whose ideas have been perverted. Perhaps much like one can give credit to Isaac Newton's early work in mathematics and optics and ignore most of his later, confused work in alchemy. If only the very followers of his work would understand the beginnings of scientific testing and methodology in his work and carry on from that, they might be much more helpful to their clients.

> Placebo has no physiological effect (like homeopathy).

> More info here: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/... [csicop.org]

I'm afraid that the article you just cited specifically says:

> And finally there are real physiological effects resulting from the ritual of treatment.

So I';m afraid that even your primary source disagrees with your claim to some extent.

Github's hosted service is more reliable than almost every in-house source control central repository I've seen in decades of experience. The concern about the off-site risks is understandable, but for robust multi-location access, it's been much better than anything that even I could host in house.

This may be part of why gitorious is having problems. If they lack the internal know-how to arrange solid HTTP proxy forwarding, and SSH pass-through by running an SSH man-in-the-middle secured channel, well, there could be all sorts of problems they can't deal with.

> Adult pornography on the internet is actually illegal in the US

Could you provide a citation or evidence of this, please? There have certainly been attempts to regulate it, with mixed results. But even casual research leads very quickly to the Supreme Court case that struck down porongraphy provisions of the Communications Decency Act. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...) And even that unconstitutional law attempted to restrict pornography to minors, not pornography as a whole.

There was a particularly memorable quote in the Supreme Court case, one to keep in mind when filtering Internet traffic. That includes this, and the recent blocking of ISIS traffic on twitter.

> Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer.

I was referring to the various reports around 2010 and 2011 saying that over 30% of the Internet content was porn. Those numbers have been called into question (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090), but from network experience and dealings with bulk storage and network traffic, I'll continue to claim that it's the most _likely_ content of any single Petabyte sized archive. I'll agree that it's not the only possible content of such a large repository.

You've a valid point that "it''s still legal" for ordinary pornography, at least in most countries. Child porn is the political leverage used to censor or filter Internet content in many countries. I'll be quite curious to see if this case actually involved child porn, or if it was merely distasteful or a means to get other traffic data for the prosecutors.

There was n infamous case about Amateur Action BBS, a very popular porn site that was framed for dealing in child porn. The frame failed, since they did not even open the box of content they hadn't ordered, but the postal inspector from Tennessee succeeded in convicting a California couple for content that was previously ruled to be constitutionally protected in California.. The history is fascinating: there was a good thread at the time in EFF discussion groups, still available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ma... b

Given storage work I've done, when you're hosting that much content and that much traffic, it's almost _always_ pornographic. I do hope that the Canadian courts can be sensible about what is specifically and knowingly hosted, and what is treated in a hands-off fashion like US "common carrier" standards require.

I'll be even more fascinated to see if any intelligence agencies know about child porn and refused to reveal or prosecute its source, due to a desire to keep their monitoring secret. We've certainly seen that in the USA.

> Women are already empowered enough.

In the USA, it's gotten profoundly better in my lifetime, but even here it is hardly complete.

Empowering women also leads to lower birth rates and reduces poverty profoundly. One of the biggest reasons that ISIS, al Quaeda, and other fundamentalist groups grow is that they offer poor, disenfranchised people, especially unemployed young men. It's a vicious cycle of violence and poverty, and it _cannot break_ without control of birth rates, becuase there is _no work_ for these young men. Their only hope of prosperity, whether physical or spiritual, becomes the gang and tribal groups because if they do not join, the gangs and fanatics will _take_ their money, their turf, and eventually their lives.

He apparently leaked information about 140,000 accounts. His sentence was vacated and conviction reversed on appeal because the appeals judge felt he should have been tried in his home state.

It's too bad this judge was not available for the "Amateur Action" computer porn case in 1996 (http://fac-staff.seattleu.edu/mchon/web/Cases/thomas.html).

The "lighting a fire under the IT staff" too often results in the manager of IT having meetings, submitting checklists and expense reports, and doing _nothing_ to address the actual issue. Too often it's not a specific line of code, which can be corrected, but poor practices and attitudes about what security can and should be applied to projects.

> Any scammer worth his salt does his homework

I'm afraid not. The scammers tend to be high volume, low overhead operations. Some ongoing email scams and phone scams even seem tuned to fail very quickly for even slightly alert victims, so that the scammer's time isn't wasted on victims who will catch on somewhat further along in the process, and they can invest time in many, many more calls to much easier victims.

There is no hint that they're uninstalling the fake SSL signature authority, which is installed by the software and is fairly easily used for man-in-the-middle attacks of Lenovo customers. I do wonder who has the private keys to that signature authority, because they could have _already_ issued fake SSL certificates for all sorts of fake websites.