Occam's razor is just a rule of thumb, not something you can use to determine a fact. Using it as an argument is stupid.

See also http://peterkazmaier.com/?p=32

Actually, lack of evidence does lower the probability in a lot of cases, but only if you know what you are looking for already...

But you are still basically correct, as long as we are talking about a deity, a preternatural being of some sort, in a very wide sense. It is impossible to assign any probability to something that is undefined.

However, if by using the word god you mean one of the named gods of the major religions, I think it's pretty safe to say they are unlikely to exist, since the religious literature gives us clues to what to look for, and there appear to be no credible, verifiable findings.

You don't need to fudge the meaning a lot, however, to move it back to the undefined territory, though. Just say none of the holy books are 100 % accurate and there might be some truth to some of it...

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instance, hiding the Apache version number might actually decrease security since now you might miss yourself you are out of date.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.