A custom CMS isn't a bad thing is you commit hard to securing it.

For various reasons, I've built custom CMSes. What I've committed to doing is limiting the accepted inputs. If something only needs an ID, then the inputs should be scrubbed down to only accept integers. If something only needs a name, scrub the inputs down to a regular expression covering letters, spaces and integers.

Where people get in trouble is not scrubbing their input aggressively.

Before people get too horny for the "diminishing" supply of oil, ponder two facts:

1. Have there been lines for gasoline in America during the last five years?

What? No, there haven't. You mean, it's not like the 1970s, when there really was a supply disruption?

2. How much oil actually spilled during the Gulf disaster in 2010?

I want folks to think real hard about how bad the government and the oil companies were lying before they consider this issue.

Now, ponder how much oil actually had to be spilled for an oil slick to go from Texas to Florida? And how many feet deep? And how much dispersant?

A shitload more oil came out of that well than the gov't and BP claim. They say a few million barrels. But, just think of the volume of oil it takes, with most of being underwater, dispersed by agents and eaten by bacteria, for that oil to spread through a volume of water stretching from Texas to Florida.

No one wants to admit oil's dirty secret: we have fuckloads of it.

Really? How was the Euro 100 years ago? What? Non-existent, ya say?

The Euro is a scam. An outright scam that wallpapered over the historic stupidity of European economics. On the one hand, you have the Mediterranean countries, with their hyperinflation. On the other hand you have the Germans with their policy of strong currency to a fault. The basic idea behind the Euro is to stir countries with opposing, stupid forms of economics together and say, "Tada! Stability!"

It's like putting bald tires on the left side of your truck and mud racing tires on the other side and saying, "Look, all-season tires!"

FB owns a lot of users and a couple really worthwhile properties that those users beat the hell out of. As a consequence, FB will experience the same type of long death that arises from a large user base reluctant to move all their stuff to a new service. Hell, look how many active users Yahoo Mail still has.

The only real downside for FB is that Zynga can plug into any potential successor. That means should a successor emerge in the near future, Zynga can move overnight into that space. Since a lot of FB users are there only for the Zynga games, any move by Zynga into a successor's space would be massively damaging to FB.

Is the slavery so over-the-top if you consider them sentient beings?

Unless you consider fish to be currency, in which case dolphins are just independent contractors.

The EU, as currently conceived, just flat-out doesn't have the power to enforce laws in individual countries. Look at the recent abortion ruling by the EU against Ireland. Ireland's response amounted to "And . . . ?"

The first time the EU tries to make this stick, they're going to have to go to court against every member nation the company in question operates in.

The Europeans need to face facts: they're not remotely as committed to the ideal of unity in practice as their speeches would suggest. Look at the bailout. The Eurozone basically exists so Germany and France can export surplus productivity to lazier, poorer countries. The Eurozone exists to correct flaws in the German Mark that the Germans themselves could never fix. But, when it comes time to pay up for indulging those lazier, poorer countries for profit, the Germans and French bitch and complain ceaselessly about having to do it. And worse, they force their partners into austerity measures that fundamentally extend the failures of the Mark to the Euro.

The Europeans are too stupid for their own good. The invent a unified government that no one ever intended to obey. They implement a a common currency that no one wants to back -- and then bitch when it turns out ya kinda have to back your currency no matter how badly your partners piss on it.

If it weren't for improving the passport rules, the EU would go down in history as an abject internationalist failure alongside the League of Nations.

The only question for the Europeans now is whether they do what the early US did. The early US figured out that the original Articles of Confederation were useless and barely empowered the government to do anything (sound familiar?). Eventually a new constituent assembly was called and a real Constitution (admittedly full of poisonous compromises) was written.

Until the EU gets down to the business of writing a non-pathetic organizing document, they might as well save the bullshit and let the Chinese steal everything.

In a first world nation, 98% of everything is done by robotics already. Look at a train. A train is a giant computer on rails with a couple humans there to intervene in the rare emergency.

The romanticism of space settlement is likely to give way to something like the movie Moon (2009). Hopefully we don't have to resort to cloning Sam Rockwell.