Some also believe in flat earth. It's unbelievable BS, but I should probably not call it that then? How about wrong? Not true? False? Donkey crap and kitten whiskers?

Just because some people believe in astonishing BS doesn't make it any less BS.

I use a nuclear explosive briefcase I got into my hands when the USSR fell,,,,

If you think of Internet just as any other place, places are kind of public from the public, but then people build walls around things and create private spaces and secure places for our "stuff". They can always be compromised. So how is it any different in the interwebz? Well, it kinda isn't.

Of course you're right about these things - you can't connect to cellular network without giving away your position. But we have ways to circumvent these problems, you're phone's location can be tracked, but the phone and SIM card doesn't have to give away your identity if you do things right - and you can anonymize your internet connection and prevent your position being tracked online. It's all similar to things we build IRL to create privacy and security. Of course one needs to have knowledge, and preventing your location being known is not realistic option for most people, but it's not so much because of internet itself being a public place.

You did shit when USSR was trying to invade my small country, even though you had promised otherwise. But we beat them back, and we beat them back good.

You did OK with Germany - of course you did so with the help of USSR, who you let do most of the job anyway. But thanks for participating.

You may leave my country at any time - it's not like we asked you here, it was you who asked to be let here and practice with our military. We're not a NATO country and we don't depend on you - if we were attacked, it's doubtful you would lift a finger out of anything but your self interest.

Yes, Germany did bad. It would have been dealt with even if you didn't join, but it was helpful. That doesn't mean you're needed by the Europe today - and whatever you did or do that help Europe you do only of your own interests, and NATO is not "at no charge", it has high costs economically and in human life. You take more than you give and you drag those countries into action to protect your own interests.

Also, I'm not German, but I do want your useless pizza-faced mouth breather troops out of here too.
And there was no "victory in the cold war" - so thanks for not winning the war you kept going on. Thanks for Taleban too, that was a pretty cool creation that the world is ever so grateful for.

The relative peace in Europe for the past 80 years was kept by European countries finally working together, not by your meddling.

But you most certainly have drank the "greatest country in the world" kool-aid. You, whose country can't even build a working healthcare infrastructure, where infant mortality rates are at 3rld world level, are not a shining beacon whose example should be followed. Currently your country is trying to fsck up Nordstream 2, rambling about how your "helping Europe" not get too dependent on Russian gas - and why? Well, to make us dependent on your gas, for moar money. That's how you're "helping".

"all at no charge" my ass.

Yeah? Interesting...

My country sometimes feels like behind the rest of the world in treatment of certain issues, like ADD/ADHD. In Finland proper treatment of ADD/ADHD with dopamine stimulants really only begun in the early 2000's, which is why I said "Using Ritalin to treat ADHD is so 2000's. And Concerta became to market soon after. There was no treatment or even proper diagnosis for ADD/ADHD before, at least here - what's now known as ADD and ADHD was often diagnosed as MBD, which is an umbrella diagnosis for "we don't really know" short for "Minimal Brain Dysfunction". I guess I would have benefited a lot from proper medication during my school years (late 80's to late 90's), but there was no proper diagnosis for me (and I wasn't diagnosed with MBD either).

You people really see yourselves as some God given gift to the rest of the world.

By "real depression" you are talking about deep clinical depression - I'm not going to argue about different meanings for the word "depression", or if one meaning is more real than the rest, but it's relevant to my point. The fact that clinical depression is very much different from normal feelings of depression resulting from whatever happens in life, like your best friend dying suddenly - which can also affect one for years, but is still normal human reaction which is normally "cured by time" as one processes what happened and their feelings about it and finally accept the new reality.

The point is that most people diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants are not clinically depressed. If we take your definition of "real depression" we also have to address the issue that people who don't fall under that definition are already medically treated for depression - often with worse results than if they weren't treated with pharmaceuticals. Considering this, is it that crazy to worry about this too becoming treatment for normal "mommy died" depression, which it really shouldn't become?

Ritalin also has poor delivery mechanism. I would rather suggest dextroamphetamine or modafinil, but if it's methylphenidate then Concerta is the drug you should be taking if you want it to carry through the day without so called "roller coaster effect" where the drug kicks in, starts decreasing in effect until the next dose, then raise again and again begins to decrease, until the next dose kicks in, etc. - Concerta will not only release the stuff slowly throughout the day, it will also start releasing stronger concentration of methylphenidate later in the day to address acute tolerance that forms during the day (and decreases back to normal during the night).

Using Ritalin to treat ADHD is so 2000's.

Maybe you should read his comment again, but this time without stopping in the middle (or rather in the very beginning) - he didn't suggest stimulants as treatment, did you not read or comprehend his whole comment?

And when did posting to slashdot mean that one can't possibly know anything about what his talking anyway? Because it seems you're arguing that something must be wrong, because it was posted in Slashdot comment section.

Yup, dopaminergic stimulants like amphetamine or cocaine are not seen as good medications for depression for a good reason - which is why I'm baffled of bupropion (Wellbutrin, Zyban, Voxra), a potent NDRI (Noradrenaline and Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor) is sold and prescribed for depression. It's a dopaminergic stimulant, of course it will help with depression - just like coke does. Should it be used for treatment of depression? I'm kinda suspicious if that's a good idea... Is it any better than prescribing small doses of amphetamines or cocaine?

As a daily user of medicinal methylphenidate (for ADHD) though I can say that I still do get a mood lift when the drug kicks in. I'm prescribed one 56mg Concerta per day, which is in the high end of dosing - maybe it's higher than required, because many ADHD people don't feel this effect from their medicinal dose, but on the other hand 36mg didn't feel like it was effective enough to help with my ADHD, so... But my point is, as long as I don't increase the daily dose it doesn't seem to grow tolerance the same way amphetamines (for example) would. There's this thing called (at least by some) "acute tolerance", and it's why Concerta has special mechanism for increasing the amount of methylphenidate it releases during the day so that later in the day it releases more methylphenidate. It's designed to release all the methylphenidate during the time you're awake, and during night this "acute tolerance" that forms during the day goes down again and supposedly the next morning the drug works just like the day before and day before that, etc.
However if you should increase the dose from therapeutic to recreational a more lasting tolerance does start to build. I've yet to notice that happening with my current dose, however I don't know if this would be the case if it was used to treat depression.

IIRC NS4 was The awful version, but not everyone switched - that much I do remember for sure. I was one of those who always preferred NS, even if for a short while IE might have been the better. At that point I had already lost my trust in MS when it came to security, and history of IE has shown me I was right to not trust them - it doesn't necessarily mean NS was any better at the time, but the way I saw it back then my choice was between someone I already didn't trust and another whose products were overall seen as trustworthy. I chose to bite through the crap and hope for things to get better with future versions. But my reasoning behind my choices is not relevant.

And let's not underestimate the downright religious nature of x vs. y type software "wars" - NS vs. IE is one of the best known examples of it. Many people dedicated to one or the other never even bothered to do a honest testing between the two.

But MS didn't bundle IE with windows because it was the better choice - and it wasn't the better choice for long anyways. They did it because IE was their product and they wanted to dominate the browser market as well. Same thing for Google. For either one of them, it's downright ridiculous to suggest that their motives had anything to do with caring about what is the best option for end user - they would do it for the same reason Edge defaults to Bing: because it's their product.

Funny - I realize I haven't asked everyone, but among my friends I can't recall a single one that ever bought films they haven't seen yet, unless it was something they believed to be good anyway. I've known several who had at least a moderate habit of collecting good films - from those I've known, none had enough money to put into that hobby that they could spend money just to "try out" a movie they didn't know if they would like it. They all pirated movies as well - and I know there's a lot of films that are expensive enough and hard to even buy some of the most dedicated ones had never chosen to spend their limited money on if they hadn't been able to see them first.

"Those people" do exist, how anyone comes to a conclusion that it can't possibly be more than couple freaks in a basement is simply bewildering to me.

Also people who pirate something often become customers later. As someone who has experience of becoming familiar with a software product using a pirated version, then later in life (anywhere from day to years) buying that or another product from the same company because of earlier experience. Heck, I briefly used FruityLoops in the early 2000's, a pirate copy - when I moved to Linux there was no good enough solutions that worked (either by running windows software with wine or with native linux applications) for creating music like I had liked to, I ended up ditching that hobby for over a decade - now for couple last years I have started to fiddle with music again, although this time with good FOSS applications like LMMS... But when I bumped into FruityLoops Studio for mobile devices on Google Play Store I didn't hesitate long before I decided to purchase a license. Although I guess I should make a backup of the install, in case it ever becomes unavailable. I would not ever had considered paying for it if I didn't have the experience with much older version of FruityLoops earlier. This is not an individual freak example, it happens all the time.
You make what you want out of it, but those examples are not made up from thin air.

I advocate piracy. Not the kind where pirated stuff is sold for profit, but software and entertainment piracy through sharing, I do advocate it. I don't mean I want people to pirate as much as possible, quite the opposite: if you have no problem paying for it, you should. My country, Finland, has had a long cultural understanding, and laws, that copying music (whether from radio, from friends or the libraries copy, even internet) for personal listening is not punishable and although technically "unlegal", not something most people frown upon. Same goes for films and even software.

When it comes to software, most that I use are freely available (as well as being F/OSS) anyway, but when I think how much less I could have learned with computers (as well as culture) if I hadn't had access to pirated software (and media).

* Was able to learn programming with QuickBasic, Borland C/C++, Turbo Pascal, x86 assembly years before we got a modem and I could access BBS's - thanks to dad's work friend who apparently was responsible of programming some big machines software at factory, I got these tools from him.
* Was able to learn making electronic music with a PC
* Learn to make my computer do what I want with my choice of software and configuration. Basically, I don't know if I had ever become a computer geek at all if I was only restricted to what I could play.

I still buy software. I've bought a lot of the software I originally had pirated. Same goes for music, I may have thousands of song ripped or downloaded on my disks, I still have some old tapes I copied from friends in the 90's. Might even still have couple of forgotten VHS tapes. I also have a growing collection of original music CD's, vinyls, even casettes and dvd discs. I have even created software, music and graphics with pirated proprietary software that I've published - however I haven't profited from any; as younger teen I wanted to make a game or application and release it as shareware version and the only compilers I had access to (and knew of - in 95 we got a modem and from Fidonet message boards I learned about DJGPP, but it wasn't until probably 97 that I finally got myself a 32-bit compiler for DOS. First compiler I could legally use to create a proprietary program I would ask money for, and first piece of software I knew was "Free" or "Open Source", which began to intrigue me more than doomed to fail idea of shareware profit. I had been planning on saving to buy Watcom's C/C++ compiler to legally be able to sell my software if I want to - but then I learned that you don't always need a commercial solution to get a professional solution ;)
I bought OS/2 WARP 4 from store in '97 when buying my first very own PC - I had grown to hate Windows 95 since, well.... '95. I loved it, but as I couldn't access any new software, and DOS games (which were of great importance to me, especially DooM) didn't work with my sound card (or maybe it's limitation of OS/2 DOS support - but then, otherwise it's as they say "better DOS than DOS" and "better (16-bit) Windows than Windows (3.x)"). Playing DooM wasn't a chance without sounds and source ports for OS/2 were long in future. The only OS I actually paid for, only to be forced to go back to the Win95 I installed from the CD that came with the machine my dad bought the family in '95. I'm glad I paid for it though, unlike Windows95, it's price was justifiable. The only OS (before Linux) I had experience with and which could be called stable.

I honestly think that software developers, especially smaller ones, benefit more from piracy than lose in actual sales (i.e. people who would actually have purchased the software if they couldn't have downloaded it for free). In the 90's a CEO of a Finnish antivirus-software company answered a question about software piracy with that he doesn't think piracy as threat because the ones now using pirated version of their software today are the ones who will buy their software tomorrow. That's not an exact quote btw. Not to mention the benefits from people being able to access this stuff, learn to use it and learn from it, it directly benefits the human kind universally. I'm deadly serious about being an advocate for piracy. Piracy has also been a huge help in preserving digital history. For the benefit of mankind no less!

My mother and father were both obsessive film collectors, but those hundreds of VHS tapes full of movies, guess how they got them? From public TV - they didn't feel they needed the original boxes, they weren't that kind of collectors. It was just love for the movies. Oh, the amount of culture I would never even known to look for if it wasn't for all those movies from all around the world. The idea that recording and collecting movies from public broadcasts like this should be illegal is totally alien to me, it feels like artificially making up rules to limit a resource we have legitimate access to so that certain uses of the resource can be turned into extra profit. And the fact we had an extra tax that went to our version of RIAA on empty audio tapes, CD's, VHS's, DVD's meant that we were paying a tax for having a right to copy media for personal use when we bought the empty media for it. The funny thing is that in the early days of consumer level CD-burners they sold same CD's from same manufacturers in two different packages, one was labeled for "DATA" and the other "AUDIO". The tax was only on CD's sold for "audio use" :D

I feel like I have rambled enough... I tried to focus my mind a bit better, but seems that today my ADHD just wont let me write in more organized and clear manner, I'm going to stop here.

Can anyone confirm or debunk this claim? That sounds insane.

Because you should be told in that case as well. In my country you are told when you're not under surveillance any more.