I have a couple problems with the implication that "short time to find/fix" is so acceptable.

1. Some amount of damage was done (and no one really knows for sure) through this bug. A fix was identified rapidly after the bug was -discovered-, but that's a long time after the bug was -introduced-.

2. For some systems, particularly those like SCADA systems where we really have deep information assurance concerns, patching software is not easy! Not everything can use "grab the patched source, rebuild and reinstall" or even "download the patch and install" repairs.

Thus the emphasis Has To Be on preventing these kinds of problems, then defending against them. Fixing them after the system is deployed is by far the weakest strategy. (Thus I salute with a full hand the initiative announced today, and discussed on a related SlashDot thread: http://news.slashdot.org/story... )

Interesting! I wasn't aware that this was an option. I will have to investigate that. Thanks!

So far as I can tell, DRM-free means "no DRM".

FWIW, I actually find Steam really annoying. I usually use a couple of computers at once, and I sometimes have a slow-paced game on one and want to play something faster on another while, say, waiting for turns to process or something. I can do this with even the most draconian DRM schemes, but not with Steam. Yes, I'm aware of Offline Mode. Valve Support has told me that it is in fact prohibited to use Offline Mode to run another copy of Steam, even if I'm using it to play a different game.

Seriously, just... Why?

Why should we read on for Bennett's "thoughts"? He's a twit. Why do you guys keep posting this garbage? Someone teach him how to use a blog, since what he's got here isn't "news", it isn't "stuff that matters", it's "some guy writing badly about things he doesn't really think through".

No, not all churches operate that way. Many churches are religious organizations that may or may not even be structured enough to need a legal existence. Only one "church" I've ever heard of specifically claimed not to be religious until the tax consequences showed up.

Your other points are, well. You didn't do any research and you didn't say anything coherent. Try again?

1. It's annoying.
2. Most people don't think like that.

People are not built for that kind of caution.

I got as far in the "cyborganize" page as "your brain works just like everyone else's" and stopped reading. There's a whole lot of similarities, but there are huge differences, too. For instance, the rate at which you forget things, that they so proudly identify as precisely worked out? Highly variable. The gap between, say, an autistic person who doesn't have ADHD, and a non-autistic person with ADHD, is going to be large.

Maybe the system is independent of these variances, but in general, if someone says everyone thinks the same, I dismiss them as not having made even the most casual effort to comprehend the field.

There's a lot of very good material already written on the topic. Quick summary:

1. The people who founded Scientology explicitly stated that was not a religion, but a scientific practice. They changed to calling it a "religion" solely for tax/legal purposes. That's an official statement from Hubbard himself, not speculation.
2. Fairly dangerous and abusive. Look up Lisa McPherson, or Paulette Cooper.
3. Lots of very shady practices, like pressuring members to have abortions so they won't be wasting money on kids that they could be donating to the organization. Yes, really.

Plenty of stuff here you could look up. It's not so much about the specific beliefs as about the organizational structure and practice.

I think there may have been a true statement somewhere in there, but it was too subtle for me to find. The anti-ADHD stuff is pure Scientology spin, promoted aggressively precisely because the benefit of ADHD medication for most people is so very, very, obvious. Similarly, the "not much better than placebo" claim is a massive overclaim. There's some specific drugs that are pretty unreliable, but the key is that that's averaging over a general population; if you look only at the people who react well to them, and you move other people to something else, it actually works pretty well.

The claim that "no real disorders have been detected yet" is just plain stupid. Talk to people who are doing neuropsych, there is a ton of very nice, concrete, research being done on various cognitive abnormalities.

That doesn't mean they need to be actively funded by others.

"We will hear and they will be punished!!!"

http://www.crosstalkonline.org...

And here's my $.02: C syntax has been actively harmful in this regard. It's too easy to make a typo that compiles, or to introduce a statement/expression that has a different result than you expect (e.g. the Apple "extra break statement" bug.)

Not really related, there were lots of people using other preservatives already, and long before it was established that Wakefield was commiting deliberate fraud, it was well-established that if something in vaccines was causing autism, it wasn't thimerosal.

I think that's because you're fucking with a well-researched medical procedure based on absolutely no information whatsoever that would show that you have a reason to do so.

Fair enough, and that begs the question whether the passengers on the ship could ever tell the difference...