I see this attitude a lot on /., but I don't understand where it comes from? It seems obvious to me that having a strong verification system in place is a good thing for everybody but the fraudsters.
In this case it turns out that it wasn't actually secure, which raises concern about whether the protocol was subject to adequate public scrutiny before it was decided to employ on such a massive scale. But do you have any reason to say that they aren't actually interested in preventing fraud?
Are there more secure methods that they are refusing to employ? Or are you saying that the problem of secure authentication is inherently unsolvable, and that they should just give up and resign themselves to laughable measures like signatures and card numbers?

Are you sure? The CIA world factbook lists the US as having the 4th largest export in US. dollars in the world - counting the EU.

Visit the test site and look again.

I don't see that Opera has done anything particularly protest-worthy here. Maintaining proxies to circumvent oppressive regimes' firewalls, admirable as it might be, is not in my default expectations of a browser company, and I can't help but notice that neither the Mozilla Project, Microsoft or Apple provide such a service, leaving you with few places to turn if you're going to boycott everyone who isn't in the trenches fighting the CPC.
It's regrettable that the government of China chose to operate this way, but Opera merely chose to follow the local law by restricting access to a service, much as every search engine of note has done, in China, Germany, the US and elsewhere.
If we as a society really don't want to economically aid a state employing political censorship, we should stop pussy-footing around and enact a proper embargo. Yeah, that won't happen.

I differentiate between not actively resisting, and actively aiding, though. If, for instance, Opera released the internet browsing history of individuals on request, that'd be a serious breach of trust in my eyes, and I'd do my part to name and shame.

From their diagram, which admittedly could be made up of equal parts ignorance and guesswork, it looks like they're envisioning it used as a universal breakout cable.

Though if we could at least get so far that the choice was between IE with the Chrome plugin and IE with the Flash plugin...
But of course, I'm sure the IE team has already done the responsible thing and told their friends and family to stay the hell away from that shit.

Cute, but railguns require a conducting projectile. Maybe you could try a coil gun.

And manage it, that's huge. He still has the final say on any code that goes into the main line. Any serious kernel developer will have to at least tolerate him, which shapes the direction of Linux immensely.

Well, to be fair, while clearly not as pristine an art form as games with the direct involvement of the peruser they command, there have been movies made that may be said to possess some degree of artistic merit.
While not what Nintendo is doing here, a movie that you can optionally interact with isn't per se a bad idea.

Introduction to Algorithms isn't a bad read, and is likely to be the textbook used for any courses you take on the subject.
For everything else, there's Knuth.

Huh. One of the interesting things things about Reiser4 from an end-user perspective was Hans Reisers plans for file metadata. From what I can find about btrfs, it currently doesn't even support normal extended attributes. There was also talk about making it easy for developers to extend the filesystem with plugins that could add e.g. compression schemes.
I can't really recognize anything from Hans Reiser's ramblings in the btrfs documentation that isn't standard file system improvements already seen in e.g. ZFS. does anyone have any specific examples of the ZFS-leapfrogging features referred to?