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That is certainly not the most common use case of SSL. The most common use case is simple client/server communication. In that case, SSL is most certainly end-to-end. If you want end-to-end encryption for an IM system, use OTR. Can you name a non-proprietary, non-XMPP messaging system with presence? I can only name one: RabbitMQ. The majority of messaging software out there does not support presence. Just to name a few such systems: JMS (e.g. ActiveMQ), JBoss HornetQ, ZeroMQ, Starling, Kestrel, Redis, MemcacheQ There's plenty of messaging software out there that's not intended for use in an IM system. XMPP, on the other hand, has many uses beyond just IM systems, such as Vertebra. Hypothetical? Unimplemented? I'm using pub/sub today with XMPP on ejabberd. The XMPP server is what needs to decide what goes where. The XMPP protocol provides the declarations needed to do it. That's a separate problem, and one rather elegantly solved by OTR. Again, this is also solved by OTR Well, secure, decentralized, and human meaningful: pick two. PKI is secure and human meaningful.

No, the issue with replay attacks can only happen if you don't check the hash against the content. A hash tree lets you incrementally verify the content as it's received.

Yes, altering the original question alters the outcome of the poll. Changing the word "temperatures" to the word "cheese preferences" would also alter the outcome of the poll. And your evidence is...? Well, according to my as-yet-unchallenged assertion regarding all scientific organizations of national or international standing, 97% agree and 3% have no opinion. And your explanation as to the sudden change in the relatively steady preindustrial levels of CO2 is...? For tens of thousands of years they remained unchanged, then the industrial revolution began. General Circulation Models which use the anthropogenic CO2 hypothesis are able to accurately reconstruct the historical record. What is your basis for asserting otherwise? Let me note now that models which make contrary assumptions are, for whatever reason, not able to accurately reconstruct the historical record. For this reason the majority of climate scientists support the "consensus", because the alternative is a non-answer. Were some climate scientist able to make an accurate historical reconstruction using a different set of model inputs it would likely be given more credence, but based on the best evidence-to-date there is little more reason to consider those sorts of explanations than there is to consider light traveling through the luminiferous ether, because models of the behavior of light based around luminiferous ether do not give realistic results. Lots of things have gone on in the past 4.3 billion years, including many mass extinction events. You may not care about those. I care greatly about the possibility of hundreds of thousands if not millions of humans dying. This would not wipe out the human race but I still feel it's something that should be prevented. If we can prevent hundreds of thousands of people dying because they do not have access to safe water sources than it's something I think we, as a species, should undertake. And how many of those conditions actually affect Earth's global mean surface temperature? Climate models are capable of attributing climate change to the various component radiative forcings. Everything else is extraneous factors. It's possible climate scientists are wrong about everything, but to date the evidence and explanations are entirely on their side. Until their explanations are falsified we should trust them.

Upon further inspection JohnB's statement seems a bit over-the-top: 250 kg kangaroo? Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo#Description A large male can be 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall and weigh 90 kg (200 lb).

Clearly the solution is to line the tracks with misters that emit a pheremone which is repulsive to kangaroos

It seems the FOX failure has crept into the forums as well!

Too late... much too late. Also: holidays are for everyone, drinkers and non-drinkers alike. If you were out and about on New Year's Eve, and not drinking, chances are you were in the minority

It's not as if Gnutella has exclusivity on hash trees and they are used by numerous other protocols, not that your OP included any reference to hash trees even though they're the solution to your state problem. By doing it in this manner you negate all benefits of a hash tree. This requires omniscience as to any hashes that have been used anywhere on the public internet to garner any sort of benefit. Since you don't have that, the approach is worthless, sorry. The optimal solution to this problem is to distribute a signed hash tree to the receiver ahead of time. This allows them to verify any part or the totality of any file as it is received.

That's all true from a historical perspective, however coming from a "Christian nation" that trounced all over the Middle East, our image problems elsewhere in the world have abated with the election of Obama. Muslims, on the other hand, are hated throughout America and Europe. Blame it on "the mass media" if you want, but I don't think it's anywhere near that simple. In America it's a case of neo-McCarthyism. In Europe it seems like it's a case of "unwanted foreign immigrants", similar to how Mexican immigrants are treated by many American conservatives.

I'd be happy with a train that runs between Denver and LA at >100MPH.

FOX News: we have technical difficulties with our satellite link when Democrats speak

It doesn't need to be infinite... just build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun then send the energy to earth in an ultraconcentrated beam... problem solved. After that you just need an unobtanium receiver dish to convert that super intense beam back to useful energy.

I too would like to see a better transportation infrastructure, particularly in regard to public transportation. Our regional transportation service (RTD) does a fairly good job, particularly the light rail service in areas where it's operating. However, there have been substantial delays expanding the light rail service. The light rail expansion I thought would reach my hometown (and really need it to right now) has been repeatedly delayed. Originally slated for just two years in the future, it's now been pushed back to 2016 at the earliest. It was only a month ago that they finally secured ownership of the land they need to build the tracks. Having traveled to Europe, the transportation situation in the US is really sad. I look at the rail services offered in countries like France and Switzerland and am amazed. A city not much larger than my own boasts a metro system with two subway lines, which makes transportation within the city incredibly easy. And for getting anywhere else in Switzerland, I can take the SBB, which is fast, convenient, and the cheapest way for a foreigner to get around. I looked into traveling across state via train in America a month or two ago. It would take 8 hours at a cost approximately equivalent to a 45 minute plane ride. WTF? America needs more trains like these, not the antiquated ones offered by Amtrak: Unfortunately I don't have high hopes for the future of statewide and international rail services in America. I really hope we manage to expand them as they are desperately needed and I am glad Obama and Biden are both proponents, however it seems Americans would rather drive their cars than take trains. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Amtrak is a joke so no one uses it, therefore Amtrak has no money to improve their service, therefore Amtrak remains a joke. America could really use a nationwide high speed rail service... then maybe it wouldn't be necessary to drive or fly everywhere to get around.

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Almost every scientific institution in the world with national or international standing recognizes the reality of anthropogenically-forced climate change: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change None of these institutions dispute it. A few are noncomittal. 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that global warming is primarily caused by human activities such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation. See: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

In addition to what has already been listed: - Massively multicore CPUs: we're now up to 100 general purpose CPUs on a single chip. Also: CUDA. Programming for Von Neumann machines will soon be dead - Massive advances in the speed and performance of virtualization (thanks in large part to those aforementioned multicore CPUs). VMware, VirtualBox, etc - Windows 7: finally Windows doesn't suck! - Numenta/NuPIC and its first practical application: Vitamin D - Real D and IMAX 3D finally elevating 3D movies beyond a gimmick, and the first batch of movies that really make use of the medium: Coraline, Up, and Avatar. This decade: 3D movies in the home - Brain/computer interfaces finally reaching the mainstream: introducing silly Star Wars toy! Also: the Emotiv Headset - Blogs and - Twitter, Facebook, and the "realtime web" redefining the way information flows Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedOh, and a huge one I missed which I can't believe hasn't been mentioned yet: Google: redefined how we search for information. Moved us off of installed applications and into "the cloud" with their huge suite of webapps: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader. Beyond that: cloud computing. Computers (and storage) went from being products into being services. Computers are now a metered utility, and you can purchase as much or as little as you need to accomplish a given task.

Any ideas or technologies you thought would take off during the "naughties" that didn't? Over ten years ago I heard of the idea of putting a hydrogen reformer into a car, using that to extract hydrogen from gasoline, and then running the resulting hydrogen through a fuel cell in order to produce electricity. This idea seemed great in that we could start with the existing gasoline infrastructure but start rolling out more efficient fuel cell cars. Brilliant! Unfortunately, it would seem the technology never materialized. Wikipedia gives a list of reasons.

1) Why would we burn hydrogen when we can use it in far more efficient fuel cells? 2) Unlike CO2, water vapor exits the atmosphere: it's called rain.

This is easily solved with hash trees. Then there is nothing preventing a replay attack using a previous signed message digest.

Are you trolling? It can be either, depending on how it's deployed. In the most common cases, TLS is end-to-end. And what are you advocating as an end-to-end alternative? OTR? Uh huh, PKI is "archaic". Uhh, what alternative are you proposing exactly? PKI works, works well, and it's ubiquitous. Furthermore, what standard has the scope of PKI and even has technical advantages over it? What are those technical advantages? And why should we care when PKI works as well as it does? TCP is also "archaic", and unlike PKI there are actually better alternatives, like SCTP. Unix and C are likewise "archaic". Learn to worse is better. XMPP is truly amazing, and is the only popular messaging system with pubsub and presence (RabbitMQ does have some bolt-on solutions for adding presence to AMQP but they aren't standardized like they are with XMPP). What are these technologies you keep alluding to? As someone who works with XMPP and PKI on a daily basis I find your naivety infuriating. I really hope this is just a troll.

Just about to roll down from my comparatively tiny suburb to the big city, where chances are I'll probably end up at a karaoke bar come the stroke of midnight. We'll see

Yes I certainly noticed every animal had 6 legs... except the Na'vi

Hmm, I guess Avatar gets a bye for them having USB plugs in their hair. "Don't play with that... you'll go blind!" Awesome. Exactly how did those things evolve again?

The issue isn't total production. The issue is how much accumulates beyond the natural fluxes. A dying tree gives off CO2 but a growing tree sequesters it. The natural sinks cannot accommodate the CO2 that man is introducing into the climate system. Given that, recent increases in average CO2 levels are due almost entirely to anthropogenic sources, which is the point iNow was trying to make: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Anthropogenic_greenhouse_gases Since about 1750 human activity has increased the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Measured atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are currently 100 ppmv higher than pre-industrial levels.[21] Natural sources of carbon dioxide are more than 20 times greater than sources due to human activity,[22] but over periods longer than a few years natural sources are closely balanced by natural sinks such as weathering of continental rocks and photosynthesis of carbon compounds by plants and marine plankton. As a result of this balance, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide remained between 260 and 280 parts per million for the 10,000 years between the end of the last glacial maximum and the start of the industrial era

Well, haven't posted in this thread yet but... "Sexting" in the age of MMS certainly makes me question the current child pornography laws. A 17 year old girl could take pictures of her boobs, text them to you (without your permission), and upon your cell phone automatically receiving the message, even if you don't view it, that makes you a sex offender in possession of child pornography. The child pornography laws in the US are pretty f*cked up. Their hearts are in the right place but the laws do not account for the multitude of extenuating circumstances under which one can come to be in possession of child porn. It's clearly laws that were written before the age of instantaneous electronic communication which can't deal with the status quo.