Heartbleed may be a huge IT problem, but you seem to have forgotten that health care system decisions are not made by IT security managers. They are run by demi-gods that we mere mortals are instructed to refer to as "doctors." And the doctor's prioritized view of IT is this:

#1. Be Available. I may need this system right this second in order to save a life. I don't care if it's my kid's Nintendo DS, I'm telling you it might save a life.
#2. Stay The Hell Out Of My Way. Don't interrupt me when I'm saving someone's life. And you don't know when that is; just that if you're interrupting me, it probably is now.
#3. Give Me Exactly What I Want. For I am the giver of life and death, and you must respect me.

So unless a problem is currently causing them an outage (so not just any old problem, it has to be causing an actual outage), it won't rise to the level of severity that says "skip all quality control processes and immediately patch this."

It doesn't matter if the router is vulnerable to hacking. It doesn't matter if a hacker who pwns the router could brick it. It doesn't matter if he is stealing patient records. Those things aren't interfering with #1, 2, or 3. So follow procedures, deploy it in a lab, go through testing and QA, and install it only on Wednesday afternoons when the hospital admins are all on the back nine.

But they did neither invent it nor made they any innovative progress. They are a marketing company - good at repacking other peoples inventions and selling them to a mainstream market.

Thanks to over 20 years of monopoly practices and systematical destruction of potential rivals, indeed there aren't very many. But that's like saying that you don't have any alternatives to being a muslim in Iraq. Just because someone has taken away all your other choices doesn't mean the remaining choice is any good.

True, but let's be honest here: We are comparing different flavors of shit. Office, in any of its incarnations, is an abomination.

The battery pack is not the bulk of the price of an electric car. It's all the other bits.
So it is not going to drive down the price, not by any reasonable amount.

What is needed is a single company making the motors and standardization. If the Govt demanded that all cars follow a standard motor design then suddenly costs will drop. Ford,GM,Toyota,Honda are NOT going to standardize unless forced to. And prices will not drop until there is a standard that is interchangeable.

Why should THE MAN want to brick your phone, when instead they can just track you - that's what they want - then they can brick *you* as needed.

Given our track record with Juniper, "drop everything and patch now" is a foolhardy approach, especially with something as important as a border router or firewall. I wouldn't apply any of their patches without seeing a long track record of safety. With heartbleed there was an unknown level of risk that they would be attacked; with any given Juniper patch there is a known risk the network would just go down.

Of course, given the choice, I wouldn't select a Juniper device to route packets to a doghouse, and would never place one as a mission critical node on any network. Then again, that's not my choice to make, just one we have to live with.

"3D room painter "

That's called explosives...

Apparently the sound from your mic and the echo from your gyroscopes were both parsed by your speech-to-text converter. I guess it works better than we thought!

Apple fixed that problem. The iPhone has no battery door, so it can't be removed in case you don't want the phone to spy on you.

When you look at the technical advancements in agriculture, they're composed of small features integrated in to (or bolted on to) existing equipment. You don't need a new tractor, you just need to mount a GPS receiver and a database onto your old one. A processor no bigger than a cell phone can do lots of that. Adding electrically operated valves to an existing fertilizer or pesticide spray system? Again, very small. It doesn't have to auto-steer, it just has to know where it is, and where it's been.

The makers don't have to build the tractors, they just want to improve them.

Launch and land a "pep boys" on mars...

I realize reading the article is considered bad form, but if you read it you'd learn they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. That's somewhere between zero to two months. Lots of big shops have a monthly patching cycle, and you don't just drop every patch into a mission critical system the day it arrives.

They said they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. The window was zero to two months, not five.

And it's not that data security is a low priority, it's just that it may not be as high a priority as network availability. This is health care, where problems in communication might affect patient outcomes. "Hey, sysadmin, Doctor Green couldn't respond to his page last night, and the patient died as a result." These are the kinds of arguments that are thrown at the IT departments at every health care provider. Whether or not we consider them rational or valid is irrelevant.

So in that backdrop, we might try to understand that they probably don't just slam in every patch that the vendor has to offer, at least not without a giant process circus. I would guess that they have a patch intake process, where they have to run the patch by some engineering team that evaluates the nature of the patch, and devises some kind of testing plan to execute in their lab environment. They then have to pass it to the testing team who will set up and execute the patch process in the lab, document all their findings, and then turn the patch over to the production network team. They'll put it on their list, and they'll have their own manager who says "whoa, why are you security guys rushing to slam this patch in to my border router? Let's slow down and think about this one."

I could easily see it taking a month in a big, regulated corporate environment.

Black tanks in greenhouses are used as thermal storage to heat the greenhouse during cold days. 55 gallons of water in a black tank that the sun hits all day long, holds enough heat to keep a small greenhouse at or above 40 degrees for almost an entire winter day where it is bitter cold outside. IT will actually keep it above freezing for over 3 days.

We used to fill 55 gallon drums full of water and paint them black to hold up shelving, we had a small 10X20 greenhouse and 4 barrels of water kept the greenhouse warm for a week during a bitter cold snap. Water is an awesome heat storage medium.

Actually no, Society is not OK with that. Only the most horrible pet owners let their cats out like that. It's the scumbag fringe of society that is OK with it.
Many cities are trying hard to fight the scourge of bad pet owners letting their cats out.