Oh, don't get me wrong, everyone uses encryption. Unfortunately a few times over the past couple of years I've ended up getting people to temporarilly turn encryption off so I can dump the traffic and see WTF is going wrong because the damned applications won't display or log a useful error. I know *most* people don't understand technical error messages, but would it kill them to stick a "details" button on the dumbed-down error popup to make it trivial for a techie to ask the user to click it and read out a more useful message?

Mostly under Linux the error messages are useful to someone technical. Increasingly other OSes (Windows, OS X, iOS, Android) consider useful error mesages to be not user friendly and just give you a generic "something broke" error that is no use to man nor beast - frequently I'm left digging out tcpdump to diagnose customer's problems because the application itself won't give me any information (yes, even in the system log) - I shouldn't need to tcpdump their IMAP traffic to discover that the server is telling them their password is wrong damnit!

And I got downmodded into oblivion. You are exactly the kind of person I was talking about. The whack job Libertarian with some sort of social disorder who goes around declaring that any successful woman is an uppety attention whore, and proper women like nice feminine jobs.

The problem is: what constitutes "safe"? You're never going to have something that's completely safe, so it all comes down to probabilities. This is comparing the chance of your child being harmed through your actions (getting the vaccine) vs. the chance of them being harmed through your inactions (not getting the vaccine). Rationally, if getting the vaccine reduces the chances of the patient being harmed then obviously that is the right course of action, but does this make the vaccine "safe"? I suspect a lot of people take the irrational line that they don't want to take any action that might harm their child, but never properly think about the consequences of inaction, so go down the inaction line even if that is the worse choice.

Partly, there is a problem that diseases like measles aren't very common these days, to people perceive the risk to be very low. They ignore the fact that these deseases are uncommon *because* of vaccination.

Secondly, she seems to have a failure to understand basic statistics by her comment "If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f--king measles" - this argument is comparing a certainty (the child has autism) with an uncertainty (that the child will suffer lasting damage from the measels). Given the choice between a certainly autistic child and a child with a small chance of dieing (or other serious complication from measels), I might make the same decision and go with the measels, but that's not the choice the anti-vaccination crowd are making. If the argument had been comparing two certainties - "If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the child to die from measles or have autism" - then I imagine the response would be very different.

Whether or not you believe that vaccines cause autism (and there is absolutely no evidence that they do), the above rational arguments still apply - if the chances of serious injury or death from measels for unvaccinated people is higher than the chances of autism for vaccinated people then having the vaccine is a complete no-brainer.

I'm waiting to blame Obama's successor for the lack of a 1999 moonbase.

You're posting on a site where Libertarian aspies make up a significant minority, so you'd best get used to these sorts of comments.

Yes Microsoft has done many nasty things, but shutting down support of a 13 year old OS isn't really one of them.

If you buy a product, find out the EOL date. If it is too soon for your liking, don't buy it.

"Out of date" is meaningess marketing blather. "End of life/support" is what counts, and for that, Windows 7 falls out of extended support in January 2020, nearly six years from now.

I don't know. I don't use it, and when it appears I go to classic view.

Well thank you for making this special trip to /. to tell us all about how you don't visit /. anymore.

I read the post as "She should have been helping her peiple, because she's black and a lot of blacks were harmed in Katrina." It is inherently racist.

And what languages are these languages themselves written in? At some point you're working with something written in C, C++ or assembler, and if those languages are dangerous to directly write apps in, then surely they must be equally dangerous to write the compilers and platforms on which your non-VM language runs.

At some point it's turtles all the way down. By writing in some other language, you're putting your faith in the people writing the interpreters, VMs and/or compilers, and in many cases those developers are little different than the unfortunate fellow that introduced this particular vulnerability into OpenSSL.

Moving away from C just means you now have to have faith in some bytecode virtual machine's memory and buffer management. Is it a more secure approach? Maybe, but if the root complaint is putting faith in complex software, coding in Java or some .NET language means trusting the people coding those engines are equally capable of screwing up. All these higher level virtual machines and interpreters are ultimately written in C.

Yeah, I'm sure Comcast's management and investors totally feel bad about that whole public opinion thing.