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"Out of date" is meaningess marketing blather.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.

No, the numbers have turned out AT ALL. Because we haven't been given actual numbers. The numbers we got don't tell us who's paid (thus making time spent filling in an online form into an actual money-changes-hands transaction that actually insures somebody), and don't tell us how many people in that mix were the ones who had their insurance cancelled on them (roughly 6-million, so far).

So, actually, the numbers turned out pretty much right where critics said they would: abysmally low.

I think you don't understand what the word "right" means.

Should people also have a right to housing, clothing, food, climate control, utilities, and the rest, without concern for cost? Does everyone have that right? Because if you don't have those things, you could die. Just like you could by not having a "right" to the services of a podiatrist when you have achy feet.

If everyone has a right to the labor of professional medical people, and everyone has a right to the medicines, supplies, facilities, and multi-million dollar test equipment ... how does that work? We all have the right to assemble, the right to free speech, etc. The constitution protects us from government interference in such things. If we have a right to a little bit of the waking hours of a nutritionist, or the right to something that a bunch of people working in the pharma industry spent their week making, does that mean that everyone should get those things for free? Who pays? How can it be a "right" if you have to force your neighbor, on penalty of losing their wages or their home, to provide it to you? That's your idea of a right? Get a grip.

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.

I know my webservers are all good, because they're linking against openssl 0.9.8. I just managed to confirm that Debian Squeeze's stock OpenVPN package links to the 0.9.8 library as well, and isn't statically linked, so, so far as I understand the vulnerability, there's no chance I was compromised.

It does indeed pay, on occasion, to stick with older versions. I had actually been looking to upgrade my VPN gateways to Wheezy a few months ago, and am rather glad I didn't.

All my servers are sitting at 0.9.8, but at least some of the Windows clients are not. Do I need to worry about?