Actually that means it runs Linux natively, which is kind of a big draw from my perspective. I'm considering getting one, but will not be running ChromeOS on it if I do.

If they set up a guard to keep people out, that's pretty disturbing. My mom is in a nursing home right now for rehab following knee surgery at the moment, and they do not have security guards at her nursing home, nor did they at the previous one she went for rehab when she had hip replacement surgery. Both of these were real nursing homes that also have rehab centers.

What nursing homes do have are people at the front desk who prevent you from leaving if you aren't supposed to. This is to protect Alzheimer's patients and other patients with dementia, who could easily wander off into traffic. But a security guard preventing people from coming in to visit patients is weird. It's pretty routine for clergy to visit folks in nursing homes, so a home that prevents them from doing so would be raising a really big red flag. If you have a home like that near where you live, you should do something about it, not just sit there criticizing.

First of all, having the NSA as your IT security team, even if it were true, is a double-edged sword. But secondly, that is not in fact the NSA's remit. The NSA may advise on security, but they don't operate it. And as you are no doubt aware if you follow the news, the government is not notoriously full of clue when it comes to IT.

A moral dilemma is when you're trying to figure out whether to kill one person to save three, not when you are trying to figure out where to store your email. That's an IT decision. Just because the right thing to do is clear to you in the abstract doesn't mean it would even be clear to you in practice. How would you feel about carrying two phones? How would you feel about having your private email on a government server? When you read science fiction, does the character with the smart phone carry two of them so that she can have access to her secure stuff and her regular stuff? Hell no.

So yeah, of course we can armchair quarterback it, but let's not pretend it's not political.

The sad irony here is that the Clinton presidency was the first where they had to set up a real email presence, and they hired some really smart people to do it. They did a great job. But that was a long time ago, and things have moved on. So they're getting criticized for using SSL 2.0 for transport security, which is a valid criticism now, but is still better security than most people have. And of course it's not like security on government servers is better. So this is kind of obviously a deliberate attempt to create a fuss over something that really isn't as significant as it's being pumped up to be.

On the plus side, maybe more people will start using strong TLS transport security for their email...

Of course all C++ features have their uses. Otherwise they wouldn't exist. Every one of them scratches some itch.

I don't think you actually mean "virtual classes" here. But yeah, if you have to implement classes in C, maybe you should have used C++. One of C++'s problems is that it builds on C, though, so the fact that you can do some things, particularly classes, better in C++ than in C shouldn't be a surprise: that's the itch they were scratching.

True, but for example while Scheme is highly extensible, there isn't a lot of really obscure syntax, nor is there a preprocessor. Anything that's Turing complete can develop widely divergent dialects, but C++'s dialects are notoriously obscure.

You can find some really elegant C++ code out there. I am quite fond of the Qt libraries, for example. But Qt is its own C++ dialect. The company I work for codes a lot of our software in C++, and it is really nice, clean, maintainable code. But we have a style guide that everybody has to follow, and that's how we pull it off. Essentially, we are not writing in C++. We're just using a C++ compiler to compile NomLang.

Oh no, on the contrary. There are plenty of idiots who can write code in C++.

The problem with C++ is that it's way too easy to write write-only code, because the language has so many features that nobody but language experts understand all of them. So we all program in different dialects, and then scratch our heads when we read other peoples' code.

Sure, the new part of the old-time religion teaches that stuff, but unfortunately the old-time version of it heavily emphasizes brutal repression, and some of the addenda to the new stuff was clearly written to repeal the actually innovations in the new part, to which you are referring. In practice, the old-time religion OP is referring to does not teach peace, love, joy, forbearance, kindness, or any of that stuff. It teaches war, paranoia, retribution and selfishness. It's almost as if the antichrist had taken over large parts of the church in the U.S. Actually, it's just as if that had happened. :(

The anonymous hit piece is the Slashdot article, submitted by "anonymous."

Personally I have no opinion about HTTP/2, but I have to say that this anonymous hit piece looks a lot like some IETF participant who didn't like how the process came out trying to create the appearance of consensus against it by pumping up the anger of the interwebs without actually saying what's wrong with the spec. When I see people making statements not supported by explanations as to why we might want to consider them correct, my tendency is to assume that it's hot air trying to bypass the consensus process.

It's also a bit annoying to see the IETF accused of having published a document advocating snooping when in fact someone floated that idea in the IETF and it was shot down in flames, and what we actually published was a document stating that snooping is to be considered an attack and addressed in all new IETF protocol specifications (RFC 7258).

If all predictions had indeed not come to pass, you might have a point. But of course that's hyperbole, which is to say: you are making shit up. In the real, fact-based world climate science has an all-too-good track record. Yes, it is not perfectly accurate, but that's really not something with which to comfort yourself. If you get run over by a bus, it doesn't matter whether it hits you from the front or the side: you're still dead. It's best to pay attention and get out of the way when there is a bus bearing down on you. And as for extinction events, it doesn't matter whether they're human-caused or not. What matters is not being taken out by them. Or anyway, so the thinking goes...