I hereby present you with today's Indignant Goldberg award for simultaneously finding the most convoluted way possible to perform a common operation and also bitching about its difficulty.

Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet

As long as you don't have to pay for the eggs you're cracking, right?

So much this. In the Slashdot echo chamber we presume that everyone in the world should be the security experts we are. No one outside forums like this thinks the way we do. Your average mom & pop grocer doesn't know about security, can't imagine what a "default password" is or why it would be bad, and sees a POS as an appliance much like a refrigerator or stove.

Tell a restaurateur that they're stupid for not changing the default password, and they're likely to tell you how your stupid home food storage and cooking methods are likely to give you listeriosis. We are experts in our domain, and expecting everyone else to care about it (especially while remaining ignorant of their specialties) is a major failing on our part, not theirs.

I bought a MacBook Pro because it gave me hipster cred, not because it runs all the Unix software I need for work better than Windows ever could or because it runs all the desktop software I like that's not available for Linux. I have a daily OmniFocus reminder to use Emacs to write a love letter to Tim Cook.

I certainly didn't buy an iPhone because it's a nice phone that integrates well with my Mac software, and I only bought an Apple Watch because the brain implanted kool aid told me to and not because I think it's an attractive watch with tier-one support from a highly rated electronics manufacturer.

I love only shiny things and I'm a sheeperson with an IQ of 43. Baaah. I'm not influenced by things like "build quality", "enormous ecosystem", or "meets all my requirements better than the alternatives that I've used extensively at work". Those things are crazy talk.

If a person claims authority on a subject based on falsified experiences isn't that pretty much the essential definition of FRAUD? (Particularly if money is made in the process.)

If your advice is connected to peoples' actions that could have ramifications for their health and safety, then negligent manslaughter might be included as well.

Look at it this way, if we started this, we'd at least have fewer celebrities talking about health issues, which is ultimately a net good.

Or, perhaps the young are still naive enough to believe their rage matters?

"Change is coming" - sure it is. What will change is only that the naive, hopeful young will grow up and recognize that short of actual revolution, nothing is going to substantially change (no matter how many "causes" you "like" on facebook!) and that their energies are better spent just focusing on the things and people that are important to them.

you could ingest a device that pretends to use your biometrics for security validation

Be sure to check your pill to see if there's a skimmer taped to it!

Or maybe just eliminate subsidies to the car industry altogether?
- eliminate loopholes to the CAFE standards,
- eliminate tax breaks, salvage loans, and hidden subsidies to the petro-car mfgrs (there is no "too big to fail")
- eliminate green subsidies to the electrical/hybrid car mfg ...and just let the market/consumers eventually decide.

Then again, gas prices MAY be low throughout the reasonable lifespan of that car - likely someone buying an SUV is only going to keep it 2-3-4 years ANYWAY.

I'm not buying a car for forever, I'm buying it for now.
And if the price/performance curve is in favor of gas, I'll buy a gasoline car (I do wish the US auto fleet had *some* decent diesels available, for cripes sake they're not the chuggy-fumey 1980s diesels anymore).

And no, we're not going to run out of oil anytime soon, either. People have been crying about peak-oil for nearly 100 years. (shrug) There WILL be a time when the price for gas is prohibitive, and THEN I'll buy an electric, or a hydrogen, or whatever car that the tech can provide at that time. I *genuinely* don't see the point in paying for a hybrid or electric on "principle" - particularly when the payoff, even with gov't subsidies, isn't there over the life of the car.

While I suspect we agree on the principles here, let me just call out that quote by Franklin as one of those thoughtless crap statements that's far too often repeated. (Like "correlation doesn't prove causation" as another example.)

We trade "freedom" for "security" every day; it's called civilization, and it's what separates the ego-driven society of barbarians from the rule of law of townsmen. The fact that our civilization is so successful suggests that it is overall a worthwhile choice.

While the images are certainly pretty, and also certainly scientifically useful, nonscientists generally expect to look at a color image and see what they'd see if they were looking at it out the window.

Instead of showing us "image" vs "enhanced image" of the crab nebula, I'd rather that they took some pictures of things we see regularly - a person, for example - and show us the results of the SAME image-processing on these familiar images, so we could judge if the 'enhancement' is trivial or substantially changing the image.

...he says, quoting a malpractice lawyer of all things. By that ludicrous number, one in 680 Americans are killed by doctors each year. If you live to the age of 75, your odds of dying this way would be 1 in 9.

Plenty of people get bad treatment, sure, but you can't make me believe that one in 9 will actually die of it. That would make malpractice nearly as deadly as cancer, and that's just not plausible.

The people you're describing drive me insane. We have a pediatrician who said what you did: either you trust her to recommend vaccinations, or you find someone else to work with. She doesn't want patients who continually argue against everything she says.

Here's a test. You know all those godless communist governments that want to take over America and sap our precious bodily fluids? They don't have profits, right, because they hate our freedoms. They also don't care about their disposable citizens. Right? OK. So why is it that those countries vaccinate their citizens? It's not for the profit motive of drug companies, because those are owned by the evil socialists. It's because they cheap out and practice preventative medicine so that they can keep working the proles 112 hours a week, and you can't do that when they're sick.

But tossing aside the Fox-news-watcher-ready wrapper, it's true: absent a profit motive, every organized country in the world immunizes their citizens so that they don't get sick as much. Do you really think China gives a crap about GlaxoSmithKline's margins? Hell no. They use vaccines because it's far and away the best possible investment into keeping people healthy.

There is literally no valid greed-based explanation for vaccinations. It's dumb when you consider the American health system, and utterly braindead when you look at the other 95% of the world's population.

You're so full of shit. According to The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in 1989 the CDC recommended 8 vaccines for kids (the same 7 it recommended through the 70s, plus Hib). The 2010 schedule includes the 8 from 1989 plus hep A (dangerous in kids, lethal in adults), hep B (40% lifetime risk of liver cancer in 95% of newborns who contract it), flu, varicella (not the innocent, cute little illness antivax wingnuts claim it is), pneumococcus (lethal), and rotavirus (potentially lethal).

The evil drug companies took the 8 vaccines from 1989 and added 6 more potentially lethal or crippling diseases, for a total of 14. One-four. Maybe the 72 number is an innocent mistake reflecting the total number of shots, although I sincerely doubt it's that high as DTaP and MMR are each 3 vaccines combined into 1 (as they have been since the early 80s). That narrows it down from 14 to 10 unique vaccinations, and they simply don't take an average of 7 shots each per vaccine.

Yes, I get testy about this. As many times as antivaxers tell me to "do my research!", it seems that none of them can be bothered to.