This should be +5 already.

It's a tough balancing act for sure, but there's an assumption that you're making here: those people do NOT have access to top of the line supportive care. If survival rate is 20% with little to no care (which is what is currently happening in Western Africa) but (hypothetically) 30% with the experimental treatment regardless of care, what do you do? You're still increasing their survival chance by 50%, but it could also kill people who'd live with top care without the drug.

Never forget the big picture in situations like these. You can't handwave all of the context and do an analysis with the best case scenario when that scenario is never ever met in reality.

The quarantine isn't working because the countries are on the verge of toppling down. They can't enforce the quarantine. Thing is, we don't have that miraculous experimental treatment you mention. First of all, we don't have enough of the currently in testing treatments like ZMapp to effectively stop propagation or reassure the population. Second of all, we don't even know if that will work. You say the population needs to see an increase in the survival rate, but what if even with ZMapp it doesn't change enough? You run the risk of people not only distrusting their government as much or even more, but also of thinking that Western medicine is powerless to fix things. That could cause hysteria even greater than is currently happening.

xkcd 810.

Valve have not shown a particular tendency towards using algorithms to fix things though - they generally just throw the work to their users, from tagging to rating to curating. While I agree that a fairer system to sum up reviews would be good for the consumer and good for smaller developers, I don't think it's what Valve are looking for. It's quite likely that showing more of the top sellers sells more copies of those games, which have dramatically higher sales volumes and prices than indies. That's a bigger cut for Valve.

As much as people forget, Valve are not in this to make gaming a better place. They're there to make gobs of money, and have been rather successful at doing so thus far. Considering the sort of talent they hire and have hired in the past, if they truly wanted to fix things, they'd be fixed. If they're not, they either don't consider it important or have a reason for not fixing it.

So what you're saying is that because an awful lot of prominent distros, and thus prominent developers, have decided that his software was the best tool for the job, people who don't like his software should resort to attacking him? Unless I'm missing something, he's not the one who chose to put his software into Debian, OpenSuse and Arch, he made it and promoted it; complain to the Debian guys if you don't like it, but don't hire a fucking hitman on him for crying out loud.

To put it briefly: there is no legitimacy to what those people are doing. It's not logical, it won't help anything, it's dangerous, it's deranged, it's scary.

Do you even hear yourself when you spout this sort of bullshit? Seriously, you need a reality check.

The guy's made some software you don't like. STOP THE PRESSES. Oh wait, no, don't, because it's really just a minor inconvenience at worst? You know that you can politely disagree and just elect not to use his software instead of wanting what he's worked on to be completely wiped from the face of the Earth, right?

I'm at a complete loss as to how someone can even suggest that this is the logical course of action to take because someone wrote code you don't like.

People treated slaves like objects and women like subhumans not that long ago - should the slaves just have done some self-reflection and realized that they were, in fact, objects and subhumans?

This kind of shit is never okay, regardless of who's involved. Don't get blinded by personal bias.

Pet peeve: it's kWh, NOT kW/h. Units, people! kWh = kJ/s * 3600 s = 3600 kJ, therefore a unit of energy. kW/h would be imply that your power consumption increases by 1700kW every hour, which would be a rather ludicrous measurement!

The author's French and the spelling of that word in French is in fact "authentification". One of the many instances where French and English have confusingly similar words.

Interestingly though, this fits with each language's tradition regarding Latin roots: English will use them almost as is (authenticatus -> authenticate), whereas French will generally integrate the word into the language's grammar and syntax (the -ifier suffix means "make something become", hence "authentifier" means to make something become "established as genuine", ie. authentic). NB: I am not a linguist or anything, I just enjoy reading up on etymology.

PHP? You do realize APIs like DirectX have stuff like CreateDXGIFactory, CreateDXGIFactory1 and CreateDXGIFactory2, all to support new variants of the API? It wouldn't be unheard of to add another new variant, though unlike in those cases it wouldn't be to add new functionality that wasn't integrated into the old interfaces.

Which I've heard also created problems because (bad) programmers were testing for XP (ie. NT 5.1) and up by doing majorVersion >= 5 && minorVersion >= 1.

Guess what happened when Vista (ie. NT 6.0) came along? It's rumored to be the reason for subsequent versions to stick to 6.x with x>0, though I'm also guessing the kernel hasn't changed that much since Vista, so it'd make sense to keep it at version 6.

Hold on - you're saying that you'd currently trust unreviewed patches in a kernel? Are you fucking insane?

You'd need to have a chain of trust so that the voters are reliable as well, otherwise expect to see trolls downvote everything just for the lulz. The system then becomes awfully complicated and heavily reliant on users being trustworthy at all times and actually desiring to vote (and there would probably be a fairly large amount of messages to vote on).

Moreover, having your messages visible by random strangers is rather creepy.

Except that's not what the summary's saying. TFS says that police agencies are distributing and/or promoting an insecure and not particularly useful piece of software to parents under the guise of "protecting their children". I'm sorry but the police's job isn't to be doing software advocacy, and it especially isn't to promote a specific piece of commercial software, let alone actually buying it for other people without them requesting it. That it's bad at its job and can compromise personal information is just icing on the cake.