If he was twelve, XP was released before he was born.

In IT terms "before you were born" is old. Very old. Ancient. Dead. Buried. Gone.

I touched my last XP install two years ago when I migrated a school using it from XP to 8 (and all their servers a similar jump).

The prime argument? It was a school, and the OS they were using to teach ICT to the kids was OLDER than the kids. All of them. And, as such, they did not know how to operate it because they were all used to Vista, 7 and 8 at home. We were teaching them BACKWARDS skills to do things on OLDER software than the ICT skills they already had when they entered the school.

What percentage it's on is neither here nor there. Still WinZIP is on millions of computers. But it's old. And versions of WinZIP from the XP era are ancient. I bet I could find a ton of computers with Quicktime and Realplayer on them still. They're old. They're ancient.

And, like XP, they are obsolete.

Sorry, but what tosh.

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the EU. Your problems in the US are your problems.

And Windows XP is not "secure". It's like saying that a door you have laying in the shed is "secure" just because you're not using it so nobody would bother to break into it.

You have to consider local, internal attacks (especially if you're dealing with government, NHS, police, etc.) as well as anything from the outside. And you can't isolate XP enough to be secure and work in a networked fashion.

XP is dead. It's lifespan is over. Hardware support for it is dropping fast. I abandoned it in my last workplace because we had major difficulty getting drivers for things as simple as SATA controllers for it, not to mention wireless and network interfaces. Beyond that, 64-bit XP is niche and 32-bit XP prevents a lot of things working. Even for home use, a lot of games nowadays do not work on 32-bit-only systems. XP-64 also brings it's own share of driver problems as there are EVEN LESS XP-64 drivers than XP drivers.

Sure, you can virtualise it, but then you're not running XP at all, really. And still the problem is "It's on your network" if you want to do anything vaguely useful with it. And that provides an attack vector both to and from that machine if it's unsupported and compromisable.

Give it up. I held out until two years ago and that was FAR TOO LONG to hold out on XP for. The alternates really don't make users suffer at all after the initial acclimatisation.

Move on. It's not Windows - it's like someone running Slackware 7 in the modern day, on a 2.2 kernel. Sure, you can do it, but you're setting yourself up for a lot of hurt and hassle just because of the age of the tools and hardware you need to use.

If you have ANY significant number of XP machines, it's time to pay the pittance that an entirely new machine would cost (I'm getting business-class machines for GBP150 - $250? - with Windows 7/8 on them). If you have one or two machines, sure it's not particularly cost-effective but I guarantee you that it will hurt your wallet more when it goes wrong unexpectedly (virus, hardware replacement, data compromise, etc.).

And Windows 10 is expected to be free, for the most part.

If you have a "network", especially a business one, of any description, you are negligent in sticking on XP now. I would not want the most basic of business data processed on XP. I don't deal in multi-million dollar networks, I don't do high-end gear with clouds and servers coming out of my ears. I do small schools. But, for any business that includes a network or server of any size, I would be doing them a disservice to suggest that that DON'T move off XP. Not just failing to mention the possibility, but failing to actively DISCOURAGE further use of their network with XP clients.

You can't secure XP. You can isolate it, but you can't secure it. And there's no real thing as a limited user in XP because it's basically a cinch to demonstrate privilege escalation using any number of pieces of bog-standard software on XP (that you CAN'T patch or upgrade because the XP releases of that software are no longer updated!).

Give it up, really. And you don't even have to pay Microsoft a penny.

There's just a slight difference and you've not chosen an analogous situation.

It's more like telling users that they'll just have to get used to feeling ill every time they look through your new holographic windscreen, no matter how much it makes them hurl. "You'll get used to it", as they have to pull over and shut their eyes for ten minutes before they can resume driving,

There's only one game on the planet that makes me feel ill when I play it (Duke Nukem 3D), something to do with the way the perspective moves as you rotate. So I don't "suffer" with anything like this at all.

Learning to drive, however, is an entirely different matter. If a VR headset makes you feel ill and you have to "battle through it" to enjoy it, the market will collapse overnight because everyone will buy one, stop using it, then tell all their friends not to bother.

The guy who posted junk about MMR vaccinations causing autism was also fired.

Should we believe them too, just to be contrary to expectations?

Anyone with a brain:

Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?

Because, I know I wouldn't. Not without hashes of pre-infected data that I could trust, on some untouched backup device, to compare against. And then the restoration, comparison and cleanup operation is actually worse than just restoring to pre-infection backups.

You have to think of this. These people put a virus on your system that locked your files away. And you're "trusting" them to not only restore those files but to do so without introducing further infection vectors in the process. What's to say that their decrypt / encrypt routine isn't just a smokescreen to infect all your files with something else en-route? Or that they've not just done it to delay you realising that they now have that document you had with all your passwords in it...

If you're victim to ransomware, there are two options:

- You have no backups, the data wasn't important enough for a GBP50 device and you pressing the button once a month, so you've not lost anything of major value by not paying the ransom.
- You have virtually-full, verified backups just over there anyway and would have to perform all kinds of integrity checks to ensure the ransomed data is clean.

The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself (and your customers, if you're a business). You can't stop data exposure, but to have to pay to get your data back, that's just stupidity on your part.

As such, blocking the infection vector is infinitely more important than anything else, and then taking a good backup on a regular basis is second on the list. Anything else is very much bottom of the list.

What scares me most about ransomware is not the encryption, or the ransom, or the difficulty of decryption (once that data is compromised, it's gone, it's as simple as that). It's purely that it means a system-level restore of your PC / network, and that you had a hole somewhere whereby it could wreak that kind of havoc.

Actually, products like crisps (potato chips in the US) are probably worse than even that. It's the metabolisation and fermentation of the food in your teeth that produces the acids the decay them.

And bits of a starchy product like potato stuck in/on your teeth hang around a lot longer and in lot greater quantities than anything you might swig from a can (which washes over your teeth briefly, is swallowed, then stimulates saliva production, all within a few seconds).

You know what's worse than all this stuff? How you eat/drink. If you swash the drink around your mouth, you're elongating the exposure greatly. If you have stuff in/on your teeth (even invisible) then you're doing even more that's bad for your teeth.

Sorry, but by the grand scheme of things, a swig of Coke at lunch isn't doing anything. And virtually every human that's ever lived, ever, has had dental caries at some point - to some extent. It's almost a uniquely human thing, because of certain oral bacteria.

If you cared about dental health, you wouldn't eat this stuff. You don't need government banishment to stop doing that. Or even stop your children doing that. Few people, however, ever go down that route. And if you do, banning crisps (chips) is going to do a lot more for your teeth than anything to do with sugar in drinks, flouride in the water, etc.

[Citation required]

Don't conflate "some European countries" with "the whole of Europe including the UK", for example.

Use a real browser.

One that forces you to click-to-play any plugin (option in Chrome, for instance).

It's probably the Twitch one that's playing for you, on that page.

I should think that something like an earthquake - a regular, powerful, but maybe overall-small contribution, to movement that's visible in frequency data from a range of devices in a geographical area (i.e. averaging out the noise from all devices to leave behind that which is only common to them all) would show up.

I might be vastly wrong here, but even a few thousand devices reporting a set of FFT data of a certain frequency range (which range would take experimentation but I guess existing research would be able to point the way quite quickly), averaged out with nearby neighbours, and then compared geographically should be able to avoid any random noise and provide enough info to know something is up. In the same way that astrophotography often uses image-stacking - take 1000 blurry photographs, center them, overlay them, average them out (so they each only contribute 1000th of the signal for each pixel) and you can get some pin-sharp detail of what's actually there in the images.

A 1000 people running the app in Silicon Valley should be enough to average out "in your pocket bounces", "car vibration", etc. to provide just the background movement that's apparent in all of them.

What are the chances that you could get people to sign up for some kind of app, SETI@Home-like, that frequency-analyses the accelerometer in a phone tied with the GPS-location without any extra fancy hardware?

Done en-masse, FFT'ing to a graph of an interesting frequency range, talking back to a cloud server, surely you could spot a pattern even through the noise of every single movement of every phone in order to detect a consistent, regional variation in a certain, shared, frequency range?

Surely, if you just have enough people signed up to the app, you can not only detect an earthquake (whether you can detect it early enough to do anything is still an open question, really - predicting earthquakes is little more than voodoo, and it's only physical movement of the earth itself that we can actually detect and report on!) but you could also use the app to alert those same people as it happens?

How much of that is pure mechanical failure, and how much of that is the driver failing to maintain the vehicle properly and regularly?

Mechanical failure is lost in the noise. And, short of brake system failing at high speed and the handbrake being unable to bring you to a stop in time (which is possible even with a reasonable braking distance), or possibly a serious steering fault, quite what mechanical failure is going to cause you to hit something if you were driving with proper bounds - at the correct speed, distance, and care?

Pure mechanical failure of a critical system causing an accident is really quite rare indeed. Even the Toyota "unintended acceleration" stuff turned out to be mostly user-error.

Do you even understand what a Peltier does? It sucks at power generation, absolutely sucks, even if it's possible.

Because primarily it's not a generator - that's just an inefficient side-effect - it's a heat pump. And what you're suggesting is to heat the hot end of a Peltier, thereby doing what? Generating a pittance of electricity. You'll also need to cool the cold end of else it's just a block of metal. It's the temperature difference that matters. And there's no such thing as a free lunch in energy terms.

However, batteries do suck. But carving out valleys to be dams and reservoirs also sucks.

The efficiencies - again - of a small in-house reservoir are so poor as to be worthless. How much power do you think you're going to get by pumping even mains-pressure water through a pipe? I'll tell you... you can power an FM radio, because there's an actual commercial product that does this on your shower hose, and I'm not aware of ANYTHING more powerful that uses the same generation method. And anything you've pumped to the loft and dropped down won't be that pressured. And what do you do with the water once it's dropped? You wasted it, that's what. Because pumping it between tanks forever is going to require more maintenance than a loft tank, and those have gone out of fashion for all kinds of reasons, not least that a lot of them can't be classed as drinking water.

The efficiencies we're talking about here are pittances. By comparison, a decent, expensive, high-tech battery is actually quite a commercial piece of hardware, if they can pull it off. If batteries were so inefficient, you wouldn't use one in your car. 12V 400Ah of power is not to be sniffed at and can least you YEARS and YEARS with an ancient lead-acid technology (I've never had to change - or maintain - a car battery in my life yet). That's why all the home wind- and solar-generation plants use such things, they're one of the best things we've got on that scale. The next step up is flooding some poor bugger's village to make a new reservoir and destroying the natural habitats.

And the other 89+ countries all colluded, I suppose?

Everything is a poison in sufficient amounts. Everything. Even water. Pretending any substance can be zero-issue is the problem. They all have doses at which adverse effects will appear in one, some, most or all people. Stay below a correct, proven, recommended dose and you minimise the problems. But still someone will have problems with it.

In the same way that we can't even make fucking bread (the staple of centuries, if not millennia) any more without someone dying or getting ill from it somewhere, an artificial sweetener will always have "that one guy" that can't have it. Rather than ban the substance because of that, just stop that guy having it, and set a dose to minimise the number of guys it affects.

That's what the UK do. That's what the FDA do. That's what all the other countries do too. Based on how many people react badly to the substance in experiments. This isn't politics of one agency in one country, this is globally-proven science and statistics.

"Aspartame has been found to be safe for human consumption by more than ninety countries worldwide, with FDA officials describing aspartame as "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved" and its safety as "clear cut""

So.... no. Probably not. But judging by the comments on here, you're not alone.

Have sugar. If you don't want sugar, but you want your drink to taste sweet, you can have natural sugars. Otherwise, you're fucked and eating synthetic stuff no matter what?

Almost all of those substances - in moderation - are food-safe and no more dangerous than eating sugar, or any other natural food. Some people might collapse and die from a single exposure, others it will make ill, others it will upset them a bit, but the vast majority will just eat it and get on with life.

If it worries you, go back to eating sugar.

Seasoned programmers that "know their stuff" that have been told to keep their un-maintained junk out of the kernel before now? And in no polite terms?

"Worked beautifully" resulting in many unbootable (or, worse, variably bootable) systems over the years. It's far from perfect (I'm not expecting perfect, but it's far from it).

Though I don't doubt that there are entire swathes of people happy with it, that there is so much opposition is not only indicative that it's far-from-perfect, but that many people may be avoiding using it altogether?

I'm by no means a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to new stuff but systemd still appears a backward step and even the DISCUSSION of systemd generating such heat is indicative of underlying problems that aren't being addressed (even if those problems are entirely political, which I doubt).

And I agree that there's little competition but things like upstart were in fact the middle-ground. Systemd has a huge headstart, but also keeps hitting political brick-walls in its race to be default and little is done to appease or even acknowledge the criticisms

"We know better" is not the basis of any argument for either side. But "We're never going to change either" is just head-banging nonsense. I don't think anyone is opposed to change on the SysVInit side (the very existence of upstart and a variety of other projects), they just don't think this is the right change. However, the systemd crowd are very much in the "We know best, so you need to get onboard" arena.

And when you're dealing with critical areas like even being able to boot a kernel, you need to dial back to the users and say "What do you need?", not "This is all you'll ever be given, deal with it"