True. I can appreciate that. In some cases - like the ignored warnings in the article, or my drunkard town - it's just plain dumb and there ARE places to go. Hurricanes and large scale events like that, sure. Not much to be done there. I wouldn't be so cold to say "Eat it"
What Antique Greekmeister said above: "Would you pay double the price of your current home, or apartment, to live in a safer place further from your work? Could you afford it?" - If I were in my little town? Yes. It's better than potentially drowning/dying under a collapsed foundation.

Jokes aside, I never understood why people live in KNOWN dangerous places.
There was a small town near my hometown. My boss at the time lived in this small town. Every year around spring time that small town would flood. My boss' house would literally have a moat. Tells me how tough he's got it because he has to move all his stuff from the bottom floor to keep from getting wet. I had a hard time finding sympathy for him. Why? That entire small town was BUILT ON A FLOOD PLANE.
Then again that town had a nickname "Scorched Liver" due to the excessive drinking observed in this town.. perhaps explains a bit there.

No, I'm saying it's not a great idea. I realize there's cases where it's unavoidable. Software/hardware constraints and what have you.
Patches stop coming out, exploits rise and then what?. Fixing a leak with tape.

While what the article says is probably a good way to handle the EOL.. over time this is just going to get bad.
Ever image a machine to win98 and plug it in to the intertubes lately?
Yeah.

and now it's not.. it's ok everyone. Just going insane.
I'll show myself out.

why.. why is it red?!

and here I thought you were being optimistic.
Oh well.
Who likes waffles?

I also work closely with school IT in Canada. This is a common thing.
When I read the summary I was thinking "Really?". This is the school's network. Politics is very much a big part of this. People want to bring their own devices, but all the soccer moms out there want "OMG PRON" blocked 100%. To a degree I agree with this - there's a time and place for everything. School ain't the time for that sort of thing, and IT can get in some real legal hot water if they don't do something about it.

Case in point, when google implemented SSL, we found that google's image search would hand out porn happily when asked. We had no choice but to implement something that will filter these things. Moreover, as previously mentioned it's also used to dole out wireless access seamlessly.

Really, in my opinion this boils down to respect. This is an institution's network. A bit like visiting someone's house. You know the rules, and this is not YOUR network. They're letting you USE it in order to (in this case) learn. Not to look at porn (or whatever). Bring your own device? Then it's subject to the same rules.

There's nothing nefarious here.

That site makes my freaking head hurt so much

This.
People seem to be able to reconcile their religion with scientific fact.
In my opinion it's intellectually dishonest since you basically have to ignore some critical things on one or the other side of the fence to make it work.
What usually happens is people cherry pick from whatever holy text they subscribe to. Which is a big difference between science and religion.
Science/scientists can admit when they're wrong (most of the time) and adapt and move on. Religion on the other hand..

.. then I saw screenshots and was all "So.. it's basically a skinned version of Inkscape?"

I'll admit all I read was those two lines :) The only exception I take - popularizing code like this - is we get a flood of useless coders out there, who don't know how a compiler/linker etc etc work. Not to say we don't already have that.. just worse.

On the other hand, sparking that interest is fairly key. Shrug, if it works, it works.

WAAAAAIIIT wait wait wait ...

"Flappy Bird might be kaput, but its hilariously awkward hero is serving another useful purpose in its afterlife: teaching people how to code."
and
"There's no actual code to learn, thanks to a visual interface that allows budding developers to drag 'blocks' of commands into place."

So.. you're teaching people to code by not teaching people to code?

I can agree surveillance has it's place, but there is a line. I think that line is somewhere in Utah right now.

I for one am half with you, yet not.
I'm getting sick of seeing "down with beta" etc. Versus the discussion I like seeing.
At the same time this 'handful of crotchety people' seems to have made quite a loud noise, and seem to make up quite a few people.... and they have a point. Beta is not ready. To say that they(slashdot) were going to make beta mandatory in the near future, in a similar state it's in now. THAT is a joke.

We might be sick of seeing it, but I think it's a necessary evil. Now if we could get this kind of response to truly important matters *cough*NSA*cough* then we might have some hope for humanity.