It's not just the outdated OS that is the problem. One must wonder why a medical image storage server is allowed by the network to make outbound network requests all the way to China.

I was wondering this myself. How is this legal? It seems to me that a major class action lawsuit should be just around the corner, followed by some kind of criminal proceedings, followed by a bunch of people in government getting kicked out of office.

Oh wait, that's right. Too many politicians are without ethics and are easily bribed.

Re-packaging the product as your own is bad enough, but another bad part is that older projects may have security vulnerabilities as well. It seems like it would be far more ethical to me to simply mark the project as "abandoned", then after a while remove it completely. If the project is alive somewhere else, then contact those folks, let them know what is up, give them a chance to close it all down themselves or revive the proejct on SF.

But taking it over? No, that is not cool.

My father told me that when I took math classes in college, that Statistics I will teach me everything I really needed to know about the subject, but that Statistics II would teach me how to lie with what I learned. He was not incorrect. There's so many ways to manipulate the data that I find it very, very difficult to trust ANY stats that I find in the news without also having access to the raw data, the methodology, questions used, selection process, etc., etc., etc.

I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.

I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.

"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B."
"I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere."
"I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."

Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.

That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.

You assume he changed his stance. I think his stance hasn't changed - he just said what he needed to say to get elected. In other words, he lied. This is nothing new for him, by the way.

It seemed that the company did, in fact, have growth on track: The article mentioned that in 2014 sales were up 40%. That's huge, and it shows that whatever they were doing was working. The company was actually doing well and had broke even for the first time.

Investors were likely unwilling to dump more money into the company because they saw these lawsuits and said, "Damn man, there's no way I'm going to make my money back in a reasonable amount of time. Sorry dude."

So... Thanks, France.

Isn't socialism wonderful? Workers of the world unite and all that? I mean, obviously, the business is rich with unlimited funds because it's a business, right?

For now. In a few years I fully expect additional funds to be appropriated so that people can have both services subsidized.