Company Spokesman: Especially if it's going to cost us money, and don't call me Shirley.

Call 'em hackers enough time, and people will be distracted by their alleged malice to the point where they forget or don't even believe anymore that the files were literally just out there for anyone to see. It's like leaving a $100 bill on the sidewalk and waiting to see who turns it in at the lost and found so you can call 'em a thief to distract from your own leaving it lying around.

In plain English, that means "My password is weak and my inbox and outbox contain a lot of names, addresses, and social security numbers."

Agreed, and I wasn't specifically limiting my remarks to merely the pertussis vaccine. Simply examining the possibilities.

I remember actually being contacted by a community leader for my site over in Area51 with a legitimate email that reflected the first upload I made to that site. The metaphor was fascinating, and the concept hasn't been repeated successfully by anyone. Today, everyone is expected to find their own "friends", but the concept of "neighbours" was brilliant.

Another concept I think was good but has disappeared (probably due to botting) is the "webring". Today, we have seen them replaced with omnibus social sites where nobody provides actual content beyond forum posts, and I think the internet is poorer for it.

If I wanted a free bit of webspace today, I don't even know where I'd go to get it at this point.

There is no confusion on this subject with me. I am simply saying that if a vaccine does not protect sufficiently against a certain strain, that strain will be the one that continues while the others decline. It's how natural selection works no matter what the scale; create a change in an environment and the traits that make survival possible and/or most likely are the ones that will flourish.

Flickr is probably Yahoo!'s second most useful feature, after its Fantasy Football leagues.

I'm afraid you're correct. Geocities was leaps and bounds above the blogs that dominate today's internet. You know, back when people mostly made their websites with either crappy drag and drop tools that came free with your free space and when people used to used to make the extra-cool sites by tweaking them in Notepad.

That this article suggests GeoCities was a blogging network tells me this was written by someone who never visited sites hosted by GeoCities.

Really though, Y! has a horrible track record. The question is, will enough users stay to keep it viable? Will they trust Y! enough to keep putting their efforts as users into the site?

Be that as it may, the problem isn't the lawsuits themselves but the culture that fear has created in the medical community. I've worked in the field, and am now in IT support in that field. I can tell you right now that a lot of what goes on in the American medical system is people covering their arses in one way or another.

Does it really matter? Much like MRSA, I think a lot of times the inevitable Darwinian result happens when a vaccine or medication is ineffective against certain strains of a virus, bacteria, or other pathogen, which results in that version which resists the treatment being refined into what they like to call a "superbug" and having less of the vulnerable ones to blend into. I suspect it could be the case that what we're doing is turning a recessive gene in the bug into one that is standard for basic survival.

Vaccines have a great reputation, largely resulting from the highly successful campaigns with smallpox and polio. However, these were done in a less litigious era, and unlike today's medical practice, they could operate without the fear of gigantic lawsuits if something went wrong.

These reduced-effectiveness vaccines are like many "safer", "greener", or otherwise "less harmful" solutions; they have their drawbacks, but only a fool would try to push their solution by advertising those drawbacks. Now we're seeing two effects. A re-emergence of pertussis, and decreased public confidence in vaccines.

Yahoo! seems to have a business model that somehow thrives on buying sites, driving away all the users, and then shutting down the service. If this goes through, Tumblr will die like countless other sites bought by Y!

Not to mention Tumblr thriving specifically on photos that people don't actually own. Y! lawyers will destroy it if the executives don't.

The biggest issue at hand here is that these agencies and the government see it as law enforcement's "right" to be able to tap your communications, when in fact, the only reason tapping was ever used in the first place was because the technology was inherently insecure. I see no reason to enable their power trip by prohibiting one from intentionally protecting one's data and information use (the kind of thing the Fourth Amendment is specifically designed to protect) from the start.

I have to do the same damn thing every three months on one system and every six months on two. This doesn't count my system admin passwords (which we mostly eliminated through the use of private keys). One system I use so rarely that I have to have it reset when I want to use it (it's the vacation database, which does not use the same password as anything else in the company).