I remember back when XP was officially discontinued there was some article that said something like 70% of ATM machines worldwide still ran XP. Anyone able to confirm if this is the case? If so, are they exploiting some vulnerability in XP that is never-to-be-patched?

There's an old Chinese proverb that reads "A wise man will always take his own advice!"

So Bill Gates has owns how many millons/billions of dollars in Bitcoins?

As a relatively new Linux user, and a Linux Mint user, which desktop environment do you recommend? I've been using Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon for about 3 months, and despite not doing much that is too complicated or customized, I've crashed Cinnamon quite a few times. Felt like a flashback to Windows 98. With the LTS version around the corner I was going to do a reinstall so I could keep it around for 2+ years. So should I be considering the MATE or KDE version instead?

I'm really looking for a new OS to learn that is stable and functional for my day-to-day activities. Been a Windows user for years and the oasis of both linux versions and choices of desktop environments, then to choose to use LTS or non-LTS has confused the living hell out of me. And with no friends to call on the phone and say "tell me about this stuff.. does it apply to me and if so,why?" is just not an option.

I've been dual-booting Windows and Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon for about 4 months. But I've dabbled in Linux Mint going back to version 13. I spend lots of time in Linux when I know I won't need to run any Windows applications/games. Unfortunately, the lack of good support for my gaming needs(mostly Diablo) makes me have no choice but to go back to Windows regularly. :(

Actually, a bunch of the doctors that helped create some of these vaccines did deliberately expose themselve to the diseases as proof to the public that it worked. This was back in first part of the 20th century when people couldn't believe that vaccines actually worked as well as claimed. Go read up on how some of them were created. Back then scientists were hardcore and all about proving their stuff was safe and better for the public at large. They felt they had a committment to society to:

1. Make the vaccine.
2. Make the vaccine safe.
3. Make the vaccine effective.
4. Convince the public of #2 and #3, at almost any cost, including their own safety.

Of course, today it would be considered attempted suicide if you deliberately exposed yourself to some of these diseases. But, in a twist of irony it's okay to not vaccinate a child because a parent "is a dumbass".

Some immunologists allegedly died trying to prove that some bogus vaccine worked too!

"How do you think we can get through to the anti-vaxxers?"

Easy... ever heard of the phrase "I say we take the safety labels off of all products and let the problem sort itself out"?

I know several people that refuse to vaccinate their children. They don't care what evidence you provide. They will argue until the day they die that vaccines cause autism. You can't argue with that level of conviction(or stupidity).

Yes, there's a good chance we're going to lose people that were vaccinated and still caught the (insert any vaccinated disease here) but that's the breaks when you deal with society. They won't always agree with you. And their stupid mistakes will sometimes cost you more than you are ever willing to pay.

Except there's not enough known, proven lithium reserves on the planet to make enough cars to help with the air pollution there. That is, assuming that the pollution is mostly from cars.

The fact that so little lithium is available on the planet is one of the reasons why vehicles produced at very large scales will never be electric vehicles or hybrids. I remember reading somewhere that if you had every ounce of lithium on the planet right now that is reasonably expected to exist(regardless of the cost) available you couldn't make enough batteries for 1/5 of the vehicles in the USA that are currently on the road. Nevermind the rest of the world.

The Mexican government and several other sources have already said that they'll know who opened the container with the Co-60 soon enough. Unless they had significant amounts of shielding they could have received a lethal dose in a few minutes. They said that just 5 minutes worth of exposure will kill the individual in about 3 days.

I think you are missing the bigger picture.

Regardless of how well or how poorly an item sells, regardless of a company's reputation, and regardless of what you and I "think" about their product, if significant quantities of their product is being RMAed that is going to kill the profits of that product. If its a very high failure rate it might bankrupt the company. OCZ has some products that have been claimed to have a 40% return rate during the warranty period. Oh look, OCZ is filing for bankruptcy. Coincidence? I think not.

Even if the claimed return rate is 1/2 of reality, that's still 20%. If just 1 out of every 5 customers is having to do an RMA you can expect people WILL be upset and people WILL complain. Just think about how many do a second RMA and that one fails too!

The bottom line, products should not regularly require an RMA during the warranty period. Both so a customer gets a feeling that the product lived for the duration of its expected life and because the company doesn't need to go bankrupt while dealing with failed product processing, return shipping, customer service calls/emails, etc.

I disagree. I've had several friends(at least 4 off the top of my head) that have bought OCZs. None of them lasted 6 months without having to do an RMA. One friend had 3 RMAs in about 9 months. Despite having 3 months left on his warranty he went with Intel(because of my recommendation) because it wasn't worth his time to continually have to restore from backup to a temporary drive while he does the RMA.

Even in forums I hear people talk about failed OCZ drives regularly. Sure, there's the occasional Samsung and Intel in there. But OCZ sure is mentioned FAR more frequently than the other brands. I'm not convinced that their market share is 90% to offset the number of users that complain about failed disks.

Personally, I don't care if they used 1-million write cycle flash memory instead of Kingston's 3000 cycle memory. If every drive I've had second hand experience with has to be RMAd in less than 6 months something is horribly wrong and I'd be avoiding that product or brand. There's alot more to a drive than just the number of write cycles. Poorly written SSD firmware could easily make a drive with a very long lifespan be abnormally short due to write amplification. So feel free to keep talking numbers, cause the comparision of write cycles is only a very small part of what makes an SSD reliable(or not).

In my opinion OCZ has undoubtedly made some bad models. Are they all bad? Probably not. But, it doesn't take much to earn a reputation for being crappy. And once you've earned that reputation it's going to take some serious convincing to get people to spend money on your product again. In my case, they'd have to give me a drive for free to prove that they really are just as reliable as the 3 Intel drives I've had in my 3 main machines that haven't failed in 3 years+ of use.

Got a link? I haven't read that. I read that a backdoor may have been the cause, but it wasn't proven conclusively.

Just goes to show what I asked a few weeks ago. Back in Oct I posted a comment that this may lead to a IT revolution of sorts because of all of this.

No surprise that when I commented about it before I was labeled 1:Redundant.

Think ahead people. If I were a competitor from outside the USA I'd be asking Snowden to release more details. Heck, I if I were a CEO of one of them I might be writing him a "thank you" check. The worse the NSA spying appears to be(or even that looks plausible to do with financial resources) the more people will want to avoid US companies that might be in bed with the government.

At this point, it doesn't really matter "how much" worse it gets. Everyone's already figured they can source hardware from outside the USA. What would be an interesting twist is if decades later we find out that all these people started buying from China or some other country and those do actually have backdoors while the US companies actually didn't.

This is precisely correct. LEDs, when properly designed and manufactured, have lifespans that are just phenomenal. I have all LEDs in my house. The ones that I bought that were high grade CREE LEDs I expect to have the rest of my life. Zero failures after 5 years of use so far.

On the other hand, some of the cheaper ones I've bought have often not lasted 2 years. I tried some cheaper ones just to see how well the worked. They often didn't even produce the amount of light they were claiming.

In conclusion you absolutely get what you pay for. And who is going to convince the government to NOT buy from the cheapest bidder. So this will probably be an epic fail since NYC is probably looking at the short term savings vice the long term savings with quality components.

Note that I did not check the actual vendor model to see what brand they are using for this NYC deployment.

I admire your "plan ahead" approach, but in 2 small cities I've seen where they had some that were solar powered, they ALL were damaged by the accompanying natural disasters so they really didn't help even when disaster strikes. :(

They are just too fragile to hope to survive things like hurricanes, tornadoes, really bad thunderstorms, and earthquakes.

So just say "uses an interface that is physically and electrically compatible to the USB standard".