Great Barrier Reef: I'm not quite dead yet!
Global Warming: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Science: Yes he is
Great Barrier Reef: I'm not
Science: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill
Great Barrier Reef: I'm getting better
Science: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.

How is it that no one beat me to this post here on slashdot?

Terrorist 1: Why all this bombing? Why not hit the great satan where it hurts -- in the pocket book?
Terrorist 2: We though about that, but with Iraq, Social Security, Medicare, bank bailouts, quantitative easing and now Mars, their own government and federal reserve are simply beating us to it. We'd just be spitting in the ocean.

(Yes, I know poo-pooing a Mars mission here on slashdot will get me moded into oblivion, but really?!? Mars? Grow some crops in the desert first and then let's talk about space.)

Okay, I relent and agree. MS actually is pretty f-ing amazing in terms of supporting stuff for the long haul. Sorry, Bill. I apologize. .NET is still a PITA that I don't enjoy coding in though.

Did anyone catch the name of the prosecutor who filed the charges? I'd like to nominate him or her for president if it's not too late.

Uh..fanboy much? Did we forget silverlight? (Yes, I know they've committed to security bug fixes until 2021, but still...)

This is why commercial software is just plain bad -- we buy because we hope to get something near perfect and avoid this type of stuff. But alas, free or commercial, developers have always had the same struggles with an ever-shifting landscape. At very least with FOSS you can take up maintenance of a library yourself if you have to. And a relatively small effort to fix a critical bug or missing feature can pay off big when it brings new users and developers.

Commercial licenses should have a provision that if the vendor ever decides to discontinue future development, they are required to open-source the whole thing for free.

Yes, and he's clearly in the wrong because he clearly knew he was using something he didn't pay for. But the world really does need to come up with some logical legal argument that places blame on a party who's negligence in terms of IT security harms some 3rd party. In this case, T-Mobile is the party harmed in terms of lost revenue, so that doesn't apply. But ethical hacking and wistleblower protections laws are clearly non-existant or not enforced, and never will be until the law places blame on the party who could and should have afforded the effort for better safeguards.

What, what?!? If you search for the word 'butt', wouldn't you complain if you DIDN'T get an explicit image? Or is the problem that the My Little Pony image wasn't explicit enough? Maybe one really does have to go to the 2nd page of search results from time to time.

I hope it's US DoD trying to catch up on cyber security. Or maybe not. I'm not sure who's scarier, foreign governments or our own. Not that I like terrorists, but I'm pretty sure we all need to be more worried about all the the "official" guys we willingly bought nukes and stuff for than we do about the "alquiedas" who might like to steal one.

Wow. That's a bleak and insulting picture of both the future and of slashdot. And you're clearly suffering from Dunning-Kruger -- or more accurately, the rest of us find you insufferable due to Dunning-Kruger.

I admit, I awk and perl pushed everything about linear algebra and a whole boatload of other things I learned in school out of my brain. But that doesn't make me stupid -- I simply know practical things for my particular and current situation. I have no doubt I could pick up linear algebra quickly should I ever find a use for it. But advanced mathematics is a very specific skill that's valuable only in a very specific few situations -- just like awk and perl. And just as equation solvers like matlab devalue some of the skills of people who can do certain algebraic manipulations in their head quickly, new languages, software and IT design patterns will (hopefully) supersede today's internet duct tape. But just as you learn to use matlab to work more efficiently, I learn how to use Docker Swarm and Consul and RUM and CNDs to work more efficiently. Sure, some of today's current IT people will be freed up for more productive work because I can do more with less. But those of us left will be paid more, not less. And the results of our less but smarter work will make the world exponentially better (though we'll almost certainly not be paid exponentially more).

We all need to admit that the privacy war was lost long ago. But we have plenty of use cases for all the Big Data too. So instead of ranting about privacy, we need to change laws to make everyone who tracks us give us copies of all that Big Data in real time and in a useful (i.e. machine readable) format.

Anonymous (if you do it right) and saves you money at the same time. There's the moral dilemma, of course, but if you're paying for something anonymously you must be a terrorist anyway, so...

From what I've read, drones are already an important part of the blow distribution infrastructure.

As far as hookers go, well, I'll be by the time they're delivered via drone, the drone will actually be the hooker...

I think the caring (more) for women is at least partially biologically hardwired, but of course, the advantage of being human is that we don't have to obey our hard wiring when it conflicts with a reasoned ethical position.

Treating men and women when they're on the down and out could happen if we applied ourselves. But currently, as a society, we're more concerned with treating men and women equally in boardrooms, and as there are fewer women on the bottom, well... it's not an area I see getting a high priority in the near future.

Oh, I understand it very well, and was active in a rare non-judgemental forum for a long time. The actual act itself is often triggered due to short term events, but people contemplating suicide have often lived with depression a long time, and among them, interest in methods is so high that most 'help' forums will outright ban any discussion of suicide or methods and/or threaten to call police on anyone discussing it. Most will have had suicidal thoughts for months or years, and looking at how to do it is a normal component of that. Many will prepare for and have a method that is at least realizable within a few days to a week.

Most are smart enough not to actually admit to it to healthcare or family, as nothing good for them, personally, will come from that, so I think it looks a lot more sudden and unresearched in many cases than it actually is.

I doubt masculinity has much to do with it; the human body is simply quite durable. If you want to be certain, it all comes down to one thing; destroying the brain, physically or by oxygen starvation. Most effective ways to do that are by necessity quite violent, and the ones that aren't are technically complicated or highly uncertain. As both men and women contemplating suicide will find that out quite quickly, the disparity must be explained by something else. And like I said, personally I think it's largely due to men being quite sure that they're not going to get any long term help, so they'd better make sure they're off permanently.

"Which is not to say I'm unsympathetic, but the issue isn't the disparity, it's the things that drive people to suicide."

That's saying that women are incompetent at suicide. It's not like it's a big secret that pills and cutting aren't very likely to actually kill you and getting information of easily accessible methods that will actually get the job done isn't more than a search away (automotive assisted decapitation ftw!). Being capable of researching options isn't a gendered thing (or we should re-evaluate a lot of things).

I suspect the reality is that the disparity is largely based on the rational projections of future life chances. There's a large difference in the likely development of a life for those who aren't completely capable of dealing with it for men and women. Women make an ultimately rational choice to keep chances high to get help, because they have a significant chance of actually getting help, and even women who can never support themselves will often be able to life a somewhat decent life, get support from parents, attract a mate, etc. While men... well, a failed suicide attempt isn't exactly CV improving material.

So, whether a fully conscious choice or not, the disparity is sociologically and probably biologically rational. Men have better reasons to be serious about it if they decide to check out.

And I really don't see any tendencies that it will change. Rather, I think our care for women is biologically hardwired, and the way society is progressing for the moment, being unsympathetic to men is more popular than ever. I mean, fuck, look at something like BLM; even if, in reality, the black men are mainly getting shot due to being male rather than being black, would you try launching a 'mens lives matter' movement? I think not.