They may have medical equipment that is connected to a serial port and only has a WinXP driver. The lifecycle of such hardware is a lot longer than typical PCs.

In a company I worked we ended up quarantaining the hardware that needed WinXP because of other measuring hardware, and migrated the rest to Win7. After that only the Win7 PCs were allowed on the internet.

The fact that NSA and other government agencies demand a backdoor in propriatry OS and programs or create one to spy on us is the real problem.

Open source is the answer. I was hit by a Windows virus in 1995 and switched to Linux after that.

If you write an un-targetted virus, you must assume it will hit everything. Also life-saving institutions and machines. Which makes you a terrorist and possibly a murderer.

"Sorry judge, I did not mean to bring down all hospitals in the world, and causing more than 100 dead. I was only playing around with a virus construction kit and then my cat stepped on the Send button."

or...

"Please don't kill me, I did not mean to bring down your criminal computer network. (followed by the sound of a gunshot)"

I would certainly hope this virus will also affect certain criminal organisations who will be so pissed off that they will put a price on the heads of these virus writers.

There are virus writing kits around which make it easy to release these viruses and before it becomes a hobby of 16-year olds someone should set an example.

BTW: what is the maximum sentence a virus writer can get? Does it depend on how much damage it caused? Or can you go to jail for owning a virus writing kit and not using it (yet)?

What would deter virus writers? 5 years in jail without access to a computer?

Jean-Claude Juncker and the other eurocrats have proven to be so self-centered and closed to criticism about their inefficient monthly moving back and forth between Brussels and Strassbourg, their huge salaries, huge allowances and free pension schemes, expansion into former USSR and middle East territory, inability to make southern countries to behave themselves financially, turning the border control in a ferryman operation to make human traffickers rich, and much more, that the only way to change the EU is to step out of it, and start a New EU.

The UK is the first of the net-contributing countries, a few more and the EU goes bankrupt. The New (or North) EU will consist of the net-contributing old-EU countries.

This message is brought to you from the Netherlands.

Dries MUST act in the Open Source way. Consult the users in a democratic manner, and execute the outcome.
If not he will loose much more than just Larry. he might loose it all.

Look how Mark Shuttleworth reversed on Unity. Dries can do that too. Bring back Larry.

I got fed up with the Linux fragmentation of all these distro's inventing the same wheels in parallel, wasting resources that could have been spent at really killing Windows. I went from SuSe to Ubuntu 10.04 as that was the biggest distro then. It had a nice unobtrusive UI that looked a lot like Windows 7 which I used at work.

The introduction and enforcement of Unity made my flee towards Linux Mint Cinnamon, then the biggest alternative distro. For me as a Drupal back-end developer, I don't care much about UIs. I need an out-of-the-way window manager, and as much as possible screen real estate. I use a terminal with a few tabs open, 2 browsers with a lot of tabs open, PhpStorm and FileZilla. That's it.

Why Mark S does not switch to Mint/Cinnamon must be the damned Linux mantra roll-your-own-distro and his own stubbornness. Productive people don't need Unity with its merging a phone UI with a PC UI, and we do not need Gnome3 either, we spend our time in applications ON TOP OF the OS and the Window system. So stop the fragmentation and join the Linux leader or at least something in the top 3, not #54 in popularity.

Since 1 dec 2016 I got a new job and was allowed to choose my own laptop, but I choose a NUC6 i5 with 2x 24" screens, and put Linux Mint 18 on it. The first few days it totally froze on me a few times, but after upgrading to Mint 18.1 and Cinammon 3.0.6 it has now run uninterrupted for 2 weeks already.

I have the CPU temperature and performance monitor in the footer, it is currently 39.3 deg Celsius without any noise at all (I have no music on so it is totally silent here). I run PhpStorm, 2 Firefoxes with in total 21 tabs, a terminal with 3 tabs, 1 vagrant VM, 1 Chrome browser with 4 tabs, 1 file manager and 1 PDF viewer. It is not cheap, but a lot cheaper than laptops with the same specs. Colleagues with Win of Mac laptops do have their fan running audibly.

My previous PCs were a MacMini and an MacBookAir, but I would not want to switch back.

If I follow a few YT links from a non-YT site, all those videos show the same adds, even without the 'skip in 4 seconds' possibility.

I have lost interest completely after seeing the same add 3 times, and start vowing to never buy the product shown in the add. That can not be the effect the add company is after.

On my last job (Drupal back-end developer) I worked 4 days from home, and 1 day at the office where planned all meetings and customer contacts. Traffic to the office was 1 hour instead of 30 minutes without traffic jams. Working at home is perfect for receiving the stuff you and your neighbors bought over the internet, or start early in your pyjamas and spend your lunchtime in the sun in your garden. But it can be lonely, I live alone in a small village where nothing happens.

In my new job (also web developer) it's 5 days at the office, but very close, only 13 minutes by car and 30 minutes by bicycle. As I also need to learn the new development framework I interact a lot with my colleagues, and the threshold asking an opinion on something you made or a solution you have in mind is very low. I also enjoy the lively discussions at lunch.

I think the team atmosphere can be reproduced quite a lot with tools like Slack if you already know the colleagues in person. That's why completely remote (at home or in India) is not as efficient as full-time office or part-time office. Avoiding the worst traffic days while still seeing your colleagues is the best compromise.

I have used Linux for 21 years already, going from Suse to Ubuntu and then Mint after Unity was introduced. I could not be happier on my new job when I started 1 december that I was allowed to choose my own laptop as long as it was made by their preferred supplier. As a web developer I favor screen real estate more than the portability of a laptop, so I was very happy I noticed the Intel NUC 6 which I fitted with 2 x 24"monitors. I installed Mint 18 on it and was as happy as any /. reader could be.

Until my screen froze, not responding to mouse or keyboard. I disabled the screen saver, but when I was resizing a window it froze on me again. About 2 times per day. i ran all the updates I could run and now have it down to 1 screen freeze every 2 days. I think it is bug 1321623. https://bugs.launchpad.net/lin...

When I see they were perfecting the screen savers for Mint 18.1 while this bug kills my productivity it annoys me quite a bit.

I had a room in my house listed on AirBnB, but took it off because my privacy is worth more than a few euro.

The first renters were a mother and her student son who were moving the student back home and needed one night sleep in between. They had a well-written profile with a few photos that gave me the idea I could trust them, also including a few good reviews. My house is not set up for commercial renting, it is stocked with food and alcohol that cannot be locked away.

The second renter who applied had an arabic name and no profile at all, also no reviews. While my initial thought was to turn him down, instead I mailed him for more information 'to see if my room would be the best for him'. Turned out he was an arabic man who worked in Europe for a few weeks sent on a business trip by his employer, and had wife and children and was very western-oriented. As I explained him he would not get any rooms without a full profile (and preferably some good reviews as profiles can be made up), so people could familiarize them with him. Trusting him into their house. In the end he did look further for a place closer to tourist attractions.

My point is that if AirBnB starts anonymizing renters to hide the information I need to trust someone into a private house, into my private space, I must conclude there might be something wrong with them. So I stopped renting my room. On my holidays I use AirBnB a lot, but more than 50% of the places are not AirBnB purists but hotels and guesthouses anyway.

And rightly so. Working people are paying betweeen 38 - 52 % income tax (in the Netherlands), and big companies like Apple, Starbucks, etc are paying almost no taxes (Apple paid 0.005% in Ireland) with all the money going to shareholders and massively overpaid CEOs. Some USA CEOs get more salary than small country's budget.

It's stealing from the poor and giving to the already-rich. There are already concerns that this wealth-gap will result in riots and revolutions. This theft has to stop before it gets out of hand, your billions are no use if you have to employ a small army to protect yourself, your family, hell even your mother-in-law (ask Bernie Eclestone).

All countries in the world will benefit from local taxes being paid, specifically 3rd world countries which are being robbed of their assets via bribed officials and cannot feed or employ their people. And if all these companies pay their taxes, taxes for the working class can come down. That's the Robin Hood way, taxing the rich and giving to the poor.

Take the active ingredient of Vietnam-era Agent Orange and label it as RoundUp weed killer, then genetically modify plants to not die from this poison so that farmers can spray massive amounts ($$$$) of RoundUp on their crop. Only the crop survives. Everything else dies.

Monsanto 'forgot' to genetically modify humans. We are not 'RoundUp-Ready'. So while our GMO food drenched in RoundUp poison survives, we humans are not insensitive to it. Small amounts of Glyphosate are being found in every food ingredient, even in organic food grown close to fields where RoundUp is used. Organic plants also interbreed with GMO plants in the natural way, so 100% organic farmers are sued by Monsanto for what the military terms as 'Collatoral damage'. Organic farmers get sued for illegally using patented Monsanto seed that just blew over from GMO fields. And those farmers cannot pay the legal muscle to fight Monsanto... So everyone pays.

Monsanto is getting rich on poisining our food, racketeering our farmers, poisioning humans.

Despite claims that RoundUp is totally safe to drink (by a Monsanto lobbyist who was then offered a glass, and refused), they could let the person drink a bottle of Monsanto's RoundUp. It does not only clean up pavement, but society too.