All the symptoms mentioned by the parent poster are recognized for acute inhalation exposure to Mercury, but I'm running into paywalls trying to find out just how rapid their onset can be.
At a concentration level similar to the ones you're likely to see in the few moments after breaking a lightbulb, symptoms of acute mercury inhalation exposure require "a few hours" of exposure to develop. The patients in this review each absorbed a dose similar to the complete mercury contents of a typical CFL; it seems unlikely that an accident of the type described would result in more than a few percent of this amount of absorption, as the instinctive response to the bulb breaking - closing your eyes and exhaling - will prevent most of the contaminants entering your system. Also, unless the lamp was turned on at the time it broke, it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of the mercury was in vapour form.
Fortunately, I still have a "backup" mercury thermometer that's close to 40 years old - but I've wondered where to buy a backup for the backup should it meet an untimely demise.
You should consider replacing it with a readily-available spirit thermometer, e.g. this one. Spirit thermometers have a smaller temperature range that they can measure than mercury thermometers, but are often more accurate over that range, and if you just want one for medical purposes, you're not interested in any temperatures outside a very narrow range anyway. Plus, when that untimely demise eventually happens, it won't create a health hazard that requires careful cleanup.
You mean like all the great references from the article? Hey let's ask the people that are trying to downplay this situation what their take on the whole thing is?
But here you go: reference. He didn't review it. He just gave it title spot and listed it as a stand out.
I found this by actually following one of the references from the article.
What I found out by following those references: she started sleeping with him in May. This article was published in January. To quote Gjoni's account:
To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no reason to believe that it was sexual in nature.
That was written by one of the people she slept with. The one that the article said claimed never wrote a favourable review of her game.
Personally I would count "There are thousands of these games and this one stands out the most" to be a pretty favourable review.
Yes, but according to the account written by her ex, it was written 4 months before she started sleeping with the reviewer. It's hard to see how, given this information, it is even slightly relevant.
1. GGGGP was talking about Quinn, which is not what this image is about. 2. The analysis here is in any case somewhat dubious, as the supposed problems noted can be explained quite simply. Really, an average of 26 seconds per tweet to write correctly spelled and punctuated messages is not even slightly difficult, so I don't suspect advance scripting was necessary. The speed of reaction to get the screen shot can be explained by the capturer noticing the first few tweets, then opening the sender's timeline to take the screenshot, during which time additional tweets will have been sent. If the early tweets were noticed on a mobile device and the capturer then moved to a PC to perform the screen cap this also explains the lack of search terms and the fact that they are not logged in.
She even admitted flat out on twitter to having sex for publicity,
Link please. This information is missing from most accounts I've seen that I consider credible, so I would certainly like to know more about it. Preferably including precise phrasing and context.
and yet not a single time has the issue journalistic integrity of video game reporting been raised.
And in all the analysis I've seen of this, nobody has pointed out a single published article that appears, based on the timeline published by Quinn's ex, to have been unduly influenced. Which is probably why journalistic integrity isn't being raised in many places: it just doesn't look like anyone has actually done anything wrong.
There exist obvious and blatant conflicts of interest in several of her endeavors and the media that actually cares to report this ignores this fact.
Like? Please provide actual examples, rather than allusions to the existence of such things along with unjustified claims as to their obviousness.
The 'allegations' are actually facts, and what I care about is that she slept with those people for publicity she did not deserve, that was taken from more deserving games
Please provide a link to publicity she received from somebody she was sleeping with at the time of publication, or in any reasonable period of time prior to publication. Note: this article doesn't count, as by the most reliable accounts available she didn't sleep with its author until 4 months after it was published.
It's a fucking scam. Nobody harassed Zoe Quinn. She made it up. She profited. Her game that couldn't get a green light before got one.
The timeline I saw suggested her game got the green light 3 days before the story broke, i.e. the publication of the details of her relationships most likely happened in response to the fact that she was suddenly becoming better known.
That's quoting her a long, long way out of context. The confession was to cheating, which also amounts to hypocrisy due to the fact that she's on record as stating that she considers cheating to be equivalent to rape. As the rest of us, generally speaking, don't consider these to be equivalent, however, let's keep the actual facts of what she did straight.
I didnt get to the parts about accusing her of trading sex for reviews or anything
Right. That's because they weren't in the account that you read. They were made up by other people after that account became public, and started spreading as rumours before anybody did the research and found out that the guy involved didn't review any of her games in the relevant time period.
Those aren't the false accusations referred to by the article. The false accusations are the ones that suggest that she slept with Nathan Grayson in order to persuade him to write a positive review of one of her games. These accusations were quite widespread (e.g. 1, 2, 3), and appear to be completely false because nobody has pointed out a review written by Grayson of any of Quinn's games which was published after the date she's accused of sleeping with him.
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone who doesn't know her personally would care what men she chooses to sleep with. It's not like it's actually any of our business, really. The one important accusation, that she used sex to get positive reviews for her game, turns out to be false. So let's just forget about the rest, OK?
I see the words "objectivity", "mpartiality", and "fairness" all included as part of the second paragraph as common parts of established journalistic codes. I'm pretty sure when you have had a sexual relationship those are going to be very difficult things to maintain when speaking about that person or their work. I wouldn't actually expect anyone to say in their article "We shagged and they were awful in the sack, but the video game was pretty great." I would instead expect the journalist to either state that they had a more than professional relationship with that person, or most likely just abstain from writing about them or their game. He should have told his Editor that he had a non-professional relationship with her and had someone else write any articles regarding her or her work, or including plugs for her work.
You see, that's the interesting thing about this story: everyone assumes that he wrote about her games at some point while they were together. But he didn't. As far as I've been able to discover, he last mentioned one of her games in an article he wrote in January (link). He also mentioned her on a personal level, but didn't discuss any of her games, in an article he wrote in March (link). Yet according to her ex's account, he only started sleeping with her in May. So what exactly is unethical here?
He says billions of new games come out every day. Then gives a picture of her game as the only picture in the article and lists it as the number one stand out. You call that "in passing"? I call that "favourable".
Fine. It's a favourable, if brief, review. But as it was written 4 months prior to there being any kind of relationship between the two of them (according to her ex's account) it's quite tricky to see what, if anything, is wrong with it.
He didn't write an article specifically written as a review of her game. What he did was write an article about how there were thousands or more new indie games. Then in that article he said that her game, was the big standout and the only graphic in the article was for her game. That isn't exactly a review but it sure is a ringing endoresment. And while that can sound like nothing of consequence a mention like that on some of these gaming related news sites can make or break a game in a huge way. Just look at how Minecraft went from something no one had heard of to an incredible success in the course of a single weekend, arguably because of a silly web comic.
Yes, but according to her ex's account, she only started sleeping with him in may, and this was published in january. So, it's hard to see how this would be evidence of any kind of malfeasance.
Additionally there have been and still are feminists that claim that all heterosexual sex is rape. Which would make pretty much all men rapist. So again, not fictional.
In any self-selected group that contains more than about 20 people you'll find at least one who's a complete and utter nutcase. Using the most extreme to discredit the entire group is a very dubious tactic.
1. The allegations against Quinn are not false - there's plenty of evidence showing this.
The allegations are quite serious. I hope the evidence against her is good. Please provide links, because I haven't seen any that amounts to more than rumours.
2. Sarkeesian has been repeatedly debunked and shown to be nothing more than a con-woman.
I haven't watched her videos, but the impression I get is that they are typical feminist fare: slightly exaggerated, maybe even overreacting to minor points. Perhaps even some of the things she says are untrue, I don't know. How this translates to it being reasonable to figure out her home address and send her death threats, I'm not entirely sure.
It doesn't seem to be pervasive. [...] Over half of all gamers are female. I doubt this is "Misogyny In Gamer Culture". I think instead this is just a few vocal idiots.
Sure, we've now reached the point of equality in terms of the actual market for games. But there's still a horrible lack of equality in:
* People who develop games (only 4% female). This is much worse than the general software developer situation, despite that being bad enough in itself (29% female). * People who write about games for magazines, etc. I can't find any good stats on this, but thinking about the magazines and sites I read, I'm going to guess the figure is probably somewhere in the 15-20% range. For other fields of journalism, the figures are usually around the 30% sort of range, so again I *think* the gaming press is doing worse than average here.
These statistics show that this is much worse than a "few vocal idiots".
No, it doesn't degrade, it stays the same. If you change the environment or system it runs on that is a different story.
In any realistic deployment of computer systems, the environment changes. There is practically nothing that can be done to prevent this.
There are plenty of open source products that are platform dependent
Sure there are. But how many open source platforms are there that cannot be used with modern hardware, or cannot be used at all due to widespread security vulnerabilities or bugs that haven't been patched?
Out of interest, what are some of these software packages that you used to use but now can not?
Ones that spring to mind: Borland Pascal 7. The drivers for several pieces of hardware that I used to use. An administration program for a router that depends on an obsolete and insecure version of Java and will not run with more recent ones. There are more, but most of them are so long ago I no longer recall exactly what they were.
Current article is a POV rant that lacks notability and the article has historically swung from a POV rant to a POV brochure, mainly edited by single purpose accounts. Despite repeated requests, sourcing is from poor or primary sources. The lack of good, reliable secondary sources means there is no way to produce an article with appropriate balance and suggests the company is not notable enough for an article in the first place. Recommend deletion.SiobhanHansa 14:41, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Not re-created since???
Nope, and still not likely to be accepted as [a]n organization is not notable merely because a notable person or event was associated with it. As all coverage of this organization I can see is either (1) not in a reliable source or (2) relates to this specific incident, there are still no "good reliable secondary sources" as the deletion reason you quoted above put it, so a new article would likely be immediately deleted. There may be enough coverage for an article about the incident, though.
As another example, understanding half a dozen sort algorithms is pointless. If you're writing your own sort function, you're doing it wrong. Just call the one in the API.
Understanding those algorithms is still important, though, even if you're just using the available APIs. I know that depending on what framework I pick, the API's sort function will either be an implementation of quicksort, quicksort with an optimization to prevent worst case performance on presorted data, mergesort or (rarely) a handful of others. In many cases it is important to know which one is being used. Is resorting an already sorted list going to give me poor performance? Will elements that compare equal be maintained in order or would they be psuedorandomly transposed? If I know the details of common sorting algorithms I can tell this at a glance, and can easily remember which applies to which framework. If I don't know the details, I'll have to dig into documentation (or, quite frequently, stack overflow questions) to find the answers, which will take much longer.
And the other thing that CS teaches is that there are alternative approaches: why are you using a sort function, when you could be keeping your data in a tree structure instead?
I'm afaid it is _exactly_ how X works. The X "server" needs to reside on your local host to see remote X applications displayed locally.
The X 'server' does not need to reside on the remote machine, but the components for X are so interwoven on most remote host environments that it's quite risky to pick and choose components.
Right. Local machine is the admin's desktop, running the X server, and the remote machine is the network server, running the X clients. I don't see the problem with this setup. It doesn't leave the server running X, and there's no security implications because you need to be able to connect to the server via ssh to get anything to work.
Well software doesnt degrade over time due to use [...]
No. It degrades over time for entirely different reasons. But it *does* degrade over time. There's plenty of software I used to use which I now cannot for various reasons (e.g. contains known unpatched vulnerabilities; not compatible with modern hardware; suffers from Y2K-related bugs; depends on operating systems that contain known unpatched vulnerabilities; depends on operating systems that are not compatible with modern hardware). Were it open source, I doubt this would have happened.
Think how bad the OpenSSL bug was. Now realize the possibility that proprietary code could be just as bad, but no one can look at it.
FTFY, a more measured approach more consistent with reality. While the potential is there, we have not seen anything as bad as the OpenSSL bug.
The latest set of Microsoft security patches fix a vulnerability that could plausibly be exploited to remotely execute code and which has affected all versions of Internet Explorer since 6.0. This probably has significantly worse impact than Heartbleed did, and is such a regular occurrence that nobody has bothered pointing it out for special attention. Heartbleed was news simply because we expect open source to do better.
Even if I were to never even look at a single line of the source, the fact that it's availble to others adds value for me. I can go download a patch someone else wrote that fixes a bug MS hasn't bothered to fix. [...]
I am also in favour of Open source myself and get your point. However, after the OpenSSL bug, my belief in this "someone else" has significantly lowered. If too many people rely on "someone else" fixing a problem in his/her spare time you are worse off than when people are paid to fix closed source software. If the problem is important ($$$) enough, it wil be fixed.
Heartbleed was a subtle bug that was fixed after 2 years and 1 month of being in the release branch of openssl. Looking at the "critical" and "important" bugs in the latest round of Windows patches, I see one that has been open since IE6 was released (13 years), one for windows 8 (21 months), OneNote 2007 SP3 (35 months), SQL Server 2008 SP3 (35 months), Windows 2003 (11 years) x2, SharePoint Server 2013 (18 months), and.NET Framework 2.0SP2 (5 years).
It looks to me like open source is working just fine here; Hearthbleed appears to have been fixed much faster than an average important security flaw in a closed source package.
Slashdot Mirror
All the symptoms mentioned by the parent poster are recognized for acute inhalation exposure to Mercury, but I'm running into paywalls trying to find out just how rapid their onset can be.
At a concentration level similar to the ones you're likely to see in the few moments after breaking a lightbulb, symptoms of acute mercury inhalation exposure require "a few hours" of exposure to develop. The patients in this review each absorbed a dose similar to the complete mercury contents of a typical CFL; it seems unlikely that an accident of the type described would result in more than a few percent of this amount of absorption, as the instinctive response to the bulb breaking - closing your eyes and exhaling - will prevent most of the contaminants entering your system. Also, unless the lamp was turned on at the time it broke, it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of the mercury was in vapour form.
Fortunately, I still have a "backup" mercury thermometer that's close to 40 years old - but I've wondered where to buy a backup for the backup should it meet an untimely demise.
You should consider replacing it with a readily-available spirit thermometer, e.g. this one. Spirit thermometers have a smaller temperature range that they can measure than mercury thermometers, but are often more accurate over that range, and if you just want one for medical purposes, you're not interested in any temperatures outside a very narrow range anyway. Plus, when that untimely demise eventually happens, it won't create a health hazard that requires careful cleanup.
You mean like all the great references from the article? Hey let's ask the people that are trying to downplay this situation what their take on the whole thing is?
But here you go: reference. He didn't review it. He just gave it title spot and listed it as a stand out.
I found this by actually following one of the references from the article.
What I found out by following those references: she started sleeping with him in May. This article was published in January. To quote Gjoni's account:
(source)
It is therefore irrelevant.
That was written by one of the people she slept with. The one that the article said claimed never wrote a favourable review of her game.
Personally I would count "There are thousands of these games and this one stands out the most" to be a pretty favourable review.
Yes, but according to the account written by her ex, it was written 4 months before she started sleeping with the reviewer. It's hard to see how, given this information, it is even slightly relevant.
Evidence.
1. GGGGP was talking about Quinn, which is not what this image is about.
2. The analysis here is in any case somewhat dubious, as the supposed problems noted can be explained quite simply. Really, an average of 26 seconds per tweet to write correctly spelled and punctuated messages is not even slightly difficult, so I don't suspect advance scripting was necessary. The speed of reaction to get the screen shot can be explained by the capturer noticing the first few tweets, then opening the sender's timeline to take the screenshot, during which time additional tweets will have been sent. If the early tweets were noticed on a mobile device and the capturer then moved to a PC to perform the screen cap this also explains the lack of search terms and the fact that they are not logged in.
She even admitted flat out on twitter to having sex for publicity,
Link please. This information is missing from most accounts I've seen that I consider credible, so I would certainly like to know more about it. Preferably including precise phrasing and context.
and yet not a single time has the issue journalistic integrity of video game reporting been raised.
And in all the analysis I've seen of this, nobody has pointed out a single published article that appears, based on the timeline published by Quinn's ex, to have been unduly influenced. Which is probably why journalistic integrity isn't being raised in many places: it just doesn't look like anyone has actually done anything wrong.
There exist obvious and blatant conflicts of interest in several of her endeavors and the media that actually cares to report this ignores this fact.
Like? Please provide actual examples, rather than allusions to the existence of such things along with unjustified claims as to their obviousness.
The 'allegations' are actually facts, and what I care about is that she slept with those people for publicity she did not deserve, that was taken from more deserving games
Please provide a link to publicity she received from somebody she was sleeping with at the time of publication, or in any reasonable period of time prior to publication. Note: this article doesn't count, as by the most reliable accounts available she didn't sleep with its author until 4 months after it was published.
It's a fucking scam. Nobody harassed Zoe Quinn. She made it up. She profited. Her game that couldn't get a green light before got one.
The timeline I saw suggested her game got the green light 3 days before the story broke, i.e. the publication of the details of her relationships most likely happened in response to the fact that she was suddenly becoming better known.
Zoe has, by her own confession, committed rape.
That's quoting her a long, long way out of context. The confession was to cheating, which also amounts to hypocrisy due to the fact that she's on record as stating that she considers cheating to be equivalent to rape. As the rest of us, generally speaking, don't consider these to be equivalent, however, let's keep the actual facts of what she did straight.
I didnt get to the parts about accusing her of trading sex for reviews or anything
Right. That's because they weren't in the account that you read. They were made up by other people after that account became public, and started spreading as rumours before anybody did the research and found out that the guy involved didn't review any of her games in the relevant time period.
Stop moving the goalposts. The accusations by here boyfriend are here:
http://thezoepost.wordpress.co...
Tell me, which one of these accusations is false?
Those aren't the false accusations referred to by the article. The false accusations are the ones that suggest that she slept with Nathan Grayson in order to persuade him to write a positive review of one of her games. These accusations were quite widespread (e.g. 1, 2, 3), and appear to be completely false because nobody has pointed out a review written by Grayson of any of Quinn's games which was published after the date she's accused of sleeping with him.
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone who doesn't know her personally would care what men she chooses to sleep with. It's not like it's actually any of our business, really. The one important accusation, that she used sex to get positive reviews for her game, turns out to be false. So let's just forget about the rest, OK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
I see the words "objectivity", "mpartiality", and "fairness" all included as part of the second paragraph as common parts of established journalistic codes. I'm pretty sure when you have had a sexual relationship those are going to be very difficult things to maintain when speaking about that person or their work. I wouldn't actually expect anyone to say in their article "We shagged and they were awful in the sack, but the video game was pretty great." I would instead expect the journalist to either state that they had a more than professional relationship with that person, or most likely just abstain from writing about them or their game. He should have told his Editor that he had a non-professional relationship with her and had someone else write any articles regarding her or her work, or including plugs for her work.
You see, that's the interesting thing about this story: everyone assumes that he wrote about her games at some point while they were together. But he didn't. As far as I've been able to discover, he last mentioned one of her games in an article he wrote in January (link). He also mentioned her on a personal level, but didn't discuss any of her games, in an article he wrote in March (link). Yet according to her ex's account, he only started sleeping with her in May. So what exactly is unethical here?
He says billions of new games come out every day. Then gives a picture of her game as the only picture in the article and lists it as the number one stand out. You call that "in passing"? I call that "favourable".
Fine. It's a favourable, if brief, review. But as it was written 4 months prior to there being any kind of relationship between the two of them (according to her ex's account) it's quite tricky to see what, if anything, is wrong with it.
He didn't write an article specifically written as a review of her game. What he did was write an article about how there were thousands or more new indie games. Then in that article he said that her game, was the big standout and the only graphic in the article was for her game. That isn't exactly a review but it sure is a ringing endoresment. And while that can sound like nothing of consequence a mention like that on some of these gaming related news sites can make or break a game in a huge way. Just look at how Minecraft went from something no one had heard of to an incredible success in the course of a single weekend, arguably because of a silly web comic.
Yes, but according to her ex's account, she only started sleeping with him in may, and this was published in january. So, it's hard to see how this would be evidence of any kind of malfeasance.
At some level, you're assuming whore == woman
That's probably because the word's most common meaning is gender-specific:
(source: OED 4.0)
Additionally there have been and still are feminists that claim that all heterosexual sex is rape. Which would make pretty much all men rapist. So again, not fictional.
In any self-selected group that contains more than about 20 people you'll find at least one who's a complete and utter nutcase. Using the most extreme to discredit the entire group is a very dubious tactic.
1. The allegations against Quinn are not false - there's plenty of evidence showing this.
The allegations are quite serious. I hope the evidence against her is good. Please provide links, because I haven't seen any that amounts to more than rumours.
2. Sarkeesian has been repeatedly debunked and shown to be nothing more than a con-woman.
I haven't watched her videos, but the impression I get is that they are typical feminist fare: slightly exaggerated, maybe even overreacting to minor points. Perhaps even some of the things she says are untrue, I don't know. How this translates to it being reasonable to figure out her home address and send her death threats, I'm not entirely sure.
It doesn't seem to be pervasive. [...] Over half of all gamers are female. I doubt this is "Misogyny In Gamer Culture". I think instead this is just a few vocal idiots.
Sure, we've now reached the point of equality in terms of the actual market for games. But there's still a horrible lack of equality in:
* People who develop games (only 4% female). This is much worse than the general software developer situation, despite that being bad enough in itself (29% female).
* People who write about games for magazines, etc. I can't find any good stats on this, but thinking about the magazines and sites I read, I'm going to guess the figure is probably somewhere in the 15-20% range. For other fields of journalism, the figures are usually around the 30% sort of range, so again I *think* the gaming press is doing worse than average here.
These statistics show that this is much worse than a "few vocal idiots".
No, it doesn't degrade, it stays the same. If you change the environment or system it runs on that is a different story.
In any realistic deployment of computer systems, the environment changes. There is practically nothing that can be done to prevent this.
There are plenty of open source products that are platform dependent
Sure there are. But how many open source platforms are there that cannot be used with modern hardware, or cannot be used at all due to widespread security vulnerabilities or bugs that haven't been patched?
Out of interest, what are some of these software packages that you used to use but now can not?
Ones that spring to mind: Borland Pascal 7. The drivers for several pieces of hardware that I used to use. An administration program for a router that depends on an obsolete and insecure version of Java and will not run with more recent ones. There are more, but most of them are so long ago I no longer recall exactly what they were.
Deleted in 2008:
Current article is a POV rant that lacks notability and the article has historically swung from a POV rant to a POV brochure, mainly edited by single purpose accounts. Despite repeated requests, sourcing is from poor or primary sources. The lack of good, reliable secondary sources means there is no way to produce an article with appropriate balance and suggests the company is not notable enough for an article in the first place. Recommend deletion.SiobhanHansa 14:41, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Not re-created since???
Nope, and still not likely to be accepted as [a]n organization is not notable merely because a notable person or event was associated with it. As all coverage of this organization I can see is either (1) not in a reliable source or (2) relates to this specific incident, there are still no "good reliable secondary sources" as the deletion reason you quoted above put it, so a new article would likely be immediately deleted. There may be enough coverage for an article about the incident, though.
Since when do people serve court orders by email...?
In England, since 2006. Are the US courts really so far behind the times that they still don't consider email a valid method of service?
As another example, understanding half a dozen sort algorithms is pointless. If you're writing your own sort function, you're doing it wrong. Just call the one in the API.
Understanding those algorithms is still important, though, even if you're just using the available APIs. I know that depending on what framework I pick, the API's sort function will either be an implementation of quicksort, quicksort with an optimization to prevent worst case performance on presorted data, mergesort or (rarely) a handful of others. In many cases it is important to know which one is being used. Is resorting an already sorted list going to give me poor performance? Will elements that compare equal be maintained in order or would they be psuedorandomly transposed? If I know the details of common sorting algorithms I can tell this at a glance, and can easily remember which applies to which framework. If I don't know the details, I'll have to dig into documentation (or, quite frequently, stack overflow questions) to find the answers, which will take much longer.
And the other thing that CS teaches is that there are alternative approaches: why are you using a sort function, when you could be keeping your data in a tree structure instead?
I'm afaid it is _exactly_ how X works. The X "server" needs to reside on your local host to see remote X applications displayed locally.
The X 'server' does not need to reside on the remote machine, but the components for X are so interwoven on most remote host environments that it's quite risky to pick and choose components.
Right. Local machine is the admin's desktop, running the X server, and the remote machine is the network server, running the X clients. I don't see the problem with this setup. It doesn't leave the server running X, and there's no security implications because you need to be able to connect to the server via ssh to get anything to work.
Well software doesnt degrade over time due to use [...]
No. It degrades over time for entirely different reasons. But it *does* degrade over time. There's plenty of software I used to use which I now cannot for various reasons (e.g. contains known unpatched vulnerabilities; not compatible with modern hardware; suffers from Y2K-related bugs; depends on operating systems that contain known unpatched vulnerabilities; depends on operating systems that are not compatible with modern hardware). Were it open source, I doubt this would have happened.
Think how bad the OpenSSL bug was. Now realize the possibility that proprietary code could be just as bad, but no one can look at it.
FTFY, a more measured approach more consistent with reality. While the potential is there, we have not seen anything as bad as the OpenSSL bug.
The latest set of Microsoft security patches fix a vulnerability that could plausibly be exploited to remotely execute code and which has affected all versions of Internet Explorer since 6.0. This probably has significantly worse impact than Heartbleed did, and is such a regular occurrence that nobody has bothered pointing it out for special attention. Heartbleed was news simply because we expect open source to do better.
Even if I were to never even look at a single line of the source, the fact that it's availble to others adds value for me. I can go download a patch someone else wrote that fixes a bug MS hasn't bothered to fix. [...]
I am also in favour of Open source myself and get your point. However, after the OpenSSL bug, my belief in this "someone else" has significantly lowered. If too many people rely on "someone else" fixing a problem in his/her spare time you are worse off than when people are paid to fix closed source software. If the problem is important ($$$) enough, it wil be fixed.
Heartbleed was a subtle bug that was fixed after 2 years and 1 month of being in the release branch of openssl. Looking at the "critical" and "important" bugs in the latest round of Windows patches, I see one that has been open since IE6 was released (13 years), one for windows 8 (21 months), OneNote 2007 SP3 (35 months), SQL Server 2008 SP3 (35 months), Windows 2003 (11 years) x2, SharePoint Server 2013 (18 months), and .NET Framework 2.0SP2 (5 years).
It looks to me like open source is working just fine here; Hearthbleed appears to have been fixed much faster than an average important security flaw in a closed source package.