I would expand on it like so: personal attacks in an argument are the large refuge of the incompetent because that is the extent of violence they are willing to involve themselves in.

So your response to someone who you feel has personally attacked you is to claim that he's incompetent because only the incompetent would make personal attacks? I hate to break it to you, but that's a personal attack, and you've kindof argued yourself out of the argument here.

I think that says more about crappy college poetry than the state of computer AI...

"You wound me, sir!" the AI cried,
"For student I am not.
In terms of prose and poetry
More than you've learned, have I forgot.
Yet you compare me to the fools
Whose minds through college rot?
The only insult worse would be
An editor of Slashdot."

That's nice and all, but it doesn't solve his performance problems.

And unlike Android, if you have any iOS device released since June 2011, you can update to iOS 8.

Oh yeah, that's sure to solve his performance issues!

As Apple pulls further and further away from the once-cozy relationship they had with Google, what makes you think they'll fail to mirror Google's own business models and ventures? Then all that data they've been collecting will be, retroactively, just as loaded as what Google has on you.

Sounds like the problem is your company. Taking it out on random Slashdot commenters may give you a moment of catharsis, and there may be fancy, elaborate and kindof-barely-working solutions to your stated problem, but neither will solve the actual underlying problem.

Actually, a lot of decent federal programs and decisions have come from minority governments, and those are really only possible in a system with more than two parties. So I wouldn't actually say nothing changes in such an event.

Evolved since then? If anything we've devolved, and shall continue to do so. Fear-based policy and actions have a way of reinforcing themselves.

A single data point doesn't turn an irrational fear into a rational, respectable one. We can still demand more sense and an actual understanding of the risks from the authorities, instead of a fear or public panic based one. As many have pointed out, more people die on average per hour from vehicular accidents in America than have died from terrorism since 2001-09-11. I know we aren't ever going to get a proportional response to such things from authorities, media, or the public, but is being at most within a few orders of magnitude really too much to ask?

From looking at the picture in TFA, it looks like the pinhole camera was duct-taped to the remains of a light pole on the bridge. You can make out an old baseplate, and the 3/4 inch steel pipes are just the conduit cemented into the bridge itself in order to protect the wires - that were cut off and left when the light was removed. You can see this sort of shit anywhere there is decaying infrastructure, as it takes more money to properly clean up after something is removed.

What, you expect us to spend money to maintain our infrastructure? No way, we're already all tapped out with all the money we need to spend to defend against terrorism! Why, just this week there were two objects that kindof maybe sortof looked like bombs in Georgia! We can't afford to spend money on repairs or even proper dismantling when the fear^H^H^H^H threat of terrorism is hanging over our heads!

While I won't disagree that personal attacks cause issues and are ethically questionable, the counterargument (and the framework under which the anonymous doxxer is likely working under) is that awareness that the wider world might come crashing down on you will affect others' actions. So even if this isn't their district, it might well affect the actions of principals and other administrators in local districts, and in general humanity would be better off if there was a counterweight to the zero-tolerance bullshit, which was that admins would fear the general public's zero tolerance for the bullshit of zero-tolerance.

Now, to be clear, I don't actually think doxxing this principal will affect the actions of any other principals, since this kind of idiocy is already showing itself to be impervious to foresight, awareness, and sensibility.

Alternatively; "Here is how Google royally screwed up writing their OS so that updating even relatively minor parts requires a full OS upgrade while Apple and Microsoft seem to have figured out how patching works."

But that's precisely one of the reasons why they aren't bothering to patch this; in fully up-to-date Android releases, WebView has been replaced by a Blink component which Google can update via the Play Store, independently of OS updates. Many, many components of Android are like this these days (which is a problem for anyone not wanting Play Services, but that's another story). And actually Apple is a bad example, since they still for many OS components need to update the entire OS, it's just that unlike Google they've retained tight control and thus can push out those updates whenever they want.

Actually, Chromebooks do indeed have a shell and a default text editor. I think it's VIM? I forget now, and I left my Pixel at home and normally have it booted into a normal Linux desktop. The trick is just that you have to flip it into developer mode, which then gives a scary warning screen every time you start it up, and you're giving the kids a lot of leeway to muck up the system then I suppose, but on the other hand resetting it entirely is as simple as hitting spacebar and then y (if I'm remembering correctly) upon boot one time, and giving the kids who want to fiddle the ability to fiddle is probably the best education you can give many of them---figuring out how school computers and networks worked so I could install Doom and play it with my friends taught me more valuable lessons and skills for my current sysadmin job than any actual classes did!

The argument goes both ways -- I've spent hundred hours of my life learning POSIX, and if my boss wants me to run a POSIX program in Windows, I'm pretty much doomed.

Aha, but see, that's another reason to argue against proprietary systems and stacks. When things aren't proprietary, it's nearly inevitable that crazy, determined people will port it to everything you'd want to run the stack on; if your boss wants you to run a POSIX program on Windows, Cygwin certainly provides a pretty damn complete environment for doing so. Nearly every CLI programs I've ever wanted to use on Windows that I can on Linux is already in their repos, even, so the chances that you've written a POSIX-compliant application that can't run through Cygwin seems quite small.

And hell, a lot of the time these days things aren't necessarily so low-level, so stuff like MinGW are all that one needs to compile a Linux/BSD/whatever-aimed CLI program for Windows. And Free toolkits like Qt supply all you need to write and compile full GUI programs that'll run on POSIX-ish systems just as well as Windows, and hell, the few things you're for some reason doing low-level enough to require POSIX somehow can probably be #ifdef'd with what little WinAPI you know.

I'm not even kidding, that's literally what the systemd camp have proposed. (I actually think systemd is pretty snazzy on my smartphone, but I'm extremely skeptical of it as a sysadmin.)

Man, you were doing so well (not that I entirely agreed, but you were making well-argued logical counterpoints to GP's points) until the last sentence. I guess it's troll-v-troll here.