Depends on how much credit you want to give for predictions that correctly interpret the purpose and effect of the shift; but provide no technical detail whatsoever.

Would the grim ruminations of the marxists concerning the distribution of the means of production qualify? They tend to either be writing about smokestack industry or broad historical trends, specific implementation unspecified; but some of them would probably feel pretty well validated by the (substantial) shift from computers that provide programming tools by default, to computers that don't ship with any; but can run some if you obtain them elsewhere, to computers that explicitly and artificially forbid essentially all program production(on the device itself, if you SSH into a real computer Apple and friends don't much care what you type on their shiny tablets).

I don't think that the sort of techies who like techology enough to enthusiastically prognosticate about the future of it would have guessed "In the future, computers will be opaque closed boxes. And consumers will fucking love it with the same intensity and in far greater numbers than you did your obscurantist geek box. Where is your god now, nerd?"

Ever notice it's always anonymous coward who respond to people who oppose obamacare? It has already been widely established there is an army of people hired by government and political agencies to troll the internet forums. Here on slashdot, we are seeing them here and now.

The slashdot demographic is not generally of the opinion expressed by these leftists. It's very out of control.

How much tyranny before it's too much? I expect this one to be the last straw and yet some will suck this one up too and start blaming their relatives.

I don't remember exactly when the move started; but 'mainstream' anti-vaxers switched to the "green our vaccines"/"reduce the toxins"/"too many too soon" line some years ago to help distinguish themselves from the fringe 'Vaccines sully the bodily purity and weaken the vital essences with Aborted Fetus cells and zionist NWO population control schemes!!!' anti-vaxers.

Shockingly, this move has not led them to embrace any of the vaccines that have been reformulated by popular demand to reduce or eliminate whatever originally had them worried, nor has it led to any apparent interest in working with the toxicology people to determine what level of 'greenness'/'reduced toxins' is acceptable. Nor has there been a rush of interest to vaccinate according to some sort of reduced-pace schedule(though some individual doctors have various ones that they prefer).

Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.

Honestly, I liked them better before their shift. There is a certain intellectual honesty to embracing a position that others see as lunacy and then fighting like a rabid weasel against all evidence. Not a...healthy...kind of intellectual honesty; but a kind of intellectual honesty. Mealy-mouthed disingenuous bullshit, though, lacks that virtue, and aggressively so. Even more cynically, it uses the cause of actual epidemiology, toxicology, and medical monitoring, safety standards, approval protocols, and other (vital) elements of keeping medicine honest and more useful than it is harmful as camouflage for a load of anti-scientific nonsense.

If they were willing to actually come out with some some sort of target (even if it seems pointlessly low according to current data), they'd just be the cautious wing of an actually scientific exercise in epidemiology and toxicology. As it is, no goals are defined, no data accepted, no improvement is ever good enough. It's pure smokescreen.

I agree that it isn't a bigger issue in terms of expected ongoing pain/users affected, since the issue with trusting too many shady/incompetent CAs is showing no signs of real solution ('pinning' is an OK hack, so far as it goes; but it doesn't go very far on most users' systems and nobody seems to have an actual ready-for-prime-time solution that shows signs of making it out the door).

I was thinking 'bigger' in that only SSLed stuff accessed by excessively-trusting systems can be compromised by a rogue or incompetent CA, while anything can be compromised (and relatively silently, some atypically clueful person tends to notice the shady certs eventually, which is much less likely with a perfect copy of the actual private keys) if you have the same private key material as the legitimate host.

So, barring the possibility of some particularly nasty targeted exploit against some specific organizations, affected population is likely to be smaller; but the set of vulnerable systems is necessarily larger. I really didn't make what I meant by 'bigger' clear originally, did I...

I suspect that the okay-ness of this fact depends on whether you are a disinterested observer (in which case your points are valid and likely account for many silent users, along with some amount of abandoned accounts, squatters, etc.) or whether you are somebody at Twitter, who would probably prefer to keep their (laughable) early post-IPO value of something north of 30 billion dollars, rather than have further bad news after announcing in Febuary of this year that you'd lost half a billion dollars in the last year, and that your >P/E ratio is kind of tepid.

For a site that requires sign-up to do all but the most crippled reading/following (do they do public RSS, such that you could 'follow' without an account? Barely matters since the public mostly doesn't and their design makes just-sign-up-with-us easier for most non-geeks than getting RSS up and running, especially across devices), 56% participation is actually higher than I'd expect, and certainly far from shockingly low. It's just that any pretense of being worth more than the scrap value of their office furniture is largely based on optimistic subscriber numbers, so I suspect that they are Not Happy about somebody talking about it. If some analyst comes out with "Percentage of twitter accounts that are actually bots" tomorrow, I imagine they'd be less happy still.

Not (all) twits gonna tweet. It's actually something of a heartwarming discovery.

But seriously. It's barely considered a planet and now people want to point out its faults? Leave Pluto alone!!!

Did you notice how I said that the harping, not the rules, is an utter waste of time?

I have no problem with grammatical conventions. I try not to depart to egregiously from them myself. That doesn't oblige me to like the grammar police, or to refrain from criticizing the insufferable moralistic error-sniping that certain people engage in just to show how serious they are about grammar. The ones who treat comparatively new rules as though they'd been handed down from time immemorial or who are still rejecting as an undignified neologism some usage with the thick end of a century of documented history are particularly vexing.

If you skip that nonsense, you can have all the advantages of well-formed communication without any time wasted. As for celebration of ignorance? I'd say that math takes substantially more flack, and that's a subject that virtually nobody picks up an idiosyncratic-but-workable knowledge of through basic cultural exposure, nor is it a subject where you can be substantially wrong and still get adequate results. (There is the separate, deeply vexed, issue of whether assorted nonstandard, but internally consistent, grammars associated with various regions and subcultures should be coddled or suppressed; but that's not an ignorance question; but a standardization one.)

Investments in lobbyists always suggest a belief (though they don't tell us whether it's true or false) that the ROI on regulatory meddling is greater than that of other purposes to which the money could be put. What could possibly go wrong?

It's almost as if GNOME and Unity and all of that are like a precursor to Obamacare or something.

I don't know what KDE is like now, but I was seriously annoyed by KDE at first -- everything with a damned K in it and giant frikken icons that looked like they were designed by mechanical (excuse me, mekanikal) engineers. Maybe it's better now... who knows... I'm still kinda angry that GNOME betrayed the usership so badly.

There is simply no end to the complaining about the latest GNOME desktop. It is exactly as Linus Torvalds said it was. It's an unholy abomination and most people don't want it. They should have kept the old desktop and offered an alternative to see how people wanted to go. But no. They just had to annoy the hell out of so many people. I want to say "let them die" but then I wonder what would happen with the GNOME2 stuff... is MATE being actively developed? If so maybe the likes of RedHat will shift over to supporting and developing MATE/GNOME2 again.

Sorry if I'm not the first person to wonder about this question, but there are some eery and striking similarities in my mind with ebonics and common core. I know they have a problem with Turkish people there but I didn't realize it was that bad.

I suspect that they don't emphasize this as much when teaching the not-dead ones; but when I took Latin it was overtly acknowledged that this was expected to improve my knowledge of English grammar and the (very large, if rather skewed toward jargon) chunk of English vocabulary that was pulled in from Latin with varying degrees of mangling.

Both because Latin grammar is substantially different, and because technical knowledge of English grammar couldn't be assumed, they didn't try to teach according to analogy with English grammar, or otherwise do something that required a formal knowledge of it.

Because of my...rather peculiar...profile on language acquisition, I ended up scraping through in large part by inferring Latin words I didn't know from the English words those Latin words were supposed to be helping me with, which was somewhat perverse; but so it goes.