The "cannot be stopped" part of the summary is complete nonsense. All you need to do to stop the internet is show it something shiny. Public opinion and passion is notoriously fickle.

If there are a thousand crimes committed, the police will make a real effort to investigate all of them, allocating their resources reasonably according to the severity of the crime and the likelyhood of a successful investigation. They will work on an investigation for days, weeks, months or years as required.

The internet "angry mob", on the other hand, will only investigate the single most exciting, dramatic, attention-getting crime. They will devote 100% of their effort to finding a scapegoat for that crime, until they get bored or something more exciting comes along.

A smart police force can and will use the power of the masses (think "Amber alert"), but it is still in control of the investigation.

My wife and I were discussing these kinds of childhood adventures. She once missed a stop on her bus, and didn't get to school. The bus happened to drive past her daddy's office building, and she recognized it (from car trips where it was pointed out "that's where daddy works!". She got off the bus, and went to the building's courtyard. She played by herself all morning. At lunchtime, lots of people came out to eat their lunch. One person talked to her, and asked who she was and why she was there. She (happy to talk to a complete stranger) gave her name and said her daddy works here. The person got the daddy's name, daddy was notified, and she was quickly taken to school.

Likewise, I had lots of adventures when I was 4 or 5, taking my bicycle and dog and wandering far from home until I was hopelessly lost, hours later. But I always found my way home, or found someone whom I could trust to help me, and it all worked out in the end.

This generation of children will never experience these adventures, since parents are able to keep 24x7 connection to their children.

If you don't get lost in your neighborhood at age 4, how are you going to handle backpacking in Thailand when you're 21?
If you never have to look at strange adults and judge which one is the safest to talk to when you have a problem, how are you going to be able to approach a member of the opposite sex at a high-school dance?
If you never practice getting out of a bad situation when you're 5, how are you going to deal with pressure from your boyfriend when you're 16?
If you are afraid to march into unknown territory when you are 6, how will you create a new product and a new market when you're CEO at age 46?

Life is all about getting hurt, healing, and becoming stronger as a result. Kids need to live.

I don't actually blame the parents, I blame the technology. Parenthood does strange things to a person's brain, and it is impossible for a healthy parent to want a child to suffer, even if it is good for the child. I'm sure that if our parents could have shacked us with love the way current parents can, they would have. And I'm sure we both would have been worse for the experience.

Why not do both? Protocol is: get fingerprint. If you cannot get a fingerprint, then you should use your discretion and initiative, e.g.:
- carefully and thoroughly interview the visitor.
- understand and verify the person's reason for not having a fingerprint.
- understand why the person is visiting the country.
- determine whether this person is likely to be a risk or not.
- decide if the person should be allowed into the country despite the lack of fingerprints.

If the border guards didn't want to think, they would have just deported him right away. They were willing to think. They did think. They interviewed him, thought about what he said,possibly spent some time verifying what he said, maybe consulted other people, and in the end they decided he was an acceptable risk. The process took 4 hours. It seems reasonable to me.

I think this shows a system working perfectly. The normal case (over 99% of the time, I would guess) is a few seconds for a fingerprint. The exceptions are dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with a thorough interview and careful consideration (not a stupid snap judgment).

Actually, the problem is that ordinary people don't realize that chaotic systems ARE predictable. You cannot predict precise specific events, but you can predict broad trends with very good accuracy.

However, ordinary people simply don't think in terms of broad trends, they only think in terms of specifics. Because "the scientists" are unable to accurately predict the exact temperature in their home town on the Sunday of the big football game, they feel climate science is worthless. And what the climate scientists can predict (things like the average temperature going up 0.5 degree year-by-year) is too small and distributed for an average person to even notice, yet it has huge effects on the world.

The problem is that people are allowed to graduate high school without a basic understanding of statistics and probability, so instead they rely on personal experience and anecdote. They think "I didn't see it happen, so it won't happen." or "I saw it happen, so it is likely to happen."

A couple of examples that I like to use to give probability-impaired something to ponder:
* Almost every week, someone wins the lottery. But lottery tickets are still a very bad investment.
* 5 out of 6 times you play "Russian Roulette", nothing bad happens. But it is still a very bad idea to play.

My first thought was "Well, duh! Of course it's going to hurt if you stop taking a stimulant your body is accustomed to." What kind of idiots don't know caffeine is an addictive drug?

Then I realized most don't know it, and I blame the War On Drugs. It has led to oversimplified thoughts like "Cocaine, heroin, cannabis are drugs, and drugs are evil. Alcohol, caffeine and nicotine are not evil, so they must not be drugs."

In fact, all drugs have some effects on mind and body. Depending on the quantity of the drug, the individual taking the drug, and the context of the usage, some of those effects are good, some are bad. Some drugs are illegal, because their bad effects generally outweigh the good, and some are legal because society has decided that the bad effects are generally not too bad. Some are restricted because they have good effects in only very specific contexts, and the potential for very bad effects in most other contexts.

When can we get past the "all evil" propaganda and get to a more nuanced "be aware of the effect it will have, take appropriate precautions." mindset?

My wife is a pilot, and she tells me that (oddly enough) it is American ATC who are the worse offenders for not using ICAO-standard English. The ICAO standard may be to say "Turn left 30 degrees to enter a circular holding pattern", but the American ATC will be the ones to say "Ya'll hang a left now and hang around over the island until we're ready for ya, OK?"

When people get confused, they blame the damn foreigners for not understanding English, instead of their own ATC for not using the standard terms which the pilots are required to know.

You set up the machines to all boot over the network, from a common image, and to load all system files from a NFS share.

The only thing on the workstation is the user's $HOME directory, and some local stuff like /tmp, /var, etc.

Your users don't get root on their workstations. They shouldn't need it. This isn't like Windows, where a huge number of apps don't run correctly if you don't have admin rights. Linux is designed under the assumption that users don't have admin rights.

Maybe I'm being naive, but what more do you need?

Colbert's naming games are nothing.

A while back we (Canada) had a right-wing politician (Stockwell Day) trying to pass a law that would force a binding referendum if a particular number of citizens signed a petition for it. I think he wanted to stamp out gay marriage, or immigration, or some other thing that "white skin and red neck guys don't like". (Sorry I don't recall the details.)

Before the "force a referendum with a petition" law passed, Rick Mercer (Canadian comedian who hosts a fake news show) started a petition to force a referendum to have Stockwell Day's name changed to Doris Day.

IIRC, there were enough names on the petition to trigger the referendum, but the law itself didn't actually pass, so the referendum didn't happen.

Now that's a naming game.

When I read this post, the one-line summary was cut off at "TAKEN FROM ASS". I always thought that was where Fox news got their content from.

The job of a reporter is to obtain, verify, and evaluate information.

Nope, the job of a reporter is to write enough column-inches per day to fill the newspaper, and to make it interesting enough that people buy the newspaper and read the advertisements. Reporters are judged firstly on the amount they produce, and secondly on how interesting the writing is. Correctness only factors in because a correct article may be more somewhat interesting than an incorrect one.

"Eyes on Ads" is all that really matters to any media company. Having correct news may help to get eyes on ads, but it is not the objective. And if a reporter takes twice as long to write a correct story, but only delivers 10% more eyes on ads, then it's not cost-effective.

If there is any factor other than pure profit controlling what gets reported, then it is the ideology of the owner of the media outlet (e.g. Fox News).

This is the harsh reality that the "news professionals" don't want to admit. It will remain this way until we get news sources that are paid for by the readers, not the advertisers.

Notice that the parent starts his post with "Once upon a time", which is the standard opening for fairy tales.

News has always been mostly biased and sloppy. The "good old days", when men were men, everyone was honest, people didn't get sick, child abuse didn't exist and everyone loved their spouses never existed. It's just a romantic notion, best viewed in sepa or black-and-white.

Also, nowdays we have the technology (access to other sources of news) to know when the a particular source of news is wrong, so we are often disgusted at how wrong the news is. Back then, the average user had no way of knowing if the news was correct or not, so they just trusted it. That is why the news appears more incorrect now than in the past.

The more I hear about this kind of "monetizing" effort, the more I imagine the water cooler conversation like: "I used to use the internet before it became totally useless. Now I just get my news from the newspaper."

ISPs and "content producers" are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.