Not picking on you personally, but there sure are a lot of dumb ass conspiracy theories on a thread about critical thinking.

The purpose of the neurological changes that take place in a teenagers brain seems to be in part to inspire rebellion against their parents to the point where they flee the nest, once the rebellion succeeds grandchildren bring relative harmony for a decade or more.

Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.

The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.

In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.

Yes, the very nature of large organisations drains initiative, males in particular evolved to work in small groups of 5-6 and live in tribes of ~150 people, anyone not in their tribe was by definition "sub-human" but not necessarily a mortal enemy. A wise organisation acknowledges this and will give small teams a great deal of autonomy to achieve a particular goal, eg: think how the military would tackle the goal of "keep the park tidy and well maintained", you may have to explain to them that anyone can use the park, but you get the idea.

Disclaimer: I spent seven years in the 90's as technical lead on an automated job dispatch system that handled thousand of workers and tens of thousands of jobs each day, it covered the continent of Australia, at that time it was by far the largest mobile dispatch system in the southern hemisphere in volume of work and geographical coverage. The backend used "linear programming" techniques (WW2 logistics), no human could beat the daily work plan it churned out. A bunch of execs would get up at 5am and paw all over the plan, add some "special constraints" and end up with a less efficient solution. Often the "special constraints" were accepted anyway, since - we can't have (say) the telecoms minister waiting 2 days for a new install in his office, it has to be done first thing today, and it has to be done by employee X who drinks at the same pub, who gives a flying fuck if 25 nobodys drop off the original work plan?

Because we never had people trying to wipe us out before Muslims came along...

Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.

I'm 55, the phrase has been around for a long time, Carl Sagan was fond of it (unfortunately my HS never mentioned it) so it wasn't until I dropped out and saw Sagan and Randi talking about it on TV that I became personally aware that it was a skill that can be taught. Perhaps it's been hijacked lately in the US to mean something else but I haven't noticed. To me it has always meant 'skepticism', in particular self-skepticism. Sagan also referred to it as his "bullshit detection kit". As for TFA, memorising facts* is essential but insufficient, ie: you can't even start to think about things that you don't remember, which is what Newton was getting at with his "shoulders of giants" comment.

*Facts as in - "two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them", that the force is ~9.8m/s on Earth's surface is trivia, handy to know but not essential to the concept that's being memorised since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong. Of course there are exceptions where memorising numbers is a useful "short-cut" for the student, multiplication tables being the most obvious

AIUI the "clones" are totally different chips inside that present the same interface. So you can tell the difference by disolving the package and inspecting the die.

As a manufacturer of devices I can see a few defenses you can employ

1: avoid chips that hide their internal details from you. The FTDI clones are totally different internally from the genuine devices but because that is all hidden from it's difficult to tell the difference without decapping them. Something like a microcontroller is much harder to clone without the customer noticing.
2: avoid manufacturing in a country where faking things and substituting parts from non-approved sources are culturally accepted.
3: if you are big enough to justify it put in place a program of destructive testing of samples of incoming material. Especially if supply problems push you into buying from non-approved sources.
4: don't buy from non-approved sources just to save a few bucks.

Of course all these defenses will cost you money which is why many device builders don't do them.

That's because you don't want to get between a land whale and his supersized Big Mac with extra cheese and bacon, double onion rings and bucket of Coke.

How is a research group with non-privileged access to third party data going to determine such things as shipping addresses? The bitcoin blockchain doesn't extend verification to those shipping addresses etc, so the point stands - it doesn't tie in anything which cannot be faked, all you actually get with the blockchain is "random number X did something with second random number Y".

Great, the bitcoin blockchain can't be faked - but what about these logs that say "bitcoin wallet X purchased some cocaine and sent it to Barack Obama, The White House, Fuck You Street, Merka"?

Theres an expression "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense". This is especially true when dealing with small samples.

Not finding evidence of transmission during that period doesn't mean we should stop looking. The cost of following up all contacts of the trivial number of people with ebola outside the core outbreak countries is trivial compared to what the cost would be if one of those people acted as the seed for a significant outbreak.

That makes no sense.

Look at it from a macro-economic perspective: The reason we're moving to automation is because it increases efficiency, allowing us to produce more goods with fewer resources. That will increase average standard of living.

There are a couple of ways it could go wrong, of course. One is that the increased efficiency and therefore increased wealth could end up concentrated in the hands a small percentage of super-wealthy people. We've actually seen a lot of this over the last few decades, but we've seen it previously during other technology-driven economic restructurings as well, and what always happens is that competition eventually drives the margins of the super successful down and in the end the wealth ends up getting spread more broadly.

That points to the other way it could go wrong: The common man only gets his share of the increased wealth by doing something to earn it. Even though increased efficiency means there's more to go around, barring some sort of large scale government-driven redistribution, you still have to work for your share of it... which means you have to be able to do something that others who have wealth consider of sufficient value to pay you. So the other way it could go wrong is that there may simply be nothing available for such people to do.

That last is also a risk we've seen bandied about in past economic shifts, especially the shift from agricultural to industrial labor. What has happened in the past is that we've created new kinds of jobs doing previously unheard-of or even previously-frivolous things. I don't see any reason that this time should be different. I expect the transition to be painful -- and the faster it happens the more painful it will be -- but I don't think there's any end to what people want. People with resources will always want things that people without resources can supply. I don't claim to have any idea what those things will be.

It's also possible that I'm wrong, and that we'll have to take a socialistic approach to distributing the fruits of automation-driven productivity increases. I don't think so, and I think we should be careful not to move that direction too quickly, because it has huge negative impacts on productivity and we're going to need all of the productivity increases we can get, but it is possible.

This driver does not appear to make counterfeiting significantly more difficult, AIUI the counterfeit USB-Serial chips are microcontroller based and what the driver does is to rewrite one of it's IDs in a way that fails on the genuine chips but succeeds on the counterfiets. It will be trivial for the counterfieters to update their firmware to act like a genunine chip in this case.

What this driver did is make devices containing counterfeit chips mysteriously fail in the field long after deployment with no indication of why. Having a load of your devices suddenly and mysteriously fail in the field is not going to be good for your reputation.

Sure if you have any sense you try to keep counterfiet parts out of your supply chain but for the little guys that can be easier said than done. You are totally reliant on your distributors not to supply counterfeit parts and your manufacturing partners not to make unauthorised substitutions.

The fact is that it's going to happen regardless of where minimum wages are set, or even if there are legally-mandated minimum wages (as opposed to the market-determined real minimum wages). Anyone who thinks most unskilled jobs aren't going away is crazy. The question is at what rate this change will occur, and it seems quite clear that high minimum wages will make more automation economical sooner, pushing the rate of change.

We're edging towards a major economic restructuring driven by widespread automation. We've had automation-driven restructurings in the past, and dealt with them, and this too will be handled. But when you're talking about widespread elimination of old jobs and creation of new jobs, speed kills. Retraining, and even just adjusting to the new reality, take time, and in the meantime millions upon millions of displaced workers are a huge drain on the economy, not to mention miserable.

I think it's pretty clear that high minimum wages are a forcing function for this transition, and I don't think it's something we really want to force. Ideally, it would be better to slow it down, at least in terms of the human cost, though the most obvious mechanisms for slowing it (labor subsidies) may also dangerously distort the economy.