How many years is it since you first heard "Don't feed the troll", which clearly refers to it as the monster and not the fishing technique? Certainly before the dotcom days, in my case. I think you've fallen into the trap of defining the finer art of trolling as the only true trolling, when the ones posting goat.cx links were trolling for newbies just like you. Or taunting the guy with a short temper. Or tricking the veteran into writing a long, insightful reply just to realize he was wasting his time on a troll.

Baiting, flaming, pranking, bullying, flamebaiting, pretty much any way of subtly or not subtly at all trying to disrupt a discussion and have people go off on wild rants and off-topic discussions and flamefests and whatnot has been known as trolling for a very long time. Sure the elaborate trap to lure the wary was one part of it, but there were always those looking for the cheap lulz. And if you can't win by trolling, you can always accuse someone else of being a troll. And if you can't find anyone to take the bait, be the clueless n00b too so you can get everyone to shout at you to stop feeding the troll.

I think a combination works best, major releases makes most sense when it comes to technology/code you must support while a minimum number of years makes sure you won't go Firefox and suddenly be at version 40. For all the other bashing Microsoft can take, their policy is actually a good model:

Basically you get a guaranteed 10 years of support from release, 7 years as long as you're buying the latest version (minimum 2+5) and if it takes longer the support period stretches too. Don't expect another XP though, Vista runs from January 2007 to April 2017, Win7 from October 2009 to January 2020 both 10 years, 3 months. And with Win10 seemingly on schedule for release this year it'll be the same with Win8.

"Oh come on officer, I was only 0.25c above the limit!"

Ordinary fireproof safes are designed to keep papers from bursting into flames. Data rated fireproof safes keep the interior temperature under 125F/50C, like say this one so computer media survives just fine. In fact, this a "Why can't I be arsed to google this for five minutes?" question.

No, what he wanted it for is to get professional Photoshop experience on his resume and as a stepping stone to a better paid position. He just can't say that and you're too focused on technical aspects to realize he's the smart one getting the company to foot the bill. Or did you get a check when you saved the company money by using GIMP? Do you think the potential license savings is going to make you more marketable? Unless you're looking at employers trying to skimp in all the wrong places, you're not. He's likely to get more and better offers having worked with expensive professional tools than a tool every amateur can play around with. Kinda like nobody hires a photographer who takes all his pictures with an iPhone, even if the pictures are fine.

Well I suppose you could always hope the Republicans win and be called an ageist instead, going by their last two candidates.

Until they pass a law demanding that all encryption software must be able to comply with lawful warrants to decrypt the contents and outlaws the rest, making it a crime by iteself. Or just create some procedural rules to keep you in contempt of court until you decrypt it. You really think they're going to clamp down on all proprietary software and totally ignore open source just like that? I admire your optimism but if they can make this happen open source encryption will be on death row.

Those who want to believe otherwise rarely let that get in their way, that we're still working out the minute details of complex interactions is an easy way to dismiss everything. See evolution, the climate, medicine, nutrition, ecosystems, pollution, almost everything that doesn't reduce down to a physics/chemistry experiment really.

It's the best tool for the job if you want to run a Windows network? Seriously, it's not like you decide management tools and let your platform/applications revolve around that. This is the step after you've convinced everyone to give up Outlook/Exchange and Word, accounting to give up Excel, PHBs to give up Powerpoint, design/marketing to give up Photoshop and every other bit of Windows-only software they got and your server admins ask "So what's our replacement for AD?" and they're going to ask you if it has features X, Y and Z just like the others did.

My guess is that every argument you just said will be met with a shrug and "It seems to work just fine for us, don't know what you're talking about. So how do we push a group policy to all clients in Linux?" and if your best answer is to write a script to ssh into each box and patch a configuration file they'll just roll their eyes and say "Linux does not have the necessary management features we need" and you've got one more group added to the list of migration opponents. Contrary to the *nix philosophy, I've yet to meet anyone happy to replace one tool with five, even if each is arguably a bit better. Swiss army knifes works quite well in the real world.

On the other hand, not an inch has been driven without a licensed driver behind the wheel. Until and unless it drives itself it's only a glorified cruise control, because it doesn't free you up to do anything else, it doesn't allow for self-driving cars and it doesn't lets minors, the intoxicated or anyone else impaired to use the car. It doesn't matter if it can drive 99% of the roads 99% of the time if we still need that human there for the 1% when something weird happens. And unlike industrial robots in controlled environment, there are going to be weird things happening.

You can look at the resistance when it comes to pilot-less planes, which should be a lot easier. They have autopilots, they have instrument landing systems and in theory they don't need pilots but in practice they all have them anyway. I suspect the same will happen with cars, in theory we don't need drivers but it'll take a really long while until it happens in practice. And that doesn't include any major setbacks like a critical bug causing a spectacular pile-up or mowing down a pedestrian. It only needs to happen once to set self-driving cars back 10 years or more.

About 2000 years ago, we mostly kept the peace for over 200 years. And you're measuring the casualties after the deadliest war in human history, particularly when you consider #2 and #3 being ~100 years long and WWII six so it's no wonder normal years look good. And when you consider the global thermonuclear war that almost happened in 1962, I think you're cherry picking data. I think perhaps it's safe to say we've swapped frequency with severity, because I don't think there's any doubt that a potential WWIII will dwarf WWII's casualties, possibly on day one.

Of course you might say that's not going to happen. That's what they said before WWI. That's what they said before WWII. That's what they'll say before WWIII. Don't forget that with alliances and pacts and whatnot one small dispute can start dragging more and more states into the conflict like dominoes falling. People around here stare at their local geopolitical bubble and don't realize that the same alliance that protects us is also likely to drag us into conflicts far far away to aid them, the way we expect them to aid us. It's like we don't want to acknowledge that part of the equation.

On a WORM tape, that's the only right answer to this particular question.

For ordinary backup of systems I'd consider just having enough copies on HDDs, because it tends to be fairly obvious when they fail. If the system is reasonably intelligent I should be able to plug in any drive and it'll seamlessly add it to the backup cloud downloading what it needs from other nodes, I'm not sure it's the most cost effective way but it's not really the price/TB that drives backup costs, often it's a total disaster to lose 10GB of important business documents, source code etc.

Manually swapping tapes without a tape robot is a massive pain and prone to human failure. If you have a single tape robot in a single location, that's a huge single point of failure. And if you have a redundant array of very expensive tape robots, well you're in the 0,1% of businesses I know. You'll find many companies with <100 employees total with maybe 50 at a main office and 10-20 at a couple branch offices. You can make a good geographically redundant backup system from that, as long as we're not talking huge (but important!) amounts of data.

It's not a thought crime if you have the intent to go through with it when you have the means and opportunity. If you write stories about kidnapping a kid or roleplay it with your adult girlfriend, that's fantasy and a thought crime. If someone provides you with ether, a getaway van with stolen plates and point out a secluded place where a kid likes to play alone late at night and you get caught trying to actually kidnap a child that's no longer a thought crime. Which is why we catch them in the act or reasonably close to, not where they might have any "alternate future" in which they don't go through with it.

Making it appear like the risk/reward ratio is in your favor is not entrapment. Maybe you wouldn't have taken the time and effort or found the courage to find/learn/make/use those means and opportunities yourself, but it's still not thought crime. It's more like real, unreleased criminal potential where they're testing your answer to "If you knew you could get away with it, would you....?" which is an entirely different question than "Do you ever dream of....?" because one implies a desire to carry it out in the real world and the other one doesn't. That's a rather important distinction.

Replace USA and Ireland with China and USA respectively and ask yourself if you think it's okay for the Chinese government to subpoena a Chinese company to provide data from a US subsidiary about US citizens, stored in the US. My guess is that most Americans would strongly object to their data being handed over to foreign governments that way, particularly without the US legal system getting a say. In particular, to a court not bound by the 4th amendment or any other protection that data might have had under US law. So it's one rule for us, one rule for everybody else.

It's like the US government hasn't backed down an inch since the Snowden revelations and is still in "all your data are belongs to us" mode. Then again people continue to use GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Facebook and all these other US services that'll jump when the US government yanks their chain so I guess people don't care enough. It's obviously to anyone that cares that any relation to the US is the touch of death when it comes to privacy.

Texting and it's roots in IRC talk like LOL, BRB and emoticons has greatly influenced informal communication, but if want to write a paper formal English hasn't changed nearly as much and that's without a governing body. My native language has been formally regulated for 100+ years, meaning there's a formal guide to what words and grammar are "correct" and that schools formally and universities, public institutions and many other informally defer to as correct Norwegian. It has been revised three times since WWII (1959, 1981, 2005) though the revisions of course incorporate and adapt to how people use it I still think it's fairly possible to have strong control over an artificial language.

What will kill any "simple" universal language is the verbosity, we say "I'm in" instead of "I agree to your proposal" even though it is grammatically gibberish, in what? And "I am" describes a state you're in, not a change of state like making a decision but it's effective assuming your counterpart also understands you. I believe some have worked on such a form of "intermediate language" as the basis of universal translators where everything is rigorously defined and only the mappings to human languages are ambiguous, but it's not a language anyone would speak.

And what we need changes over time, 150 years ago nobody knew a "car" so if we optimized for the 1800s there'd be nothing shorter than automobile free. Other words go out of need, when did you last use a quill? Today we'd happily relinquish it to be called a featherpen and leave the shorter word for something useful. Or the way people in Africa don't need many words for snow and ice, which obviously take up short combos in English. Which is also why we "steal" words like gay or tweet, that used to have entirely different meanings - it's not like homosexual has ceased to exist but it's way too many syllables for everyday use.

That's also why we need different layers of terminology, a doctor might talk to a three year old about how his tummy hurts, he might talk to you about how you have an ulcer and he might talk to another doctor about a venticular inflammation of the gasteroperiax interor or some other semi-Latin gibberish. We have different needs and a universal language often acts like there's one way we could speak to each other when that's clearly not the case no matter what language we speak in now. And it's probably more important that the doctors are able to quickly and exactly pass information between them than whether it's understandable for everyone else. Same with game developers talking about voxels and tesselation and so on, after all we are mostly not talking to people totally ignorant of the subject and we adapt.