The important part is that we are NOT seeing such rapid changes amongst the PREDATOR population. So this is not unusual at all.

The lizards that are not sticky enough to climb out of reach of the predators are the lizards that get eaten by the predators.

Way too many people don't realize that our current economic and political system would not survive if critical thinking skills became commonplace.

Possibly. Although the same can be said of every other economic and political system as well. Which is a bit of a problem. People are messy. And each person has his/her own priorities and beliefs and weirdness.

We are destroying our own planet in the name of making 0.01% wealthy, and most of us, most of the time, are perfectly content to participate in the process in any way that pays decently and offers "interesting" work.

Just because someone exercises critical thinking does not mean that that person will come to the same conclusions that you have. They probably aren't starting with the same objectives as you.

Which is why companies DO NOT WANT real critical thinking skills.

They want people who think like they do and who come to the same conclusions that they do based upon the same information that they have.

We had slavery in the US once, it was "legal". That doesn't make it "right".

As it turns out, "most people" didn't like competing against slave labor in the labor market or against giant slave-staffed plantations for farmland.

It's cute that you think that slavery ended because the populace and the government felt high-minded and righteous about it.

There was a time when their readership was white-shoe, blue-blood Ivy Leaguers who didn't have much appetite for low-rent right wing politics.

Now their readership are low-rent capitalists from the hinterlands who think that cheap greed plays and ideology go hand-in-hand, so that's what they give them.

And even without the law it seems fairly simple.

You do not INTENTIONALLY break equipment that you do not own. You do not do that. No matter how you feel about that equipment. Particularly when the person who now owns said equipment has no idea that there is a problem.

And I'd be wary of any company that could not understand that.

They seem to have moved to the description "less lethal" when talking about weapons of this class, especially projectile weapons like pepper spray pellet guns and the "rubber" bullets used in extreme riot control circumstances.

Non-lethal weapons would allow protestors to protest without getting killed.

Protestors should be able to protest WITHOUT the police using either lethal or non-lethal weapons against them.

The important thing here is to take away the governments ability to kill.

Except that you are not doing that.

You are providing the police with pain-compliance (aka "torture") devices.

And as can be seen in many news reports, once the police/government has them, they will use them. And that use will not be INSTEAD of more lethal options. They will be used when the victims do not IMMEDIATELY follow the orders of the police. Even if those orders are illegal to begin with.

Those weapons will be treated as a "force multiplier". Not as a preferred option over lethal force.

I think most individual server filesystem monitoring for free space is kind of a waste of time anymore or at least low prioirty.

SANs and virtualized storage and modern operating systems can extend filesystems easily. Thin provisioning means you can allocate surpluses to filesystems without actually consuming real disk until you use it. Size your filesystem with surpluses and you won't run out.

Now you only have to monitor your SAN's actual consumption, and hopefully you bought enough SAN to cover your growth until you can buy another one.

I listened to an economics podcast that discussed the role of automation in the economy.

The Google car came up and the MIT professor who was being interviewed said that contrary to what a lot of people think, the Google car is highly dependent on very detailed annotated maps and can't just detect stuff like traffic controls (lights, signals, etc).

I can see a driverless cars happening in urban areas if "self-drive" features start getting built into roads, like RFID chips embedded in lane stripes, traffic controls that have RF signalling. Even then you would probably need car-car signalling.

But at some point it seems like they aren't driverless cars as much as they are trackless trains or some kind of personalized mass transit. Decide you want a ride someplace, request a car and it follows GPS + signalling to your house from its parking place and then delivers you to a destination. Uber without the driver.

That makes sense on one level, but using telnet is a bad habit one shouldn't get into.

I agree. A better habit is setting up and using SSH.

Not only that but "defense in depth". Do NOT rely upon your perimeter defenses to stop all attacks. It only takes one person with a compromised laptop and you're cracked.

1) these were default passwords that everyone on the team knew

SSH can be set up the same.

2) the development VLAN is secured from outsiders

Until it is compromised.

Remember, in defense you have to be right on everything all the time. An attacker can just stumble into something you missed. Like someone's laptop that was brought in when it should not have been.

Can we first then agree one what exactly constitutes a troll?

Of course not. Defining it would undermine the censorship power of people who want to ban/control/censor "trolls". A vague definition that includes anything from "classic" trolling -- inflammatory opinions about a topic designed to elicit responses ("If Macs didn't suck so much...") to whatever existing harassing, threatening or fraudulent behavior has been re-labeled trolling allows maximum latitude for those given the authority to censor it.

I think "the new trolling" is a complicated concept, driven by the large number of people who weren't users of longtime Internet social forums (web-based message boards, USENET) but have come online in the age of Facebook and have sort of everyday expectations of civil social engagement which are less common. They may see what passed for heated debate in years past (EMACS! vi!) as pretty hostile.

Another driving force seems to be really extreme people who seem kind of publicity-driven who really seem to embrace what amounts not to trolling but to harassment and defamation, either just for spite and publicity or with some kind of weak self-righteous justification.

This seems to be the way its actually being adopted if you start to consider the collision detection, adaptive cruise control and lane detection systems in some cars.

There was an article hear about a luxury car that has the ability to let you take your hands off the wheel for a certain amount of time under "cruise control" conditions and it will actually drive itself for a brief period. I think the article was about some "hack" that let you evade the built-in time limit for taking your hands off the wheel, meaning that the self-driving component was manufacturer-limited to avoid being used as a self-driving car.

I'd guess that self-driving cars will get adopted more this way than suddenly buying a car that can drive itself everywhere perfectly.

I've bought clothes from LL Bean for over 25 years. On more than one occasion over that time I've noticed new pants bought in the same size and style as I've been wearing suddenly getting a little roomier.

I'm not sure if the sizing changes were the result of changes in fashion or adaptation to a clientele with more girth. If you look at magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of mens clothing was much slimmer fitting and perhaps a looser fit became the fashion standard. But it could also be that people were simply buying larger sizes to accommodate weight gain and vendors adapted their sizing in ways that made them looser fitting without specifically altering the specific dimensions of waist size or leg length.

It could be just changes in contract manufacturers, but I think that kind of variation would be too small to notice.

But that's what we do, legislate morality.

Stealing is morality. Killing is morality. We legislate all of those things.

That's what makes this something of an intellectual puzzle to me. I agree with the idea that illustrations, no matter how realistic, don't harm anyone directly. But sex and children are an indefensible combination in any way, shape or form. I don't know that I can say even pictures of children in a sexual context made and seen only by their creator are ever ok. Trafficking in them just guarantees its immoral.

The CDC cannot be everywhere.

I don't want them everywhere -- I do want them in the very few places that have Ebola patients, though.