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.

That depends on what you mean. If you're talking about the sudden push for banning guns that happens after every school shooting, then yes I do find it to be one. If you're talking about using the relative statistics of school shootings in the US vs. other countries, then I find that to be a valid, and not a "for the children" argument, as it's typically brought up with other statistics to cover the entirety of gun-related crime/etc.

As an aside, you're stretching the Second Amendment's meaning if you think that all gun control violates it; not even the NRA thinks that. I live in a state where it's easier to get a gun than a car, and I find that to be ridiculous. I would be for tighter licensing controls, at least to the level of cars - why do I have to prove I can safely drive a car before I'm allowed a license to drive, but I can wander around in public with a gun without any kind of license, or that I can buy one without any evidence that I'm even remotely competent at gun safety?

Once again, that's a false argument. Nearly everything the government does - in fact, pretty much the entire point of having a government involved in any kind of regulation - is to do this. The point is minimum standards, and the general safety of the citizens. And the fallacy you're bringing up here is that what parents do with their children only affect their children. The current anti-vaxxer bullshit is a perfect example of this - the government didn't step in when it should have (by requiring kids going to school to be properly vaccinated), and now we've got measles and whooping cough and other nearly-eradicated diseases having major outbreaks. These outbreaks put more than just those unvaccinated individuals at risk - they also affect those with weak immune systems, babies too young for vaccines, people who got the vaccine but it just didn't take, etc. by interfering with the herd immunity.

Hate to tell you this, but that hostility you're talking about isn't just Democrats, and among Democrats it isn't even close to a universal belief. I am assuming you're talking about diverting public funds to private schools here, in which case the typical reaction against it - which I've heard from Democrats and Republicans alike - is "if the school's not doing good enough because it's underfunded, why are we taking money away from them instead of using it to fix them". Unless you're talking about the whole "public schools are actually liberal brainwashing programs made to teach kids that Jesus isn't real" thing I hear occasionally - at which point you're a crazy fucking idiot and have no idea what you're talking about.

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.