It's a good question, but I don't share your dismissal that it's just, "criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment."

As someone with experience hiring/managing/firing people, I think there is something to the criticism that our schools don't prepare people for the need of critical thinking in the "real world", and it's a criticism that I've made many times. As I see it, it's very common to see workers in the position of having been given instructions on how to deal with a problem, and then encountering a situation where those instructions don't apply. How does the worker respond?

In my experience, very often the worker will just follow the instructions anyway, even if they notice that they're doing something that makes no sense and will obviously cause problems. A fair amount of the time-- again, at least in my experience-- workers will follow the instructions up until a point, figure out that they can't proceed, and then do some other things that also don't make sense, and then pretend that they've finished the job. Every once in a while, if someone is smart, they'll stop and ask for further guidance, but that's rare because nobody likes to admit that they don't know the answer. Even more rarely, someone will actually come up with a comprehensive solution that actually solves the problem.

And really, all that is just one symptom. Another symptom is the extent to which people will come to work, do exactly what they've been asked to do, and nothing more. Often, there's no curiosity about the role that they're playing within the company, about how their role could be expanded or refined, or somehow changed. Even the better employees are generally those who just follow instructions, and those people rarely seem to grasp why they were provided those specific instructions, let alone figure out a better set of instructions for themselves. And if they had come up with a better solution, they rarely suggest it to their boss.

So what is "critical thinking" in this context? I think it involves "problem solving", which might be no less vague. It involves a sort of curiosity, to want to know what's actually going on, and why those things are going on. I'm not sure what else...

But school often doesn't prepare us for that. We're trained to sit down, shut up, do exactly what we're told and no more. Don't ask questions. Don't imagine that you might be able to come up with a better solution. Just do what you're told, and don't think too much about it.

It's damaged (unusable by the user) until they get a tool from the people who damaged it. Sounds like extortion to me.

I think I mentioned elsewhere, a part of the problem with the sort of notifications I'm talking about is that I'm receiving them from many different vendors/services/devices who each choose their own standards, forms, and methodologies. It's the nature of things that I don't necessarily have any control over what I receive, how I receive it, when I receive it, or what form it comes in as. If I could even control what came in the subject line, then I wouldn't consider it such a problem.

For example, it's not just notifications saying, "Recovery: server.domain.com is online", but also any number of different notifications from different domain registrars that a domain is about to expire. I can't make GoDaddy, Namecheap, and NetworkSolutions follow the same procedures for how far in advance I get notified that a domain will expire, or what that notification will look like. I can't even stop one of those companies from deciding to change their own policies, changing the subject, content, and sender of those kinds of notifications. In fact, just to give an example, Dropbox uses Mailchimp for a bunch of their notifications, which means that each email is sent from a different sender address.

You can say, "Well these companies should have a better method of notification than email," or "These companies should be following certain standards," but good luck with making that happen. Until you can come up with a better solution, I'd really appreciate if someone could come up with some good tools for managing this kind of flood of notifications.

Actually, he was supposed to be taking his temperature regularly even if he felt fine. That was part of the protocol for coming back from an Ebola outbreak.

I don't know about that. The reports that I've read have admitted that he was feeling ill in the days beforehand, but that he didn't have a fever. At least, he says he didn't have a fever, and he says he was taking his temperature twice a day, as he was supposed to. So I guess it depends on whether you want to take his word for it-- referring to the guy who knew he might have Ebola, was feeling sick, and still decided to go bowling.

If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on, "He wasn't checking his temperature and doesn't really know when the fever started."

In my fantasy world, you wouldn't defend a corporation for damaging people's hardware.

They're rendering your device unusable, which they may not do knowingly.

That is irrelevant. You cannot give yourself rights with shrinkwrap license. The law still wins.

If only one of them does it, they will have lost money over this.

Yes, if they did it by accident. If it can be shown that they did it on purpose, and that is almost certainly the case here, then it doesn't matter what they put in the license.

Some of that kind of nonsense happens in Powerpoint presentations-- embedding images that might be a couple hundred megabytes each. I see that in marketing companies often enough, but it's still been a pretty steady rate of growth for the past few years.

However, I still don't see multi-gigabyte Word or Excel documents, at least not often enough that I recall it.

Well yeah, lots of people are. An awful lot of work is still done in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. No need to embed a 5 GB video just because you have the space.

Not in mine. Granted, we're both going off of anecdotal evidence, but in my favor, my experience is based off of managing a few hundred servers and a couple thousand desktops.

It seems like most workstations/servers that I manage, if they're taking up massive amounts of space, it's very often because they're storing lots of old stuff. Several years ago, when we only had a 30 GB drives, people would go back and clear out, delete, and archive old data. Now they just store it, because why not? Storage is cheap. Most of the time, it doesn't seem like the data set is growing faster, but they're just holding on to old stuff longer.

So yes, I think it's true, if you have a 60 GB drive that's 90% full, it's a more pressing concern than if you have a 10 TB RAID that's 90% full. The RAID may be a bigger problem, but it's a less immediate problem.

I think you mean "superior to", because "better than" is based on a judgement by others. You could make an objective judgement based on numbers of some sort, there.

It's GM's fault that they only have two or three cars worth buying, and that they're not selling an EV.

it means none of those things but storage cost. The insurance for the second vehicle is reduced, and often the insurance on your primary vehicle is reduced when you add another vehicle to your policy, even if you don't decrease the primary vehicle's mileage. And you get an older vehicle for the second car, and it costs you less to buy, less in depreciation, etc.

It still might not work out, but it doesn't cost twice as much.

Then they definitely get smacked down for dicking with interstate commerce.