No, nutballs who decide to kill soldiers on the street because they are part of an organization that is taking some modest steps to help stop other nutballs from killing more innocents as those nutballs attempt to institute a medieval Islamic thugocracy in as many places as possible ... that's what precipitated these attacks.

If the crazies weren't mad at the concept of having their Islamist wet dream torn down, then their followers in places like Canada wouldn't be getting the message to go out and kill soldiers in the street. None of that would happen without theocratic wackadoos deciding to kill those who are trying to stop their tactics. The attacks in Canada were precipitated by religion, not by Canada's involvement in trying to stop any army of tens of thousands of religious murders.

1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985.
2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.

Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...

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.

30% Interesting
30% Overrated
20% Flamebait

Final result? -2 Troll

Looks like this isn't moderation "by the people" any more...

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.

This is just evidence that the US has progressed beyond high tech manufacturing - a 20th century legacy industry.

The US is now fully connected and chooses to specialize in bleeding edge products like selfies.

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.

Except we go after their financial networks, launch targeted attacks against them and so on. So yes, we do indeed go after them. It's much harder when their networks are using liquid assets traded through the black market now isn't it.

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.

Yeah. 18 years. That's the same bullshit climate change deniers have been using for a long time. Why the past 18 years? Because once you start going back farther in time, the evidence is undeniable and clear.

But if you limit what you look at and ignore the numbers that give clear evidence, yeah, you can force data to say whatever lies you want it to say.