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.

Dear NSA,

I would love to design the phone that you are asking for. please pay the sum of $USD 30 million into my bank account and i will organise it straight away. also, please sign a contract that you will subsidise the cost of every single phone sold because in order to add the extra encryption that you are expecting it will push up the price, and in a competitive business world nobody would buy it without subsidies.

I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Signed, Luke Leighton
(Libre and FSF-Endorseable Hardware Design Engineer)

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.

I think it would actually have gone much harder for SpaceX if a F9 had exploded before Antares. Orbital is not going anywhere and will get another chance to send their payload to the Space Station. The investors in SpaceX aren't going to be flighty, and neither Air Force nor NASA are going to close the game because of an explosion, given their history.

ULA doesn't have much chance to use an explosion to their benefit without dredging up the status of their Russian engines, the multiple Delta explosions and the old Atlas one.

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.