The fine was on top of the back wages.

9 month before that the excuse of beer goggles came up.

Always excuses for Powershell's insane verbiage.

What exactly is ambiguous about "mv", "rm" and the like?

Microsoft cared so little about scripting that they left everyone for fifteen years with CMD.EXE and VBScript. I made them work, of course, because what choice did I have. Throw in some third party tools, and you had a solution, though an often very klunky kludgy one. But yes, in general, the notion was that you would just go into Administrative Tools and everything you needed was there... but everything never was there. Frankly, I don't even think GPOs became relatively complete until Server 2008.

The problem here is that the word "troll" has subtly shifted in meaning. When I was first on the Internet in the early 1990s, it was basically online assholes who would make rude comments, try to start flamewars and the like. I don't remember anyone who actually made threats against other people being referred to as "trolls". Back then being abusive like that could get you kicked off of mailing lists, sent you into-moderation hell on moderated newsgroups, and possibly even having your newsfeed terminated by your provider.

This new definition of "troll" is very recent; Twitter-age nomenclature.

"user-settable blacklist."

user, here, is ftdi, though ;(

I don't know if it ever went as far as trying to get rid of sysadmins (Redmond has made no lack of money off of MCSEs and the like over the years), but they certain encouraged an attitude that command prompts, scripting and of the more "traditional" methods of system administration had been rendered obsolete; or rather, would be with "the next version". I have been subjected to numerous issues over the years that required me manually altering the registry, registering/re-registering/de-registering COM DLLs, screwing around in the bowels of IIS, Exchange, SQL Server, and yes, in many cases, invoking the dreaded command line. It was always alright because "In the next version, this functionality will be added!"

And now, as of 2014, Microsoft has pretty much flipped everything on its head. The GUI admin tools are all but deprecated, viewed as the lesser way to administer a Windows server, and PowerShell is proper and appropriate way.

The worst part about all of this is neither Microsoft or its legion of faithful sysadmins see any irony in this. Unix, in their view, is still some antiquated operating system with dated methodologies and philosophies (despite having commands like Move-Item to *nix's mv).

My hypothesis is how black holes often work like a gravitational lens for light, they could be located in the right spot that in essence focuses the xray energy right onto our location.

One of the things I am missing is the idea of a whitebox mobile devices. so you can build your own phone and your own tablet.
It may not be Sexy as an iPad, but you can configure in ways to get what you want out of it. More speed, more memory, better video, or huge battery life...
That is what made the PC popular, was the fact that you could get a PC configured for what you need it for. A cheap low end box, to a high end system. Was all possible.
This also allowed for a bunch of small companies to start building computers.

Days after another Islamic radical mowed down two Canadian soldiers.

It's not time to panic, to be sure. It's time to deal with radical Islamist extremists.