Depends on what he tweets with it. Or threatens to. Anybody who reads Slashdot should know how easy it is to get a lynch mob stalking some random stranger with death threats with lies.

You've clearly never, ever worked in customer service.

He had that option when she threatened to call the police. He declined. Strictly speaking, he still has that option in a civil court, but will decline that, too, I expect.

This guy's only disability is that he's an asshole, and that's not a protected class.

That's one interpretation. The other is that - as the articles say - he named her in the very public tweet, and might have threatened to escalate further and encourage people to harass, threaten, or do worse to her. It's not implausible that she did feel threatened by his behavior, and threatened behavior.

You, of course, will assume that the article is a true and complete account, because that's the popular thing to do on the internet, but there's always two sides.

One thing that was included in the article was that he named the gate agent in the tweet. That pretty much proves your theory that his intent was intimidation. Given how easy it is to convince stupid assholes on the internet to stalk some random stranger with death threats, I'm not all that sure it was an overreaction.

If it was as he described, his best reaction would be to tell them to go ahead and call the cops, which would have proved that the gate agent doesn't have the authority to do so, and determine whether or not their supervisor was an idiot.

I dunno about you, but I - who have no children - would rather be sitting in the uncomfortable chair at the gate waiting for the idiot parents with unruly children get their shit together than be sitting in the even more uncomfortable, far more cramped seats on the plane. Let the parents board first, by all means.

Then I suggest you not enter any races in which the loser will die.

I'm told that the F35 is the largest, heaviest fighter with an airframe that produces the most drag, that the US has ever produced...

And where did you hear it? According to wikipedia:

Wingspan:
F35: 35'
F14: 64' / 38' (swept)
F15: 42'
F16: 32'
F18 C/D: 40'

Empty Weight
F35: 29,000 lb
F14: 43,700 lb
F15: 28,000 lb
F16: 18,900 lb
F18: 23,000 lb

Combat radius (internal stores)
F35: 600 nm
F14: 500 nm
F15: 1000 nm
F16: 340 nm
F18: 400 nm

Of what can be verified, none of what you heard is correct...

Is this the release that adds support for HiDPI on external displays? I was pretty disappointed when I got a 4k display to find that it was unusable under OS X 10.9.3. (You can drive it at 4k, but cannot scale the interface).

Double kudos for writing it on touch screen devices. I do some Play-by-email roleplaying and at times I do posts on my Nexus 7, and man oh man it's difficult. I wouldn't even dream of doing long prose writing on a tablet.

The fact that someone bothered to make uPnP suggests that there's a need for this capability for average users. Things such as voip, gaming, exchanging files - if you can't have peer-to-peer connections, you're reliant on big centralised services for all of these things. Granted, we seem to have gone down that path already (perhaps driven in no small part by the prevalence of NAT), and these services may have a place, but do we want it to be *all* there is to the internet?

As for your second point - well, Microsoft seem to have managed it, and if they can surely anyone can. I accidentally left my Windows box connected to the internet without an external firewall for a few months with no ill effects. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Monty Python gave the answer ages ago.

I'm even quite sure that's their motivation. Or at the very least their excuse. "We're keeping them safe!"

Ignoring that people should first and foremost have the right to choose whether they WANT to be kept safe. That's the fallacy of self proclaimed "protectors": They don't ask those they "protect" whether they'd want to be protected in the first place. "Protecting" someone against their consent is basically illegal restraint.

But the manager was dead, right? Please say so, I need closure!

Do you really expect the average user to know about IPs, ports, TCP/UDP etc.? That's not very realistic. I don't agree that a safe alternative is impossible - there's no magic power that packets have to hack a computer. Any failings are due to poorly written software.

If an application doesn't need to listen for connections, it shouldn't open a port. A firewall won't make any difference here.
If an application does need to listen for connections the firewall will need to let them through. Again, the firewall doesn't help - at least not at the level of sophistication you'd see in a home router's firewall.

No. That was point:
2) Sometimes the guy at the top doesn't have the best interests of the country in mind, and nobody can make him.

If you want to call that corruption you can. In my mind it merely includes corruption.

FWIW, I don't think that power corrupts, rather it's lack of consequences. This is closely related, but not the same. But it's also true that power attracts the corruptible (as a gradient). Different people are corruptible in different ways and to different degrees. And one consequence of that is that they are attracted in differing amounts to different kinds of power. The guy who's attracted to being a policeman isn't the same as the guy who's attracted to being a politician, and neither is the same as the guy attracted to being a banker.

P.S.: Yes, that's still an oversimplification. Think of it as a finger pointing at the moon. Look at the moon, not the finger.