Heh, I guess they're "under pressure" not to release models for music as a result :)

Sure, we will always put forward a different facet of our identity to each individual, group and context we interact with. Your hostility aside, I like where you're going here.

I don't think the parent comment was saying we need to narrow the lens we view each other through, rather that we need to learn to judge each other on more realistic criteria as part of adapting to a society where it is easy to pull up a whole history of an individual's interactions. But to some extent we can't choose how our own social emotions and instincts will cause us to react.

How can we as technologists designing systems that disseminate ever more information about our peers take steps to encourage constructive, reasoned reactions?

Um, do you speak from experience with infrastructure engineers or this is just the vague impression you get from Internet fora? I don't quite have the hubris to assert one way or another, I was hoping to better understand. Like most things I haven't done, I imagine than actually doing it is a lot more complicated than imagining it and there are some real-world aspects that make this far less impractical than it seems. Were I to guess, it wouldn't be the people setting up the system I'd blame. I imagine that no one wants to pay for it because it's not a guarantee and isn't noticable until it's too late which is probably after next quarter. Is brightly coloured plastic and some redundant VPNs and commodity PCs it really THAT expensive though in the context of generators and such?

I don't understand. Is this actually a threat or is it just an attempt to break into some webservers/desktops? Why would the SCADA system controlling things like gas and power be connected to any machine with an Internet routable IP or that is able to connect to any machine with an Internet routable IP? Is it impractical to only use bright red network cables for Important Things and, in those situations where it's worth the compromise, traverse a wireless link or a leased line (ie. phone system directly, not Internet) through a carefully configured VPN with more bright red cables on the other end? If you want access at your desk... another machine with bright red cables. And glue in all the usb ports. Power plants right? They don't do this do they? Why?