They're out there, you know? An entire group that has brought down airplanes killing people through their actions. The government and other agencies work around the clock to counter these threats because they definitely will do it again and we are otherwise not safe in the skies. I'm talking about birds, of course.

It's not a joke. Birds getting sucked into jet engines isn't a great deal for the bird, but just as anyone that has ever hit a deer with a truck before knows throwing an animal carcass at a piece of machinery with all the glorious power of kinetic energy can royally mess up your engine. More than 200 people have died in crashes directly caused by birds and planes colliding, not to mention the half a billion dollars done in damage annually.

How do we keep the birds away? Well, border collies are a popular method, as are trained falcons to hunt their fellow avians. The best solution, and certainly the one that involves the most fun for the person charged with its execution, is driving the birds away with remote controlled airplanes. And if a combination of World War I dog fighting and Duck Hunt doesn't sound exciting enough to you, according to Eugene LeBoeuf, chief of the U.S. Air Force's Bird/Wildlife Aircraft Strike Hazard Team, you can always just launch fireworks to scare them off.

Thanks to a group of online performance artists that emerged during the election, trolling has been experiencing something of a renaissance, or more accurately a bronze age. Once people annoyed other people online only for the sake of a primitive urge for attention, but as I pointed out twice, there are now whole groups of people that have turned the practice into activism and art.

Sadly, none of them get paid for said work, but there is another kind of troll that does. His name Zedrick Cayne, and he is a troll for hire in the online game Eve. If you're not a gamer, Eve is basically a huge galactic space simulator where you build yourself up doing menial tasks until you can afford a giant space ship capable of engaging in battles.

Like any MMO, the game has jerks, and people want those jerks to get their just desserts. That's where Cayne comes in. His contracts, which cost between 100 million and 500 million in game currency (ISK) a week (Roughly $5 to $15 real world money), plus bonuses for damages and tips if you want to the results to be well-publicized, involve a constant stream of harassment as well as other exploits like bilking targets out of ISK.

One of Cayne's most famous exploits was bringing down a player named Socratic, who annoyed his server so much that 14 people were willing to sacrifice themselves in a plot to take him out. Cayne chronicled the whole thing in a blog with loving detail about how exactly you can troll another player to the point that they have to run as far away as possible. That might sound harsh, but I'll just quote Martin Blank, "If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there." So if you find Cayne hounding you, you might want to start asking yourself who you made so mad that someone would pay just to have you hounded.