Ah, it's been a while, Green Site!

Ok, there's a great deal of confusion I see here. It's a question of use-case.

Drag queens are performing artists. See Rue Paul or Pandora Boxx, neither of which iirc use HRT or intend to transition to adopting their performing identities as their own 24/7. Companies get FB pages, so why shouldn't their performing identities get FB pages in addition to their own personal pages?

I find it odd that FB is apologizing to drag queens or that they would even target drag queens. (I'd also like to add that one curious thing I read in Whipping Girl is that drag queens are often welcomed into the female restroom, but trans women are shunned from that place.)

In the case of trans men and women, if FB has targeted them (I haven't been), FB is clearly wrong and the apology is justified. Especially in the case of trans women, proceeding with a legal name change is a risk that can land one homeless in a gutter. I'd also like to add that in my personal experience that I'm gendered female by others quite often (just lucky I guess), however changing my real name without being able to go without a job for a year or two would be suicidal. Employers have this little habit of demanding documents that contain one's legal gender. If one's legal gender doesn't match with the gender of one's identity and the gender others assign to one, it's OMG fucking holy shit GTFO.

There's also the complication that a name change is not enough to get those documents to match one's lived gender. My state requires bottom surgery before the documents can be amended, although some clever trans women are able to get the gender on their driver's license changed at the DMV with a little social engineering (others aren't so lucky). Other states make it impossible to change those documents even with bottom surgery.

My friends know me by one name. My employer and clients know me by another. However, FB is not a network for professionals so instead I have a LinkedIn profile with one name and a FB profile I haven't touched in probably two years with another name (just a few more years and it'll be my real name), the one my friends know me as.

What is straight peoples' clothes, exactly? Do homosexuals wear something different to the office? In my experience, gays and lesbians tend to dress just the same as their heterosexual peers.

Yes, I'm intentionally being obtuse. I hope I addressed the confusion about drag above. This is a question of identity.

I'd also like to give you something to think about. Currently I'm between genders, so it's all wibbly-wobbly. However, should I obtain bottom surgery after going full time as a woman, I will then be a heterosexual woman and indistinguishable from any other straight woman who cannot have children due to whatever medical problem.

Your head will asplode the day the procedure for a barren cisgendered woman to receive a transplanted uterus (I'm too lazy to find the link, but I believe the procedure involved transplanting her mother's uterus into her so that she could have children) is expanded to transgendered women.

Why would a cisgendered woman want to have a male identity? If this is a case of a trans man or somebody experimenting with presenting a male identity, then I would say it's justified.

I've met a few trans men, and the decision to undergo gender transition is an even bigger hurdle for them than trans women. There is no bottom surgery they can hope for, and they have to be absolutely certain before they expose their bodies to testosterone. Estrogen is easy, and its changes to the body can be hidden or even reversed. That's not true of testosterone.

The voice drops, facial hair develops, and it's all permanent. If there were a magic pill I could take that would change my brain from female to male, I might take it. My breasts can be easily removed, and the other changes will fade over time as testosterone becomes established in my body. A trans man does not have this option of an easy out once he makes the decision to transition .

It's been established that homosexuality and transgenderism exist in the animal kingdom, at least as far as mammals are concerned. However, I can't comprehend why somebody would make a FB profile for a pet, so I don't think I can advise on this one.

Coming back to this to summarize, I'm confused that FB didn't limit the apology to the transgendered or why they were even targeting drag queens. Drag queens are performing artists. If companies can have a FB profile, their performance should also clearly get a FB profile.

Let's also be more clear. The term "cross-dresser" can mean any number of things and is too vague to be useful.

At any rate, this all illustrates how brain-damaged a "real" name (I hope I've called the idea of a real name into question) policy is.

Gender transition isn't something where you just throw a switch and it's done in 5 minutes with liberal hounds chasing down anyone who doesn't recognize the new identity. There is a period of time--years and years--where one is in varying degrees of legal limbo, and free Obamacare sex changes are a delusion of Faux News. Not every trans woman is perceived as a woman as easily as I. Assume your ability to spot a "cross-dresser" is infallible and perform the Crocodile Dundee maneuver enough times, and eventually you'll grope a cisgendered female and find yourself in a world of shit while I go unquestioned.

There's no transmitter in my key. You're thinking of the RFID keys, which are pretty good security: coupled with a decent quality alarm with multiple immobilizers it makes a car pretty much unstealable unless you have a flatbed.

But there's no reason you can't simply put the RFID into the alarm keyfob instead of the key. In fact, most of the pushbutton starters I've seen in recent years work exactly like that -- there's an RFID in your keyfob, and if you don't have the keyfob in your pocket (or within a few feet of the car), the car simply won't start. If the car gets out of range of the keyfob, it'll trip the fuel line immobilizer.

A ship engine isn't a fixed RPM diesel generator, it's a variable RPM diesel engine.

What I was talking about, you need to be comparing against a diesel-oil power plant, which can exceed 70-80% efficiency. Still not as good as hydroelectric (which can exceed 95%), but aside from tidal and hydro power plants it's by far the most efficient method of generating energy that we have. It's also worth mentioning that a diesel engine can run on basically unmodified cooking oil (look up biodiesel). I sincerely doubt that your Prius would enjoy being fed that stuff.

A fixed RPM diesel is *significantly* more efficient than a car engine, on the whole. We're still not approaching the 90% that GP quotes as the efficiency for an electric, but it's enough of an improvement to still waste less energy despite the losses inherent in transmission lines.

The long-distance transmission of energy, incidentally, is where the real loss in the electrical grid comes into play. That's not really an issue when you're talking about hybrid drive vehicles. Still, I've wondered for years why car manufacturers don't design a pure electric car (plug-in), and fit it with a fixed RPM generator for extended range instead of trying to design a hugely convoluted hybrid drive train that can receive power from both. (and no, Top Gear doesn't count).

It's the encoding that the HDMI decoding device supports. It does support uncompressed stereo PCM audio in the spec, but most devices will use some form of compression in the transmission, in order to reencode it as DTS or Dolby Digital for your receiver. A lot of devices do this by default, without user input, if they're connected to a receiver that can handle more audio channels. While this can usually be disabled/reconfigured, a lot of users won't actually think about that.

Case in point -- I'm watching an MKV on my WDTV Live! as I type this. I ripped the DVD myself, and know for a fact that the audio channel I'm listening to right now is AC3 stereo (though the file does have an English-language 5.1 channel). The stereo's surround sound/5.1 light is active. The device is upmixing the audio to 5.1 surround before it's sending it to the receiver.

With a sufficiently high bitrate, and a detailed enough codec, you may as well not be compressing it.

The problem with the comparison between an MP3 and something encoded with FLAC is that you're still working off a digital source. By its very nature, the digital source is lossy -- it's limited by the original sample and bitrate. You can offset that by using a high enough resolution on the digital source, but ultimately, there's still going to be loss of information, no matter how high a resolution you use for the source.

As for audiophiles, I identify as one. I do prefer FLAC for archiving purposes, because I'm not hurting for space, and because it allows for a much higher bitrate than MP3 (and my stereo plays FLAC natively), but I will also qualify it with what I consider a far more important distinction : you will get *much* more mileage out of a good set of speakers than you will from going with FLAC over MP3. There is absolutely no reason at all to go with FLAC over MP3 if you don't have hardware that can take advantage of it. If you're listening to it mostly on a cell phone with shitty ear buds, then there is absolutely no reason to waste space on a high resolution recording. Similarly, if you don't have a stereo that can play FLAC natively (since even passing the sound over an HDMI link will cause the signal to be degraded), and you're not pairing it with good quality speakers, then it's a total waste of space. And no. That $1000 set of speakers you bought at Best Buy is *not* a good quality set of speakers. That's not even close to high end, when it comes to audio hardware.

I'm not denying him employment. I'm choosing to do business with a different company that has a better track record on issues that I consider important. There's an enormous difference. In this case, all 4 of the main companies competing against Mozilla's flagship product have better records on LGBT rights than Eich, and so I have chosen to do business with one of them instead.

Also, if Eich has changed his mind on gay marriage, he hasn't publicised it. Actually he's done quite the opposite, by publicly refusing to apologize for it. That refusal is, to me, tantamount to saying that he still believes that gay couples shouldn't have equal rights, which is a matter that affects me personally. If he chooses to ignore the writing on the wall and continue his opposition to equal rights, that is his choice to make. And if that choice makes him unemployable, he has nobody to blame but himself. Freedom of speech means he's free to be an asshole, it doesn't mean I have to do business with him despite his douchebaggery.

If it's not as important to you, that's your choice. But don't claim I'm discriminating against him, or being bigoted. I'm not. I'm just voting with my clock cycles and bits (since no money actually changes hands when I download/install another browser).

Walmart is forgetting that Visa is a private business, and can choose not to provide services to Walmart.

For one, I don't think that Walmart's margins are so thin that they can't afford to absorb a transaction fee for using Visa... I'll admit that Visa is much more expensive than direct debit (at least in this country... Visa is about 20x higher transaction fee than Interac), but it's still only about 1% transaction fee. If Walmart's margins are *that* thin on their product, they better pray that this thing in Crimea doesn't turn to a war because they'll go bankrupt with the increase in fuel costs it'll cause.

And for two, if they don't like paying the transaction fee, then don't. Costco seems to be doing quite well for themselves, and the only credit card they take is Amex, and that's only because Costco issues its own credit card which is backed by Amex. Walmart chooses to accept Visa and Mastercard. If they don't like the terms, then don't accept it.

Walmart? The retail chain that pays its employees such a low wage that they can't even afford to shop at Walmart, and deliberately cuts back on their employees' hours to avoid having to pay benefits? *this* is the company you hold up as the model of how to run a business?

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2...

If Walmart is a paragon, what the hell does that make Costco?

Patents, in theory, are actually a reasonably good idea.... the problem is, you need to find an adequate balance between rewarding innovation, and allowing others to benefit from them as well. That latter bit is the reason they expire. The former bit is because it can be very expensive to come up with and implement a new idea. Development costs, and all.

In practice it doesn't always work that way, but I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. We should figure out how to prevent abuse, not get rid of the system entirely.

Similarly, btw, copyrights do actually serve a purpose. As wonderful a world as it would be that artists and content creators could be free to create without worrying about where their next meal comes from, they do still need to eat. Copyright exists so that people can be rewarded for creating works. It's ridiculous that it lasts long enough that your grandchildren can still profit from it, but I wouldn't toss it completely out the window, either.

Sustainability is still a good thing to be going for... regardless of whether they're doing it for marketing reasons, or because they believe that 50 years from now there won't be any more coal fired power plants, doesn't really matter. Investing in renewable energy sources now is the smart thing to do regardless of whether you take an optimistic or pessimistic view of why they're doing it.

Really? Because 1080p h.264 *can* be that low if you compress the hell out of it, but we've found at the company I work for that anything less than about 4.5-5mbit for the video (and another 1mbit for the audio) is basically unwatchable on a big screen TV, due to compression artifacts. We actually encode HD at a higher bit rate than that for our own IPTV offering, and SD comes in about 4.5mbit with the audio included.

And that's using h.264, which didn't exist 10 years ago. You were able to get an HD stream + a couple of SD streams on a 10mbit connection? Must've looked like shit....

Pretty much. The character I have in mind would have begun transition already with some other characters already referring to him/her as "she." It's kind of the situation I'm in now; write what you know I guess, just as long as it doesn't turn into some kind of self-insert fantasy.

One of the things Goldsmith does in Genma's Daughter, which is a Ranma 1/2 fanfic, is to refer to Ranma as he or she depending on which form he/she's in but always as Ranma until he/she decides to lock the Juusenkyo curse and go full time living as a woman for a few weeks. At that point, the author begins referring to the character as Ranko. Not to give spoilers if you haven't read it, but there are only a few times when Ranko is in male form after that, and Goldsmith reliably refers to the character with the name "Ranko" and the pronoun "he."

In the non-fiction book Whipping Girl, Serano observes that pronouns are often a matter of presumption and contextual guessing that one has to make within the first few moments of meeting somebody. After all, we generally don't go around performing a "Crocodile Dundee" manuever to verify which body parts a stranger has between their legs before we decide whether to use "he" or "she" when referring to that person. Checking others' genitals would also lead to ambiguity in the case of trans women who have the female gender and a woman's name on their driver's license but have not yet undergone (or does not desire) surgery.

One might argue that the state of one's genitals is of utmost importance, which is one thing that feminists and right wing authoritarians can both agree upon. However, because we do not check others' genitals regularly, it becomes a moot point unless there's romance involved. The zombie flic Wild Zero presents one such situation.

As Serano also notes, sometimes we get it wrong. As an example, I used to work with a perfectly cisgendered man when I used to do fast food who would often be ma'amed when talking to customers over the drive-through speaker because he had a feminine way of speaking. Sometimes when I'm very tired, I'll get ma'amed by strangers who have only my appearance to go on when clearly presenting as male simply because when I'm tired, I forget to use masculine body language. So, it's not as straight-forward of a process as we'd like to imagine it is.

I feel that getting the language thing down would be one of the challenges of presenting something like that to a wider audience. One solution might be to write from first person, but it would be more interesting to use third person omniscient so I can use the same technique as Goldsmith. I feel that the way other characters use he or she can be an effective way to demonstrate what other characters think of the protagonist's gender---the narrator's choice of pronoun being dependent on whether the character is presenting as male or female---, and which particular name the narrator uses to refer to the protagonist can demonstrate the state of his/her own identity at that point in the story.

Good point. When I switched to a powered antenna here in Ottawa, Canada, I was able to pick up several channels I couldn't get without it. Even with my relatively inexpensive indoor antenna (a Terk HDTVa, which Google says can be had for about $60 in the US), I get 14 channels, including two from the Watertown, NY broadcast station (PBS and Fox), from a 16th floor apartment with a southwest view. If I turn the in-line amplifier off, I only get 6 channels, all of them local. Oddly, one of those 6 channels, I don't get when the amplifier is on, so I actually have to turn the amplifier off when I want to watch that channel... o.O

If I had a different fronting, or if there was a building south of mine that I could bounce the signal off, I could actually get the signals from another transmitter north of the city, and would actually be getting about 22 channels (though 5 of them would be in French).