Do you think, our involvement in the First World War was "screwing the world"? How about the Second? I bet, you don't lament those...

WWI was a pointless battle between imperial powers and we should have stayed the hell out of it. The Pacific battle of WWII would not have happened if we hadn't played the empire game in the Pacific, stealing Hawaii and threatening Japan with Perry's "black ships"; the European theater was a straight-up result of WWI.

We should never have been in Korea or Vietnam. Or Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the Philippines or Cuba or Puerto Rico or Guam.

Our history since the Civil War shows that the founders were 100% right about the temptations of a standing army: once you've got one, you want to use it.

And for the grammar trolls, yes I know a sentence should not begin with "And".

I know this is a tangent. But it is perfectly grammatical to begin a sentence with "and" or "but".

So how do I have the same song in multiple playlist when the definition of a playlist on other players were "files in a folder"?

Good lord, they really do let anyone in here nowadays, regardless of technical savvy. Son, have you never looked at an m3u file? It's a list. Of songs, each song being one file path. You give this m3u file to your music software and it plays each one, in either sequential or random order.

I find it so contradictory that the same mass of people that seek booths in order to hide who they vote for, are so willing to hand out information that's much more personal to a site like facebook.

I will decide what's more or less "personal" for me, thank you very much.

Probably because Apple's business model isn't based around being as sleazy as possible.

Citation needed.

We don't have to deal with constant unwanted advances - we only do the dating thing when *we* want to.

On the other hand, the "first mover" has to deal with the threat of rejection, of even ridicule, in a way that the "approachee" does not.

Being able to successfully make the first move takes courage, self-confidence, communication skills, at least a pretense of extroversion, and charisma. Yes, some of these things can be learned, but they are also partially innate. (And someone who goes looking to learn these skills is likely to find the hideous misogynist "pick up artist" community. Ugh.)

I've approached women and I've been approached by them. (And by men.) It's a hell of a lot easier on the ego to say "no thanks" than it is to be shot down by someone you're attracted to. Perhaps, if you're a charming natural extrovert, YMMV.

Note that "behaving like a jerk", which is the problem here, is orthogonal to "making the first move".

How about.... when a man wants to send a message to a woman for the first time, first of all they need to spend $10 to buy a "point", the content (with sender and recipient anonymized) get sent to 5 other random men for approval; they will be asked "Is the content appropriate and respectful" Yes/No ?.

Fine, just as long as the same rules apply when a woman wants to send a message to a man for the first time. Or a man to a man, or a woman to a woman, or a transgender person who does not identify as either "male" or "female" wants to contact someone.

Gender equality means gender equality.

If kids could not be prosecuted, some poor, down on the luck, homeless kid will end up taking their own photograph and selling it.

And that would be horrible. Far better that said hypothetical kid remain impoverished and homeless, right? It's not as if anti-porn concern trolls are going to want to pass laws to make sure kids aren't impoverished and homeless. And it's not as if we could have kids under adult supervision by any means other than criminal prosecution, right?

Once upon a time, there was this stuff called "Read Only Memory". Not EPROM or EEPROM, but ROM. Once it was created you couldn't change the contents of it.

If I was worried that scammers were going to take a board that I was selling as a Whizzo rather than a Whizzo Plus because it didn't meet Whizzo Plus specs, and flash it as a Whizzo Plus anyway to rip off customers, I'd put "Hi there I'm Whizzo serial number 987654321 born 2014-09-24-18:58:56 GMT at the Utopia Planitia assembly line, signed <digital signature>" somewhere in a bit of that old-fashioned Read Only Memory soldered to the board in a tamper-resistant manner, and also have that serial number etched into the board.

It's a manager's job to manage.

In theory. In practice, it's more often a manager's job to validate their existence to other mangers via shiny charts with no referent to actual facts, until such time as the project falls apart, at which point they blame the workers and use their social connections (groomed via all those shiny charts) to obtain another meaningless management position.

If only there was some sort of cultural moment dedicated to changing the perception and social role of women. We could call it "feminism".

I think you might have a branding problem with that name. It's sometimes been associated with anti-intellectual post-modern garbage (such as this), transphobia (such as this), and various bits of misandry. ranging from the subtle (bell hooks's claim that rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women) to the absurd (Dworkin's claim that "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for womenâ(TM)s bodies.").

Of course there are wingnuts in any group, but it seems that feminist leaders have not done an adequate job of disassociating from them. Since the majority of women reject the feminist label, it seems to me that those of us interested in gender equality -- which would include listening to women's opinions, no? Including the majority of women who reject the label "feminist", right? -- might want to find a new one. (I've been thinking "gender libertarianism" might cover it, but the American so-called "libertarian" movement has been working hard for decades to degrade that term. Maybe "gender anarchy"?)

Any article citing statistics is invalid when they don't understand the difference between percent and per cent.

FYI: "The one-word percent is standard in American English. Percent is not absent from other varieties of English, but most publications still prefer the two-word per cent. The older forms per-cent, per cent. (per cent followed by a period), and the original per centum have mostly disappeared from the language (although the latter sometimes appears in legal writing).

"There is no difference between percent and per cent. Choosing between them is simply a matter of preference." -- http://grammarist.com/spelling/percent-per-cent/

I guess you don't have any grandparents who live alone, but can no longer reliably identify their own children....You are so deep into denial about the reality of aging

The "reality of aging" does include old people completely destroyed by aging. And we need to get serious about dealing with that, letting people check out when their life ain't no more fun.

But that reality also includes 90-something karate masters who are still practicing.

The "functional limitations" of which the author speaks can, to some degree, be mitigated by lifestyle. So can the supposed "lack of creativity" -- the problem isn't aging, it's stale ideas. Learn something new. Change fields.

My maternal grandfather was still quite aware, oriented, and active in his church at 90. And the heart disease that ultimately did him in could quite likely have been partially prevented or reversed with better lifestyle habits. My paternal grandfather was a bit short of his 79th birthday when complications from coronary bypass surgery (again, largely preventable) did him in. He never really recovered, emotionally, from the loss of his wife (could have used better social support, more community connections), but he was in no way crippled or suffering from dementia in his final years.

So given the example of my grandparents, with good dietary and exercise habits, good social connections, and a little medical help I can hope to get into my 80s with my brains mostly intact. (If we don't completely fsck up the planet, and if we make a few medical breakthroughs, with a little luck I hope to see the dawn of the 22nd century -- I'll only have to reach 131 to do that.)

Of course, I could also get run over by a bus this afternoon, or diagnosed with some particularly nasty cancer next month. One never knows.

"It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us â" without having to pay for it, of course."

Looks more like "We want to figure out how best to coordinate and share that portion of the work that the people whom we pay to develop software for us, do on free software." (Though they're not using that dangerous word "free", of course.)

"Free" or "open source" doesn't mean no one is getting paid to develop it.

Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google."

Actually, no, they don't. They mean "look it up with whatever search engine you usually use". As in, google it with Bing".