Question, why do you (generally speaking) feel the need to lump all the people who disagree with you together into one group, give that group a sarcastic name,

I call the people involved in this scandal "Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)" principally because I refuse to insult the feminist or progressive movements by calling these people with feminists or progressives. Genuine second-wave feminists have publicly criticised their behaviour.

If you want to understand the difference, look up the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags on twitter. The Social Justice Warriors are hateful, disingenuous, at times sociopathic bigots. They are adult, internet-empowered versions of the bullies and tormentors which many gamers remember from secondary school.

Gamers are the victims here. The modus-operandi of the SJWs is to cast themselves in the cloth of underprivileged groups -- most SJWs are in fact white, upper middle class, college aged -- then proceed to level accusations of privilege, bigotry, and misogyny against just about anyone involved in gaming for even the slightest perceived infractions. A climate of fear has developed, first in the indie and later wider gaming industry as a result of the "social justice" witchhunts which these people regularly engage in. Worse, this has resulted in SJW-aligned developers and journalists rising to positions of power and being first in line for awards and increasingly development funding, with cronyism trumping competence.

For Gaming, so often a hobby of last resort for the excluded and isolated in society, this is an awful and tragic outcome. For gamers, male, female, straight, gay or trans, it is a frightening development. Their hobby, their refuge, is being taken over by bullies.

Because their rhetoric and especially actions come across as so farcically disingenuous, I don't believe for a second that SJWs actually believe in or support the causes of homosexuals or transgender people in video games. Their support for women is also largely forced, and disturbingly biased towards the conservative view of women as a weaker sex who must be protected/defended (A view consistently challenged by the games industry over the years).

My honest opinion of SJWs is that they are privileged Neo-liberals, who adopt a forced social justice persona both to project their own (increasingly obvious) bigotry onto others, and ultimately to benefit themselves socially and financially. They are disingenuous, extremist bullies, and the gaming community is under co-ordinated PR attack, and has been almost completely censored on gaming websites.

The Social Justice Warriors are right about one thing though; this is a historical moment. Whether they win or lose, the GamerGate scandal will be seen as a watershed moment in the history of online-communities, and who controls them. Two weeks ago, I would never have believed that a clique so small could all but take-over a community so large, but it is becoming clear that this is precisely what (almost?) happened to gaming. There are lessons to be learned here, unrelated to the immediate issues, and I only hope the right people will take note and heed them.

Is it possible that some of the entertaining, amiable geeks that I spar with, party with, code with and blow things up with turn feral and run in packs when I'm not around?

It is unlikely. If you read further into this scandal and its surrounding issues, you will find that it is the gaming community which has been libelled by a clique of disingenuous bullies. These people will routinely label their opponents as bigots while displaying shocking levels of bigotry and hatred themselves. You can see ample evidence of this behaviour in these very comments.

For a better understanding of where the real "Ugly incidents" in this scadal are coming from, simply look up the #GamerGate and especially #Notyourshield twitter hashtags. The vitriol, hatred, and misrepresentations in this debate are coming from Social Justice Warriors (I refuse to apply the terms feminist or progressive to these frauds.)

This isn't about Zoe Quinn. This is about Gamers being bullied and their hobby being culturally colonised by corrupt hypocrites.

Gamers are the victims here. The people crying misogyny are the real bigots. Look up the harshtags #Gamergate and especially #notyourshield on twitter to get a real feel for what is going on here.

Although I was under the impression that the Leidenfrost effect only worked well on bare skin, so I'm surprised he didn't get frost burns to his scalp and clothed parts.

It's one of the (great many) reasons why using web apps for business frequently sounds nuts to me.

How often over the years have we heard stuff like "we can't switch from Office to OpenOffice because of the costs involved in retraining everyone to use a different UI"? Well with a "cloud app" you have *exactly* this problem, coupled with the fact that you usually get no notice that it's going to happen - you just log in one day and everything's moved around.

Flashblock will block HTML5 videos too.

Well it does solve some problems, just not problems many server administrators largely cared about while creating problems some systems administrators really do care about.

Well, if the project really is an NSA backed obfuscation of Linux a la SELinux, then confusing sysadmins and hampering their ability to control their own systems would be less of a bug and more of a feature.

Why replace pam.d, crond, init, and add complexities like dbus in a single package that runs at PID1 when it doesn't need to?

Because confident young men in a hurry to make their own mark on the world have little time for learning the tools or the lessons of the past.

It's possible to be a lucrative demographic without having PR money. Case in point: Alcoholics.

I think the wholesale failure of web 2.0 sites to facilitate any discussion of these issues over the last few weeks proves just how shallow their promise of a brave new web is. The scope and scale of the censorship seen around this issue is to my knowledge unprecedented.

Slashdot had the right ethics and mores all along, Anonymous Cowards and all. The community can mod them down, but even they should be free to speak.

I think a poster on the escapist forums but it most succinctly: "The gaming community is being bullied for profit".

The gaming community is being singled out for being misogynist, over the film/tv industry, over the music business, over religious groups, because they are a relatively easy target who won't put up as much of a fight. While it's almost certain that Sarkeesian has received threats, let's be honest, they do not carry anywhere near the same weight as those which would come from, say, a religious group who was called out for being conservative. Gamers also lack the PR money to respond, which would be readily available to entertainment companies. Overall, it's a fairly safe group to criticize.

I'm sure that misogyny exists in video games, but no more (and I would argue to a lesser extent) than that seen in general society and other forms of entertainment. Yet Sarkeesian and her backers have launched what amounts to an internet crusade against the most counter-cultural -- and I would argue visibly progressive -- media industries.

Her videos present selectively chosen examples from several video games, purporting to show that games are actually hateful towards women. Many of us have played several of these titles, and can judge how exaggerated such claims are. Indeed, using Sarkeesian's techniques, it would be perfectly possible to go through these games and more, and selectively picks clips and examples "proving" that games and the gaming industry promote animal cruelty.

Yet no-one makes the animal cruelty argument about video games. And the reason is I think obvious -- The misogynist argument makes more money. Sarkeesian has been backed to the tune of $150,000 to makes these videos. Sites like Kotaku generate huge ad-revenue from the inevitable click-bait headlines which follow from these exaggerated claims. The more games who take the bait, who defend their hobby from these accusations, the more revenue goes to the people making and promoting them.

This does not represent a genuine feminist movement. This represents a business model. Gamers are being singled out and bullied -- over religious conservatives, over music video directors, over corporate policies towards women -- because gamers are an easier and more lucrative target. Gamers are "hate-baited" with very, very ugly accusations painting them as haters of women, so that their predictable responses can be farmed out to ad-servers and marketing firms. Bullied; for profit.

I've played video games since 1990; I do not hate women; My hobby does not hate women; The vast majority of people who play video games do not hate women. Please, Sarkeesian's of the world, turn your attentions to the people who do.

Oh yeah, I'll also point out that the original poster's numbers stuck out like a sore thumb before I even looked up the figures: Petrol is lighter than water, so its immediately obvious that 4.75 tons is going to be over 4750 litres (at current forecourt prices, about £6000) and I know I don't buy anywhere close to that amount of petrol each year. Doncha just love the metric system for making such things so obvious. :)

4.75 tons of petrol is 6445 litres. Since petrol is 85% carbon, we can divide the 6445 litres by 0.85 and we get 7582 litres of petrol containing 4.75 tons of carbon.

Your answer is wrong: 4750 Kg of carbon / 0.85 = 5588 Kg of petrol. It looks like you divided by 0.80 instead of 0.85?

5588 Kg of petrol / 0.737 = 7582 litres of petrol.

Ok, I have a home connection that does 40Mbps down and 20Mbps up. It is capped to 100GB/month during the day (no cap at night, and this is when I run off-site backups and such). I never come close to exceeding that cap - the speed is useful for downloading the odd film, watching streaming HDTV, uploading photos, etc. for short periods. If I need to download a new Linux distro or something, I can do it in 10 minutes - doing this stuff over ISDN would be either very painful (requiring planning a download a long time in advance of actually needing it) or just plain impossible impossible. ADSL, again, would be rather a pain for the occasional large download.

On the other hand, if I were running bittorrent 24/7 I would be able to blow through 15TB of bandwidth in a month, were it not for the cap. But I'm not interested in doing this, so I don't understand why those people who are interested in shifting 2-3 orders of magnitude more data than me should expect me to pay more in order to subsidise the build-out cost of the ISP upgrading their network to support them.

The bittorrent crowd would characterise my 100GB monthly cap as terrible because, at full speed, I could blow through it in 5 hours. The thing that they completely fail to understand is that I never have any interest in blowing through it - I like a fast connection because it lets me do things quickly, not because I can download lots.

That sounds an unreasonably high figure.

Petrol weighs about 737g / l, so 4750Kg of petrol is 6445 litres.
Wikipedia says the carbon content of petrol is up to about 85%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
So 6445/0.85 = 7582 litres of petrol contain 4.75t of carbon.
Wikipedia suggests average fuel economy is somewhere around 5l / 100Km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
7582*100/5 = 151640Km - I'm pretty sure that the average car doesn't travel 152Mm/year!

Lets assume you're talking about tons of CO2 rather than tons of carbon.
Apparently we multiply litres of petrol by 2.331 to get Kg of CO2 emitted: http://www.carbontrust.com/res...
So 4750/2.331 = 2038 litres. At 5l / 100Km, this gives us 2038*100/5 = 40760Km - ok, a vaguely more reasonable figure.

Apparently the average company car does around 30,000Km/year and the average private car does about 12,000Km: http://www.racfoundation.org/m...

So the average is going to be well under 41Mm and around an order of magnitude less than the 152Mm you claimed!

I'm certainly not saying that climate change is nothing to worry about - I think it's a big problem and whether or not you think it's man made, dumping vast amounts of crap into the atmosphere can't possibly be a bright idea. But I really wish people wouldn't just invent bogus "facts" to back up their arguments - the arguments should stand up for themselves, if you need bogus data to prop them up then you've got something really badly wrong somewhere.