Oh yeah, that's reasonable. I can see how the sentence could be open to that interpretation - I only saw the "in relation to" parse the first time, but I can see how both would be valid parses (but only one would actually be a true statement :p).

Huh? A precedent means that there have been rulings on a subject. Clearly, there have now been rulings on the subject. There being a precedent doesn't say, without further specification, which *way* the precedent went...

Context? Sources? I went to Harvey Mudd (admittedly several years ago, maybe this is something new?), and have no idea what you're talking about - punishing male students for being "macho"? Yes, everyone knows it's easier to get into top tech schools if you're female, but that's not remotely specific to Harvey Mudd, and doesn't have anything to do with "punishing" or being "macho"...

It's not about quality at all - there are tons of awful, buggy, moronic AAA games. It's not about quality - it's about *budget*.

Fun fact: if it's nonconsentual, it's still rape even if it's your wife. Wait, actually by fun I meant "totally the opposite of fun", sorry about that.

Will anyone be willing to create a working "theoldmaps.com" to go along with "theoldreader.com"? Because the new and nominally-"improved" google maps definitely doesn't work particularly well on my home computer, and having a working google maps is pretty much necessary.

> "dudebro pissbaby fuckboy"

Next up on stage, Pissbaby Fuckboy!

> "An anonymous reader writes that Doug Hughes, 61, a mailman from Ruskin, Florida"...

I'm tired, and managed to somehow read that as "a mailman from Russia". I was pretty impressed with the guy's dedication, flying a gyro-copter all the way to DC!

Nice troll.

Introversion *is* a thing. You might not believe it (or you might just be a troll), but plenty of people actually don't want nonstop social interaction, and voluntarily choose to be left alone. They may not even be ostracized at all!

Now, do introverts want to be 100% alone all the time? No, they usually have a few friends they see fairly often, and are usually happy to be more widely social every so often, just not all the time. But mostly they would be just as happy having a few friends, and *not* ever going to big parties or anything, too.

I doubt a Mars mission would only send a single person, so, mission accomplished? (As far as this one problem, which seems tiny compared to all the jillion other bigger problems with sending people to Mars, goes.)

I *can* imagine the possibility that within 5 years, we'd have portable enough 3d imagers and powerful enough phones to both stick the hardware in a phone-sized device and have a phone-sized device run the required software. I have no real understanding of how the physics of that would really work, granted, but it doesn't seem totally outside the bounds of possibility.

But that's just the input. I *can't* really imagine the possibility that within 5 years, we'd have powerful enough *printers* to take the output of such a precise scanner, and recreate it anywhere near so precise, even if you're only talking about an object made entirely out of one or two kinds of plastic, which is unlikely to be the sort of object people would really want to "replicate". "Just about anything"? Yeah right.

Wake me up when we can replicate food, say, and have it taste the same as the original. Will we see that in my lifetime? Maybe, if I'm lucky. Will we see that in 3-5 years? I'd bet quite a lot of money on "no", and I'm not a betting sort of person.

> Are you pissed off enough to take the time to hand-write a letter to your congressional rep? Are you pissed off enough to get 20 people to sign it? These aren't monumental tasks, nor are they expensive.

They also aren't terribly *useful*. I'm pissed off too, but I'm not so pissed off that I'm going to hire a bunch of people to go door to door to get the signatures that would be required to get something on the ballot, which even if it passed, they'd probably just sneakily ignore it anyway.

Public opinion and people actually knowing it happens is way more important than your congressman knowing about it (anyway, he probably already does, probably thinks it sucks, but knows that if he ever tried to touch it, he'd be labeled as not "tough on crime" and his career would be over.)

A few years ago, I got served a lawsuit regarding a person entirely unrelated to me, but who happened to have the same name as me and live in the same city. When they couldn't track him down at his home, they found *me* listed as working at my work address, and gave it to me instead. I called him frantically, he said that's fine, mistakes happen, he was sure I wasn't the guy, he'd talk to his server and he was sure it was a mistake.

He called back the next day, said the server confirmed I was totally the guy he had a picture of (very unlikely, given I'm like 15 years younger...). I actually had to get a lawyer to get the guy to back off me. Luckily my mom knows a jillion people, and a friend of a friend of hers said he'd be happy to send the guy a nastygram on my behalf pro-bono. When the guy heard from an actual lawyer, he must have decided it wasn't worth it and went back to actually tracking down the guy that was supposed to get it, because I never heard back from him again.

So yeah. Not at all surprised there are a lot of awful lazy process servers out there who would rather just drop a lawsuit off randomly then actually make sure they gave it to the person who deserved it.

Come on, at least properly quote Tom Lehrer: "There are people out there who don't love their fellow man... and I hate people like that."

Give them nothing! But take from them... everything!

And if you do discover that you have inadvertently hired a douchebag, fire them already.

As a consultant, I have privs to do all kinds of damage in all sorts of places to not only my company, but any number of companies I'm doing work for or have done work for in the past.

First off, I'm not a dick; even if I were leaving because the company had shafted me horrifically, rather than, as it sounds like here, because I hypothetically just found some other opportunity that suited me more... even then, even if I felt like being vindictive (unlikely), I'd still restrict any harm I thought I could get away with causing, to those people who actually deserved it, not indiscriminately start screwing things up in a way that would harm all kinds of other people who had nothing to do with whatever hypothetical thing I'm imagining the company had done. Anyone who you imagine might start deleting crap out of random databases or whatever, you should can the guy right now, cause what's stopping him from doing that *now* over some slight, real or imagined?

But secondly and far more importantly, if I were that sort of person, and I was disgruntled, do you think I'd tell you and give you a chance to lock me out? That'd be pretty stupid. If I were disgruntled and wanted to cause harm and then quit, I would obviously do it *in that order*. cause I mean... duh?