Then the kids would have their own damned jobs to go to

We're all rocking out on MySpace.

as the nook reader is slightly better than the kindle reader on android.

That's the only thing I use it for. I rarely buy real books these days.

In my experience (New York State) they tend to side with the employee at the first level of appeal. If the employer contests that decision it goes before an administrative law judge, where anything can happen, though even there they tend to favor the employee in this blue state.

I quit a job once upon a time and secured unemployment. The employer attempted to retroactively impose random drug testing, I asked for an opt-out since it wasn't part of the conditions of employment when I was hired, they said no. I cited the applicable case law with HR, they still said no, so I quit. Won that one at both levels of appeal, found a new job three weeks later, started it two weeks after that, using the interim to take a nice vacation to Finland on the ex-employer's dime. I may have sent them an unsigned post card from Helsinki saying thanks for 50% of the salary for 0% of the work.....

And you've concluded stimulant use in the workplace is expected from the fact that 85% of people use caffeine? Have you ever known someone who was fired or held back from a promotion for a failure to use caffeine? I haven't. I've worked in offices my entire professional life and managed to go that long without picking up a caffeine habit; it hasn't held me back any. *shrug*

I would have filed a claim for unemployment, then when said claim was initially denied because you quit voluntarily tell the Department of Labor why you quit. You would have doubtless been approved at that point and DOL starts an investigation of that company, a win win.

I mean, I've no love for SJW-type whining identity politics (which is sadly what much of progressive politics has turned into), but what exactly are the stakes in the Gamergate debacle? Are gamers particularly worried that the industry is going to stop including sexy women and cliched plots to sell games? Because that's fucking stupid. The gaming industry will do that maybe 20 years after Hollywood stops.

So, I mean, are there any stakes at all here for the anti-SJW camp? Are there laws being debated in Congress? Are gamers being discriminated against? It's annoying to hear journalists pontificate about shit they don't understand, but that includes damn near anything they talk about. It's perhaps even worse to have to listen to a manufactured controversy, but still....

Why should we care? Let them troll away and then it all goes away once the journalists get bored with it. There are plenty of pro-egalitarian (i.e. anti-SJW) battles to be fought that have actual consequences, but this doesn't seem to be one of them.

Or am I really so old that I'm failing to realize that being a gamer really is a cultural identity and they really are being discriminated against?

This kinda-sorta happened already with HDTV early adopters. I picked up a 1080i HD CRT from Goodwill a couple years ago for $20 that had only component in, no HDMI. Whoever paid full price for the thing must have been pretty pissed after HDMI and bluray came out and the only HD content they could show was a couple of over the air DTV channels.

For me, they jumped the shark / violated their unofficial motto the day they declared war on the microSD card in their hardware. I could never get too riled about the morality of doing business in China or submitting to the will of three letter agencies here at home because unlike many people I was never under the illusion that they were some kind of activist organization. "Evil" was therefore obviously a reference to not fucking up their own products in an attempt to manipulate their customers into, say, using their cloud storage solution.

Also, I seem to be the only one who finds it extremely alarming that Google has devoted a lot of energy to replacing GPL pieces in Android with BSD-style licensed equivalents. This isn't a simple precautionary exercise or worries about "viral licenses". This certainly isn't about freedom. The moment AOSP projects threaten them (or become an inconvenience) they will simply change licenses and break backwards compatibility. Geeks will struggle mightily to make non-geeks care about this, but there will be no viable alternative in the marketplace, millions will be locked into Google's content ecosystem, and the OEMs (with the possible exception of Amazon) will obediently follow Google.

My prius cost me $6000 used. There were $3000 used models available, but they were all Gen 1 and didn't have their battery packs replaced.

That's what over-the-air updates are for.

What's truly pathetic is I can't get it from Time Warner Cable on our dedicated fiber (not DOCSIS) connection, despite their claims that it's available to DIA customers. They have been dragging their feet now for eight or nine months, professing that we're the first business in our whole area (~250,000 people) to ask for it, so they don't actually have any experience getting it to us.

That's either complete bullshit (we have one of the largest universities in NYS here, along with major defense contractors and even a Fortune 100) to stonewall my request, or it's actually true and a sad reflection on our complete lack of progress on this issue.

If that's your argument just use the Windows firewall. It's completely free.

The rest of the West doesn't stop it either. It may be unique to the United States (+ South Korea and the Philippines, incidentally) in the non-religious context, but if you want to mutilate your son elsewhere in the West the authorities won't do anything to stop you. There were rumblings about Germany doing something to end the practice, but that's politically tricky to say the least, given their history with a certain frequently prosecuted group that happens to practice circumcision.....

I love how society gets worked up about FGM but thinks it's okay to mutilate young boys by the millions. And don't give me any shit about how it's not the same thing, because even if I bought the BS put out there by the pro-circumcision crowd, it'd still be the equivalent of elective cosmetic surgery on people too young to give informed consent. Of course, it's not really, you're chopping off functional body parts.