Yeah. I don't find the implication (that I'm black, gay, whatever) offensive so much as the terms themselves, which are particularly vile as their basic connotation is that somebody of whatever group is less valuable as a human than others.

Erm, read my comment. I'm certainly not saying this is acceptable, what I am saying is that all bad behaviour gets "reported" under some fairly narrow categories. Having a better way of report - and dealing with - such behaviour would be beneficial to all.

For example, if you're reporting personal threats, a report could also scan the chat log for key-words and escalate. Racial/sexist could scan stuff like the N word or b**ch. As there are probably quite a lot of reports, this should help push stuff that's more serious and beyond the typical "noob, loser" etc up the chain.

There's no reason an improvement to such a system couldn't benefit not only women, but everyone.

The difference here as usual is that women expect to be treated differently

The difference is that people pay more attention when it's not a random white male complaining. Seriously, I could do without that shit too, but when I complain about it, I'm a whiner. When a woman complains about it, it's a potential gender-discrimination issue. Ya know what though, if women can clean that shit up - at the very least so that 20+ men aren't acting like 12-yr-old boys - hopefully it will improve things for everybody. That sounds fine to me.

I'm fine with the occasional noob or "you suck", but some people really seem to take being offensive as their goal in life, to the point where the only thing they seem to want is to make everyone else have a shitty time.

So for (b), if Linda is consistenly a serious issue, then Fred reports it. If he reports it multiple times and it isn't dealt with, then he sues the company for harassment.
Literally telling Linda to go f*** herself isn't really a winning response in any situation.

I represent that remark. The fact is that men are expected to want sex, so unless it's guy-on-guy or somebody twice your age, it's not taken seriously.
That said, I'd imagine that penetrative rape - the type commonly suffered by females - is a lot more traumatic.

As a straight male, I've been called Noob, loser, moron, fag (though it doesn't apply), n*gga (though it doesn't apply), whatever.

As much as I hate internet tracking, something I wish it was a little better in terms of these losers. Maybe if the game corps could better track the useless trolls and accept feedback then things would clean up.
DOTA2 had a $10m tournament this year. It's big news. Yet the only real categories they have for reporting are the broad "communication abuse" and then feeding/etc. Maybe if had better ways of identifying (and warning/enforcing) the racist, sexist pricks we could clean some of this crap up. Steam and Origin capture most of the non-console game market, so getting a perma-ban from multiplayer on both platforms (not just the game, but the whole thing) would go a long away to showing that this shit isn't acceptable.

Back when I worked in schools, one of our techs setup LTSP with NFS-mounted homedirs.
I mentioned that perhaps IP-based host authorization wasn't exactly a secure way of doing things, especially when it applied to both students and teachers/admin-staff.
I was told that it wouldn't be an issue, and that files were perfectly safe.

So some time goes by and a demo is scheduled for the system. My compatriot logs in and... he gets a hot-pink desktop with My Little Pony wallpaper theme. Unfortunately that didn't dissuade him from going with NFS, and they rolled it out anyways: "kids will never figure that out"

One thing that shouldn't be underestimated is the ability of a user (especially a young user) with *lots* of free time on his/her hands to figure out ways to game the system...

The sad part being that many non first-world countries still have better internet service than our so-called first-world countries...

Maybe he was transporting one of these.

Ukraine claims that any hardware that was left behind was non-functional. It was supposedly later claimed by the rebels that they "fixed" one of the BUKs. Maybe the fixing didn't enable the safety lock (or it wasn't working as intended)?

I think a big issue is that the longer this goes on, the less reliable "evidence" there will be. From all the reports, the scene of the crash is chaotic. Bodies aren't being tended to (or refrigerated) properly, pieces of the plane have been removed. At first it was "we're sending the black box to Russia for investigation" and then "we haven't found the black box yet", etc etc.

It's going to be pretty hard to sort things out if the "evidence" is being mishandled this badly, whether intentionally or otherwise.

I've found the opposite. My local Chapters is good at stocking mostly big names. However, since I picked up a Kindle a few years ago, I've found tons of good authors I'd not heard of before. Yes, there is some formulaic drivel, but the biggest problem for the most part is a few typos here and there.
How often do you review a book before buying it at a bookstore? At least online, I see a bunch of reviews and can read what people have to say before I buy. The worst book I got was actually from a bookstore. Perhaps it might have come up with a good plot, but the terrible repetition and generally poor editing made it unreadable

In terms of monentary cost, many useful things are. Free software also used to be less of a crapshoot (is it *really* safe, a virus/trojan, adware, or nagware)?

Apache: Free
OpenOffice/LibreOffice: Free
Java: Free

There were/are also a lot of free utilities that - while not pretty - were basically in the realm of "hey I made this to solve X for myself and thought somebody else might find it useful."

There may be some learning involved to *use* the product, and certainly many FOSS solutions involve community-provided updates, but in terms of personal cost it's free for me.

It's like where I used to work. We had certain users that were bad on the network (running torrents, whatever). They were important enough that they couldn't really be penalized and kept finding ways around the blocks. Instead, they just put the "bad" users' internet connection through a old switch (or was it a hub) that got like 10MBps

Basically, Verizon is doing the equivalent to sticking a 10MBps switch on the connections where Netflix routes through...

Too well-bribed to regulate....