I am not a linguist, but I think you are confusing articles with pronouns. The former is not as powerful in communicating social norms as the latter. More to the point, descriptors for people are more powerful than descriptors for non-person objects. To suggest that language is just arbitrary (in idiosyncratic, not post-structuralist terms [1]), and not without ideological power is naive.

No anglo-centricity about it. Sounds like someone made a fuss about a simple change they should have accepted, and then multiple parties treated each other badly.

[1] Language is arbitrary in terms of signifiers always pointing to signifieds that are in fact signifiers themselves (infinitely recursive); but that means that linguistic choices about something as simple as pronouns can and should be situated in a context to understand them, and that is not without baggage. Like the time a recruiter sent a message to a local UG list I am saying her employer needed to hire "a bunch of guys quickly." It's not intent, but socially situated meaning that makes that problematic reinforcement of stereotype of consequence.

Very wise question. Is it because the amendments are made by committees?

IMHO, this is one of the problems with the US system. The constitution grants the houses the ability to govern themselves. So while a bill requires a simple majority to pass, there are lots of other votes that must happen before the bill can even be voted upon. There are rules static when a bill can be introduced, how amendments are added, how it gets out of committee, and how it comes to the floor for vote. So in the end, a senator/representation can't just propose X and bring it up for a vote. At that point, is it really democracy any longer?

The SSDs will have lots of regulation on-board because there are very specific voltages required to read and write to Flash memory. They should be just as reliable as USB flash drives and RAM and CPU and video cards and other electrically-sensitive things that require particular voltages to operate.

I'll bet if you do constantly rsync your iTunes music directory you will see deleted files. Because if you have iTunes set to "manage music" it will rename files according to some scheme that seems to randomly change over time. (Or because you changed some metadata like the song's name.) So it's entirely possible that a whole bunch of files were "deleted" - because iTunes moved them to a different location, and as far as I know, rsync doesn't have the ability to track files being moved around. (And a bit of Googling suggests this is in fact the case and offers some workarounds.)

Neither have I. I've never had it delete a song. What I have seen it do (multiple fucking times) is refuse to sync new music over to an iPhone. It'll get as far as "waiting for items to copy" and then just sit there for as long as you're willing to wait, not copying a thing. Googling (and bitching about it on Facebook) reveals I am nowhere near alone in experiencing this problem.

So, then, the other way around: OS X's filesystem (it is HFS, right?) on Windows. Because I've still never seen iTunes try to format a thumbdrive, but I've definitely seen Windows offer to format a thumbdrive it doesn't recognize the filesystem on.

Did iTunes do it or did the OS she was running do it?

Because as far as I know, unless the thumbdrive was an iPod itself, iTunes isn't capable of formatting it.

I'm guessing that you did something like create a thumbdrive using NTFS or whatever Mac OS X's file system is (HFS?) and then tried to use it on the opposite OS, which balked, and offered to reformat the drive into a filesystem it understood, which your niece just hit "OK" for.

Because iTunes may be a piece of shit (as far as I can tell, when iTunes Match released, Apple intentional broke syncing so it's no longer possible to sync music from iTunes), but I've never heard it do that. (I really should clarify that last one since you can get it to sync, but it easily breaks such that it will stop adding new music to an iPod/iPhone until you factory reset it and copy everything over again. At which point it will break again, so every time you get a new album outside of iTunes, you're in for another "factory reset and copy everything over again" loop. Which sounds like what this lawsuit is about, actually. Oh, and based on the last time this happened, it will then copy things over wrong so that metadata for songs refers to the wrong songs and some songs don't copy completely. I'm not arguing that iTunes isn't a completely broken piece of shit - it is - just that I've never seen it format thumbdrives.)

Great, so now we just need to fix the sudden random failures where the drive completely fails but it is 6 months old and showed no signs of degradation. A coworker of mine just had that happen with a Crucial SSD.

One power saving feature on my phone is that it stops polling for text messages, thus forcing me to unlock the phone and click a refresh button, thus using more power than the background polling would have used in the first place.

While that may be true, it does not fully account for the discrepancies we see in society.

It isn't about barriers so much as it is about encouragement. Certainly, girls have access to all the same stuff boys do. But society encourages them toward different things. I didn't see this so much until I had 2 sons. Here are some examples:

- Buy a happy meal from McDonalds. They ask if you want the girl's toy or the boy's toy. The kids are being placed on a track very early.
- Watch some kids TV shows and compare:
    - The number female scientists versus male scientists.
    - Same with heroes and heroines.
    - And athletes.

My 5-year-old son recently told me that girls like cute things and boys like science. He figured this out from watching G-rated movies, TV, and commercials. I try to review what he watches, but it is inevitable! I have peers with female children didn't even buy Mega Blocks, Duplo Blocks, or Legos for their daughters. Then when the girls turn 5 they declared that the kids just weren't interested in them. BS: they got doll houses, and my little ponies, and 2 cheezy "Lego Friends" sets.

It isn't just that girls may have a proclivity toward those things. They are actively steered toward them. Only after this is fixed can we make a reasonable judgement as to what natural tendencies the sexes have. But we have a long way to go before we get there.

It looks like you need a Steam account to watch. You can view the list of public broadcasts, but attempting to watch them (even on the supported browsers) brings me to a login page. No idea if it works in just a browser if you have a Steam account.

Oh, and if you're at work, visiting that page also verified other reports that people were using it to stream porn. So visit it at your own risk.

This is what the press has been saying but it isn't 100% accurate. One is less likely to infect, but it is still infectious. Naturally, a person coughing and sweating profusely is excreting more bodily fluids than someone who is asymptomatic. But they are also more likely to travel and go into work, thus exposing people. It is a double-edged sword.

If we are sticking with my example, it does cause disease - it kills you in 30 years. I don't like that. Everyone is hoping it approaches 90 years, 100 years - well, good luck with that. I'd rather just stop the disease entirely since it is totally preventable.

In what case?

One of the most nasty things a disease can do is to slowly replicate without causing symptoms. These long incubation periods are why Ebola, Tuberculosis, and Rabies are so dangerous. It makes them hard to detect and gives the host time to travel and potentially infect others without either party knowing. By the time the symptoms manifest it is often too late. By contrast, a disease that produces symptoms immediately is easily detectable and the host seeks treatment. If it is really really fast, they die before they can pass it on, and such diseases quickly eradicate themselves.

I don't look forward to a world where AIDS only manifests after 30 years, but everyone has it.