U.S. English is itself a variant. However, when in Rome, shoot Roman candles...

I'm going to ignore the rest of this ridiculous exchange and go out to enjoy the beautiful day.

That may well be so, but last time I checked, Slashdot was published in English. I don't resemble the World Series at all, though I do confess to being nearsighted.

Would you kindly look at a dictionary?

dike: an embankment for controlling or holding back the sea

dyke: disparaging term for a lesbian

New low in ignorance and carelessness for Slashdot.

This is fascinating in light of the recent lawsuit filed and won in Louisiana on behalf of a group of teachers from the Philippines who were brought here to teach and virtually held hostage by the agency that recruited them. (They won their lawsuit a few days ago--can't recall the more recent source.) Their visas were held by the recruiter as they were squeezed for ever-increasing fees, forced to rent substandard housing at exorbitant rates, and otherwise abused.

It's especially fascinating to me that in these recessionary times when recent American college graduates can't find work, we have to import elementary and high school teachers and people with the most basic IT skills so that they can be held in indentured servitude and squeezed for more and more money. I guess human trafficking is no longer limited to unskilled workers.

Sorry, but if Baidu wants us to believe that their spiders behave lawfully, they should arrange to receive lawful communications regarding them. As for me, I'm enjoying the respite--since the spiders stopped when I terminated the communication.

Of course, you are right about the routing. But since giving in to my baser impulses and blacklisting the entire country on my one humble web server, I've had a remarkable decrease in my annoyance factor in terms of crap like port scans, login attempts, comment spam in the blogs, and even a respite from the damned Baidu spiders who won't observe anybody's robots.txt file. Along about the fall of last year, I began observing what looked like attempts at ddos attacks--all originating from China. None of them succeeded, but my annoyance levels grew by leaps and bounds. When they started in with the UDP port scans (which I confess baffle me), I'd had enough. Incidentally, if you try to contact Baidu to see about their injudicious crawling, your email will most likely be returned with a note that your email provider has been blacklisted in China. I don't know what I'll do with all the time I'm saving--take up a hobby, perhaps.

Go take a couple of courses for non-credit or "enrichment" at your local community college. Start a little bit behind where you think you are at the moment. It will air your brains out in a non-pressurized environment, give you some idea of what you need to be doing, and won't cost much. I did it years ago, about ten or twelve years after I finished college. It rebuilt my confidence, sharpened my skills after ten years of disuse, and was highly enjoyable in the bargain. The fees were very affordable. I never regretted it for a minute and considered it time well spent.

I think it's because they're medical devices, and the makers charge whatever the traffic will bear. Insurance pays for most people, after all. Ever look at the markup on a pair of plain old eyeglasses? Even with the preparation of lenses with your prescription, it's pretty terrible.

The suggestion: If you've been diagnosed as functionally deaf by a physician, and if you're in fact unemployed, why not nose around and see if there's a benefit available to you from your state? It's an assistive device, and there may be some sort of loan, grant, or other fundage available to you. That might be especially true if you're not going to be able to locate and keep a paying job without one. Look at vocational rehab stuff.

As somebody who (a) values privacy and finds government's invasion of it abhorrent; but (b) has seen some of the results of chronic animal abuse, I feel a bit like the proverbial Christian Scientist with an appendicitis attack.

From the animal-rescue point of view, the world is full of crazy and vicious people who cruise around "adopting" animals for subsequent abuse. This includes dogfighters looking for bait, people who produce crush films, hoarders, puppy mill operators, crazed cat ladies, people who practice killing and torture rituals, and even idiots who just want a fresh puppy every year or so. Most animal adoptions take place on a sort of honor system, the potential for abuse is huge, the actual amount of abuse going on is both shocking and sickening, and there simply isn't any money for any investigation or follow-up.

From the invasion of privacy standpoint, it should be observed that there are also plenty of animal-loving lunatics abroad in the land. That would be the folks who think that animal abusers should be tortured, castrated, deprived of their children, burned out of their homes, or otherwise "suitably" punished for their misdeeds. People exist who believe that the death penalty as it's administered here is too mild for animal abusers. Such a list in their hands would be downright dangerous.

There must be a way that law enforcement could share information regarding convicted abusers with licensed shelters and rescue groups without making such information readily and publicly available in a one-stop database.

Sigh.

Both of you are missing the point. Both Twitter and Facebook can be set up to confront you directly and say something along the lines of, "Kleetman is now following you/wants to be your friend. OK with you? (yep/nope)" That provides the opportunity to opt out (as it were) and the opportunity to do a bit of trivial checking-up if desired. The perception of being followed by a mysterious individual who roams the Intertubes assembling lists of women named "Anne" is just plain distasteful.

You don't even have to have an abusive ex-husband. I found I had acquired a follower with the unlikely name of "Kleetman Nissanka." Our buddy Kleetman seems to have assembled a collection of people to follow--all of whom are women, and all of whom have the same first name as mine. He may have found my public profile (which lists two websites, both business-related), but I certainly didn't give him permission to follow me. I have now cleansed Kleetman from my profile and re-disabled Buzz. I guess people at Google don't have to worry about stalkers, spammers, and other assorted gentry.

Wish I had some mod points. What you say makes a lot of sense.

It's interesting to read this, as I've had some random and somewhat incomprehensible port scans coming from an IP address identified as one of theirs. If you're just an insignificant slob, you can't write to their abuse address, either; you'll get bounced. I simply blocked that particular IP address. Let them worry about who's gotten to them.

(Not affiliated with Doctors Without Borders): http://www.ewb-usa.org/

They had people in Haiti when the quake struck, and some were actually missing for a while. They have at least ten ongoing projects there.