A more accurate description would be that a small group of people are trying to silence these women. ("Conspiring" may or may not be applicable, since it's not clear whether they are acting in concert with each other, or why they would need to)

Basically you have a bunch of entitled man-children who don't think that these women should be able to criticise them or "their" favorite topics, and so they are trying to intimidate the women into shutting up.

It doesn't matter one bit what the women allegedly did to "deserve it" -- In a just world, these law-breaking cowards would be exposed, named, shamed, and prosecuted. Hopefully some of them will be. Impunity is repugnant.

Can you provide a list of circumstances where death threats are acceptable behavior? Because to my knowledge, there aren't any.

That's okay, since the Slashdot TOS agreement requires us to recommend nuclear power above all others.

So to the OP: start working on a fission reactor in your basement. Once you have it running, it will be very cheap and reliable.

I suppose that is possible; although I've never actually encountered that problem (over the last 15 years I've spent doing C++ programming).

If you use smart pointers to manage your dynamic allocations, you'll find that memory management in C++ isn't any harder than in a garbage-collected language. It's only when trying to manually manage memory (C-style) that it gets tricky, and manual memory management is almost never necessary.

(The downside is that you have to make sure to avoid reference cycles, but in my experience that is easy enough to do. The upside is that you don't incur the overhead of a GC thread, and that your resources are freed deterministically the instant you are done with them, rather than "at some time in the future, maybe". That determinism gives us the added bonus of making smart pointers also usable for managing other resources besides RAM -- sockets, file descriptors, etc)

And what exactly would that be? I don't think most people understand macroeconomics well enough to know "what is necessary" -- so even if a politician did know what to do and planned to do it, he probably would not want to alienate 50+% of his potential voters by explaining to the public "what is necessary".

... all I got was a shiny bomb case full of pinball machine parts.

What, and make ourselves easily replaceable? In the absence of unions, code obfuscation is the only job security we've got. ;^)

I'd say the reason we don't see a lot of demand for Hypercard-like environments these days is, they aren't necessary anymore.

Back in the Olden Days, if you wanted to accomplish something on your computer, and there wasn't an application available that met your needs, you might respond to that problem by writing one yourself. Hypercard could make that easier for you to do, if you weren't already an experienced programmer.

These days the software market is much larger and more mature, so if you want to accomplish something on your computer, chances are very good that there is already an application that does what you want better than anything you could make yourself. So instead of spending a few days learning Hypercard and then designing and implementing a HyperCard stack, you just Google what you want to do, find five different applications that are ready to use (and probably free, or cheap), and pick one.

So I don't think there is a lot of pent-up demand for a Hypercard-like language these days. People who want to learn how to program will continue to do so, and people who merely want to get a task done ASAP have plenty of premade higher-quality software to choose from. The "middle ground" of people who want to make an app without officially learning how to program has gone away.

The unstated assumption above is that an AI will have emotions and motivations that resemble those of humans -- as if mimicking homonid psychology is the only possible approach to AI. I see no reason why that should be the only way to make an AI and plenty of reasons why you wouldn't want to do it that way. It's like arguing against the development of cars by worrying that they will leave too much manure on the streets.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Frankly, if there's one benefit to our inevitable conquest by our new robot overlords, it's that machines will be available to do all of the tedious tasks cheaply, freeing up humans to do something more fulfilling with their time. If those humans choose not to work, that would be a reasonable choice for them to make. In particular, they'd no longer be burdening their fellow humans, since the machines would take up the slack.

Would that promote laziness? Probably. But it would also free a lot of people up to pursue the skills/talents they are really good at or interested in, rather than forcing then to waste their productive years doing work that is meaningless to them, just to put food on the table.

In other words, we can lower the retirement age to 18. Works for me!

Methinks the carnivores doth protest too much.

Some theorize that that has already happened.

Personally, I don't buy it -- most people are not that tall.

I didn't suggest government mandates of anything; I was just commenting on the fact that when companies set their budgets, they consider employees' wages to be optional, but the other categories I mentioned are always considered untouchable.

... or the increases could be taken out of corporate profits, shareholder payouts, CEO compensation, etc.

It's not clear to me why these alternatives are never considered. (Actually, it is pretty clear -- because the people in power like money and would rather keep more of it for themselves)