So complete supplication to an authoritarian regime is the better policy? Well fuck lets lift all the trade restrictions on North Korea / Russia / Syria, etc.. What could the possible consequences possibly be? Commerce and trade clearly trumps any other possible outcomes.

You're personally value judging the class of a person based on their name, which is itself flawed. The studies I've heard about found: 'upper class' parents are biased to name their kids something unique and distinct. The next tier down social class is more likely to name their kids after kids from the higher social classes 'popular names'. Playing out, you could have an 'upper class' 15 year old and a 'lower class' one year old with the same name.

Your Harley or LaTrina may have been hot upper class names at some point, but I haven't looked into that.

More importantly, are you saying racial job discrimination is wrong, but class discrimination isn't?

Its not racist at all. With birth records, you can map a person's name as well as their race, and all kinds of random other data.
If Eliyah are almost entirely named to black babies, it's a 'black' name statistically.
If Cody's are almost entirely named to white babies, it's a 'white' name statistically.

Once you've got a baseline of extreme limits of 'white', 'black', 'hyspanic', 'asian', etc.. names, you can perform blind tests on how people react to different names. There's nothing racist about it. Its pretty simple to quantify.

The hard names are those used by all cultures, which is why researchers don't use those names when performing these types of tests.

http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
^
Interesting talk on the subject.

Stall stall stall till the other guy runs out of money / initiative!!!

You don't seem to complain about all the other products you use daily which were all/mostly manufactured in part in China. Obviously there's shoddy shit sold by all sorts of people, but you typically won't buy it unless you have confidence that said shit legitimate enough to assuage your risks. IPhones are made in China. But they're sold by Apple. People like and trust Apple, so Apple has the incentive to make damn sure that their products are high enough quality to match their perception.

The product was sold through Amazon. If you ask the vast majority of Amazon users, they'll say when you buy from Amazon.com, you're buying Amazon. It is only in Amazon's best interest to tighten up and compensate buyers for potential losses due to shoddy products sold through their service. Otherwise, it'll end up much like Ebay has: the shit hole of fraud and bogus products on the internet. I can't name a single friend who still uses EBay after many years of use. Too much BS.

I thought I was the only one that thought these things were the biggest pile of fluff. I'm taking bets on the next over-hyped technologies to fall over:
  - Personal Drones
  - VR
  - Tiny Video Cameras (GoPro-like's)

I'm sure there's more, but these ones both seem to be well over-baked in tech press. That said, there isn't too much on the near horizon that seems fractionally interesting to the disruption smart phones have caused in the tech world.

Lower your screen brightness? I've programmed 16 years professionally, 8 years in school, and probably gamed and watched TV throughout that period during my off hours. I've never had significant or even minor issues with screens 'burning my eyes' or some nonsense. There's nothing wrong with black on white as long as your screens are tuned to you. If the screen brightness is too painful, turn down the brightness. Its a pretty simple solution.

IMHO, White on black is a lot harder to focus on the words but with so many of these things, its largely subjective. I've known some to use blue on grey, which I find abhorrent, but they loved it...

What's missing from your system is either proper DPI or Android's DIP (probably the best measure) adjustments.

Dots-per-Inch (DPI) world: If you have a 10 point font, it should be the exact same physical ruler size if you measured a word on basically any monitor assuming they were correctly specifying their DPI setting in their EDID. Of course there are distortions in monitor pixels, etc.. but should be darn close.

Device Independent Pixel (DIP) world: The OS must knows the 'context' of the screen (aka distance from the viewer's eye). They use the DPI of the panel and multiply by some factor based on how far away a human reader 'should' be from the screen. If you're 10 feet away vs. 10 inches, the number of physical inches representing that same character can vary wildly, but the human perceivable size of the words should 'feel' about the same size.

You US point of view isn't shared internationally. Know your rights and don't be an ass assuming everyone follows the same laws:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

The definition of private also varies widely depending on country (there are probably a few more measures now that drones exist and are cheap and ubiquitous).

As for the rest of your panacea arguments, the sad fact is most laws are passed because people abuse them without it. Having separate bodies making vs. enforcing laws makes for an essential barrier to limit making a law just for sake of it.

We have privacy laws because we don't want to be micro-scoped and shamed for being different. This is NOT a bad thing. We should be different, and we shouldn't be shamed if someone wants to do something against some social norm in their bedroom, or in their covered back yard. The laws in place attempt to strike balance between two unrealistic alternatives: Full surveillance where nothing is secret vs Complete autonomy where even just crimes cannot be addressed without violating one's personal refuge.

Funny story, I have a friend who's a male nurse, and I was in dorm with a couple more in school. The only people giving them a hard time were friend and people outside the field (me included with light ribbing). If anything, male nursing is an out-group stigma and certainly not borne from people in-industry (at least from my limited peers' views).

Can you say the same for IT? I've known a lot of ladies in my time in IT (some companies even bordering on 50% staff) and although far fewer cases of discrimination than some would purport, IMHO more than typically female dominated fields.

My only note would be that you're comparing different classes of job without like-comparison. Of course programming is a white collar job where you typically go to university, get your degree then start your professional life. You have a similar trajectory with business, sciences, accounting, etc...

Doctors and Lawyers have seen great strides in female entrance lately. If more women are stepping into higher rewarding jobs, it could be leaving a vacancy of jobs for less desirable fields of which women participated more in. If that's the case, a vacuum of computing jobs will eventually be filled by women (and men) looking to better their economic station.

Women's bias seems less about stability and more about work flexibility:
http://freakonomics.com/podcas...

Yes, there's a social stigma for men not entering nursing. There are probably a lot of programs to entice men into the career, but you don't see people whining about them on the internet. We on Slashdot whine about women in computing because the vast majority of the audience are in computing fields and they see a double-standard. Hell, any sort of institutional 'encouragement' for minorities/genders/etc.. are considered discrimination against ME ME ME!!!!

Hate speech, profanity, spam, threats, etc.. they all run rampant throughout content sites that don't actively fight against them. Sure, Facebook doesn't have to censor nudity, but they chose to draw the line on where they did. That was their choice to make, just as its your choice to use a more free service.

My only burn is that Zuk specifically went out of the way to break his own policies to assuage further political backlash. Trump clicked 'I understand these onerous speech restricted privileges' when he accepted the EULA.