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Yes. Girls were not allowed to take certain classes. Girls in other male-dominated classes were harassed to the point of having to drop out of the class, thus reinforcing the position that obviously girls just can't do the work. The entire community would make it socially awkward for the parents of a girl taking an interest in "male" occupations. Frequently remarks were made about the only reason a girl would want to go into something like that was to chase the boys. Parents would forbid girls to study or even engage in such activities as a hobby. I was personally told that working with computers was "not something for girls to do", unless I wanted to take typing or data entry classes. My father slapped me when I pointed out that Ada Lovelace was a woman. Not everybody grows up in a liberal, open-minded environment - and I grew up in California. Look at the media. How often is it portrayed that women who are serious about any non-traditional feminine interests are either "butches" or "bitches".

/rdb - definitely not free, but a fascinating use of the shell and shell extensions as a database management system. Don't know if it's even still available. The NoSQL developer Carlo Strozzi said that he was inspired by it. Used to be at http://www.rsw.com./ An excellent white paper, "The UNIX Shell As a Fourth Generation Language" describes it, and there was a book too - "Unix Relational Database Management". I used it nearly 20 years ago for a retirement home's database when their DOS/dBase system broke down. Slackware Linux version 1 ran fine on their old PC. In fact, that was my first Linux kernel compilation.

Rather amusing. The six top recommended servers were exactly those posted above.

Thank you very much! Over the years I have gotten many useful apps and utilities from posts like this.

Well that was interesting. I don't know exactly what was going on, but when I changed by router's DNS from the default (ISP-provided) to one of these, there was a startling improvement in initial page load speeds for several sites that I checked.

All three of my boys learned to touch-type quite well playing the old Hero's Quest game. So there is definitely some benefit at least to the old text-based games. "Pick up rock" "Throw rock" and the faster you got at typing the better you took out the monsters.

Actually it is fully named "taregol hodu", meaning Indian chicken. If you can find any country in the world where there isn't rampant corruption and bribery and other shenanigans, I'd like to hear about it. Try reading the Miami news for a while.

Maybe because I'm a woman who got sick of being abused by men who never matured beyond puberty. I shall hope that you were joking here, but I've had to deal with all too many men who would say such things in all seriousness. Like my father, "that's not something for girls to do" or my school counselors, "you'd be more comfortable taking typing or home economics" - actually girls at that time and place weren't allowed in the woodworking or auto mechanics shop classes and the new "computer" classes, mostly data entry, were kind of iffy - or my first husband, "what do you need something like that for". The owner of the shop where I bought the parts to build my first PC told me to go home and knit booties for my grandchild. Six months later he offered me a job. Since then, I've been working with men - and women - who have respect for my capabilities as if I were a real person instead of a penis accessory.

I hired a woman with mental health problems to work in my computer shop. I told her that as far as I was concerned it was no different than if she were diabetic and needed to take medication to control her blood sugar. Unfortunately she did not keep her doctor's appointments, even though I ended up marking them on the shop whiteboard and reminding her, and she did not take her medication regularly. After eight or nine months, and some pretty unhappy clients, I had to let her go. She was very bitter and tried to cause problems. So I can understand why many firms might be reluctant to hire someone with such an issue.

I never had a television, but I remember a Beverly Hillbillies episode I saw at my grandparent's house, something about "Doctor Granny", The granny ended up "office-sitting" for a doctor, and told one overweight woman to get some tennis shoes and walk, and another one who had trouble sleeping to get down and scrub her floors. Everyone was horrified, except the two women who found the advice to work.

There are "three-point" trailer hitches; they are triangular with two points attached to the towing vehicle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkH4UW2r3ew

No.

http://www.rdb.com/

Indeed. My first two read fluently by the time they were 4 - I read beyond high-school level in the first grade - and aside from attitude problems did quite well in school. The third wasn't able to read, so I put him in a pre-school, which did nothing for him. By the time he was in first grade, the teachers were making snarky remarks about his home environment. Apparently they missed the part about his siblings' abilities, with one of them even in the gifted and talented program. He was finally diagnosed with learning disabilities after two miserable years of fighting the system, after he was also diagnosed with a mild form of epilepsy, and in spite of barely passing most of his elementary and middle school classes and failing the rest, was judged "not disabled enough" to get any special help other than what I could give him. We persevered, and he finally went on to make the Dean's list in a local community college, majoring in accounting of all things, and manages a large health food store's warehouses, while one of his brothers didn't even finish high school and runs a forklift in a Rubbermaid warehouse thanks to his wife's parents' influence, and the other who was in the gifted and talented program ended up flipping pizza dough.