The more complex analysis I've been reading about is that this is all stemming from a creep of 'cultural marxism' from academia. The thinking behind much of this is definitely marxist because as you say, it's about equal outcomes. For much of this cultural issues relating to gender or sexuality, the minorities are very much so, minorities, and market forces are essentially forcing them out. People aren't interested in products for that minority, so they don't get made because they don't sell.

Unfortunately what has crept in is the idea that every minority must be represented. This is particularly prominent in the video game industry where there's a race to the bottom to force in various minority figures, not because it makes any artistic sense, but because well, they need to be represented. As a result, we get fairly ridiculously contrived characters that do nothing except pander to those minorities, and generally annoy the mainstream market. A case in point is the developer bioware, who have gone out of their way to force their political viewpoints through their characters, and as a result, they've suffered.

So going back to cultural marxism, it's a case of forcing parity, as you have identified, rather than allowing it happen on its own and stabilise according to market demands. When it comes to something like this topic of male dominance in technical fields, well it's clear, there's absolutely no barrier preventing females from doing CS or programming, or any other male dominated fields, such as engineering. Therefore, the thinking is that clearly, capitalist ideology has failed to achieve their desires, so they need to force competing ideologies to counter it. Marxist ideologies are particularly useful for them because it enables authoritarian attitudes ahead of libertarian ones. They see the privileged people as controlling the means of production (i.e. the majority determine the market) and therefore need to take that away from the majority by making the market pander to the minorities and remove market forces from the equation. This is precisely what we are seeing here; structure things so that the majority can't participate.

The thing is, people have researched the topic in more depth, and you can find that while girls do play games, the games they do play are not the same as boys. This is why, in spite of this 50% are female, the main market is the one dominated by males, which is why the industry works quite hard in targeting that audience.

I was taught that you treat "air" as an ideal gas when there's no phase change. This was thermodynamics though. There may be an issue with humidity, but I have my doubts whether that will play a large role.

I get the feeling that maybe because there is worldwide pressure to do something about tax issues where money earned in one jurisdiction is taxed (at a lower rate) in another. This may be a case of the US government trying to tax it so that they get the money, and fight off other countries from having access to these funds. Ultimately I don't know, but one of our more colourful Australian politicians has a saying which I can probably change one word so that it applies in all cases; Never get in between a politician and a bucket of money...

Probably, the older I get, the more cynical I get, and all I can see is that business tends to lobby government for freedom from competition.

It's probably a case of companies buying keys in a cheap region, and selling them to people who otherwise would have to pay more in their region.

I decided to go nvidia this round, had issues with my previous AMD gpu where certain functions didn't work properly. The one that annoyed me the most was that I have a 1920x1200 monitor, which is an older model that won't do 1:1 pixel scaling, so if a 1920x1080 signal gets fed, it will stretch it to full screen. The AMD software could be set to maintain the aspect ratio, so it didn't bother me, after a certain update, that feature stopped working, and no matter how hard I tried, it would always stretch the display. Using nvidia now, and able to get the letterboxed image again.

GPU's are easy to change, 16:10 monitors not so much. There's no way I'm departing from 16:10!

As a windows phone user, they screwed up office on it as well. I had previously an android phone which included some variant with office compatibility courtesy of samsung, and it supported all excel functions, meanwhile the microsoft version is heavily nerfed. Some spreadsheets I was using on my phone, no longer worked properly, which was a rather big nuisance. But windows phone does one major thing a lot better than android; updates and bug fixes.

Viola is actually a larger violin.

Yea, my perception of windows 8/8.1 is that under the hood it's very good, better than 7. It's all in the UI which is completely idiotic. I have no idea how they were able to screw it up so badly. However, a couple of UI features were improved in 8, but for the most part, they stuffed up.

I have a kitchen sink!

Brianna Wu was caught subsequently did admit to using at least one sockpuppet (twitter handle was BROLOLZ). Other ones, the evidence doesn't definitively prove anything, but are highly suspicious. Hopefully the FBI is taking it seriously.

There was a bit of a conspiracy, because, while there's no concrete evidence, it appeared that a few of the 'victims' were working really hard through the use of sockpuppets, to try to build the foundations for a larger harassment campaign.

I heard that a major problem in Africa is a burial custom where they pour water over the deceased persons body and then relatives drink the water. No idea whether this is true at all, but if it is, you would sort of think that there needs to be a fairly serious education campaign to control it. Ebola isn't that contagious considering it needs direct contact with bodily fluids, so something has to be happening which is consistently putting people at risk.

In the grander scheme of things, it's not that important, it is what got the ball rolling though. Again, people were generally suspicious about the nepotism and cronyism, but there never was any solid proof. Even the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, people knew that it was probably due to pressure for the bad review, but there wasn't proof of anything, and certainly no names to attach to it, just two very large companies.

This time, it's different. There's names, there's evidence, there's clear indications that from some, they've been participating in some very dubious ethical practice. There's clear examples of a general antipathy from game 'journalists' towards their readers (many 'gamers are dead' articles in a few hours). The point is, to deny that Quinn did anything wrong, would basically admit that GamerGate is a beat up over nothing. It became a lot bigger than Quinn, but don't forget, it wasn't just the relationships she had, she also concocted that there was a harassment campaign against her last year, after her game didn't get greenlit. Because it followed the narrative many of these 'journalists' want to hear, they didn't do any basic fact checking, just took her word for it, and she reaped massive publicity for it.

I don't think it's character assassination, but if you do, you should have a look at what happened to Max Tempkin and Brad Wardell. They were accused of rape, and the 'journalists' had a field day defaming and character assassinating them without a shred of evidence, just an allegation. Now, they've all found their morals when one of their own (i.e. self styled social justice warrior [yes Quinn called herself that iirc]) got some unwanted attention that was very damaging to the movement because of the incestuous relationships in the industry. The logs from the gamejournopros list proved that they had absolutely no intention of covering it. They didn't, they banned discussion, banned people who mentioned anything. Certainly haven't apologised when they defamed others though, they just went back and tried to quietly sanitise their articles. That's why GamerGate is all about journalistic integrity and ethics; the 'journalists' have clearly demonstrated that they are unrepentant and unapologetic about not having any.