The chances that this "fast lane" will be used to service the deaf or blind is zero. This is the most ludicrous idea I have ever heard.
 

There's no shortage of people who are literally insane in politics.

Indeed. 1 out of 4 people has a diagnosable mental illness.

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older â" about one in four adults â" suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.

--NIMH

Consider what happens if the "Caliphate" gets their hands on some samples.

You mean the theocrats that are always talking about bringing the US back to its "christian" roots?

spit

--
BMO

None of this is at all true. Go look at actual research data on things like how much people interrupt and get interrupted, or how likely people are to react to something someone says.

Most women who are in professional environments have had the experience where they propose a course of action, and people ignore them and keep talking, and then some guy proposes the same exact course of action, and everyone agrees with it, and concludes that the guy had the idea. Watch carefully in meetings and you can see it too. It's sort of magical.

See, you're complaining that they don't know what your experiences are like. But you don't know what theirs are like, and given how you talk about it, you certainly aren't spending time talking to people to learn enough that you could make the comparison.

You know what I rarely come across? Aspiring software engineers, at all, period. I mean, I'm not in college. It doesn't come up.

But given the level of overt hostility women encounter, my first explanation for an apparent shortage of "good female software engineers" would be that the people who would have been good at it left because they wanted to have a job where people didn't habitually harass them.

Uh.

Actually, it is pretty much the case that women in general are harassed by men.

I'm 42. I've known dozens of women well enough to talk to them about their experiences. I think maybe one or two of them report that harassment stuff like this is fairly rare for them. The rest regard it as pretty ordinary.

It's actually really easy to check this out, because you can use whatever name you want on the Internet.

Someone decided to prove that women were just whining, recently.

What happened? He lasted two hours. Then he deleted the account, because he couldn't take it. The women I've talked to report that what he encountered is normal for them.

They're not even close to the same frequency. I know people of both genders in the game industry. The guys regard death threats as an exceptional event, and might not see one in any given five-year period. The women, if they're at all visible, get them pretty much constantly.

I've been seeing how men treat other men for a very long time now, and it is in general not even remotely similar to the kinds of abuse that the women I know take for granted in gaming communities. Like, for instance, I can post about how I like a game someone else dislikes, or dislike a game they like, and no one who thinks I'm male will threaten to rape me for it.

It's dumb to trust any technology 100 percent.

This was discussed here earlier after a poll showing that people with low knowledge of the Internet don't trust it, implying by omission that those that have more trust the Internet more, which is far from the case. The people with the most knowledge know what the flaws are.

Blind trust in any kind of technology is dumb.

Blind distrust of anything is also just as dumb.

Distrust of TOR because it was a US Navy project is practicing a type of ad-hominem. I'd rather distrust it based on either reading the code or the opinions and arguments of people better able than me at reading its code.

I've said it before about other things - there are plenty of reasons to dislike something without having to invent them. I use this when discussing GMO, because the "frankenfood" argument is specious - the real problem is the IP angle, for example.

--
BMO

You realize that there's more difference between your average man and your average woman than between your average NFL linebacker and your average man, right? (seriously, compare the stats some time - height, average bench strength, etc). You do realize how commonly women are raped and abused by men, and how they might happen to be more sensitive to the implicit or explicit threats of violence from someone that they're highly unlikely to be able to fight off?

I'm tall, 182 centimeters, and I still once had a guy literally pick me up and carry me back to his apartment when I tried to walk away from him.

There's a bit of a difference in that one in every four women actually will be raped in their life, and a sizeable percent of those getting those threats already have been.

Yes, men are raped too. About 91% of rape cases are male->female, 8% male->male, 0.8% female->female, and 0.2% female->male. Men are virtually always the perpetrator, but even when the victim is male (not nearly as common, but still way more common than we as a society should accept), the perpetrator is still overwhelmingly likely to be male.

(and if the excuse for the stats is "men aren't as likely to report being raped by a woman because of shame"... so is there no shame for a guy to report being sodomized against his will by a man?)

The basic point is: when you're threatening a violent crime against a person who may well have been a victim of such, and even if they haven't, very likely has friends who have and is more than aware of their vulnerability in this regard, that's taking it to a whole different level.

Nice being a straight cis white male when a venue is dominated by other straight cis white males, isn't it?

And just to make clear, the problem of insulting people isn't along the lines of "ching chong chow chee" or whatnot. The problem case is along the lines of:

Scenario 1:

Man: "What does that do? Sorry, I don't know perl."
Crowd: "You don't know perl? Geez, you're stupid."

Scenario 2:

Woman: "What does that do? Sorry, I don't know perl."
Crowd: "Geez, women are stupid."

Hoover dam does not use the entire contents of Lake Mead in one day, stupid.

I don't think it produces 10x as much steam for a given amount of solar energy. What it does is produce steam at a solar intensity 1/10 of the level at which other things produce steam (the other thing is producing zero steam at the temperature this one is producing steam at).

I think the real result is you need the same amount of reflector as for other schemes, however it can concentrate the solar energy on an area 10 times as large, which may be much less expensive (due to it not requiring as much accuracy, and because the receiver is nowhere near as hot).

Any chance we can just have a web browser which just does normal browsing, doesn't take hundreds of MB to run, and starts in under a couple of seconds ?

Next you'll be asking it to not leak memory like a sieve.