Using Calibre and certain plug-ins, it's not hard to covert e-books to DRM-free ePub format. Of course, if you live in the Land of the Free that runs afoul of the DMCA, but that's your own problem.

A society that "beats down" people who are accused but not convicted of being "pervs" (keeping in mind that if you yourself have a sex life, you are likely doing things that would have been considered perverted 50+ years ago) is on its way to savagery. The rule of law, imperfect though it may be, has allowed us to emerge from feudalism.

That Reddit thread was thousands and thousands of women writing about their own experiences. I mentioned how the person closest to me immediately confirmed that this was her experience too.

Do something for me, would you? Ask five women who are close to you if they agree, and come back and tell us how they responded. If their first experience of being viewed sexually was positive and empowering, then good because we need to hear more stories like that to balance the negative ones.

But so far all you are just doing is denying that the problem exists and demanding incontrovertible proof in lieu of participating in a constructive dialogue.

Oh right, it's so clear now: it was her fault for not doing anything to stop the harassment.

Next stop: telling black Americans how they should have put an end to slavery.

In some ways we all live in fucked-up societies. In the U.S. they lock up millions of people, often for minor offenses, and execute many of them. You only have to go as far as the history of residential schools for natives in Canada to see how many lives were destroyed, even in the "enlightened" 20th century. Europe had a couple of little wars you might have heard of, there are still millions of people in slavery around the world, and we may have permanently fucked ourselves by boosting global temperatures and CO2 levels.

The point is not who we can blame, but what we should do. Becoming aware of a problem is the first step towards solving it.

Not at all. I myself am a middle-aged man in STEM (chemical engineering degree, working as a software developer) and I neither harass nor rape people.

Rather, I was saying that often the problems that many women face are invisible to men, and before concluding that there is a problem, the OP could ask women he knows and trusts if they have faced harassment or worse.

There are a couple of posts from women who say that they have not had to deal with harassment and assault, and it makes me very happy to think that it's not a universal -- maybe not even a majority -- experience.

I was responding more to his (I assume) aggressive stance that there was no problem with sexism. I pointed out that, in society at large, many people also don't see serious issues that women (or, in this case, mostly 12-year-old girls) face. Yet even though they don't see the issues, those issues are very real for a lot of people.

The AC was not trying to engage in a debate, but to shut down anyone who raises the issue. Just go back and look at the language.

So you think that none of the 22,000+ posts on that Reddit thread were from the U.S.?

Just because you aren't aware of a problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Oh, and a society based on vigilante justice is not a healthy one. We respect the rule of law for a reason.

I would have thought the same too, not long ago. I don't think I've ever seen a woman being cat-called or made to feel uncomfortable by men simply because she's a woman. After all, I live in decent parts of Ontario.

Then a thread on Reddit asked women when they became aware that they were being seen/treated sexually. Most of them were 10-14 years old, and they were being verbally and physically harassed by much older men (sometimes 4-5 times older). Someone compiled the women's ages.

I asked my SO about it. She also grew up in a quiet, relatively safe Ontario town. She confirmed that the same thing happened to her starting around age 12. When she was working in a market, around age 15, middle-aged men would wait until she was walking with big trays of food (and therefore couldn't protect herself) and grope her breasts and ass. This was common, and none of the other people around would say or do anything to help.

So just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not happening. It usually happens specifically when the girls have no one around to stand up for them. Talk to some of the women around you, and get their stories. Maybe things have changed, but I thought they had already changed in the '70s and '80s and I was wrong.

Yes, but no one is going to adopt it when the base version (Delphi Architect, I don't count the lesser versions that don't even have client/server capabilities) is $2,500 with a mandatory $800/year subscription ($4,300 and $1,500 respectively for the cross-platform RAD studio). Oh, the subscription is not mandatory, but you literally get no bug fixes or updates without it.

And they have adopted a twice-yearly release cycle, so you have to upgrade every six months.

I was a big Delphi booster (owned 5 versions over the years) but they lost me with the above insanity.

Maybe because Watts are a unit of power, not energy. This is a U.S. report, so they tend to use Imperial units. 4,211 BTU works out to 4.4 MJ (MegaJoules). In Chrome I didn't even have to finish typing in "4211 BTU in Joules" before it gave me the answer.

Oh, and in English we always capitalize "English" and "German" (and, of course, other languages).

To "weather something" means to endure severe conditions (e.g. weather) and survive. Imagine being on a ship and getting through a severe store. You and your ship have weathered the storm (this is almost certainly the origin of the phrase). So the company called Mendeley, which is considered an upstart in the publishing business, has survived a storm of controversy (over being bought by Elsevier) and joined the other scientific publishers to protect their content behind a paywall (a website that requires payment to view the contents).

Your opinion would have more weight if it were not for the massive backlog of rape kits. Police departments seem to have no interest in clearing the backlogs.

Correct conclusion, but one point is entirely wrong. The police acted correctly, but only because there was no evidence to support her story and you can only convict people if you can prove guilt. There is no reason at all to assume that she was lying. The guy can not be found guilty, but that does not mean he is innocent.