raymorris said:
> a few hundred citizens and a few thousand foreign nationals not allowed to fly into or out of the country.

As a man, I'm not that keen on threats of murder or felony assault. I expect women in public life to be able to handle hurtful comments, but credible death threats are wrong and anybody, regardless of race, sex, or planet of origin, needs to take them seriously.

Ah, accusations from an anonymous coward. Do you have any actual evidence for your claims?

The old technology I am giving up are the wringers on top of washing machines.

They're dangerous (you can get your fingers caught) and they mess up more delicate fabrics. Also, the newer washing machines with the agitators that churn the wash around do just as good a job.

Also, zippers. Velcro is much easier to work with and it never gets stuck and it doesn't hurt as much to snag your dick on velcro.

Kids effectively have no rights. At least in recent memory (I haven't been following this, and it may have changed), many juvenile courts and similar institutions were assumed to be working for the benefit of the kids, which removed all sorts of protections. If I go to court, it is understood that the judge isn't on my side, and if I get convicted the sentence won't be to my benefit. Therefore, I get such things as the right to counsel and the presumption of innocence. Juvenile "justice" tended to dispense with such inconveniences.

So, yes, if I write violent fiction (and I do sometimes, never published though), or fiction about acts of terrorism, no problem. If my son had done that while in K-12 school, he could have been in serious trouble.

What makes you think people haven't attacked the film/TV industry, the music industry, or various religious groups as being misogynist? I've seen all three being accused. If you haven't, well, you must follow gaming news a lot more than other news. Nothing wrong with that, but you're making statements out of ignorance.

Sarkeesian has chosen to attack what she sees as misogyny in video games, much as others have attacked it in various other art forms and religions and other sorts of groups. She's specializing, which is a reasonable thing to do. She herself doesn't need to concentrate on misogyny everywhere, particularly when many other people are attacking perceived misogyny all over.

Corporate policies? You think corporate policies on women haven't been attacked? Do you read Slashdot articles that aren't about games? Have you missed all the articles on allegations of sexism and misogynist behavior in the tech industry? They attracted a lot of comments. Gamers aren't being singled out in any way, shape, or form here.

Why is this modded Flamebait? It's a blunt expression of opinions on her work, which is not objectionable, with some insults, which aren't that bad. It also insists that she should be safe from threats of violence, and that those who make them should be punished. Seems perfectly legit to me.

The old business I interned with used a Windows 2000 server until December 2013 - when the business finally folded. The server outlasted the business that owned it - having been bought second hand sometime in 2006/07, already near 8 years old.

That server was a Pentium II machine, with a whopping 128Mb of RAM, a pair of 9GB disks in RAID 1 for the OS, and a pair of 32GB in RAID 1 for the data. It also came with a pair of lockable Zip-disk drives for which we'd long since lost the keys, an unmatched DvD-rom drive that was added sometime in the last decade.

And it kept plodding along right up until November 2013 when one of the Data disks failed and decided it wasn't going to drop out of the array - completely nuking the company's accounts folder on the mirror.

There were other reasons why the company failed - but I suppose having the accounts for the last 7 years smeared across the platter in a headcrash was just another nail in the coffin.

The Machine itself was still running when the business was shut down for good. It's probably still working now too, doing God Knows What for God Knows Who? It's built like a bloody tank and did exactly what was asked of it for 14 years.

Cheaper to fix, a lot more reliable, cheaper to make, cheaper to buy for the new owner..... and really not that odious to use.

If anything, I find torque converter auto's tricky and unintuitive - and I spend the entire time driving second-guessing what the car's gearbox is going to do. Especially badly-programmed autos

I made a USENET post to an active discussion an hour ago.

I also still use a film camera to take photographs from time to time. Especially ones I'd like to last. It's 40 years old and generates lovely looking pictures, and only cost $20 on a trip to D.C. Bought from the now sadly departed City Electronics in the old Post Office.

Jihadists succeeded in a pretty big way with the 9/11 attacks. I fail to see why another group wouldn't be capable of doing something of that magnitude again, given some proper funding and competent planning. It seems illogical to conclude that there isn't a real threat against western targets after we've seen those and other attacks.

I'm not saying we should panic, overreact, or (in the case of the NSA) overreach, but I think some vigilance is surely warranted.

I believe the limiting factor on country size is 1) communication ability, and 2) transportation (force projection) ability.

Roads were a major factor in the size of the Roman Empire, for example. City-states were common when there was no force regionally large enough to conquer the city. City states also needed to maintain farmland surrounding them, so they could remain fed.

Similar technology was used to look for undiscovered chambers in Egyptian pyramids in the 80's, if memory serves

Of course. Where do you think The Mummy came from?

I love science.