I've been to some. They were doing well once they got rid of the Russian overlords. I've also been to some of the "socialist" scandinavian countries that they were doing well, much higher quality of living than the US.

It's possibly a tool to decide if someone is compliant enough to put up with the test.

I had a polygraph test once, for a summer job at Circle K (strange things are afoot there). Sitting in a motel room with a guy asking me strange questions about whether I had ever stolen anything. I didn't get the job.

You'll only make it angry. You wouldn't like it when it's angry.

I'm also under the impression that there are,absurdly, potential patent-license issues with the .mp4 file format that h.264 video is most often stored in.

Finally, of course unless the usual obstructionist Apple and Microsoft ever implement opus codec support, this also doesn't give you the legal ability to include sound (mp3 or aac, typically, for h.264 videos) with the video. Hope everybody likes silent movies...

That's not quite true for dental work, but the price is capped, so you'll typically pay £18.50 to see a dentist, £50.50 if you need something done, or £219 if you need something serious. It's only free if you qualify for extra assistance, which is automatic if you are under 18, under 19 (25 in Wales) and in full-time education, on income support or similar.

I don't worry about being embarrassed by my gender. I'm already too embarrassed by my species.

Are there things that trolls can say to you that make you scared to go outside? Do trolls send you death threats? Do trolls even bother the waste the time figuring out what your real home address is so that they can scare the bejeezus out of you? I don't think so. So why do the trolls do this to women? I don't see this as equal trolling here. Either they need to lighten up on the women or a hell of a lot more men need to be freaked out by the trolls.

In your first example, Fred went on about his work. In the second example, Fred was being a jerk by arguing with Big Boss saying it wasn't his fault, Linda started the whole thing. Do you see the difference between the two? Why did Fred make it a point to continue complaining? Why is Fred such a whiner?

I think a lot of this is just the rushing to the defense of the status quo. Usually rushing so fast that there's no time to read the articles.

Proof is to read slashdot I think. Every time there's an article discussing women in the work place or sexism or anything like that, the troglodyte patrol comes out in force to deny it all before even reading the article. The level of defensiveness gets so thick you can actually smell it on the browser.

Now I agree that this attitude of men not liking criticism from women is not everywhere. I've worked in several jobs with a very high percentage of women developers (medical industry) and I've worked for women several times. And things work out well, as those companies tended to be highly professional. But there are cases where you can see the few guys that just don't like women in the command chain or who ignore advice/suggestions from women.

Ie, it's not every man, so no one needs to defend against that accusation. But since this is slashdot, it seems so many people feel they're being personally accused whenever these sorts of stories appear.

If he did the same to a man he'd be walked out the door too. No reasonable company would ever tolerate that activity. They may not want lawsuits, but they also don't want the police to visit, they don't want the lawsuit from the victim either, and they absolutely do not want someone violent in the work place.

I had something similar happen when I ran an online game a long time ago. I created an alternate incognito character so I could just hang around and observe stuff. So I made a female character. Suddenly it was obvious I was treated differently. People followed me, gave me stuff, etc. No major insults, since our game tolerated none of that at any time (it was run by adults, not not by kids in adult bodies). It really got creepy. And the only thing female about it was the name, as it was a text-only game. I noticed over the years that any time I had a female character in a game that it was treated differently, being told "you're cute" or "why'd you make your character so ugly?".

I noticed this in one of my male friends too (who is just too flirty at times). In a game he'll be really chatty with any female character but mostly ignore the male characters. At one time the first thing he asked a female character who joined our group what her story was. She asked what he meant, and he said "you know, like are you a student, where are you from, that sort of thing". She sort of deflected it, but it was odd that he never did that sort of thing to anyone but female characters. I mentioned to him that it seemed really creepy to me, and he was very defensive saying "I was just trying to be nice". It's like he was treating the game as his dating pool or something.

I think it was a combination though, the extreme scarcity of basic goods, including food, PLUS a very high level of corruption in government and a rather brutal government. Compare to the US where the great depression led to very high levels of scarcity and yet that did not produce a generation of cheaters.

There has really been no comparison between two countries mostly equal except for one being a communist state, there are always many more variables that are different. Ie, here was have West Germany that was able to rebuild more quickly due to the Marshall Plan and which was given a relatively autonomous government not too long after the war, whereas East Germany had a lot of repression and USSR was not about to treat it as an equal. If you compared tendency to cheat across the various former communist countries I think you'd see a wide variance.