It is far more widespread and vicious towards women.

The stories that have gotten media attention have been towards women, yes. However given the way media works (reporting bias plus confirmation bias plus dramatic stories grab more eyeballs) it is reasonable to not take that at face value without looking deeper. Are there any peer-reviewed sociological or criminological studies that look at on-line harassment and gender of victims? (Genuine question, not a rhetorical device.)

This is not a new kind of perception, it's a chemical illusion

And what sort of perception is not "a chemical illusion"? Is the feeling you get when you comprehend Cantor's diagonalization proof an illusion? The feeling you get from listening to the music of Bach? The feeling you get when you look up and see a meteor streak by? Everything you experience supervenes on neurochemistry, and a cannabis experience is no less valid on that basis than any other.

Fine with me - I can quit for any reason I feel like too. Seems like an equitable arrangement.

It can be equitable if you're a skilled employee working for a sole proprietorship run by a middle-class person. You have leverage.

If you're a laborer working for a multi-national corporation, you're lucky if the stockholders don't grind your bones to make their bread. There's nothing "equitable" about a human being facing an gigantic immortal psychopath created by state fiat.

Of course there's the alternative, where you can't fire anyone, and you keep incompetent employees forever.

And there, is, of course, no possible in between state. The only alternatives are being unable to terminate incompetent employees, and allowing absolutely arbitrary employment decisions by those in power.

Dungeons of Daggorath, great-granddaddy of first-person monster fighting games, used a heartbeat as your health indicator. If you got hurt, the "ba-dump-ba-dump-ba-dump" sped up, if it got too fast you died. It certainly got my own heart racing in sympathy.

If the police "wanted to hurt you with some crap" I'm pretty sure they wouldn't need electronic information to do so.

Maybe not, but oh, it sure helps. And if cops don't need electronic information to hurt me, then they don't need electronic information to hurt bad guys, so they don't need it at all.

The protection against that is the rule of law, i.e. police being policed themselves.

And they're not. From the beat cop on up to the President of the United States, the executive branch is a bunch of violent criminals and their accomplices, with no effective check. So where does that leave us?

Criminalizing firearm possession works reasonably well in most countries where they don't allow firearms.

No, it doesn't. It has the state use force to put people in cages for acts that do not credibly threaten the rights of others, i.e. the mere possession of the tools of self-defense. Under any reasonable definition of "works", ipso facto that's not working.

Beyond that is the problem that such laws have fsck-all effect on violent crime, because the problem with violent crime is the people who commit it and not the tools they use to do so, but that's secondary to the problem that a prohibition law *is*, by its nature, violent crime.

Oh yeah, shooting at American aircraft is like totally not a big deal.

When those American aircraft are over your country without your consent or justification under international law? It's to be expected, the same as if Russian aircraft were over our country.

Do you think, our involvement in the First World War was "screwing the world"? How about the Second? I bet, you don't lament those...

WWI was a pointless battle between imperial powers and we should have stayed the hell out of it. The Pacific battle of WWII would not have happened if we hadn't played the empire game in the Pacific, stealing Hawaii and threatening Japan with Perry's "black ships"; the European theater was a straight-up result of WWI.

We should never have been in Korea or Vietnam. Or Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the Philippines or Cuba or Puerto Rico or Guam.

Our history since the Civil War shows that the founders were 100% right about the temptations of a standing army: once you've got one, you want to use it.

And for the grammar trolls, yes I know a sentence should not begin with "And".

I know this is a tangent. But it is perfectly grammatical to begin a sentence with "and" or "but".

So how do I have the same song in multiple playlist when the definition of a playlist on other players were "files in a folder"?

Good lord, they really do let anyone in here nowadays, regardless of technical savvy. Son, have you never looked at an m3u file? It's a list. Of songs, each song being one file path. You give this m3u file to your music software and it plays each one, in either sequential or random order.

I find it so contradictory that the same mass of people that seek booths in order to hide who they vote for, are so willing to hand out information that's much more personal to a site like facebook.

I will decide what's more or less "personal" for me, thank you very much.

Probably because Apple's business model isn't based around being as sleazy as possible.

Citation needed.

We don't have to deal with constant unwanted advances - we only do the dating thing when *we* want to.

On the other hand, the "first mover" has to deal with the threat of rejection, of even ridicule, in a way that the "approachee" does not.

Being able to successfully make the first move takes courage, self-confidence, communication skills, at least a pretense of extroversion, and charisma. Yes, some of these things can be learned, but they are also partially innate. (And someone who goes looking to learn these skills is likely to find the hideous misogynist "pick up artist" community. Ugh.)

I've approached women and I've been approached by them. (And by men.) It's a hell of a lot easier on the ego to say "no thanks" than it is to be shot down by someone you're attracted to. Perhaps, if you're a charming natural extrovert, YMMV.

Note that "behaving like a jerk", which is the problem here, is orthogonal to "making the first move".

How about.... when a man wants to send a message to a woman for the first time, first of all they need to spend $10 to buy a "point", the content (with sender and recipient anonymized) get sent to 5 other random men for approval; they will be asked "Is the content appropriate and respectful" Yes/No ?.

Fine, just as long as the same rules apply when a woman wants to send a message to a man for the first time. Or a man to a man, or a woman to a woman, or a transgender person who does not identify as either "male" or "female" wants to contact someone.

Gender equality means gender equality.