Given the last sentence i'm about 80% certain that this post is satirical in nature, and if so, well done!

Speaking abstractly, i know a lot of people in the SCA, so i could probably name a dozen of them if i spent some time thinking about it. Smithing comes to mind immediately as a job that a lot of people would like to do if they could actually make a reasonable living at it. There are a few people who actually do make a living at it, but it requires a lot of skill (and thus a lot of time to learn) and there's not a huge demand for it. I also know a lot of people who knit or spin or weave as a hobby. Those all used to be valid jobs, but making a living off of any of those skills these days is now _very_ difficult.

As someone mentioned above all these jobs went through a similar pattern. Originally they were highly skilled jobs and people who could do them well were highly regarded. Then mechanization (and later computerization) made these jobs easier until any line worker could carry them out. And then the need for a line worker was eliminated in 99.99% of the cases. Sure, towards the end of that process no one wanted to be the person who welded bolt #128 to component A7, or the person who ran the mechanical loom, both of whom worked 8+ hours days doing repetitive tasks for a minimum wage (or an even more minimal wage before the idea of a minimum was created.) However that just means that being a cog in a process that's already been mostly mechanized isn't an enviable position. It doesn't mean that people didn't like doing the original job before it started getting replaced by machines.

(So just to double-check my assumption: Farmer/gardener, smith, carpenter, bowyer, fletcher, knitter, spinner, weaver, paper-maker, illuminater, glass blower, tanner, potter, and that's more than a dozen so i'll stop now. Admittedly there are a lot of people who still farm and/or garden, but the ones who try to do it professionally are under huge pressure from mechanization and computerization, and the number has declined precipitously from where it used to be.)

Minus: You failed to use an obscure unit of measurement. I propose Congresses. This heat wave has killed 2.056 Congresses of people.

Plus: You used a decimal comma instead of a decimal point, allowing people to respond saying that you're adhering to a regionally specific custom that differs from their own regionally specific custom, and therefore are clearly doing it wrong.

Overall i rate your slashdotness at 77.3%, by means of an obscure personal rating system which i can't describe succinctly but will argue about endlessly if anyone disagrees with my conclusion.

"I am slightly confused as well, though. As a self-defined feminist dater, I'd assume you are somewhat left-leaning, and I swear I have never met (Note that word, I don't care about philosophers or authors, those are XX age relics) a Westerner who was left-leaning and had ANYTHING good to say about military."

I'm sorry to have damaged your stark black and white view of the world. But what's really going to bake your noodle is that i have multiple left-leaning friends who used to be or currently are in the military. One of them is even a female feminist! WHOA!

Not that this should really surprise you. There was a big deal awhile about about whether or not gays and lesbians could openly be in the military. Although certainly not all gays and lesbians are left-leaning, did you really thing every single gay and lesbian soldier was a conservative?

"Why don't they join the army then? As always, girly mentality - it's so cool, but I don't wanna cuz iffy."

Oh right, because every single guy who enjoys action movies signs up for the military. No civilians ever go to see movies like that. As mentioned above, some of them do. But most girls, like most guys, don't feel the need to actually participate in military action in order to enjoy a good fight in the cinemas. Is that a failing of human nature? Perhaps. But it's far from unique to the females of the species.

"You have her, you're happy - great, gl, keep on truckin'! Not my business tho."

If you didn't want to hear about my sex life then why did you not so subtly bring the subject up? (And i'm still not sure why you think that not having sex is such a big insult. In the past i have gone for years without having sex at times. I wasn't ashamed to admit it either then or now.) I was honestly confused as to why you want to stereotype an entire group of people, and i proposed two possible, although not definitive reasons.

You say you definitely have sex with people. That's great, good for you! I don't see any reason not to believe you, even though i obviously disagree with you on some issues. See? That wasn't hard!

But you are opting for the second option, while declaring that you don't wear a tinfoil hat. You're already admitted surprise that people who disagree with you don't all subscribe to some kind of monolithic groupthink, yet still maintain that all the guys who are dating feminists aren't getting any sex, to the extent that you're nonchalantly calling me a liar to my (virtual) face. I'll just leave that here and let everyone else decide what to think about that kind of... extreme viewpoint.

I think you may be placing too much faith in the human race. Yes some humans would undoubtedly survive anything but the worst asteroid strike. However if 90-99% of the human race was wiped out and the environment was (even more) wrecked, then i would not be surprised if humans died off within a couple centuries after that. Which would (reasonably) still be chalked up as part of the same extinction event by any theoretical future paleontologist-equivalents.

Well that's close to the right answer. It can be the north pole, or any point one mile north of a line of latitude that is 1/[integer] miles in circumference, all of which are (very) near the south pole. Meaning that you would walk a mile south, circle the planet (at that line of latitude) exactly [integer] times, and then return one mile north to your starting point.

Giving _the_ mice interplanetary space capabilities seems like a really horrible idea. Unless you're counting on them being content with taking over _any_ world, and Mars would suit them just as well as Earth. (Which would itself probably be another horrible idea.)

Freddie Mercury. Harry Belafonte. Led Zeppelin. Highway Star. Cyndi Loper. Pumped Up Kicks. Tron & Switched-On Bach. The Sons of the Pioneers. Chip Tune. Paranoia. Jimmy Hendrix. The Bobs. The Grateful Dead. R.E.M. Moonlight Sonata. The Disney Electric Parade. The Final Fantasy VI soundtrack. Forever Young. The Hukilau Song. Over the Rainbow, and Make New Friends. Joy of Man's Desiring. Gnarles Barkley.

It seems like every year, I get into more music. I discover things that I never saw in older music (such as The Sons of the Pioneers), and I also like seeing things from my childhood revisited, like with Mesh. I have a hard time finding what I consider to be genuinely "new" music; I always have this sense that I am hearing a mutation or freshening of things that have come before.

If you want to run applications completely controlled and filtered by Apple, yea go with that. Apple doesnâ(TM)t like something about some app you want to run then you do without that functionality. Apple wants you to use their crappy version of some app so they kill the competing apps, which one are you gonna be using?

I am fine with the prospect of using mobile devices to do everything assuming they have peripherals and expansion, but the prospect of Apple and Google controlling all software, not so much.

I am a father, and I have a daughter too, which gives me equal ground to respond.

* Who has the most sexually pleasurable and sensitive part of their genitals systematically mutilated at birth? BOYS.
* Who makes up a minority of college students? BOYS.
* Who is expected to sacrifice their life for their country? BOYS and YOUNG MEN -- "infant"-ry indeed.
* Who is expected to pay for the date? MEN.
* Who is expected to make more than their partner, by their partner? MEN.
* Who is always reminded from all sectors of society that, in a sexual-romantic relationship, they are the one who have to provide value through success, earning, providing, career, and disciplined behavior at all times? BOYS and MEN.
* Who is reminded that they have to EARN sexual fulfillment? BOYS and MEN.
* Who often has to PAY to have sex? MEN.
* Who has to pay child support, even if they were underage and sexually abused? BOYS.
* Who is at 10x a risk of physical violence? BOYS and MEN.
* Who is used by society for violence-work, and then criticized condemned and feared for being violent? BOYS.
* Who is given longer and harder prison sentence, for the same exact crime? MEN.
* Who is expected to do grueling grunt work, and "take it like a man"? BOYS and MEN.
* Who is considered to be an existential threat to children? MEN.
* Who is forced to pay child support for unwanted children? MEN.
* Who is denied access to children, even when they're paying child support? MEN.
* Who is not listened to, or even criticized and condemned, when they are feeling emotionally hurt? BOYS and MEN.
** Note the use of the word "whining."
* Who is the victim of roughly 35-50% of unilateral domestic violence, but is most likely to not be supported, oris even taken to jail, should they report it? BOYS and MEN. (Girls are responsible for more than 50% of teenage dating intimate violence.) See http://www.domesticviolenceres... for more information.
* Who is accused of being in a "victim mentality" for angry opposition to the lies of "equality" ..? Sympathy compassion and care for girls and women, grounding threats and punishments for boys, and condemnation and ceaseless criticism and distaste for men.

When I found out that I was having a girl rather than a boy, I cried tears of relief. I wouldn't DARE bring a boy into today's hostile climate, by choice.

* NO MORE CHILD GENITAL MUTILATION.
* NO MORE DATING DOUBLE-STANDARDS.
* NO MORE TARRING BOYS AND MEN THROUGH BULLSHIT STATISTICS.
* NO MORE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AGAINST BOYS AND MEN.
* NO MORE INTIMATE VIOLENCE AGAINST BOYS AND MEN.
* NO MORE ATTACKS ON SEXUALITY, ESPECIALLY MALE SEXUALITY.
* NO MORE SPECIAL PROTECTIONS FOR WOMEN.
* NO MORE FORCED PATERNITY.
* DECLARATION OF INNOCENCE WHEN RAPE ACCUSATIONS ARE FOUND FALSE.
* DUE PROCESS AFTER RAPE ACCUSATION.
* PRISON TIME FOR FALSE ACCUSERS.
* EQUAL TIME FOR EQUAL CRIME.

Perhaps most importantly: CARE FOR BOYS AND MEN.

Actually my girlfriend doesn't read slashdot. She's got a lot of geeky hobbies but she's not a programmer or a technology professional and most of the content here doesn't appeal to her. So she doesn't see any of what i write here and what i'm saying has zero affect on how much sex i do or not get.

From what i understand the reason i actually get "hump-hump action" is because A: the first time my girlfriend saw me she thought i looked attractive (looks certainly aren't everything, but they are something) B: when she got the chance to interact with me i seemed to be a geeky person, and C: when she tried to talk to me about our shared geeky interests i responded in a friendly fashion and treated her like a human being. Oh yeah, and the little matter of D: she actually likes sex too.

But i suppose it's always possible she's lying to me about that. Maybe she's following all my online accounts in secret and only rewards me with sex when i say nice things about women? I guess i have no way to prove otherwise. But hey, treating both halves of the human race like human beings makes me feel good, and if it also gets me sex then that's just a win-win. So i wouldn't complain about her "nefarious" plan even if it was true.

However the fact that you think people like me only say good things about women in order to get into their pants would seem to say a lot about your own worldview. Would that be because you're not getting sex yourself and therefore no one else is either? Or do you just think that those of us dating feminists aren't getting sex and we're all lying about it because we're part of a massive conspiracy?

As for the TV show/movie thing, i'm confused, you don't think people in the military are valuable human beings? Most reasonable people i know think that it's unfortunate when you can't solve matter peacefully, but that fighting to protect someone else is honorable. To quote Heinlein, one of my favorite authors "The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation." Most of the women i know would actually like to see a bit more of women being soldiers and, when necessary, sacrificing themselves so that others might live.

The most prominent examples in the movies right now are Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers. Teams of heroes fighting bad guys, each consisting of a bunch of men and one woman. So women (or at least a lot of the women i know) already feel a little excluded, and then when they go to stores they can't find any merchandise featuring the female characters to buy. So if you consider yourself to be a manly man and you don't like all those guys being kick-ass soldiers, then who's buying all the tickets and giving those studios billions of dollars? And who exactly is it that's being undervalued when the people who make the merchandise refuse to put female characters on most of it?

It's "funny". Almost all guys who try to hit on girls get rejected, either right off the bat or after a brief period of dating when things don't work out. This happens especially often when people are first starting out and don't have a lot of experience. (Yes, there are the exceptions who spend their entire lives happily married to their first high school sweetheart, but they are very rare.) And yet not all of them end up deciding that women in general are horrible.

Some guys get rejected and blame it on fate or chance or some other random factor and try again. In essence they accept that some people just aren't right for each other.

And some guys get rejected and blame it on themselves, then they either mope for awhile, or try to improve themselves, then try again. (This is the category i fall into, it's probably not as healthy as the first option, but it seems far preferable to...)

But some of them get rejected and blame the women. Maybe they were unlucky and were hitting on/involved with a bad apple, or maybe they're just projecting the personal problems in their own life on others. I don't know. I'm also not sure if they actually give up at that point, or continue on in the "sure knowledge" that the women they're hitting on are actually horrible feminazi golddiggers. Because hey, having sex with a horrible feminazi goldigger is still better than masturbation, right? (Reality not usually being black and white, it's probably a bit of both.)

(And of course these aren't strict categories. Individuals may have have a tendency towards one of the categories but have a different response in a particular situation, or drift into another category over time. The switch from "blaming oneself" to "blaming the womens" seems to be a particularly popular one unfortunately.)

I can say as a male that i've never felt under-valued or discriminated against, either in society or in the workplace. And certainly not every individual woman has valued me as much as i would like her to, but then there have also been at least one or two who valued me more than i really wanted them to. And despite the mismatches i have persevered and have had what i consider to be a reasonable number of relationships in my life, a couple short-term but mostly long-term.

All of the women i've dated have been feminists to a greater or lesser degree. They've also all been generally good people (one or two of them were more interested in quick lay and then moving on to another conquest than anything long term, which made me a bit sad at the time, but that doesn't make them bad people.) None of them seemed to disrespect me or under-value me, and none of them were looking for a "walking wallet" to bilk. Obviously most of the relationships didn't work out in the long run, but it was never because they wanted more money or that they didn't respect me.

Most of the women i know as friends or coworkers also seem like equally good people. I've never actually encountered anyone who was clearly looking for a "walking wallet", but perhaps as someone making slightly above the average middle-class income who doesn't tend to flash what money i do have i'm just not attracting the attention of such people. I've certainly heard of some specific women who may fit that bill, but they seem relatively rare. Likewise "feminazis" who actually hate men seem to be a lot rarer on the ground than the critics of feminism would have you believe.

So the common thread i see is that men who see difficulties in dating as being due to chance or their own personal failings generally end up finding a woman who's worth being with, possibly after a number of false starts, but eventually. While men who blame women for the problems they encounter only seem able to attract women who want something other than a positive emotional relationship.

The women i know, the ones who in my experience seem like decent human being and seem to make up the majority of the female population, usually seem to be pretty good at sensing when a guy doesn't actually respect them, and they tend to run screaming. (Well, not literally. Most of them are afraid to respond in a strongly negative fashion because they're worried that the guy will flip out, but they'll still try to extract themselves from the situation.)

So it seems pretty clear that if your initial assumption is that most women are money-grubbing jerks who don't respect you the women you meet are going to pick up on that, and the only ones who will still be interested in dating you will be... money-grubbing jerks who don't respect you. (And for the people who do approach women like that, perhaps the women who rejected you aren't actually "feminazis who hate all men", maybe they're just feminists who dislike people who act like you in particular.)

Which puts you in the situation of either dating undesirable people or retreating to video games and porn. (As opposed to dating desirable people and enjoying video games and porn with them.)

The solution is theoretically very simple, though obviously a lot of people in that situation find the first step of actually accepting that women are people who are pretty much the same as men and worthy of the same respect to be a very difficult one. If they can manage it however, things will get better.

And for those who haven't fallen into the trap yet, remember that the problem may not be you, but it probably isn't them either. And if you want to try an improve your odds do it by improving yourself, not by adopting a false facade to try and manipulate people. If you get in shape because you want to feel better about yourself that will show through. If you only get in shape because you think a six-pack will attract girls that will show through as well, and the girls you attract will probably be as shallow as your motives.

(And as an aside, if men are so under-valued why are movies and TV, and the merchandise associated with them, targeted at men so frequently? Do we have more money then the women? (In which case we're certainly not under-valued.) Or are we being catered to despite not having more money? (In which case we're actually being over-valued.))

"in short, even if two people are driving the exact same car in the exact same condition in the exact same driving style on average, if one at the particular moment of passing the sensor happens to be letting off the gas, while the other just happens to be accelerating when it passes the sensor, the two cars are going to give wildly different pollution readings."

Well that's how sampling ought to work as far as the overall average goes. If they were only getting readings from cars all cruising down the highway at more or less the same speed under the same conditions that would be a much bigger problem i think. However you're right that it would make it difficult to tell whether Toyota Camry #243 was polluting more than the Toyota Camry average because it was poorly maintained or because it was just accelerating.

I'm guessing they must be recording video as well to identify the make and model of the cars as well. (Are they going through and doing that by hand, or do they have some kind of algorithm that can scan the images and identify make and model?) It's possible they they're also using that video to identify if the car in question is accelerating, cruising, slowing, or braking.

But if that's the case then if they can identify that 25% of Toyota Camrys are polluting significantly more than the other 75% are they then just assuming that those cars are poorly maintained? Or are they also scanning license plates and checking a Toyota database to see when those cars were last reported as being serviced? One of those methods seems like it might be making more of an assumption than may be warranted, and the other is a bit too Orwellian for my taste.

(This question may be answered in TFA, but i can't access that while at work.)

It was an acronym at first. However after they started releasing newer games (first among those being their own "Witcher" games) they stopped using the old name and just go by "GOG" or "GOG.com" now.

I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but multiplayer is one of the features listed in the FAQ. They also have "Game inviting & joining" listed as coming soon, but i'm not sure what exactly the difference is between that and regular multiplayer is.