As to ending up in jail or dead, nothing I did was illegal. He brandished a weapon at me and I showed him I had a bigger one.

Escalating a fight when you don't need to is stupid and, in most places, illegal.

As to your second point, I looked for a point in it... and couldn't see an actual argument in it. Please rephrase.

Nuclear war is a bad thing, since it'll kill you. Promoting behaviour that leads to it is stupid.

As to your third point, I have millions of years of natural selection humming in my veins. I am not some skittish herd beast. I not a rat. I am not a rabbit.

No, you're just some dude with serious impulse control issues and delusions of grandieur.

I am a homo sapian. A man. I'm the ape that cracks atoms and marks his territory on the moon.

Claiming credit for other people's achievements is not the least bit impressive.

Come at me.

Why?

And about 1 in 1000 actors succeed and become movie stars.

It takes hard work, connections- and a lot of luck.

Unless you have all three, you lose.

Your story is atypical.

Dropbox has Condoleeza Rice on its board of directors. If anyone remembers, she was Secretary of State and also the president's National Security Advisor during the Bush administration. She basically allowed torture, and is responsible for Guantanamo. She had no problem with torturing people without even doing a basic check to see if the person being tortured was guilty of the crime he was being tortured for. And you want to talk about spying? She was part of the administration that developed the PATRIOT Act. The justification being "it's ok to spy on foreigners" .. Oh and we can DECLARE you a foreigner without any due process by making you prove your Americanness. She was cool with torturing foreigners without giving them any sort of due process, so why would you assume that she wont torture citizens if she was scared into doing so? We already know she doesn't think people need privacy.

Women make up a tiny proportion of developers, but we still see passion plays like this in forums where developers dwell on a daily basis. So, who precisely is harassing who here?

See, the thing is, you're reading that I actually need .docx, which I haven't actually said anywhere

No I caught that, but decided to making the point that docx (actually the harder HR requirement to meet) is still a very low practical barrier.

But mate, cheers for the MS Office sales pitch.

By providing 3 ways to avoid buying it altogether? and one final way that costs less than a premium coffee?? Yeah... Microsoft is paying me well to shill for them, LAMO. :p

I was not trying to kill him, I was simply sending him a large amount of high speed data.

People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

Hell, if I put a Raspberry Pi inside the scooped out guts of ENIAC, it would be just like ENIAC was streaming a movie... right?

I'm thinking of pulling the beads off an abacus and throwing a Raspberry Pi to show how an abacus can stream movies... and then maybe hollowing out a stone and showing how cool streaming could have been in the Neolithic...

Sarcasm mode off

You are of the opinion that nothing bad happens to men and it always happens to women.

Nope. I'm just doubting the OP.

You are doubting the OP solely on the basis that the OP is a male, since that's the only information you have about him. That only makes sense if you're of the opinion that nothing bad ever happens to men.

"This led to a situation where the only way the parties could get more voters was to compete for those ideologically between them leading to a race to the middle".

I think it's more that most active voters have come to believe that no candidate or party can be credible or viable unless it spends billions on PR.

True enough. But it's hardly a "nanny state" they are aiming for. More like a gradual, unobtrusive return to something as close to slavery as they can procure.

"You can't be a terrorist unless you've actually done something terrorizing, so what the authorities have to do is predict, based on association, what you're going to do".

Which is merely an extension to US citizens of US government policy for at least the past 20 years: the One Percent Doctrine. As enunciated by Dick Cheney, it ran as follows: "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response".

In other words, it's better to kill lots of foreigners and destroy their country (with a 99% chance of doing so for no good reason) than to take a 1% chance that Americans might be hurt or incur loss.

Mind you, the logic becomes a bit less convincing if you replace "foreigners" with "Americans".

Agent Smith, we need to be on the watch for these pathogens entering our soil. Here, open this bottle and take a sniff. Note the scene. If you detect any of these while on shift, please inform your superior immediately.

Now, please report to quarantine room C for the next 36 hours....

ASCII is more than 30 years old, it's 51 years old, and I'd bet $10,000 that it will be readable by nearly every computer in another 51 years. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are also highly unlikely to be unreadable anytime during my lifetime since they've been in use for 21 years and are open standards with many real world implementations.