I don't understand why companies don't implement "status" blocks that a user can implement if they wish. It's pretty simple: An account has a basic status that depends on a few different criteria, but the main one is age. An account that is less than 30 days (and/or less than 10 posts/tweets/whatever) is a "newbie", between 30 and 90 days is a "beginner", etc. Once these guidelines are in place, give the users tools to set limits on interactions with these accounts. Someone who is the target of heavy harassment can completely block interaction with accounts less than 30 days old.

In the case of twitter, this means that someone like your prophetess can't just whip up a new account when their current one is blocked. This won't completely negate the trolls, as the dedicated ones can have accounts on standby that accumulate days, or someone can create accounts with the purpose of selling them to trolls, but it does greatly reduce the troll's impact with little effort on the part of the target. This does have the potential for collateral damage, of course, and that's something the target will have to weigh when deciding to implement such a block. If you want to get nuanced, there could be exceptions, like accounts less than 30 days that have at least five followers who have existed for more than a year won't be blocked. Twitter also tracks retweets, which give another possible venue.

Steam has a similar problem, with malware creating 0-day, 0-level, private accounts, friending everyone, and those who accept get a message to a virus that tries to hack their Steam account, spread the message, and transfer all your items to another account. It's annoying to block these accounts from inviting me every day, and it wouldn't have to be if I could put a limit on who could send invites ("must have >=1 game", "must be >=Steam Level 1", etc.)

Yes, that was my thought when I first read of the report, as well. (The Great Horse Manure Crisis, for those who don't know.) I don't think we'll get to the predictions of this report, because something will change drastically due to our road there. For horse poop, it was cars that didn't need to poop (well, not in the same way...) and didn't die on the streets to be left there (okay, that does happen, but they don't usually attract flies and vermin.)

I don't know what it will be for our congestion problem. Possibilities I see:
- Gas quadrupling in price
- Vastly improved public transportation
- Mass installation of fiber, making telecommuting or just satellite offices a lot more enticing
- An epidemic that wipes out half of all commuters, resetting the clock
- Discarding the idea of a 9-5 job, allow people to vary their work times and spread out commuting more
- Lowering the work week from 40 hours to 20, so people don't have to commute as much
- Average pay catching up with inflation, severely decreasing the need for a two-income home

While I agree in whole, there is one massive, massive difference that separates a corporation and school (and brings school a bit more in line with the GP's simile of prison): Ability to jump away.

When you're in school, especially in less-dense areas, you're stuck. Unless your parents have money and can send you to private/boarding school or have the time and ability to homeschool you, you probably have one and only one option. Even if you have multiple options, your parents have to do the process on your behalf, and even then the requirements to change schools might be beyond your grasp (and require there to be space at the other school.) So you're forced to go to the same school five days a week, where you know you'll get the same tormentors and same teachers and it becomes a minor form of hell. You know you'll get picked on, so you fear stepping through that door each and every day. It's psychological torment that doesn't end when the school day does. (I'm speaking from experience.)

With a corporation, your relative ability to jump appears infinite. The only absolutes that hold you there are A) no financial cushion to tide you over while job hunting and/or B) contractual obligations. Short of those, the only obstacle to leaving is yourself. Even if you don't change jobs, and you have tormentors at work, this does significantly less damage to your psyche because you have that option to walk away. Though you may never use it, having that emergency exit makes it a lot easier to deal with the day-to-day bullshit.

plus, could you imagine if every website was paywalled?

I can imagine various micropayment services popping up, where a user pays the company $X dollars and a site enrolled with it gets a small cut for every hit the user generates on their site.[1]

I can also imagine the cries of a thousand thousand people as their websites dedicated to clickbait and content re-posting suddenly go up in flames. And I will be there to hand out marshmallows and sticks to all who want to watch...

[1] Some of this is already happening, with things like Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/FundMe and Patreon leading the way. The former focus on large influxes for projects, and having another influx for each project or to continue a project past its original sunset; the latter focuses on small amounts at a steady pace, with users paying $1 and up per month to fund who/whatever and for access to supporter goodies. If ad revenue dies, one of these companies will have something out shortly to do the same for websites in general.

I used to have a firstname.middleinitial.lastname@gmail address, which I used exclusively for business correspondence... until some idiot in West Virginia started putting it as his e-mail address. I got a few details about him I shouldn't have, and eventually got his snail-mail address and sent him a short letter telling him to stop it. He may have (especially after I responded to an order receipt saying I didn't order anything and the guy used the wrong address, and they cancelled the order with the reason "ACCOUNT HACKED", lol), but by that time I was getting a ton of spam due to this idiot and abandoned the address.

I now use a firstname.lastname@{customdomain}.com address for business. Since it's my domain and mine alone, there's not a risk of that, and I still give a professional air for having something "above" a gmail.com account.

If that is truly the case (and what you say is something I agree with, but have no empirical proof to offer), then if the goal is to improve gender equality in a domain it would be best to focus on sub-sections that speak most to the qualities of the gender that turn them away from the discipline at large.

If females tend to stay away from programming because they are more social than males, that makes them an excellent fit as someone who gathers requirements. They need a good grasp on programming but don't need to live and breathe it, and their socializing allows them to much better get an idea of what the client wants versus what the client actually writes down.

Similarly, if males are about more individual/small group things, then in the domain of teaching they would be best doing AP classes that have a small headcount or tutoring that is one-on-one. In fact, a large complaint about public schools in America is that they leave behind those who take longer to grasp something while also frustrating those who breeze through the subject (which can lead to the student acting out). Focusing male teachers thus helps to solve that problem, and female teachers take on the larger classes, which tend to be more social (and having students interact can make learning far easier than if they have to sit and read or quietly do problems.)

(All of this assumes there are no other barriers to either domain for the given gender, of course, which we all know is not the case.)

Sounds pretty paranoid, I thought all of those guns in the US were supposed to be making you safer than Australia.

The best way to survive a bad situation, guns or no, is to avoid it in the first place.

Has the ACLU ever actively worked against gun ownership, though? They interpret the 2nd as applying to government-controlled military, not individual rights, but I don't know that they've tried enforce gun control. Here's a case where they defended a gun-rights supporter, though because of the violation of his civil liberties and not because of his firearms.

It's also a matter of domain rather than interest; where the ACLU doesn't take cases that could violate the 2nd, the NRA steps in. Why should the ACLU spend its resources on a battle the NRA can fight?

Similarly, I haven't heard much about the NRA working to protect free speech or the right to proper legal representation outside of fire-arm-related cases...

This one isn't too hard; the best way to "fix" this is stop using Verizon and supporting their horrible company. I had them for a few years and always had excellent cell service, but everything else sucked balls. I switched to T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan and have saved a ton of money without supporting the cellular devil.

(I realize that there are contracts etc., but seriously, if you can you should drop them like a hot potato.)

What if they're going to pull an Apple and move to *nix as the Windows kernel, offering their standard GUI on top of it? Since Android is based off of Linux, this would give them a stepping stone for maintaining the "one GUI, every device" paradigm they're trying to push when they transition.

I know, I know, this seems implausible, but I can't see them adopting Android outright as their phone OS (even if they change the GUI) because of the amount of control that Google has over it. Sure, Cyanogen can claim they'll "take Android from Google", but good luck.

Or, maybe it's the reverse: Take Android from Google, then change up Android and make Google play Microsoft's rules.

I'm hoping that advertising dies as a primary revenue stream purely so that sites like Buzzfeed can die. Not just Buzzfeed, but there are entire networks of websites that do two things:
1) Repost someone else's original content
2) Display one at a time along with three ads
Sets of these kinds of sites use the same network and just have different domain names in order to get around any blocking. They seem to target StumbleUpon, which is where I primarily run into them, hence the need for different domains since StumbleUpon lets you block results from an entire domain.

Stuff like Patreon and Kickstarter are showing alternatives to advertising, standard subscription models, and random donations, and this will only pick up as the fight against ads increases.

Hell, I've noticed less ads on Hulu (free version); previously I could expect two+ minutes of ads per break, but recently there have been 2, 1, and in rare cases no ad break at the marked spot even on videos I would expect to be popular. This is without running any kind of ad blocking (the computer I watch it on is a dumb media player), so something has changed in that regard.

The twitter-friendly response is, "Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean I'm happy with a webcam on my toilet."

The thought that always comes to me is "I have nothing to fear, so I have nothing to hide. If I have nothing to hide, why do you need to look?"

Why not something that rotates? Have it pointed down when not in use, but it rotates forward if you want. Not only does this make it easy to see if someone could be filming, it also allows someone to have it record in a different direction than they're looking while still freeing up hands, projecting the image onto a corner of the glasses. Imagine someone riding a bike having this pointed backwards so they can see if something is coming up without using awkward mirrors or having to look over their shoulder.

If there's a motor small enough, it could rotate automatically into the downward position when not actively being used.

Although, on average, men and women are about the same, men have a higher variance.

You're the third +5 I've seen in this thread with that assertion. Can someone link a study or group of studies that supports this?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but seeing it so often with no source makes me wonder if it's become "common wisdom".

I received several full ride offers to college. But it was because I worked my ass off. I was only modestly talented.

The quip "The world needs ditch diggers" can easily be extended to "The world needs moderately talented ditch diggers". No one stands on their own shoulders, and even the best of those math whiz's will need someone who can understand most of what they say and can check their math, or do some more mediocre work of their own that helps out the "smarter" person.

To put it in a car analogy, it doesn't matter how great your engine is if there aren't wheels to go along with it.

To put it in a programming analogy, the lead developer/architect will always need someone to implement dwim().

Even if you can't be great[1], you can still be good, and most times that's good enough.

[1] I question that assumption; introspection is an incredibly useful quality that a lot of people, even seemingly-smart people, lack. You appear to do a lot of it, so you can probably go further than you can imagine right now.