IANAL, but I believe your employer is obligated to provide you with a safe working environment, doubly so with regards to your membership in protected classes. If an employer permits a hostile working environment, especially one that unduly affects people who are members of protected classes (in this case, women) it is a form of illegal discrimination and you most certainly do have recourse.
You can't hire the KKK, let them turn your workplace into a de facto Klan meeting, and let them intimidate or harm new employees who happen to be non-white or non-protestant. The employer is responsible for that. If they weren't, the provisions against workplace discrimination in the CRA would be very hard to enforce, because this is precisely how it would be done (hell, this is roughly how it was done during many years of Jim Crow).
You have to realize that in the cases that prompted this legislation - Blackwater and other defense contractors - you have employers recruiting cowboy-mentality young men, arming them with weapons, and teaching them that might-makes-right and that not all people have rights that you are obligated to respect. They create an environment where human rights abuses are tolerated if not encouraged, and this extends all the way down to their own workers and sexual assault.
The internet wasn't being used by nearly as many people in the 1990s, especially the early to mid-90s, as it is today. It is hard to compare across decades without pausing to realize that. A lot of the differences have to do with the amount of business and commerce that happens on the internet, as well as the work done by AOL (and to a lesser extent massive ISPs like Earthlink) to market the internet for the masses.
Most of the people I knew on the internet used IRC, but that's clear selection bias: most of the people I knew who used the internet I knew via the internet, and met via IRC. Not everyone used it regularly, but in other communities (mailing lists, and the like) people generally knew what IRC was and how to connect to it. Lots of communities had and have IRC servers. Slashnet, anyone?
i'm saying wouldn't it be better to have your testicles inside your body and evolve sperm that develop at a higher temperature? its pretty ridiculous to have such an important organ dangling outside unprotected. i never understood why.
Here's a hint: we got to where we are via random mutation and natural selection, not design.
You're both wrong. There are two things that can kill: power, and frequency.
To get from being healthy and alive to cooked requires a change in energy as lots of chemical bonds need to be destroyed. This requires work to be done, and the rate at which work is done is power. This is the traditional killer in most electrocutions. I say it's the power and not the work that kills, because if the power is low enough, you can probably survive indefinitely. Power is current*voltage, and it's measured in watts. A static shock is easily 10kV - air doesn't breakdown and conduct until you've got 3 million volts/meter, so the 5mm static shock you might get when you rub your feet on the carpet is around 15kV. But you didn't move all that much charge with that action, so the current is necessarily very low, as is the power.
If you want to know how fast a microwave will cook a hotdog, a great place to start is the power rating (watts) of the microwave. If you want to know how fast an electric oven will get to temperature, the right place to start is the power rating (watts) of the microwave. You two are arguing over whether it's the 120V that kills the hotdog or the 10A that kills the hotdog, when it's very clearly the product (1020W) that does it. That's why the wattage of the microwave is a selling point.
Frequency: You actually don't need to cook someone to kill them, which means without that much work/power it's possible to kill someone. The trick is inducing cardiac arrest. The frequency turns out to be much more important than the total work done. Tasers don't do much work, for instance, but they have killed people. Someone with more of a background in the electrochemistry of the nervous system and the heart could probably chime in more on this.
One needn't compromise a router in order to gain access to it. They can be given access, after all.
There are thousands of network engineers and similar who work for ISPs, who routinely capture traffic as part of their jobs. It takes only one of them to disregard the rules/the law/their job and run a longer trace, or to run a trace to capture one specific thing and inadvertently capture passwords. Or worse yet, it takes only one of them to have their credentials or machines personally compromised.
It might be a bit farfetched, but once you start working in this business and you see how many engineers have pretty advanced credentials, you realize that any one of them could become a determined attacker and do quite a bit of damage -- or, a sufficiently determined attacker could get a job as a network engineer.
Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.