No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.

Also the user manual will be so bad, they won't figure out how to use it until 2045.

Pretty much, yeah. Though I don't actually get to grow a beard unless I'm either on leave or deployed overseas, so I guess you got me there.

Of course, if you had a functional sense of humour you would have realized that my "manliness" comment was tongue-in-cheek. The fact that I do cut down trees with an axe and light them up with a blowtorch is just an amusing coincidence.

Sure, just go ahead and deny my experiences. Next you'll try to tell me that I deserved it because I was wearing a kilt. Victim blaming is always popular, especially when the victim is male.

I've never denied the evidence. You may have me confused with a strawman you constructed. If you're going to argue with him, why address your response to me?

Assuming a completely unwilling and unaroused victim, yes, I very much suspect it would be. However, feminists and victim-advocacy groups have spent the last couple decades telling us that "rape is rape" and that they're all equally bad, so it would be a bit hypocritical for them to now start screaming "BUT WE HAVE IT WORSE!".

Very true. So when that happens to me, is that because of the matriarchy trying to keep my manliness in check?

Because that's what we do when people are wrong?

I've noticed when people bring up the idea that the holocaust never happened, they get 100% complete denial and blame the messenger. Hrm ... I wonder why.

Nobody is denying that the problem exists. That's the kind of absurd strawman that always ends up derailing these discussions. What people are telling you is that:

1. Everyone gets harassed at some point. You don't see me going around talking about what an unsafe environment comicon is just because some chick grabbed my ass.
2. Problems caused by a small subset of individuals should be dealt with INDIVIDUALLY, rather than by writing long-winded articles about how the whole system is horrible. Only an idiot attacks an entire community over the actions of a few individuals. We usually call that "bigotry".

Because it's insignificant. I've caught more flack for having a slow connection than most women catch for being women. I've seen far more men bending over backwards to help "women in tech" than I've seen trying to tear them down. Men tend to be far more cruel and destructive towards each other than they do with women. If harassment in the tech community is a problem then it's a problem for everyone, and it's absolutely ridiculous to single out women as being some special class of victim.

That's feminism for you in a nutshell. The "skepchick" website rose to fame in no small part thanks to putting out a (artistic-ish) nude calendar of their members, and encouraging male adoration. Then once they had enough of a following, they decided it was now misogynistic for men to comment on their appearance or think of them in a sexual way. Lots of women have gained prominence by using their sexuality to their advantage, only to later go on long-winded rants about how nobody should be "objectifying" them.

Oh, geeze, don't let a feminist hear you say that! Every time someone suggests women maybe aren't suitable to being firefighters or combat soldiers, the wymins go apeshit.

According to the newest stats, not really that much more often than men are abused or raped by women. Domestic violence cases split almost 50/50. Sexual violence victims are still mostly women, but men come in very close behind now that we've stopped defining "rape" in a way that makes it impossible for women to be rapists.

And men being abused by men ... holy shit. If we took your approach, every man in the world should be "more sensitive to the imiplicit or explicit threats of violence", to the point where we'd pee our pants as soon as another man looked at us funny.

Difference is, men don't try to justify freaking out and overreacting by pointing to statistics. And neither do most women, for that matter; the ones who do are just a very loud minority.

I never gave my opinion on the matter. Your ignorant political stereotypes led you to make assumptions about what things I never even commented on. This is common amongst political ideologues and other loudmouths and pundits.

If it were mindless tripe you'd swallow it without a second thought. The fact is you've completely failed to grasp the points which were being made. Calling it "mindless tripe" because you don't understand it is ... pretty childish. Reminds of the hick I met down in the bible belt who called evolution "mindless tripe". You two would get along great.

I don't think you know what that fallacy actually means. Nothing I wrote is even close to an excluded middle fallacy. The particular bit you quoted might be considered a sweeping generalization, if it weren't so blatantly evident that I was mocking your kindergarten-level understanding of economics.

Hurr, durr, ad-hominem fallacy!

Not always, but you know how it is with bureaucracies ... nothing gets them motivated quite as well as a good disaster.

Naw, man. I mean, sure, there are some superficial similarities, but the things which actually caused the incidents are COMPLETELY different.

The Soviet shootdown is a simple case of browbeaten lackeys under a tyrannical regime making what they figured was the best choice to cover their asses. There was no threat to them. The aircraft was nowhere near the people who made the call, and was on it's way out of Soviet airspace. The pilot involved even told them he believed it was a civilian airliner. Yet they decided to shoot it down anyway.

The Vincennes incident was the exact opposite. It involved personnel under serious threat from Iranian forces, in hostile territory, faced with an aircraft they couldn't identify which seemed to be on an attack vector. They were scared for their lives, and under an immense amount of stress. I'm not sure how to explain that to someone who works a 9-5 job in an office. Lots of people talk about "stress" in their day-to-day jobs, and I'm sure there's some truth to their complaints, but unless you're a first responder, an air traffic controller, or a soldier in a combat zone, you really don't know what stress is, or how badly it can skew your normal behaviour. We train our people to recognize it, avoid it, or deal with it ... and we put measures in place to try and minimize it ... but when you're engaged in combat and feel that your life is on the line, even the best preparations can only do so much. It only gets worse when you're the one responsible for a multi-million dollar vessel, and several hundred lives on board it.

The difference may be easier to visualize if you relate it to something you're more familiar with. The Soviet shootdown of 007 was the equivalent of a couple police supervisors sitting at headquarters, ordering a patrolman to shoot an unarmed man running away from a property he trespassed on. The American shootdown of the Iranian flight was the equivalent of a couple SWAT guys under heavy fire panicking and shooting a civilian who was running towards them. Both are horrible incidents which should never have happened. But other than that, they have absolutely nothing in common.

Sure. So lets pass a law that says every person should be paid $50,000 per hour. Economic activity ought to be AMAZING then!

Very true. If you meet the minimum skill required for the minimum-wage job, you get a crappy job that pays your basic expenses, but won't pay off that credit card you keep racking up because now you can afford more useless crap. If you don't meet the minimum skill requirements, then fuck you - you're stuck on the government dole because we won't let you sell your services for less. Our minimum living standard says you have to be a parasite rather than contributing to society.

Totally right. Especially when we implement our $50,000 minimum wage idea. If those fatcat small business guys can't afford it, fuck 'em; someone else will come along to start a business once the economy settles down.

Totally. Just like mass-surveys become more and more useless the more people you add to them. And scientific research becomes more and more useless the more data points you gather.

The funny thing is, fulfilling his FOIA request is probably the first time anyone in government actually looked at his data.

And these days they do. It's one of those "lessons learned" things.

I, along with a bunch of other guys, once got sucked into lighting up an entire household of civilians in training. It really, really sucked. But the reason those scenarios existed is because some poor bastards lit up civilian households for real, and we got to learn from their mistakes.

I feel your pain, bro. Comments that criticize the US government and offer justifications for terrorist attacks always get SO badly down-voted.

Very true. rt.com is the propaganda outlet of choice these days, as far as external puppets are concerned. Internally ... well, all of them publish whatever they think Putin wants them to publish.