Sounds tasty (except for the "Oh, right, I don't eat it" part :-). I make up for it by fermenting stuff - mostly ciders, but also pickles and sauerkraut and such. I've made one batch of beer from a kit, and need to get around to making another batch from closer to scratch sometime soon, but meanwhile cider's easy and good, and mead was easy and I'll know if it's good after it ages another six months.

No trolling intended here - the word "Politicians" is right in the title.

The Ashley Madison crack is happening now, after several months of heavy campaigning by various US Feds and Congressmembers and their UK counterparts (like Tory Prime Minister David Cameron) who all want to ban encryption or make us put magic back doors into all our crypto systems so they can eavesdrop on conversations instead of "going dark", their term for "not getting to increase our surveillance capabilities quite as fast as we want."

With 37 million names in the database, it wouldn't be surprising if at least some of them are the same people trying to deny the public's right of privacy, and they ought to get spanked publicly about their political hypocrisy, as opposed to just getting spanked privately if that's what they were looking for.

Oh, yeah, if you've got a desktop PC, putting an RS232 card in it works a lot more reliably. We don't have many of those around (and the ones we do are antiques that have serial and often even parallel ports), and mostly have either good laptops (really convenient in a lab full of racks) or old laptops with dead batteries that still work ok when plugged in.

That's pretty much how the higher speeds work also - they negotiate 300, and if that works they signal (argh, I've forgotten if it's digitally over the 300 baud or analog tones) the higher speeds they can accept, and then send tones to see if the line will carry the sound quality needed for the higher speeds to work.

I had a while back in the 80s when one of my home phone lines could handle 2400 but the other (which used to be ok) stopped syncing at 2400 and would only do 1200. Tried to tell the phone company that it needed fixing, they asked what it sounded like, and "}i}}}}ii}}i}i" wasn't an answer they knew what to do with, so they said "sorry, your residential line isn't data rated." Eventually it degraded to the point I could call up and tell them it sounded like [LOUD STATICKY NOISES], and they came and fixed the drop line where it was rubbing against a tree branch.

The men? Absolutely.

It was originally about harassing Anita Sarkissian, for pointing out the level of sexism in gaming. The trollboys didn't like ethics in video game journalism, because she was pointing out that they were clearly on the wrong side of it, and Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend deliberately threw his screed into their shark pond because he knew he'd get a reaction there.

Narcc is right on point.

Women worry that men are going to rape and kill them. It's not a neutral Fair-and-Balanced(tm) thing.

Definitely abuse of the modding system. People who saw troll questions like that and modded them up got away with it for a couple of days before other people noticed them and fixed them.

Or at least you've never listened to what they were saying? Try it some time. And if you're working somewhere that there aren't any women to talk to, try asking your managers why that's the case. And grow the fuck up, ok?

I'm not a moderator this week.

Discrediting women's technical work is what people like that do in between making rape threats and SWATing them and editing them out of Wikipedia and it's totally disgusting and way too common.

And Microsoft has been complaining lately that the pipeline of potential technical employees doesn't have enough women in it, so that's why they don't hire many women. Why do they think women leave the pipeline? Most women in tech don't get quite the level of abuse that the Gamergaters have been giving their big-name targets, but Wu's hardly the only woman I've heard say they used a gender-neutral username on Github or Slashdot or in academia, because otherwise they get a constant overflow of shit, and that's after putting up with lower levels of sexism and obnoxiousness from nearly the beginning.

This kind of thing especially pisses me off because I'm old enough to remember the business environment of the late 70s and early 80s when things were getting better and the fraction of women in computer fields was a lot higher than in most of engineering. (That wasn't necessarily CS degrees; colleges didn't all have those yet for undergrads, so my wife and the other people she studied with tended to have interdisciplinary engineering degrees or EE degrees with CS concentrations.)

If you're an entrepreneur of any sort, you find that you've got to be a manager, and a CFO, and an HR department, and the Engineering VP, and the engineer, and the janitor, and the dishwasher, and the sales rep, and the marketing department, and hunt for funding, and a dozen other roles until your company's big enough to hire other people to do them. Every techie I know who's started a company, either by themselves or with a small group of other people, complains about this, but it's the reality of running a business - you're responsible for all the work getting done, not just the fun engineering you started the company to do. If you get big enough to get VC money, sometimes you can hire a CEO to do some of those things for you, but basically it's not your company once you've done that.

Some games can be done by one person, some are much larger projects needing lots of workers. (I'm not a gamer, so I don't know the scale of Wu's games, but it sounds like they're a lot bigger than Depression Quest and probably smaller than EA's FIFA-thing-2015.)

Authors have to deal with similar issues - they also have to put up with people saying "Why don't you self-publish? I'm sure you'll make LOTS more money than working with an old-style dead-tree publishing house!" (The usual answer from successful writers like Charlie Stross is that publishing books is a lot of work, and it's much more productive for him to spend 100% of his time writing, which he's good at, instead of 30% of his time writing and 70% of his time doing marketing and sales and typesetting and financial management and negotiating with Amazon and Apple, none of which he enjoys nor is especially good at, even though he'd get a bigger fraction of the cash, plus the way you get to be a good writer is to do a lot of writing, and the way you build a stable audience is to put out books as often as you can do it well, and being a publisher takes time away from both of those.)

From 1960-1996, the Guatemalan military government was running a civil war against anybody suspected of being Communist, where "Communist" meant anybody to the left of Genghis Khan or any poor peasant who knew anybody who might be a Communist or anybody who wanted land reform (which was the issue that prompted the US to overthrow the elected government in 1954), and they murdered and tortured a lot of people, and sometimes kept records. Some time in the late 2000s, a bunch of human rights folks investigating the dirty war and its history found a bunch of secret-police records, some on paper and some on 8" CP/M floppies.

My friend Hugh Daniel got asked to help them recover the data from the floppies - it took him months just to find enough working disk drives in the US that could read them and build a computer that could interface with them, so he could haul it down to Guatemala to copy the data and turn it into some modern format that could be read.

Eventually there was a trial in around 2012-2013, and General Rios-Montt (who'd been "President" in 1982-1983, and had come back into politics again after democracy was restored) got convicted and then got a court to grant him immunity because he'd been President. Ugly business, and not enough justice got done, but some, and at least a lot of injustice got publicly exposed.

I worked on a project in the mid-late 80s that required us to collect data from a bunch of different telcos around the country. It got sent to us in all kinds of different formats, anything from 6250 bpi 9-track tape (Yay! Oh, wait, what do you mean it's in VMS Backup format?) to 8-inch floppies to a box of tape reels with duct-tape on them indicating the tape number and a badly-Xerographed paper copy of the data format.) I really appreciated the folks who sent us dumb vanilla IBM-style tapes, with 80-column records on them - it was boring but reliable.

If you don't remember the VAX 11/780, it had a microcomputer PDP-11-on-a-chip implementation with an 8" floppy drive that it used to load boot code. We decided it really would be safe to put use that drive to read the data off 8" floppies, just as long as we didn't try to boot the machine from them, and it did in fact work.