From an objective setting, all opinions are equal, though truth (objective truth) may be closer represented by one side or another. But, since we're all subjective beings,

If we're all subjective beings, isn't that evidence that there is no such thing as an "objective opinion"? And since we're not all equal (except perhaps in the eyes of some mythical God or some mythical government), then why would you think our opinions are equal?

Everyone is welcome to their opinion

No. A young gamer who believes all women secretly want to be raped is not welcome to his opinion. Or if he is, it's not by anyone who doesn't hold the same aberrant viewpoint. "Welcome" indicates some element of respect. Not all opinions are worthy of respect.

and in a case like this, probably everyone is right (in their own mind).

What your suggesting is that there is no right and wrong. That someone who believes the Earth is 6000 years old thinks he is right in his own mind does not mean that his opinion has to be welcome in a classroom or among a group of biologists.

This notion of "there is no right, there is no wrong and there are two sides to every story" is very silly. It's something that certain people say because they think it sounds smart and worldly, but is actually very dumb. It doesn't matter what they think is right in their mind. Nobody else is required to respect their opinion in any way.

[Person A] I have an agenda, and will try to hijack an unrelated discussion with my clumsy propaganda.

[Person B] I'm a strawman meant to paint A as a victim of persecution.

Fixed that for you.

Create an account that appears to be LGBT. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be Jewish. Play some games. Record the reactions.

Create an account that appears to be Muslim. Play some games. Record the reactions..

I really don't want to ask what such an account name would look like.

And, if someone did come up with a handle or avatar that somehow indicated that they were a black gay jew, there would be approximately zero chance that they were actually a black gay jew. The notion that a gay man is going to join an online game and create a character named, "ButtsexLover69" is mainly projection on the part of the straight gaming bros.

I don't know how you choose your gaming handle, but I generally don't make it indicative of my race, religion or sexual orientation. The main problem seems to occur when a woman is foolish enough to use a woman's name.

Plus, we have plenty of examples of men using female characters in online games getting treated very badly. You can find many such stories in the gaming press.

No thank you. I generally don't click pastebin links from ACs.

You're doing it wrong.

Not wrong as in "that's wrong to do", but wrong as in "you'll do better with people you interact with in the real world."

If, of course, you can put the cellphone/iPad/keyboard down for enough minutes to interact with the people around you.

Online profiles are far more "crafted" than real-world interactions, and real-world interactions provide far more clues when someone is gaming you.

Unlimited data, first 2GB unthrottled, rest at edge speeds. Unlimited text. 100 voice minutes (add a voip provider, and unlimited voice for pennies more).

Did they change it or something? I have that plan, except its 5GB of 4G data. (And although I've never hit it, I was under the impression that it was unlimited 3G afterward.)

Also, VoIP is zero pennies more if you use Google Voice (with Hangouts). Otherwise, the cheapest third-party VoIP providers tend to charge something like $2-$3/month.

Now that we're being careful about using wifi its not clear that we even need much of a data plan.

I've got a $30/month 5GB plan with T-Mobile. (Actually, $30.75/month including taxes -- yes, that's total.) Even through I rely completely on VoIP for all my calls, I'm still within range of Wi-Fi so often that I've never even made it to 500MB, let alone 5GB. I'm now shopping for an even cheaper plan.

There is absolutely no reason to let Verizon rape your wallet unless you consistently need to stream video somewhere where only they have coverage.

That's actually a really good reply.

In the immortal words of Tim Minchin:

You confuse politics with culture and society. Let's ignore the 50,000 smartphone games that are so simple you would have to stretch a lot of things far beyond breaking to find any culture in them, to the point where Pong was some kind of social statement. But even with all those games ignored and restricting ourselves to PC games, yes they very often reflect parts of our culture and society. Some intentionally, some not. It's not a surprise, given that culture influences on us as members of society, and thus leaves a mark in our creative pursuits, just like greek culture influenced greek art and literature and any famous american book of your choosing would've been very different had it been written by a chinese author in China, for example.

Politics, however, is not the same as culture.

Merriam-Webster says:

Basically, politics is an activity. Writing a novel or creating a computer game is not a politicial act unless you intentionally make it so. There is no such thing as "unconscious politics".

Second:

This worrying about reflection of culture in our creations is vastly overrated. It's the same nonsense as the claim that violent games turn people into killers. I can play a game set not in todays culture, but in a culture where women have almost no rights, a medieval or fantasy setting, and I won't come out of the game wishing to take any rights away from women in the real world. On the contrary, it may make me more sensitive to gender issues.

When I look at female characters in video games, I see them as characters. I laugh about their ridiculous fantasy armor. I look at their boobs and think "yeah, suuure". Just like I look at the men and think the same.

You make too many assumptions about people you don't know. I'm not for turning all women into sex objects. I do, however, understand that sex and viewing a member of the opposite sex in a sexual way is normal human behaviour. Also, you can have your Chipendales, if you want. Why would I scream anything, let alone murder? You can look at me as a sex object, if it makes you feel good. I'm sure enough of myself to not be bothered. Heck, I've been hit on by gay men. Yes, it's a bit uncomfortable, but not a big deal. Yes, I wouldn't like having that as a constant part of my life which is why I feel for attractive women in clubs and understand why they prefer to go with a small group.

But all of these are a small selection of social imperfections, and there are thousands more of them, some related to gender and some not, some to the disadvantage of women and some to the disadvantage of men.

True to some extent. But you ignore that this "male ideal" is not better or more comfortable. Many men do not enjoy the role that society puts them in, and they don't want to be strong and powerful and in control. Worse, other than women they can't complain about it, because the role doesn't allow it. Stereotypes and forced roles affect both genders, that's my point. And just because you may think that the male role is preferable doesn't mean that all men agree with you.
Also, some of the smartest and most successful women I know are very much ladies at the same time. Because they understand how real power works and that it has nothing to do with the size of your bizeps.

Can't women just do this on any other dating site by not having any photos on their profile and sending photos once they've been talking to a man for a while?

Why would a man join this site compared with dating sites that let him see photos and don't make him jump through silly hoops?

Macs before 2009 can't run the current version of OS X.

Yosemite, which is the version that Apple are just about to release, runs on plenty of Macs released in 2007. The same goes for the current version.

Learn to read. I made it very clear that if a woman can't get birth control or jobs or voting rights or other such basic human rights, I'll be on her side, no question.

But there's a point where justified demands turn into ridiculous bullshit. In my country, feminists have successfully crippled parts of our language, because language was "male dominated". So instead of "student" and "professor", we now have to stay "StudentInnen" and "ProfessorInnen" or some such abominations (there are worse, like "Student*innen" - which is not a spelling error).

Texts written in accordance to gender study rules are utterly unreadable. I'm not joking.

Now where exactly are we with women in video games? Somewhere inbetween. We've not reached "you're a psycho" nonsense-land, but we're not in the "you can't vote and always obey your husband" territory, either. It's rare that a game doesn't offer female characters, or puts them at a disadvantage. We're fighting over visuals here. Maybe this generation has forgotten that giving women equal rights was a real fight once, and put in relation to that, being worried about sexist visuals is kind of not really that big a deal.

Am I for less sexism? Yeah.
Do I think the boob size and ridiculous fantasy armor in games is worth fighting over? Nope. There are much more important fights to pick, still.

The fact that there were able to add so much (stuff like virutal desktops (yes, i know Linux has had it for over a decade)) without raising the minimum requirements shows that they actually care about performance and are doing a good job.

You've got to be kidding me. Virtual desktops require not much more than splitting the data structure that holds the list of windows into N pieces (for N desktops), an integer to keep track of which one you're on, and a couple of event handlers to switch between them. If that sort of thing is enough to force you to raise minimum requirements then you need to quit using bogosort to keep your window list in the right order!

In this particular case, I don't know all the details, so I don't pass judgement.

But in more general terms, I've seen this "women in video games" topic for some years now. Here's what is having very, very little positive effect on women in video games: Feminist activists yelling for equality. Here's what does have a visible positive effect: Men and women quietly working on changing things and people complaining about specific problems to the responsible people, with suggestions on what to change.

Politics rarely actually improve anything. We realized that when it comes to Washington D.C. politics, why don't we realize it when it comes to office politics, genderism and other relatives?

I'm not sure exactly what we're giving up by maintaining minimum specs. Is there some rule by which raising the minimum specs improves performance on more powerful machines? Or that lower minimum specs means the OS won't run as well on the latest hardware?

I can run Ubuntu on an old 486. Does that mean it can't scale up to my i7, or that it's somehow less powerful than if they set a higher minimum?

Or is this a reaction to the fact that on the rare occasions that Mac OS has major update they always raise the minimum specs? Maybe the fact that Microsoft doesn't sell the system AND the OS together means they don't have an incentive to get us to dump our hardware when it gets to be four years old.

Yes, I can. But in this, they are the in-your-face aggressors. I can't remember the last time some anti-feminist pushed his agenda on me.