Nothing I wrote in any way gives an impression that I support, in any shape, manner or form, a "blame the victim" mentality. However, contributory negligence is a fact of life, and in no way is the same as saying "you deserved to get raped because of how you dressed."

Picking weak, easy-to-guess passwords is contributory negligence. Ask any bank. You're using a service with certain rules, including the responsibility to choose a reasonably secure password. There's no similar rule in our society saying "It's my responsibility to dress a certain way or I'm acting in a contributory negligent way when someone gropes me in the subway." Different "problem domain." Different expectations.

It doesn't make it right, whether it's the groper or the hacker. But pretty much every service has in their TOS a warning about choosing a non-trivial password, and many won't even approve one that's too weak.

I ditched my rack mount servers when I came home one February when it was 20F outside and my AC was running. Just not worth the cost of operating them! I culled my equipment down to a pair of T110 quad core Xeon (with HT) Dell pedestal servers, and a build-from-scratch file server with eight 3TB drives, cheap AMD proc, mobo, and all with 16GB RAM. Drastically lower power consumption than my old setup (4 HP DL585 G1's) and more powerful as well. The T110's are setup to allow me to swap out the boot drives to change hypervisors in and out. They have dedicated 1 gig storage networks back to the file server where the vdisks for the VMs all live. Between the two I can run Xen, VMWare, or Hyper-V (my work requires me to work with all three) and on those I can run pretty much anything I need. I have some Cisco gear for when I need to play with it but for the most part those stay unpowered. I can simulate most of the networking for testing.

Other than that there is a pair of 8 port gigabit switches, router running Tomato Shibby, cable modem, Silicon Dust OTA networked TV tuner, and a wireless access point in the center of the house for phones/tablets. All living on a 4 shelf bread rack in my office.

I've done this and it does work. The problem I always ran into wasn't the bandwidth, it was the encryption. I would cook the routers streaming 1080p TS files with WPA2 enabled. Eventually gave up and ran ethernet. Living in a rental townhouse, I had to get creative with runners and area rugs to do that without punching holes in walls...

Talking about the rape is harder, but it's time to do it. I've had other women wait until their friends are gone, and ask me things like "will I ever be able to trust someone again?" They can do this because from their perspective I'm in a rather unique position ... The murder? Well, that's a lot less common, but it forced me to learn a lot in a short time - seconds ... and I can understand that people with PTSD aren't helped by someone telling them to "just get over it" (one of my sisters :-).

The idea of grabbing a bunch of us researchers to help is a good one. As for the retinal super-center, appointments are FAST. The surgeon looked at my eye, the test results, the scans, etc., we talked, and he said "If we operate, there's a chance the retinal tear will grow." "And if we don't?" "It will definitely grow." "A chance is better than definitely, let's do it." "My thoughts exactly."

A week later, they operated.

People who say wait times under Canada's health care system are out of control don't realize that the triage system works. If I had needed surgery that day, I would have gotten it.

The supercenter purposefully keeps a very low profile. They don't want to be inundated with routine cases, and you simply can't request an appointment - ever. Only an ophthalmological surgeon can refer you, and that's only when there's a very real risk of going blind due to retinal problems.

On another note, the real task wasn't being "tough" - it was not becoming like anyone else who had been through all this would have become. Being tough is easy - staying open and vulnerable and HUMAN despite everything must be hard, because I see so many people just putting up barriers and walls and doing the "tough guy" act (or "mean bitch" act) to give the impression that they can't be hurt again. People might respect or fear someone who's tough or mean, but they won't go to them for help all that easily. And lets face it - nothing gives the warm fuzzies more than knowing you've helped someone (except maybe hugging my dog when things get tough, but that's almost too easy).

Considering how bad things have been in the past, the future looks exciting. I'm looking forward to sharing what I've learned. As just one example, I didn't realize just how much "head space" and real damage the side effects of ptsd were taking until a psychiatrist, psychologist, and therapist helped me, not only with the symptoms (which, except for the depression, I was pretty good at hiding), but also with understanding the underlying events. Or, more importantly, understanding that there are some things that I will never be able to "understand" in the conventional sense, such as why a high-school friend would kill his father and have me as his next target, or why anyone would think that having me raped with a sharp object is a good form of revenge.

Those last few words were hard to type but they would have been impossible a year ago. I consider that HUGE progress.

So many people have learned the hard way that sharing nude pics or a racy video with just ONE person can lead to the whole world having it. As the beer commercial says, "Ex" says it all ...

Quote from a 1950 movie, Born Yesterday:

It's still good advice today. We're inundated with examples of what can happen. In too many cases, the victim is guilty of contributory negligence, at the very least. Example: "What do you mean, 1-2-3-4-5 isn't a good password?"

Banks have already established that your funds aren't covered if you use a stupid, easy-to-guess PIN.

Poor people don't have kids so there's someone to care for them when they get old. That "middle generation" always ends up with more than enough problems just taking care of themselves and their own kids. Plus, given the historically high infant mortality rate in the areas we're talking about, conventional thinking is you need more than "a heir and a spare" to actually HAVE a heir and a spare.

Robot care for the elderly is not a solution when there's not enough resources to FEED everyone, or clean water for everyone - and we're already past any realistic sustainability point.

All the virtual pizzas and hamburgers won't fill a single real-world stomach.

Aye. And I'll raise a Mumbai Sapphire martini to that!

Thanks.

I once got regular mod points. I think if you cross an invisible "Troll" achievement threshold, you get blocked.

Because some of us really don't care if some droid somewhere is poking around in the text massages in our droids.

And anyone stupid enough to take nude selfies, maybe they need to learn that selfies are neither an art nor an art form? Take a lesson from Mother Nature - clouds leak (it's called rain).

I don't encrypt my phone data because I don't see any benefit for my own use, just more hassles. Just like I don't encrypt my on-disk or on-usb-key data. If/when I come into a situation where I need to, I will, but really, so far that hasn't happened.

+1 funny parent. Back up to normal now.

I sure hope so :-)

But we cannot easily feed 11 billion today. We're hitting the limits of fresh-water availability. Desalination is a solution in SimCity, but the real world is more complicated. And if we DID manage to get to 11 billion, that doesn't fix things, since we'll then be having people predicting the population growing to 20 billion by the end of the 22nd century.

And while economic development might wind up with individual families having fewer kids, that doesn't mean total population goes down. To the contrary, total population goes UP. Just look at the population growth in the last 100 years. We've gone from 1.8 billion to 7 billion. Additionally, with rising per capita demands for more energy-intensive food (meat instead of grain, etc) and more economic participation, the footprint of every individual is greater, so that 7 billion is having a lot more than 4x the impact of 1.8 billion 100 years ago.

Can we quibble about the statistical method to use after we've settled the basic cause and effect relationships? Here's the retired TED talk: Religions and Babies.

I think the title is supposed to be provocative but I find it has the opposite effect (two things young men don't want to talk about...) - it's really about assumptions underling the modeling of world population.

Burma Shave?