I can totally buy this, 100%. I was in the first class at my college required to buy laptops, in 1995. I can definitely say that even before Youtube or facebook, we were frequently websurfing or chatting with each other or playing little games during class. I think it was a good thing for us academically as we progressed that we reached classes that had not yet really attempted to integrate them into the curriculum and most of us stopped bothering to tote them around. (Well, and technology was progressing at a fast enough pace at that point that they were really hunks of junk by the time we graduated. Woo, 486! Woo, 540 meg harddrive!)

I have a 2.5 year old daughter and a four month old son, and I'm doing my best to play with them; I do most of my "gaming" (quotes because I don't consider most smartphone stuff really gaming) on breaks at work or while sitting with my arm around my daughter trying to get her to stay still long enough to sleep or when up in the middle of the night nursing my son. (Yes, go ahead and make jokes about no women on slashdot.) My husband and I had been still getting in some table top gaming with friends after our daughter was asleep, but it's kind of gone down the tubes at the moment. Someday I hope to even make it to Origins and/or GenCon again, but it's not going to be soon. I can't wait for them to be old enough to play that kind of game, too; somewhere I have a copy of Fairy Tale, an RPG for ages 3 and up, essentially Pretend with some light rules.

    I wasn't really expecting Google to do anything based on a comment on a glorified blog.

That explains a lot. Yesterday, all the extensions in Chrome disappeared. I re-added them, and it was fine. It would have been nice to have some sort of warning, or even a message saying what was done.

The article says they're doing it with the update to 58.0.3029.96 , and I just verified that's what mine is.

Next time, just ask, m'kay?

Retinal scan -> DNA scan -> biometric scan to verify identity, and that I'm not under duress, and finally a 4 digit PIN, "1234".

I wanna make sure no one gets on my phone and plays Candy Crush.

I was on a proton pump inhibitor for some time, and it helped amazingly. And then in came out that they are linked to greater rates of osteoporosis, already much more likely in women. So instead I ended up with taking a Zantac 300 (twice the highest OTC, I believe, at least at the time) every night before bed, before I finally found a permanent solution. I got a divorce, and suddenly my stomach acid problems went away... Oh, and even with mainly taking OTC short term acid medications (read: eating Tums like candy), my father ended up with some vitamin K issues, I think it was? He ended up with shots to bring things up to normal. I think it was Vitamin K, but whichever vitamin, it was one that is mainly gained in humans from eating meat, and he apparently had brought his acid so low that he wasn't breaking down meat enough to have adequate levels. (Note: this information is obviously second hand, so there might be some Telephone effects.)

... a C-section. I'm eight months pregnant, so this is kind of upwards in my mind (because, well, it scares me as a possibility and my baby is measuring big, so it IS a possibility), but even without VR, women make it through having a c-section all the time, with a spinal block in place to numb the whole area. Heck, women who are much braver than I am actually watch the whole thing in a mirror. (That one still just leaves me aghast that someone can pull that off.) Admittedly, they have a big goal in doing so - being able to interact with their baby as soon as possible, rather than having to come out of a general anesthetic, in addition to the risks of a general that are noted here.

Ya, I spotted it immediately. He was really brave when he was sure he wouldn't have to do it. Kind of like all the people who claim they'll leave the country over [insert socio-political atrocity]. If they ever followed through, it would really be a newsworthy event.

Lesbian sharks are always relevant. If you don't like it, you need to address it directly with them.

BTW... Never, ever, tell an angry lesbian shark that she's wrong. Nothing good will ever come from it.

Let me field that answer. They'll use it, just like organizations kept using WinXP pre-SP3, until the new Director of IT came along and said "Are you fucking kidding me?! What incompetent idiot let you stay unpatched and critically open to everything that has come along in the last fucking decade?! Oh, the same one who thought it's a great idea to never upgrade hardware, despite your staff barely surviving on machines that crash daily, or catch fire like those two did last week."

Oh, are PCs dead again? What is this, the 15th consecutive year they have ceased to be?

That'd be option 3. The prosecution would call it assault and/or battery.

That's why I'll only share such findings anonymously. Or at least anonymous enough. Go ahead, sue or attempt prosecution on John Smith who lives at 1 Main St, Anytown USA.

You have three choices.

• 1) Quit. You won't have to put up with their shit, and you keep your sanity.
• 2) Wait to get fired. That's their end goal. If you can't complain to your superiors and/or HR, you're going to get fired anyways.
• 3) Be BOFH and fight back. Depending on how you try to do this, you'll end up fired, in jail, or both. It only goes well in fiction.

A lot of what I had done for years (I moved to a new project last year) had to do with database queries and the next layer or two sitting on top of them. Periodically, it was my job to look at what queries were taking too long. While much of the time that involved in database optimization like adding indices, etc, sometimes there was truly horrible code sitting on top of the database. One of my favorites involved a list coming in, and the code created the first item on the list. Then it deleted everything associated with that list and created the first two items, etc, etc. Yuck.