You are awfully blasé about an internationally-recognized cancer researcher's reputation and career being damaged by a quote that was taken out of context, and the knee-jerk reactions and witch-hunt that followed. Once the context was established, the cowardly "leaders" of the organizations with which he was associated did nothing to remedy their appalling treatment of him.

They could afford if it they already knew and had confidence in it. How do people get started when the basic configuration is $1000+, and that's without client/server DB access ($300+ more)? And now you need to pay another $300+/year for a subscription to get bug fixes.

There was a time when Borland had a no-nonsense license (i.e. install wherever you want, as long as only one copy is used at a time), and they didn't have DRM that made the boot-up time almost double. They used to put customers first. Now they try to slip in restrictions in new EULAs, and back off if they get caught.

Sometimes "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" just don't sound right. I'm over 50 and in a relationship who is also over 50. I'm not a boy, and she isn't a girl. And what if one of my parents dies and the other begins a new relationship? "Boys" and "girls" over 80?

It reminds me of being in South Africa in the late 1980s (i.e. during the time of Apartheid), and a farmer I was visiting talked about the "girls" milking the cows in the morning. I had visions of 16-year-old milkmaids, when the reality was women over 40. In that case, "boys" and "girls" was used by whites to clearly put the black workers in their inferior place.

And yet those terrible reviews are intermingled with glowing 5-star ones. There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.

(Although people should definitely be fired -- or charged themselves -- for what they have done to young Ahmed.)

Charles Stross's Accelerando (available as a CC e-book) deals with this very well

Reddit is absolutely allowed to manage their employees as they see fit. The mods of Reddit, in turn, are allowed to exercise the powers that Reddit has given them, and to express their discontent.

Reddit is free to dispense with the services of mods and pay people to monitor and moderate all the conversations that go on, so that the corporation can maintain complete control. If they want to take advantage of the time and effort of volunteers (how many? thousands?), then they have to work cooperatively with those volunteers.

What? The NDP is the official opposition! And not doing all that badly in the polls! Tom Mulcair has pledged to bring in proportional representation if elected, if you want something that "actually represents Canadians".

I'm not affiliated with the NDP in any way (I've voted for them once out of about five elections), but Mulcair has impressed me.

Tom Mulcair was on the CBC yesterday, and I have to say (as a non-committed voter who has voted NDP, Green, Liberal and --in a sad episode of my youth-- some Family somethingorother anti-abortion party) that I like the things he says and the way he says them. No hype, no theatrics, just intelligent arguments and thoughtful principals.

With Harper, we will get a precipitous slide into government by the rich, for the rich; with Trudeau, a gentler slope but the same trajectory. I truly believe that Mulcair will try to roll back some of the encroachments on individual rights and liberty, and actually start us headed towards environmental responsibility.

Is it possible that Mulcair will fall victim to the same hubris and vested interests as other politicians? Of course. But why not start out with at least a little hope for positive change?

I was in a very similar position. Went to school at the University of Waterloo 1981-87 (took one year off in the middle), co-op engineering. My parents helped pay until I started work terms, then I paid my own way. I even ended up with money in the bank when I graduated. Tuition was, I think, about $800/semester or $2,300 in 2015 dollars, about 1/3 of what it is now.

Of course, my lifestyle fitted my income. I was below the poverty line (I earned about $9,000/year, I think, and that covered living and education expenses). No car, very little partying, fast food about once a week, ate at home the rest of the time. No girlfriend, either. Partly because I was a shy nerd in engineering, and partly because I couldn't afford to do a lot of social things to meet girls.

I got into the habit of comparing the money I had to the things I wanted, and being brutally careful about living beyond my means. That continues to this day. The only loan I've ever taken was the mortgage on my house.

I think it was someone at Google who described the two types of managers:

• 1) Shit funnels take the shit that is coming down from above, and channel it onto their underlings
• 2) Shit umbrellas protect those under them from the shit that is raining down from on high.

Fortunately, my manager is a shit umbrella.

Bad analogy. If you truly believe that a baby is a living human being before it is born then the intentional destruction of that life is murder, just like if you killed the baby after it was born. Accept the first premise, and the second logically follows.

Yes, GST is certainly charged for anything you bring in over your duty-free allowance ($200 or so, depending upon how long you were outside Canada).

And cars have different restrictions. You have to be the owner of a car in the U.S. for a certain length of time before importing it to Canada (and perform certain modifications, like making sure that the headlights automatically go on when the car is running).

A society that "beats down" people who are accused but not convicted of being "pervs" (keeping in mind that if you yourself have a sex life, you are likely doing things that would have been considered perverted 50+ years ago) is on its way to savagery. The rule of law, imperfect though it may be, has allowed us to emerge from feudalism.

That Reddit thread was thousands and thousands of women writing about their own experiences. I mentioned how the person closest to me immediately confirmed that this was her experience too.

Do something for me, would you? Ask five women who are close to you if they agree, and come back and tell us how they responded. If their first experience of being viewed sexually was positive and empowering, then good because we need to hear more stories like that to balance the negative ones.

But so far all you are just doing is denying that the problem exists and demanding incontrovertible proof in lieu of participating in a constructive dialogue.