You use this one woman's behavior to say that you will worry about ALL women, yet you aren't remotely worried (or at least, if you are you don't mention it) that THOUSANDS of men made rape and death threats to her over this.

Your comment isn't insightful - it's stupid. It's just as stupid as if I said that all men are essentially rapists and murderers (or would be if given half a chance) because some men reacted like assholes over a stupid issue.

Why are you judging ALL women by the behavior of this ONE woman, but not doing the same to ALL men because of the behavior of THOUSANDS of men? That seems a little weird, no?

Of course, ideally you shouldn't judge members of a group by the behavior of one, or even many, members of that group, and rather take each individual as they come, regardless of what categories you imagine they fit in.

Also of course, this whole thing is fucking stupid. The guys were being somewhat dumb making jokes like that in a space where they could be overheard, A was really fucking stupid for bothering to be bothered by it, let alone tweeting it. What was actually monstrous - and what people SHOULD be bothered by - is the thousands of people making threats as a result. I'm disappointed, but not at all surprised, that people are ignoring that and instead choosing to vilify one idiot who overreacted, since she isn't anonymous and can be lashed out at easily.

Or they know something about your marriage that you don't... Does your spouse use Facebook also?

Yep.

Any well designed social psych/sociology research project will have tons of ways to check for validity and consistency of data, and the more clever ones will even have ways of identifying the particular ways people will fuck with data and developing a partial profile there, too.

The vast majority of the data will be a fairly accurate representation - the user base is so large that a few "clever" people trying to piss in the well won't have any effect - they aren't even a blip - while the rest of the userbase doesn't see much point in liking random things or going against the established function of the systems.

As to the study itself - I think it will be interesting to see how the profile for any given demographic shifts over time as various things become more or less mainstream and more or less strongly associated with various demographic buckets.

In an ideal world, where there is no issue of supporting the art supporting the artist, you would be right.

But if I pay for a book by Card, I'm supporting him and his views, and I won't do that.

He's perfectly free to believe whatever he likes, and to yammer away at anyone who will listen to him. And other people are perfectly free to boycott his work and refuse to support him or those who do business with him. Card decided speaking his mind and airing his bigoted views was more important than possibly alienating a lot of people who disagree with him, and this situation is a natural consequence of his choices.

What people say and do has consequences. Card chose to be an outspoken bigot and the consequences for this seem to be that a lot of people don't want to buy his stuff. He can either put on his big boy pants and deal with it, or not. It appears he is choosing "not."

We can fix those programs so easily, if only people would get the fuck over themselves.

Social security: No cap on earnings that pay into it, but keep a cap on benefits paid out. If you're making enough money for the elimination of the cap to be a factor for you, you're making enough money for a smallish extra tax to not be a problem. Suck it up and be happy that you're doing well enough for it to be an issue. Second, raise retirement age to 70 to reflect the fact that people are living much longer.

Medicare: Public option for healthcare. Promote preventative medicine, healthier choices. We would save so much money each year if people would just get an annual physical because some illnesses that become staggeringly expensive down the road would be nipped in the bud when they are caught at the point it's cheapest to treat. With better preventative/health promotion, we would avoid a lot of expenses outright because many health problems simply wouldn't develop. That is one of the reason other countries can spend so much less on healthcare than we do, per capita, and yet have better median health.

The thing is, those are all bad because socialism, death panels, and how easy it is to get uneducated and terrified people to vote against their interests in this country.

I can understand it, but I think a much better strategy, instead of being fragile, is to accept that it will only get more and more difficult to avoid exposure othe future and to instead cope with reality.

It sucks that some people are abused etc., but even those people must face the reality that it is extremely likely that in the not too distant future it will be absolutely trivial for people to find out anything they care to know.

Given the choice between fighting a losing battle and developing coping skills to handle the new reality, I pick ladaptation.

The retina MBP is $200 more and has much better specs and isn't tricky to get running any other OS you want to put on it.

The only way the chrome book is a cheap alternative is if you don't value any of that.

It isn't always because of prestige. Many people equate higher prices with higher quality, the assumption being that the product has to be worth it because how else could they sell it for more?

It isn't he worst metric to use, either, even if it isn't always true.

I don't consider making it harder for people to get away with habitually being a raging cockknob to be a privacy issue, really. Though, I am not particularly concerned about privacy because it doesn't exist.

The only private things are things that are known literally to only one individual. Anything known to two or more individuals has the potential of being known by all individuals and a reasonable person should anticipate the potential for exposure. This is something that, before the wired world, was proverbial - a secret may be kept secret between two people, provided one is dead.

In the wired world, people seem to forget that when they send Bob a text, they aren't jut telling Bob, but literally everyone else in the chain that leads from you to Bob or who can potentially come into contact with the text you sent at any point along that chain. You aren't texting Bob; you're texting AT&T and everyone else, it's just that Bob is probably the only person interested enough to notice.

When Google went public they lost the ability to not be "evil". By law, going public means you have to put shareholder profit ahead of every other consideration or face a never ending stream of lawsuits.

Any public company that seems to be doing "good" is only doing so because they believe is more profit for them in that than in the alternatives. Such an organization might have a spokesperson who says don't be evil or whatever, but that's just marketing.

Personally, this has lead me to recalibrate my moral compass substantially. Murdering people: evil. Requiring people to be logged in to use convenient features of your product: smart business.

People other than grandparents actually pay attention to in-Eco-system reviews? Huh.

That you think party affiliation is actually relevant indicates to me that you're part of the problem.

Stop using party affiliation as a proxy for figuring out what someone is about. Party affiliation would only be a useful indicator if the people in those parties actually had principles they adhered to. They don't.

The only thing a politician identifying with either par means to me is that they want to plug into the guaranteed base of that party; it says zero about what they believe, what their party believes, or any of that.

This individual politician sounds like an asshole, but his party affiliation has nothing to do with it, any more than Akin's party affiliation had to do with him being an ignorant fuckhead or Jackson's being a corrupt fuckhead, or Romney being an out of touch fuckhead, or Weiner being an indiscreet fuckhead, or W being an incompetent fuckhead, or Clinton being a philandering fuckhead, etc. and so on.

Making flat 2 dimensional images seem 3d is really just a gimmick. I don't mind it in movies (I don't have any of the headache issues, and I so rarely see films in theater now that I'm willing to drop a couple of bucks for 3d for something big and splodey) but it's just a gimmick because it doesn't make the environment more interactive or allow you to see anything you wouldn't see otherwise.

The things that take off on the web are things that make it more interactive and that let the user do useful things. Just looking at 3d images is a neat trick, but it isn't terribly useful.

Let me take any arbitrary object, turn it around and over, see it from all angles, etc. Porn will probably show the way there - but the point is, 3d could be useful for a lot of things if it's actually done in a way to make it useful.

That sounds like a miserable slog, and it makes you sound incredibly inefficient if its true.

Frankly, with modern tools - Internet - it shouldn't take you more than 2 hours a day when looking for work. That's the point of diminishing returns - in 2 hours if youre reasonably quick you can apply for dozens of jobs. You should, after that point, look at developing new skills, doing things you don't usually get a chance to because of work needs, spend time with friends and family where you can, and basically enjoy life on the cheap since you won't often be unburdened by a job.

You, on the other hand, claim you planted yourself at one agency for at least 1.5 months - the maximum span of your unemployment - on the off chance that agency would be the one to get the job you were qualified for. You didn't spend that 9-5 every day wait learning new skills (how could you, without a computer or phone and without being disruptive in their office) or doing anything useful at all, like checking in with dozens of other agencies. And you actually think of this as virtuous!

But hey, your super job method only took you 1.5 months of wasting your day sitting at an agency, if what you say is true.

Oh, also, it's cute how you call it unemployment propaganda. Stay gold.

Unless you want to participate in the economy in a meaningful way.

Let me put it to you like this: if you lost your job today could you get another that was remotely in the same class if you did not have a computer, phone or any other way of connecting to the Internet to taking calls?

Unless you know people - and a poor person probably does not have remotely the same sort of contacts someone working at the level of the average slashdotter will have - the answer is almost certainly no.

For all practical purposes, Internet is a need in modern society. By your logic, we could say one does not need clothing - after all, they could stay home and never go into a situation where clothing is not optional.

Shit changed and shit changed fast. Catch up.