Netzilla

Partly because there are potent mainstream individuals and groups who support the use of such tactics when they suit their purposes.
 
Earlier in this thread (here) I posted links to reports of harassment (cyber and otherwise) of climate researchers, and some of the harassment comes for folks on the payroll of Big Energy. Also, attacks by in-office and running-for-office politicians means, implicitly, that these people support cyberharassment etc. as long as it promotes their agenda. This being the case, vigorous systematic prosecution of harassers will never happen, because that's a tool they already use and like.
 
I focused on the harassment of climate scientists in my posts above because I follow that science/policy front more than casually (having once done research in radiative energy transfer), it is pretty much the same stuff (though admittedly the precise language varies if the scientist being harassed is female), there are identifiable political and business entities who make use of and encourage the harassment, and therefore important powers who will stonewall attempts to crack down on it.
 
That doesn't have direct effects on specific harassment of women, except that it means that existing political and business powers aren't going to permit it to be shut down.

Grandstanding?  They had some committee hearings and they wrote a paper.   It has had plenty of committee hearings and written many papers about despots filling mass graves. Having meetings and writing paper is what the UN does.  It is basically all that the nations of the world have given them the power and mandate to do.  So given that they don't have power or the mandate to stop the despots of the world from filling mass graves, it seems unfair to blame them for failing to do so.
 
Internet harassment is not just a problem in the US, but is international like the internet itself.  Since the biggest function of the UN, IMHO, is to give people space to talk on the record about problems that cross international boundaries, it would seem to be exactly the place to talk about internet harassment.  YMMV.

It is in enlightened Western democracies.

So I get an email this morning that the integration routine I upgraded on Friday didn't run correctly. Started looking into it. Oh, wow. Frabuous day. The files I had been given to test my routines against didn't match the actual new production code.
 
"Pray tell, Mr. Babbage. If we put in the wrong numbers will we still get the right answer?"

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and 286 computers were considered nifty, it was common to send back the exit status from functions and programs to allow for error trapping and debugging. It was encouraged when I was learning C ("good programming", right up there with commenting code), and it's one of the reasons that function main() is defined as integer in that language. As you suspected, both COBOL and FORTRAN have their equivalents (STOP RUN and STOP respectively for terminating a program), with ways of passing codes back.

A girl was bullied for liking Star Wars (which is insufficiently girly), so the cosplay group the 501st, aka Vader's Fist, gave her a set of stormtrooper armor, and took her backstage to meet Weird Al.
 
http://io9.com/a-girl-was-bullied-for-liking-star-wars-and-was-helped-1725893704

The Worst Insult Ever

Get off my fandom, you darn kids!
 
I get the point you're making, but I absolutely don't buy it.
 
Star wars fandom, Star trek fandom - they're each a teeny-tiny piece of a very big universe. Geekery is far bigger (and far older) than that. When I was a kid geek, I was into (as well as fantasy/SF) medieval music. It was incredibly hard to actually get hold of, since the internet didn't exist and accessible catalogues were tiny. What mailing lists existed were, you know, actual mailing lists that were made on paper and  - well, they were mailed. We used to exchange cassette tapes, that we had made of material found wherever. Mailing someone a recording of a recording of a recording of a recording of a concert someone somebody knew had recorded at some castle in Wales ... that's pretty damn geeky right there.  And it's a geekdom that had virtually no overlap with my other music geekdom at the time - which was African music - despite the fact that it operated in precisely the same way. Divisions in geekdom have a long and dishonourable history.
 
On the comics/movie side of things, there were fandoms built around different comics (especially anime, but also eurocomics and British comics) complete with conventions and cosplay dating back decades. The earliest big comic cons started in the UK and the US in the '60's. Movies and books were the same, as were gaming cons. Fandoms have not become more isolated since the turn of the millennium - speaking as someone who has experienced it up close and personal, I can promise you that the exact reverse is true. As comics and movie geekery has been mainstreamed (and profitable!), the fandoms have become more accessible (and also much bigger) - and also broader in their range. It's a lot easier to be a geek in multiple fandoms when it's readily accessible online.
 
I think you are right that the "real geek/fake geek" thing is a grognard attitude (not all grognards are old) - it's a desire to have a little area all of your own where the other kids can't play. That's not new. I met people like that in fandom 30 years ago, and I don't doubt that the attitude is much more ancient. But that attitude didn't define or determine fandom back then and it doesn't today either. Because of course, real fans - like real geeks - by which I mean people who are really interested in some kind of fandom - welcome people with an interest in their pet topic, even though not all of them are (or will become) hardcore. They always have, in my experience.
 
cheers, Mark

Agreed. The whole idea that there is such a thing as a "real geek" and a "fake geek" is so precious as to be laughable. There's a crapton of fandoms/hobbies out there, and people are immersed to a greater or lesser degree in some/many of them. There are also many geekdoms that have nothing to do with gaming or fantasy at all. There doesn't exist some platonic ideal  ubergeek who masters every geekdom in depth.
 
I like scifi and fantasy, medieval music, play RPGs and videogames. Have done since long, long before any of those things were cool. But I'm otherwise pretty straight-up: I also like most of the the things that white middle class males are supposed to like.  Does that make me a "real" geek? Or not? I'm pretty sure some people would say yes, and some would say no, but the smart ones would say such a question is, at base so asinine as to not waste any time worrying about it.
 
Personally, when I check my give-a-**** meter, it's not registering this question at all.
 
cheers, Mark

I don't know. The pantheon of potential geeky interests is so large, I doubt I could ever be sufficiently immersed in all their facets to be a geek to all of them. 
 
I knew who winter soldier was and so forth, but I've never read Watchmen. (I'm used to the look of modern comic art, and the old stuff grates).
 
I can name lots of cards and their abilities from an obscure CCG called Anachronism, but I've never tried Magic or Pokémon. (I can name three)
 
I've played several pen and paper RPGs, but only DnD 3.5 and after. None of the advanced. I don't know THACO.
 
Nah, Geek is a word that has lost all meaning.  the fandoms are too many and too large.

https://megancondis.wordpress.com/2015/08/01/adam-sandler-is-a-fake-geek-guy/

I see your cutest captain america and raise Little girls R better at designing superheroes than you
 

 
 
 

There's no problem with having a preference for shaved leg/pubes/face/whatever. The problem only comes into being if a person insists that others have to conform to their preference. I like redheads - always have. But I'm not insisting that women with hair another colour have some kind of problem. My morbid dislike of neckbeards is already documented upthread. I'm not advocating mandatory barbering though (although I can dream ....)
 
So yeah, the assumption that women have some sort of requirement to shave, when men don't is sexist - even more, since it has nothing to do with function but is overtly sexual in nature. And to be fair, any assumption that men have a requirement to shave - even their loathsome back fur* - would be an imposition.
 
Oddly enough, if both genders had a generally accepted requirement to shave unsightly hair, I guess it'd stop being sexist and merely become intrusive .
 
Cheers, Mark
 
*I never claimed to be without body prejudice - I'm just open that these are my own prejudices, not natural laws

Same issue here. Too many bald spots on my face for a full beard and I hate shaving.

I have a goatee because that's all I can grow.

That reminds me of an exchange from an old game:
 
Z [playing an electricity-based character, has his character absorb power from several cars in a parking lot.]
Me [new to this group and the characters] So, he absorbs power from nearby batteries.  We shouldn't let him near anyone with a pacemaker.
GM - [Looks at me, laughs and pretends to scribble furiously in his notes.]
Z - [turns to me]  You'll get bonus EPs if anyone dies from your suggestion.

G.A.I.A. (Genetic Alteration Imitation Adenovirus)- a self aware virus designed by Greenpeace to terraform the world and infect those humans not immune to the virus (like Greenpeace of course) by turning them into plant/tree hybrids.
 
Of course G.A.I.A. has other plans...

"OMG! You are delicious! I'm definitely putting you on my 'It's Prey' list"
 

That's bull.
 
Even when I disagree with her assessment, I've watched the "Debunking" videos and they're horsecrap as well. It's hard to look at the industry and not see how female characters are crapped on or objectified or that the industry treats women who make games as well as who buy them with disdain - even moreso than they do the penile bearing gamers. It's not as pervasive and overreaching (in my opinion) as she says it is, but it's also pretty flipping blatant and has been for about 30 years. 
 
Even if you don't like her, think everything she's doing is dumb, let's be honest: she critiques video games, that's it. She's done nothing to warrant death threats, rape threats and flash video games made of punching her face. Having a bunch of jacked up ninja wannabe game defenders throwing her home address on the internet and treating her worse than we do CONVICTED murderers is something I expect from 4chan and the mentally challenged. 

Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds
 

In Norway, all tax returns are public. Anybody can see what anybody else earns. Doesn't seem to have caused a problem. Some companies have an open pay policy. It also doesn't seem to cause problems. Many companies and institutions have fairly tight salary bands and which band you sit in is public.
 
The obsession with pay secrecy is an artifact of a system that rewards those who control often arbitrary pay awards. It's not naive to note that other systems are possible and appear to work as well or better - that's just recognition of reality. My last job was one were both payscale and bonuses were largely transparent (meaning pay grade and annual bonus were public, though the precise figure was not). My colleagues knew I earned more than they did, but there was no resentment because they also knew why. I knew who earned more than I did, and approximately by how much, but the same applied. So no, not naive - just aware.
 
Just because something is the status quo does not make it inevitable or the best system. I admit I'm hard pressed to think of a good reason for pay secrecy, even though I understand why it's a sensitive topic.
 
Blaming her for the fact that someone else might (but in fact, did not) take her initiative and use it wrongly smells strongly of grasping for a reason to blame her for something. You could use exactly the reason to claim that the accounts department should not release figures internally, because hey, what if someone leaked the company accounts?
 
When a group decision is made (for example company policy), of course there is pressure to join in. That is equally true of the "don't discuss salaries” rule.
 
I'm guessing from what you wrote, that you didn't read anything about this situation before posting, which to be honest, is a bit of a disappointment. To spell it out, the bonus she was denied WAS RECOMMENDED BY HER PEERS PRECISELY FOR SETTING UP THE SALARY SPREADSHEET. The colleague who worked with her to set it up WAS RECOMMENDED THE EXACT SAME BONUS FOR THE EXACT SAME REASON. There is, in this case, not the slightest shred of a reason to assume that he did something different to get his bonus - in fact, we are explicitly told the opposite. And to honest, the amount in question was utterly trivial, which means this whole discussion is almost certainly not about the money but about fairness.
 
To me, it doesn't look like what she did was counter to the company's wishes, but I can see reasonable grounds to disagree. But when one colleague gets a bonus for an initiative, and the other is denied a bonus for doing the exact same thing, that starts to smell a bit dubious. At the very least, it strongly supports her claim that pay is not being awarded on the basis of merit.
 
Cheers, Mark

It is also amusing to have Google have collected data used against them.