MRA: Women hate engineering because it’s too hard and they’d rather mooch off their husbands.

Oddly enough, nobody is suggesting that asking someone out once is sexual harrassment.

I suspect though that if I were asked out once by 50 individuals one after the other based entirely on my being the only woman around, I’d feel somewhat harrassed.

That’s true. I guess I assumed that the woman who was originally quoted would have called it something other than ‘being asked out’ if this were the way it was put – although I guess technically it is. Ew.

Also, Meller, are you going to tell me what the manhating statements were, or explain why you told me you didn’t think I’d provoked my abuse (though other woman could have!), but then quoted me as an example of something that could drive a man (GENTLE AS A LAMB!) to violence? Seriously.

And even if it’s not harassment in a prosecutable sense, it can still be obnoxious.

Regards the matter of technological innovation:

I graduated high school in 1999, during the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The season finale for that season was centered around the graduation of Buffy et al from high school, and the last part (of the two-part episode with requisite cliffhanger) was scheduled the night before my last final of high school, in the week that I myself would graduate.

Naturally, at the appointed hour, I was primed to view the second part of aforementioned cliffhanger. I did not view this. What I viewed instead was a notice to the effect that the airing of the episode in question had been indefinitely postponed “in light of recent events”. A demon ate the student body, you see. They were concerned about copycats.

So I got on the Internet to see what was known about how long the delay would be and perchance if a script or something had been leaked. What I found was that the episode had been cancelled in the US at the last minute, after its airing in Canada. This would have been of little to no consequence just a few years earlier, as there was little means of getting a TV show from airing in Canada to eyeballs in the US — anime fan communities were still largely operating via VHS tape trading, for instance.

Not so this time, as I discovered to my surprise. The thing was online. It was in Real format, divided into seven parts, and was so heavily compressed that it looked and sounded like underwater synchronized swimming Buffy. It took all night and part of the next day to download. I did it anyway. I marveled. I’d grown up in a time when computers that could record and play realistic (although crappy by modern standards) audio recordings were a Big Deal, and here I was watching an entire 45-minute recording of an hour slot television program, audio and video both, that some random person in Canada had just gone and made with their computer and then put on the Internet.

Three years later, I could download then-current episodes of Buffy, in IIRC what was DVD-level quality, in about two hours.

A couple years ago, if it struck my fancy to watch the very episode of Buffy that constituted an iconic moment in technology for me, I could begin watching that episode on my computer, completely legitimately and in higher quality than I would have seen it at the time had it been broadcast normally, within five minutes of forming the impulse. For free.

Today, I can probably do the same on my phone. Which is understandable, because my phone is more powerful than the computer I watched the original episode on and has significantly better Internet access.

And in a sense that’s really nothing compared to the fact that my grandmother is making contact with former students on a ubiquitous Web-based service that few people could have even thought to include in the freaky glass dome on head future when she retired from teaching.

Too bad about that lack of technological development, eh?

I predict that technology will slow down when we start reaching the really stupid-sounding prefixes. There’s no way to sound cool bragging that your computer has a “yottabyte.”

Can I have a Zetabyte? This would involve Catherine Zeta Jones coming over to do tech support.

As it is, we all know why i am anxiously awaiting the development of “cybercuties” or “wifebots”, that will give me all of the advantages of female companionship with none of these (utterly revolting) disadvantages!

“Cubercuties” and “wifebots”! Some much gold this morning, I can’t stop laughing. I do wonder what DMK is like in real life. I imagine him as a 1940s cartoon character, but I’m sure the reality is much more prosaic.

@Sorka – http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_9cxliw0_2S8/TRmslX7ONEI/AAAAAAAAAYI/F3FacXq-jSw/s1600/monopoly2.jpg .

Yes! It’s him!

So Meller rants about things that may not be possible (some of which look to be patently impossible) and complains they don’t exist.

Then, instead of saying they might not be possible, he asserts they are certainly true, and the only reason we don’t have reliable ESP, or gravitic manipulation isn’t because it can’t be done, but because women are stupid.

Don’t forget, his utopia is for women to be slaves.

What were his degrees in again?

“There are limits to humankind’s genius, Meller.”
I would also point out that human genius needs money, time and good education.