Yes, I realize my initial comment was a stretch, and may come off as insensitive.

Though I'm not getting my information from TV. I worked with an otherwise very smart software engineer from Kentucky, who happened to also believe that global warming is a lie and evolution isn't a real thing. He was literally taught that in public school. Granted, he didn't grow up in Louisville with fast internet access, so there's that. ;-)

I recognize it's a double-edged sword. The same internet that keep peoples in political bubbles with their racist 4chan and Gab friends can also offer much more to those with an open mind.

This move by Google harms the entire country, not just the city of Louisville.

I understand that In Kentucky, public schools often don't teach evolution. It's "just a theory". What if pervasive internet access could provide better education, and better opportunities to the people?

I think that without fast internet access, Kentucky's economy will continue to struggle to reach the 21st century, and its people will continue to be subject to the tensions of inequality that are driving authoritarian populism.

You can do better than this, Google.

Is there a certain point at which the price of a BTC drops enough that no one is motivated to continue mining? (I suppose it would take a significant, prolonged downturn - as long as it's speculated to bounce back higher, people will continue to mine...)

Obviously driving has environmental impacts. This is not news. Bringing this up reminds me of this essay:

http://www.abstractconcretewor...

But when comparing the two classes of vehicles, the entire supply chain needs to be considered. You can use existing electrical infrastructure (and possibly renewable energy) to charge an electric vehicle. For a traditionally-fueled vehicle, you need to consider exploration, extraction, refinery, transportation, and disaster mitigation.

I think the lesser of two evils is clear.

Most of the types of drugs you mention are worse than doing nothing. There are some good therapists out there, but they are uncommon.

According to Ingo Swann, This is what ultimately killed the program. The spooks hated the idea that there are no secrets.

I met Ingo twice, in Las Vegas. He said that he ought to have written more fiction books, which paid better than being a psychic lab rat.

They don't need to build it. They'll be able to analyze it for security issues and keep the 0-day exploits they find to themselves. And they'll get notified in advance when Microsoft spots the same issue, so they'll have time to switch tactics.

Ah, it's been a while, Green Site!

Ok, there's a great deal of confusion I see here. It's a question of use-case.

Drag queens are performing artists. See Rue Paul or Pandora Boxx, neither of which iirc use HRT or intend to transition to adopting their performing identities as their own 24/7. Companies get FB pages, so why shouldn't their performing identities get FB pages in addition to their own personal pages?

I find it odd that FB is apologizing to drag queens or that they would even target drag queens. (I'd also like to add that one curious thing I read in Whipping Girl is that drag queens are often welcomed into the female restroom, but trans women are shunned from that place.)

In the case of trans men and women, if FB has targeted them (I haven't been), FB is clearly wrong and the apology is justified. Especially in the case of trans women, proceeding with a legal name change is a risk that can land one homeless in a gutter. I'd also like to add that in my personal experience that I'm gendered female by others quite often (just lucky I guess), however changing my real name without being able to go without a job for a year or two would be suicidal. Employers have this little habit of demanding documents that contain one's legal gender. If one's legal gender doesn't match with the gender of one's identity and the gender others assign to one, it's OMG fucking holy shit GTFO.

There's also the complication that a name change is not enough to get those documents to match one's lived gender. My state requires bottom surgery before the documents can be amended, although some clever trans women are able to get the gender on their driver's license changed at the DMV with a little social engineering (others aren't so lucky). Other states make it impossible to change those documents even with bottom surgery.

My friends know me by one name. My employer and clients know me by another. However, FB is not a network for professionals so instead I have a LinkedIn profile with one name and a FB profile I haven't touched in probably two years with another name (just a few more years and it'll be my real name), the one my friends know me as.

What is straight peoples' clothes, exactly? Do homosexuals wear something different to the office? In my experience, gays and lesbians tend to dress just the same as their heterosexual peers.

Yes, I'm intentionally being obtuse. I hope I addressed the confusion about drag above. This is a question of identity.

I'd also like to give you something to think about. Currently I'm between genders, so it's all wibbly-wobbly. However, should I obtain bottom surgery after going full time as a woman, I will then be a heterosexual woman and indistinguishable from any other straight woman who cannot have children due to whatever medical problem.

Your head will asplode the day the procedure for a barren cisgendered woman to receive a transplanted uterus (I'm too lazy to find the link, but I believe the procedure involved transplanting her mother's uterus into her so that she could have children) is expanded to transgendered women.

Why would a cisgendered woman want to have a male identity? If this is a case of a trans man or somebody experimenting with presenting a male identity, then I would say it's justified.

I've met a few trans men, and the decision to undergo gender transition is an even bigger hurdle for them than trans women. There is no bottom surgery they can hope for, and they have to be absolutely certain before they expose their bodies to testosterone. Estrogen is easy, and its changes to the body can be hidden or even reversed. That's not true of testosterone.

The voice drops, facial hair develops, and it's all permanent. If there were a magic pill I could take that would change my brain from female to male, I might take it. My breasts can be easily removed, and the other changes will fade over time as testosterone becomes established in my body. A trans man does not have this option of an easy out once he makes the decision to transition .

It's been established that homosexuality and transgenderism exist in the animal kingdom, at least as far as mammals are concerned. However, I can't comprehend why somebody would make a FB profile for a pet, so I don't think I can advise on this one.

Coming back to this to summarize, I'm confused that FB didn't limit the apology to the transgendered or why they were even targeting drag queens. Drag queens are performing artists. If companies can have a FB profile, their performance should also clearly get a FB profile.

Let's also be more clear. The term "cross-dresser" can mean any number of things and is too vague to be useful.

At any rate, this all illustrates how brain-damaged a "real" name (I hope I've called the idea of a real name into question) policy is.

Gender transition isn't something where you just throw a switch and it's done in 5 minutes with liberal hounds chasing down anyone who doesn't recognize the new identity. There is a period of time--years and years--where one is in varying degrees of legal limbo, and free Obamacare sex changes are a delusion of Faux News. Not every trans woman is perceived as a woman as easily as I. Assume your ability to spot a "cross-dresser" is infallible and perform the Crocodile Dundee maneuver enough times, and eventually you'll grope a cisgendered female and find yourself in a world of shit while I go unquestioned.

I'm going with old news from decades ago.

I'm thinking something like a pre-commit hook, only integrated into Microsoft Office. ;-)

It would be one thing to encrypt all traffic end-to-end with a Diffie-Hellman exchange per TCP connection. But it would be quite another thing to prevent active attacks from three-letter agencies. You'd need a way to establish and ensure trust as well. If they can't decrypt the connection itself, they can use an active attack to intercept it and decrypt it. Even if the target is using SSL with PFS, they could always national-security-letter a signed certificate out of a CA in their jurisdiction. It doesn't really matter what security is employed; there will always be a way to defeat it. All we can do is make it harder.

I can easily imagine a situation where he calls up someone with access to classified info, and says something like, "this is Snowden from IT; we're having problems restoring the backup of your encrypted data files on such-and-such server; can you loan me your login information so we can properly validate the checksums? You can change your password right afterward."

(slashcott doesn't begin until Monday)

Pretty much. The character I have in mind would have begun transition already with some other characters already referring to him/her as "she." It's kind of the situation I'm in now; write what you know I guess, just as long as it doesn't turn into some kind of self-insert fantasy.

One of the things Goldsmith does in Genma's Daughter, which is a Ranma 1/2 fanfic, is to refer to Ranma as he or she depending on which form he/she's in but always as Ranma until he/she decides to lock the Juusenkyo curse and go full time living as a woman for a few weeks. At that point, the author begins referring to the character as Ranko. Not to give spoilers if you haven't read it, but there are only a few times when Ranko is in male form after that, and Goldsmith reliably refers to the character with the name "Ranko" and the pronoun "he."

In the non-fiction book Whipping Girl, Serano observes that pronouns are often a matter of presumption and contextual guessing that one has to make within the first few moments of meeting somebody. After all, we generally don't go around performing a "Crocodile Dundee" manuever to verify which body parts a stranger has between their legs before we decide whether to use "he" or "she" when referring to that person. Checking others' genitals would also lead to ambiguity in the case of trans women who have the female gender and a woman's name on their driver's license but have not yet undergone (or does not desire) surgery.

One might argue that the state of one's genitals is of utmost importance, which is one thing that feminists and right wing authoritarians can both agree upon. However, because we do not check others' genitals regularly, it becomes a moot point unless there's romance involved. The zombie flic Wild Zero presents one such situation.

As Serano also notes, sometimes we get it wrong. As an example, I used to work with a perfectly cisgendered man when I used to do fast food who would often be ma'amed when talking to customers over the drive-through speaker because he had a feminine way of speaking. Sometimes when I'm very tired, I'll get ma'amed by strangers who have only my appearance to go on when clearly presenting as male simply because when I'm tired, I forget to use masculine body language. So, it's not as straight-forward of a process as we'd like to imagine it is.

I feel that getting the language thing down would be one of the challenges of presenting something like that to a wider audience. One solution might be to write from first person, but it would be more interesting to use third person omniscient so I can use the same technique as Goldsmith. I feel that the way other characters use he or she can be an effective way to demonstrate what other characters think of the protagonist's gender---the narrator's choice of pronoun being dependent on whether the character is presenting as male or female---, and which particular name the narrator uses to refer to the protagonist can demonstrate the state of his/her own identity at that point in the story.

It works, that's why. I believe given that [FUCK] BETA is going to happen, that we carefully question the validity of transphobia in greater discussions of gender.

On the one hand, there's Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. The Silence of the Lambs is actually a good movie if you can accept the premise that Buffalo Bill is not actually a trans woman (evidence provided by the character Hannibal).

However, there's the powerful feminist lobby (that's made of cis women and trans women who are grovelling to cis women to have their status as women of some kind at least).

The idea is that trans women, fundamentally, are Buffalo Bill, however that doesn't hold water. But then here come the feminists who are saying that trans women are Buffalo Bill, but perhaps on a metaphysical sense. Nobody knows that to believe because most individuals have a "cis blind spot;" that is, they cannot separate their mental gender from their reproductive gender.

The bane of the American system is freeloaders. The argument is that nobody would hire a trans woman because she would be masturbating all the time. Therefore, a trans woman wouldn not be able to pay for her own cosmetic surgery. Therefore, any arguments that being a trans woman has any basis in physical reality are clearly attempts to create communism. Q. E. D.

All that, and FUCK BETA.