Er. They *can* fire you for living in a blue house with yellow flowers.

I am in the software industry. But these sorts of comments alienate me. In fact, I considered not even looking at the comments for this article, because I knew I'd see plenty that would be alienating / saddening / just plain (c)rude. It doesn't keep me out of the industry - but it sends a clear "you, because you are female, are not one of us" message. You get that enough in the community, you start avoiding the community, or you just dread getting involved. And that creates a boys' club of networking and information sharing.

So I wade into slashdot, dailywtf, etc with a clothespin on my nose, donning metaphorical armor every time, steeling myself against the inevitable comments that, if they don't explicitly say I'm a crap coder because I have ovaries, at least make it clear that the presumed audience is entirely male, and I don't belong.

If you think it would be neat to have more women in the software community - or at least don't want to be a dick - consider whether your post is implicitly addressed to other men, and therefore sends the message that women aren't part of your community.

Some of my co-workers are running windows 7, and if they log into their workstations using remote desktop, it can cause the system to become unresponsive, and they have to force a reboot. Has anyone seen this? Does anyone have a workaround? I run windows 7 at home, but have no interest in running it at work if I'll have this same problem.

This over-30 female would be very happy if Farmville would just DIAF.

If you don't think raiding is important and, even if you did want to raid, your work schedule won't allow you to participate in a particular guild's raids, why do you care whether or not they'd want you in the guild? Don't you get it? It's like complaining that a particular chess team won't let you join just because you can't attend any of their competitions and you actually prefer backgammon, anyway. Or complaining that a competitive racing team won't let you join just because your only bike is a Huffy that you ride 2-3 miles around the neighborhood every other weekend.

I was the recruiter for an uberguild back in the EQ days. It was amazing how many people had your attitude. Loathed raiding, raiders, and our obviously crippled personalities and inadequate lives, but felt insulted that they wouldn't be invited into the group they hated.

But all those cop shows make it glaringly obvious that convincing you to talk without your lawyer is just another tactic to get you in trouble. At least, that's what I've gotten from watching them.

It's nice to say that the OP should get the roommate out of the house for activities, but I don't know if it's possible.

When I was in the worst part of my EQ addiction, I did still hold down a job. But I also kept playing *while a friend came to my apartment, cleaned my kitchen for me, and made me dinner.* I just couldn't find a good time to log off.

People invited me out all the time, but the thing was, in every case I already had in-game plans. "Sorry, I already told Foo that I was going to Dungeon X with him that day."

Aside from moral qualms about screwing with the guy, this actually isn't a bad idea. I was finally able to kick EQ when I moved into a new place that was supposed to have some sort of decent bandwidth, but didn't. 80 person raids, including raid spam, plus modem meant that if I ever turned to look at what was going on, I got disco'd. Constant disconnects broke my will to play pretty quickly.

People now use google for searches because it's familiar and a habit. But it's not the first search engine to dominate the market. For a long time, altavista was the familiar habit. When google appeared, it took a while for people to decide, "Hey, this is a lot better; I'm going to switch from using altavista to using google." But who uses altavista now? (Apparently it does still exist; I just checked.)

It's not nearly as hard to switch search engines as it is desktop applications or operating systems. It's not enough to be the familiar habit; you need to keep providing good service, too.

Out of curiosity, does it block http://www.scarleteen.com/ ? That's a great site for teens (and beyond) looking for info about sex and their bodies.

I know this may not be relevant to the OP, but can you run ssh on the n810, and if so, can you enter commands like "ctrl+a+4" to switch terminals in screen? It looks like you have to use function keys to type the number.

You wouldn't be able to drop or truncate a replicated table on MS SQL Server ... you'd have to run a delete command. I don't know about other systems.