Believe it or not, we are somehow able to have 100% confidence that there is no malicious content in our own JS code written for us by us, used on our own website, hosted on our own server, and linked via our own domain.

Go figure!

Unfortunately nobody here can really do anything about the fact that the main character of Super Mario Bros. is a man, you'll have to take that up with Nintendo. Making such a change today wouldn't be too difficult I'm sure, but back in 1985 I doubt such things were even on anybody's radar.
Which brings me to my next point, if Miyamoto wasn't even considering player gender as being a big issue then I doubt Mario was born out of a malicious desire to debase women(so no Warioesque mustache twirling then). The damsel in distress story is probably as old as storytelling itself, yes, it's a trope. Stories can enlighten us, make us think, make us feel, and of course entertain us; but we should not allow them to define us. I think that's a crucial difference between my beliefs Sarkeesian's, she wants to use the media to tell us how to think, act and believe, where I think we are perfectly capable of deciding that for ourselves.

I do pity the driver, and I disagree with @Lawdeedaw that she was completely incompetent. She was focusing on traffic coming from the opposite direction (i.e. the area of most concern) and there was no way she could have known he was there. She even looked in that direction but couldn't see him.

And I've already said that he certainly gets significantly less sympathy from me for being a malicious idiot, but I still do have some sympathy for him.

I guess I'm just not as much of a callous bastard as the rest of you

It would indeed be wildly malicious of anyone to say that he *deserved* to be run over, as if this were a necessary and required repercussion to his action. I would hope that everyone here would avoid running him over if they were in such a position, regardless of how stupid the pedestrian is being.

However, I believe that Lucky, who started this chain, had a highly valid point. If this person were mentally retarded and wasn't able to recognize this as a bad decision, this would indeed be a time for pity. However, when someone knowingly makes a bad decision, a person is certainly less deserving of our pity. Wishing the entire incident didn't happen would certainly be called for, but that person knew he was doing something bad when he was doing it. Perhaps we could instead pity the driver, who now must live with the horror that she has potentially killed or crippled a young man, with only a small amount of fault on her part (checking for people diving under your car isn't a normal part of making a left turn). The psychological repercussions of this will keep with her for the rest of her life.

As Clint Eastwood said as William Munny:

Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

I feel like I've tried to make this rather fine point a lot over the years on the Sift: I'm not saying he *should* or *deserves to* be run over by a car for trying to pull a con.

What I'm saying is he put himself into a situation where he could get run over by a car and did so of his own volition with blatant malicious intent. The fact that his pretending to get run over by a car actually resulted in him getting run over by a car yields zero sympathy with me.

Plus, I'm not sure what country you're in or if you're automotively insured, but if you are at fault of hitting someone with your car, you'll be screwed with insurance and paying a significantly higher rater for several years to come. It's not like a bank where your money is insured by the federal government and a robbery of the vault wouldn't affect you; the victim of an insurance scam is directly, immediately, and significantly fucked.

(Someone used my name when they were apparently at fault in an accident before I'd ever gotten my first insurance policy, and when I did first try to get insured, my premium was something like triple what it would've cost me otherwise.)

Again, not saying that ^that means he deserves to be crushed by a car, but he did it to himself. (Likewise, if he was playing Russian roulette and shot himself in the head, I wouldn't feel bad for him.)

You reap what you sow.

Well, a little context is in order here. I wonder if Reg even knows where this comes from. There was a very popular movie in Ireland called The Commitments, about a working class Dublin band who play soul music. (Great movie btw, I'd recommend anyone checking it out)

There's a scene where one of the musicians asks if they're not "a bit white" to play soul music. The manager responds that "The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once and say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."

Everyone in Ireland over 20 will have either seen this movie or heard this quote.

Ireland has a really weird relationship with race. If you grew up in Ireland before the 2000s, you literally never saw anyone who wasn't white. Yes, literally. As such, Irish people will say casually racist things all the time. Sometimes, like anywhere, it's malicious, but most of the time, it's genuinely not meant as offensive.

One of the reasons I sifted this is that I actually went to see Reg this weekend. He was freaking hilarious, and in fact his entire message was explicitly stated to be one of unity.

I'm paraphrasing here, but his closing line was something like
"There is no black pain, or gay pain or female pain. There is only human pain, and when people do bad shit to other people, it hurts us all."

I guess I should clarify; I think that the pace of our advances is being bottlenecked by our current system because we (as nations) continue to exploit via a relentless focus on profit rather than try to actually spread knowledge and tech as best we can.

A free education system for the world would be incredibly easy to achieve with our current technology, but as nations we don't even try to aim for such a thing. As universities and other education institutions (publishing companies, etc), we have no incentive to truly aim for this in the current paradigm because it reverses profit growth (which, honestly, in the case of education, is pretty much all over-inflated anyway). There's no malicious intent, no conspiracy, and noble goals abound, but we're doing it at a snail's pace out of selfishness.

Individual people act much more nobly than large, well-established institutions. You see a rather strong trend of such large groups behaving closer to the "rational" approach from economic game theory, i.e. the one where self-preservation and gain are maximized first and foremost. If we just rely on our institutions to fix the problems at their root or think that the incidental improvements tied to increased tech and knowledge are being nurtured even half as well as they could be, I think we'd be gravely mistaken.

I think we both ultimately hope for the same outcome, but we clearly disagree on the extent to which our current society(/societies) effectively move towards those outcomes. I would personally like to see us double down on those things that help move us forward.

EDIT: Some examples of ways we're bullshitting ourselves and not doing half as much as we could, for your pleasure.

Princeton University's motto is "In the service of the nation and of all nations" (probably slightly off on the phrasing, sorry), and they have BILLIONS of dollars of endowment. If they and their alumni network took this motto seriously, with their knowledge of business, tech, and science, they could easily bring entire nations out of poverty by simply helping local people adapt tech in sustainable ways to provide food for their population more easily, institute strong education access, and more. Harvard, Oxford, all the other big names are in similar situations. They can do SO MUCH, but just do little projects while answering to their boards about making sure to keep the cash flow positive, keep the endowment growing, keep using alumni donations to pay for things where possible. It's bullshit.

Most large organized religions are also lazy about service. There are many who do seriously just aim at food and medical aid, but most are more interested in conversions and extra tithes than eliminating poverty. How many Christian missionaries of various sects are there around the world? Of them, how many devote their missions to actual service of everyone they can to show their religion through their works as opposed to just focusing on bringing people into the fold via preaching? Additionally, the old "teach a man to fish" concept comes into play here; giving food is good, but we need to be helping people help themselves as well so that they can thrive.

I know shit is very complicated and the answers aren't easy, but we can EASILY do better than this.

"Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into technology companies’ systems."

Did you read about the latest massive bug in Apple's SSL implementation? It's a particularly stupid mistake that would have been found instantly if they had adhered to programming standards. It's also easily explained by a botched code-merger or a simple copy-paste misshap.

Yet when I looked into the details that some folks found out, I couldn't help but think that it's odd how this particular bug was introduced in late September of 2012.

Remember, Snowden's files showed us that Apple became part of PRISM in October of 2012.

So my paranoia-driven brain tries to work out the scenario:
- did the NSA know about it?
- did the NSA exploit it?
- did the NSA plant it through a mole?
- did Apple add it themselves, at the NSA's request?

Pre-Snowden, I'd have said somebody fucked up and that's the end of it. Nowadays however, Hanlon's razor doesn't fly anymore, so I wouldn't rule out malicious intent.

really need more details about this... When they had brand new devices, does that mean they were un-patched for known security holes? Or are all these exploits the Russians use unknown, and there are currently no patches, such that a completely patched/updated device is still vulnerable?

Any WiFi captive-portal "login" page could inject known browser exploits into the html - If you use your own MyFi (personal hotspot), and are willing to pay huge for roaming international data, then this form of attack isn't possible.

And the coffee shop owner probably doesn't know that their wireless access point is serving up malicious code. It was either hacked by who they bought it from, or whoever installed it, or by some hacker who went to the shop. But shame on the airport's IT security - if they have official WiFi that was also hacked. (but the criminals might have set up their own wireless and called it "Free Airport WiFi")

Every OS on every device (not just Windows) has security holes, Mac OS X included. The hole gets exploited to allow running some piece of software that the user didn't intend, and that software (malware/virus) collects user data and uploads it back to the criminals servers on the network (these 'data collection' servers are also usually attacked/compromised computers, so they can't be traced directly back to the criminals).

My advice to tourists would be to bring a "dumb" phone for voice calls. (keep bluetooth turned off though) Then you'll remember how great it was to only charge it once a week

Yeah, I was surprised at how ignorant Bill was on this too, although it wouldn't be the first time Maher ignored the facts to suit his own preconceptions (vaccines, anyone?)

At this point, it becomes increasingly difficult from a technological standpoint to put the genie back in the bottle. The internet, as a technology stack from browser to OS to network layer to hardware to comms protocols is now a hugely complex device. There are multiple attack points where malicious entities can insert "back doors" to access supposedly private communications. And governments are just one group of spies. There's also criminals and even scarier, corporations.

The only way I can possibly imagine it ever being truly secure is an end to end open technology stack that is peer-reviewed for potential issues constantly, but that would essentially mean tearing down all existing infrastructure, so it's just not going to happen.

On this one I am curious. Forget the crack and rants, forget the fact he is a lying piece of shit that needs to resign, this one seems non-issue on every level. It's not PC, but it's not malicious, and malicious is what I care about.

precisely the point I've been arguing for a while now: the hypocrisy of being giving up our personal and private data at the drop of a hat, yet being outraged when government uses it.

privacy as most people think of it is an outdated concept.

we give out that data freely all the time. we share what we're thinking and doing with Facebook and Twitter all the time.

Even when we're at home and not online, we still share private information freely with our friends and loved ones and that info gets shared with other friends and loved ones.

face it, the human being is not a private creature.

There is always going to be a risk of someone mis-using that collected information, but that doesn't mean the genie is put back in the bottle. All you can do is put safeguards in place and quite frankly, the human race needs to grow up a little so that the temptation to use it maliciously is easier to ignore.

they said the same shit about the nuclear bomb and we're still have yet to blow ourselves to kingdom come. In addition, when we master nuclear fusion it's going to leap us forward tremendously.

someone's eventually going to figure out a tremendously positive use for all of that sociological data that will benefit us greatly. That's typically the nature of all these military and space projects. The tech gets spun off into medical and other positive ventures.

Yes, insisting that diplomacy is likely to stop Assad's continued campaign of murdering his own people is a problem for me. Sure, maybe I should just accept it as naive and not malicious, but people are being killed while the world stands around yet again refusing to do anything, and that makes me angry.

I'm not trying to whitewash America's role in Iraq either. If anything I'd say my picture is a lot blacker than the people I disagree with the most. The only point I think I differ on is that I DO hold Saddam even more responsible for what he did than America or Saudi Arabia or any of his other backers. I see no reason to apologize for that. Read up on Saddam's Al Anfal campaign against the Kurds, his gassing of Kurdish villages was the least of the atrocities he committed against the Kurds. Saddam had been destroying everything in Iraq the entire time he was in power, from the absolute repression that was everyday life, to the endless feeding of Iraqi bodies to into the Iran-Iraq war, to the genocide of the Kurds, to the genocide of the Shia, Saddam had killed millions of Iraqis and systematically orchestrated and encouraged sectarian hatred and divisions. All that time America continued to callously back him because America was happy to see Iraq and Iran bleed themselves out against each other. If I find some solace in finally, at long last seeing America change it's tune and finally opposing Saddam it's not for because I think America is some humanitarian entity. You list all the devastation in Iraq since the American invasion, but just what realistic alternative version of Iraq do you see could exist today if non-intervention had been held to? Iraq today would STILL be under Saddam's control today, and I would insist anyone wanting that alternative doesn't know what Saddam really was like. I also insist it must be known that the Iraqi people were NOT going to manage to liberate themselves without foreign intervention. The Kurds contemplated it once, and it ended in a campaign of genocide and systematic rape to breed the Kurds out of existence. The Shia tried it once, and it ended in genocide for them too. The Iraqi people knew exactly how opposition to Saddam ended and it was NOT going to happen without someone coming in from outside.

Maybe I just see the world as that much more awful and horrific a place. Just because things are bad and horrific doesn't mean they couldn't be a far sight worse, and in fact haven't been a far sight worse in the recent past.

I don't object to demands for caution and concern that getting involved in a conflict can lead it escalate. I object to defending dictators with impossible barriers and burdens of proof. The fact the UN teams have trouble getting evidence shouldn't be touted as reason to question Assad's involvement when he steadily interferes and endeavors to hinder the UN investigations. If we require concrete evidence before declaring Assad guilty, and Assad refuses the UN access until they have concrete evidence a problem has arisen, no?

With that in mind here's a list of people that make me variously: scared, uncomfortable, upset and sometimes outright angry. I find it deeply unpleasant and sometimes disturbing to have to deal with them and I think life would be a lot better if we just locked them away.

Police
Politicians
Pro-lifers
Anyone who watches X-factor
Anyone who doesn't think the British royal family are murderous tyrants.
People who play music on their phone speakers on the bus/walking down the street.
People that use the term "free country" without irony.
The unregulated hyper rich over class.
Rugby players on a night out drinking.
People that advocate the death penalty.
Hyper nationalists.
Xenophobes, Racists and Homophobes.
The priesthood of amen/the brotherhood of shadow.
Young people in tracksuits/hoodies.
Anyone that uses the word "party" as a verb.
Practising Christians, Muslims and Jews (doubly so if they are raising their children religiously).
Hyper-Atheists.
Chimpanzees! (seriously, fuck the chimps they scare the shit out of me)
People that use the phrase "I just don't give a fuck" and actually mean it.
The Chinese scientists developing the "death robots" (you might laugh now....)

Whilst some are clearly more serious than others, all of the above represent things/traits which deeply concern me. Many of the people on that list I'd label as outright insane and/or seriously dangerous to my health and well being.

Some, were I to be confronted by them unexpectedly, would outright terrify me, much more so than that lady. There's a good chance that by simply responding with concern and a lack of antagonism she could have been talked down, but certainly pulling an incredulous expression and calling her a crazy lady is not likely to diffuse the situation one iota.

As I said before maybe she is a genuine danger to herself and others, such people do exist and there are systems in place to try and deal with it.

The issue here is that your not even remotely in a position to make that diagnosis, nor are any of us here. We don't know how serious her condition is or how likely she is to respond to various forms of treatment. Speculating based only on video's made during episodes (i.e. at her worst) with no context of her medical history just fuels the kind of knee jerk "lock them away" mindset that contributes heavily to these poor bastards getting the way they are in the 1st place.

For all you know a bit of in the community C.B.T. and mentoring might be all she needs/needed. Not everyone displaying psychotic symptoms benefits from or warrants full on institutional incarceration, it often makes things much worse.
She clearly needs/needed further investigation and perhaps having the benefit of her medical history and first hand interaction it might be reasonable to conclude that some form of isolation is needed. But I'd rather leave that down to those who are professionally qualified to make that judgement than bystanders who merely witnessed a few isolated psychotic episodes and know sweet F.A. about her as a person.

It's you that's failing to see the bigger picture here. You want to put her in a neat little box marked "crazy" so you don't have to face the implication that in some fundamental sense you are the same thing. The crazy person sits next to you on the bus and you think "I don't deserve to have to put up with this inconvenience. How dare they make me feel uncomfortable".......

....Do you have the remotest idea of the kind of deep lasting damage that does to a person when virtually everyone they ever meet thinks and behaves that way? How it feels for someone to just condemn you to be locked away without even attempting to understand what your all about?

It's only about 50 years ago that it was standard practice to basically label everything as just various forms of "madness" and lock them all away in the same building. While we've come along way there's still very much a ways to go and the public perception of acute psychotic illnesses is by far the most backwards.

If you'd said maybe she might need institutional treatment, or that you had concerns that the behaviour she displays could escalate to a violent incident (both legitimate concerns) then I wouldn't have reacted with such hostility.
But you didn't do that, you outright declared she that must be forcibly segregated and treated and moreover that she is definitely a danger to herself and others. No grey area, isolation is the only alternative!

I don't want this to descend into a personal attack, you might after all be a really nice person and this is a deeply rooted prejudice common to most people I come across. Much like many peoples homophobia isn't especially malicious it's just an unchallenged social convention (one fortunately that is changing).
But malicious or not the damage done is the same, for crazies, ethnic minorities and homosexuals alike. And I don't think its unfair to say that the "crazies" are the more vulnerable group by quite some margin.

You don't begrudge offering a little time and understanding for say a disabled person holding you up in a door way, why is taking a little step back when confronted with a "crazy" person so different? That postie clearly recognised she wasn't occupying the same reality as himself very quickly, but his response is to pull a face that says "what the fuck is your problem?" and just dismisses her as crazy. She might have calmed down and gone away peacefully in the space of a few mins if he'd tried to diffuse it, but he didn't, he escalated immediately. (because he's mentally ill too, just in a different way)
That's basically like someone getting in your way, you realizing its because they are in a wheel chair and then treating them like an arsehole because they had the indecency to be out in public and get in the way of the able bodied people! Those bloody cripples, they should be taken away for their own protection! (the fact the rest of us don't have to worry about dealing with them any more is just a bonus naturally )

Now obviously this is a somewhat flawed analogy as people with mobility impairments don't have heightened rates/likelihood of violent outbursts (though I'm sure there are plenty twats who just happen to be in wheelchairs). But the fundamental point I'm trying to make about how people treat the extravertly mentally ill stands. If your being directly threatened with no provocation is one thing, but this guy isn't he's just antagonising someone in a clear state of paranoia and delusion/misunderstanding (which he recognises within seconds). He doesn't even attempt to address that he just closes off and becomes passively hostile.
As I said before its understandable, but only in the same way as being frightened of homosexuality, alien cultures, physical disfigurement etc.. It's just cultural isolation, get to know a few people from any of those groups and it quickly starts to sublime into respect and understanding.

She didn't walk up to him screaming she walked up and firmly presented an accusation that the postman knew could not possibly have been true. She became aggressive/shouty only after he became dismissive, before that she was only restless and paranoid. And even then she didn't make any aggressive physical moves we can see. Postie doesn't look at all in fear for his safety to me, he turns his back on her several times and barely maintains eye contact, not the behaviour of someone that feels physically threatened!

How might she have reacted if postie had looked genuinely scared? Maybe she'd have backed off? Changed her attitude? And yeh maybe she'd have got even more threatening or attacked him with a stick too.

We don't know what she'd have done because we don't know her or anything about her other than a few paranoid videos on the internet. Leave the judgements to the people that have done the research, interviews etc. and know know what the fuck they are talking about with regards to this lady's condition and best treatment.

Speculation is one thing, outright declarations of fact is quite another. People are not guilty before you can prove their innocence...

I find it interesting that the message here is similar to this video from 5.5+ years ago and that, so far, nobody has had the sort of malicious reactions that are all over that video.