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You seem to be missing the point. The claim in TFA is that a sufficient number of real assholes exist to make women's lives miserable, and that most men don't take it seriously or do anything to help. That is entirely consistent.

That's because it's a non point. There are enough real assholes to make everyone's life miserable.I am still not clear if she is complaining about office behavior or gamer/forumite behavior but either way there's big reality checks she isn't cashing.

If she is talking about office behavior what she is describing is completely mind bogglingly unbelievable. You could be the Axeman( oh lets be PC Axeperson) letting go an entire office/branch/corporate subentity and not get the kind of blowback she is talking about.

If you are talking about gamers/game forums, lol welcome to internet gaming. I can't count how many times I have had people tell me they would rip off my head and shit down my neck.

So when you say men don't take it seriously, you might want to add that men don't take it seriously when it's directed at them as well.

Speaking of Reality checks, I decided to do one, https://www.google.com/search?...

You know how many news results actually had gamers assaulting or attacking developers ?
NONE !!!!!
NONE !!!
NONE !!!

If this woman is actually concerned about her safety it's likely she would be thousands times more effective, campaigning to improve driver education and road safety in her community.

http://www.google.com/trends/e...

Uh. Nope. Completely nope.

Read some history then come back and participate in the discussion if you wish.

GP poster is just trolling, with his "Eclipse, like all free IDE's, sucks" comment. You don't notice him mentioning his own environment.

The only other strong suggestion he can make is Android Studio, which instead of bundling Android SDK with Eclipse it bundles Android SDK with IDEA. Which would be fine, if it wasn't languishing in bug reports of its own, new major releases every week, breaking due to Gradle configurations that cause hair-pulling (what the fuck is Gradle and what was wrong with Ant and Maven for dependency management), etc etc. And forget trying to migrate from Eclipse with the SDK over to Android Studio. For God's sake, even when Google I/O was going on, the current builds of Android Studio on offer still didn't work any better than the Eclipse SDK. Life apparently is no better in the Mac world but I don't have experience there.

Don't get me wrong, I love Android, I have 3 Android devices, I'm interested in developing Android apps personally. I'm not knocking Java, I use it. I'm not knocking existing IDEs, I use them. What I'm knocking is the constant moving target status of Android where things change so fucking quickly their own devs can't even keep up with their own IDE bundles or their own documentation. As a potential Android developer, everything I run into is a turnoff. Look at the project and look at all the open issues with the IDE tools and the SDK (forget API and device bugs, those are all to be expected, I'm talking serious problems with the developer tools only). I don't have time to deal with that shit for fun.

https://www.google.com/search?...

All the Raspberry Pi in a gameboy box stories you could ever want.

You have to wonder what the progression of these will be

Raspberry Pi does Coleco Football
http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/526...

Raspberry PI does Merlin
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Probably not this
http://retrothing.typepad.com/...

Seeing as people are still selling and making new ones and I am sure the people doing so actually guard their rights.

Let's say you're a competent Java developer and you'd like to build an Android app. I wish you the best of luck!

First you're going to need to pick an IDE. I've always used Eclipse and hey look, there's an Android SDK for Eclipse. Perfect! Download, extract, fire it up... Errors. This version of Android SDK requires Android API version foo, you have version (foo - 9), please use the SDK manager to upgrade. The hell, the IDE bundle doesn't even launch out of the box?

Alright, so you're distributing your IDE with an outdated version of your API, I can forgive that. Run SDK Manager like it suggested, let it do its thing,. Update available for SDK tools and SDK platform tools, looks good, do it! ...And, errors. Package not found, blah blah, let's see what Google has to say about this one.

OK, apparently hundreds of other developers are having the same problem and have, after much wrangling, figured out a solution on their own. I see, I have to go into SDK Manager Settings, create a new User-Defined Add-On Site pointing to https://dl-ssl.google.com/andr... because the URL that ships with the IDE is missing the "s" in "https" and that server doesn't have the right packages available to download. That highly intuitive process would surely have been my first try anyway, but at least someone else found the fix.

SDK Manager seems to find the packages now, great! Got past that hurdle so let's do the upgrade. Wait, now what! What do you mean you can't upgrade to SDK Tools rev. 23 while SDK Platform Tools 19.0.2 is installed? I checked the boxes to upgrade them both; if Platform Tools has to hit rev. 20 before SDK Tools can be upgraded, why is the installer going in the wrong order?

If and when you finally get the actual goddamned IDE installed and working, have fun with the official developer tutorials to create your first "Hello World" app. See, the API has changed over the years^Wmonth^Wpast week and so the app architecture that the tutorial talks about isn't valid anymore. XML files that it says should be there, aren't, so there's no way to follow along in the tutorial by editing them.

I gave up on Android and won't touch it again unless I'm being paid to.

The usual comment, if you care about your drive being able to be unencrypted when the right govt authorities decide to go snooping, it'd be best not to trust this...

Great point of reference:

https://plus.google.com/+Theod...

That may seem strange to us in Europe or the USA where miltary and civilian operations are conducted from separate facilities

It should not be strange to Americans either. Peterson Air Force base uses the other end of the Colorado Springs Airport.

https://www.google.com/maps/@3...

And there are others, this one was merely convenient for me to point out.

For some reason Google Finance link changed to 5 years, here is the 3 year link, with Apple./a

I would not recommend holding onto the stocks of a company whose overall balance sheet has been stagnant for about a decade, and where its core revenue source is sufficiently threatened that they're undergoing a major restructuring to pivot away from it altogether. One quarterly earnings report is nothing to make investment decisions about.

The last time I saw this sort of acquisition, layoff, and rehiring cycle from a major company, it was Pfizer, and that did not end well for the shareholders.

But, it isn't only one quarter. Microsoft have for many years published very strong and growing results, quarter after quarter, with very few exceptions. People on sites like Slashdot keep proclaiming that they are dead, year after year, and Microsoft keep doing better and better, year after year. It is a quite funny situation to witness if you are neutral to the whole discussion.

It is true the stock was flat for several years some years back, but if you look at the last three years -- Microsoft stock is +63,5%. This in the period they have had the strongest prediction of decline and gloom on sites like this (and about the same stock performance as Apple at +73%!)

The "malware blocking for file downloads" is a severe invasion of privacy. It works by sending the URL of nearly every downloaded file to Google.

When a binary file is downloaded, the user-agent extracts several pieces of metadata about the file, including:

        The target URL from which the file was downloaded, its referrer URL and any URLs in the redirect chain.
        The SHA-256 hash of the contents of the file.
        Any certificate verification information obtained through the Windows Authenticode APIs.
        The length of the file in bytes.
        The suggested filename for the download.

...

  Remote lookup (present in FF 32)

The user-agent stuffs all file metadata into a ClientDownloadRequest protocol buffer and sends it to the remote service.

This remote service is https://sb-ssl.google.com/safe...

Where is your proof of so called "Terrorism" by the founders of Israel?

Um, it's pretty well documented by the British and at the UN, in their reports of the Stern Gang terrorism. Avram "Yair" Stern - who is pretty unequivocally one of the founders of modern Israel - blew up British military vehicles and bases, sabotaged rail lines, shot at trains, blew up a mine, destroyed international telegraph lines, attacked police stations, and robbed banks. His Lehi fanatics were completely unconcerned about civilian casualties (including any Jews who did not support them) and willing to ally with any military power that would send them weapons, including the Nazis.

This is all a matter of record and the state of Israel does not contest any of it; so why are you claiming otherwise?

The USA has terrorists among our founders, too. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys come to mind... although I guess they weren't in the same league as Stern.

Amira Hass [wikipedia.org] and Gideon Levy [wikipedia.org] are by no means unbiased reporters.

Okay, find me a biased American reporter who writes articles asking Americans to sympathize with Al-Qaeda. You won't, because no such reporter exists. That should be enough evidence to show that the Israeli attack on Gaza more morally ambiguous than the American attack on Afghanistan.

The swap which should never have been done as it rewards kidnappers.

Okay, maybe in your mind the prisoner swap was unjust. But it was still legally binding. By rearresting the prisoners, the Israeli government has violated its own laws and has clearly shown that Israeli law do not apply equally to Israelis and West Bankers. This only serves to add fuel to the fires of discontent that Hamas is trying to ignite. Seriously, what was Israel trying to accomplish with the rearrests?

So tunneling can be done without discovery.

You mean the tunnels that were built so that Gazans could smuggle in the fuel that they need to run their power plants and get enough electricity to power their desalinization plants so that they don't all die of thirst? These tunnels were not built for military purposes, and if Israel had not tried to convert Gaza into an "open air prison" with two closed borders no way out, they would have never been built in the first place. Then Hamas would not have pre-existing a tunnel network that it could easily expand into Israeli territory and Israel would have no need to further push the Gazans into destitution by shutting down their farms. First Israel removes Gaza's access to drinking water, and now its access to food. Tell me, who is trying to wipe who off the face of the earth?

Did the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian people do anything to catch the criminals?

Maybe the PLA would have caught the criminals if they had a real police force, but Israel will not allow them to maintain one. Likud doesn't want the PLA to have a police force capable of controlling the terrorists, because if they did, Israel would no longer have the excuse of occupying the West Bank for "security purposes." Besides, Abbas has already said that he supports the Israeli bombings in Gaza. (It is clear that he was strong armed into saying this, but if Israel could strong arm the PLA into that, they could have easily strong armed the Palestinian Police into searching for the criminals as well.)

According to this [bbc.com] it was Fatah that cut off the funds and not Israel.

Let's be real. For all intents and purposes, Fatah = Israeli military government 2.0. It is a sham. It is nothing but a thin veil over the same IDF-run government that has been in power in the West Bank since the 40s.

All this ignores the fact that Israel, in retaliation for the killings of the Israeli civilians has killed 600 Palestinians. One of the US generals involved in the initial invasion of Afghanistan (I don't remember exactly who -- Dunford maybe) said that the US has achieved the lowest rate of civilian deaths in any war in history. About 15% of people killed by US forces in the initial invasion were civilians. Let's say that the IDF matched this rate and that 85% of the Palestinian deaths are Hamas and 15% are civilians. (Highly unlikely considering the dense urban environment of Gaza, but let's just assume this.) Then ninety Palestinian civilians are dead. Ninety for three. Gaza is a meat grinder right now. Israel has "warned" the civilians to leave, but the Egyptian border is closed, so where can they go? And the fact that the IDF is undertaking this action so close the the Palestinian General elections.... They are trying to send a message to West Bankers: This is what will happen to you if you vote for Hamas. This is what we will do to you. Some democracy those West Bankers have, eh?

It's just barely possible to solve poverty. Nobody goes homeless, nobody goes hungry.

The numbers are irritating me for the moment. Transitions are possible, and inexpensive; I actually have the change-over working now. What gets me is the new tax structure doesn't increase or reduce government spending or deficit, but it makes anyone earning under about $100k slightly richer; up around $400k, they're just below 3% poorer (about $8000/year); then it rebounds, until you hit $19,467,000 income, at which point taxes break even. Above that, taxes are actually lower.

The wonky dip right at the upper-upper-middle-class is a result of converting all welfare taxes to a separate flat tax, but keeping the remaining graduated income tax system and subtracting out welfare tax proportionally. I think I have data enough for an 87% pitch rate--higher, because those people can demand a salary boost (they're in power positions) from businesses that are getting taxed a hell of a lot less than the salary dip (i.e. the market can make it up and still come out richer than they started).

Numbers without context. Check the 2013 tab. Note that there is error: Anywhere with risk (i.e. risk of incorrect math, risk of states eliminating welfare but not turning down taxes, etc.) I tend to work on more conservative numbers (i.e. I'm working on federal numbers, but not considering that states will eliminate some expenses, because they may not decrease taxes as a result--and thus not).

I'm also working entirely by federal numbers, not calculating in the state/local taxes at all. I've also ignored the standard deduction entirely, so you can imagine that people are getting that straight +$7125 right up to some $5800 of income(!), and then everyone has $5800 more than listed (because I didn't factor it into their income at all, so the amount of taxes I'm calculating are based on income that's actually $5800 higher than listed).

Yes, that's pretty much taking all the direct welfare money, chopping it up, and paying it out to everyone over age 18 equally. What's not listed is transition strategies or full final state--which includes a full and immediate repeal of minimum wage. I also don't dive into any of the impact of the system (market force impacts, ability to resist economic downturns better, improvements in economic activity, etc.). I've thought of damn near everything.

Personally, I would say buying iOS devices is a mistake generally, but not necessarily in every case. I'm in Educational IT (K-12), and have seen quite a number of pilots in our district trying to decide what is "best" option. The answer is, "it depends".

Personally, I see much more value in Chromebooks in education, especially when tied to Google Apps For Education (GAFE). Have you heard of Google Classroom? https://classroom.google.com/s... Having taken a look at the promo videos (yes, I understand) but if it is half as easy as it looks, it is going to change how we do education.

Add in things like Khan Academy, and other "online" educational material, the world is our oyster field. I see, in the future, customized education for every student, where we break free from the industrial model of Education.

This is like the 4th story on "four guys who quit some magazine no one ever heard of start a new magazine no one will read"

https://www.google.com/search?...

They have like 3k subs. Can we agree not to give them a story until they get 50k or 100k subs?

They are using Slashdot as a promotional platform and place to farm refs for Wikipedia.

Linux is great. These 4 guys don't matter.

I was in my last year of college when they landed. It's still one of my most intense memories.

It's worth keeping in mind that NASA is not the only game in town. The most interesting work right now is Skylon by Reaction Engines in the UK. Japan has the most interest in a commercial product, power satellites. Between them with China or Norway picking up much of the tab, we could see the first power satellite by 2023.

Artwork of a microwave ground station and and a vehicle to take 1000 15 ton Skylon payloads from LEO out to GEO to build power satellites.

Ground transmitter size

https://drive.google.com/file/...

Microwave rockets 3 pixs

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

I was in my last year of college when they landed. It's still one of my most intense memories.

It's worth keeping in mind that NASA is not the only game in town. The most interesting work right now is Skylon by Reaction Engines in the UK. Japan has the most interest in a commercial product, power satellites. Between them with China or Norway picking up much of the tab, we could see the first power satellite by 2023.

Artwork of a microwave ground station and and a vehicle to take 1000 15 ton Skylon payloads from LEO out to GEO to build power satellites.

Ground transmitter size

https://drive.google.com/file/...

Microwave rockets 3 pixs

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

I was in my last year of college when they landed. It's still one of my most intense memories.

It's worth keeping in mind that NASA is not the only game in town. The most interesting work right now is Skylon by Reaction Engines in the UK. Japan has the most interest in a commercial product, power satellites. Between them with China or Norway picking up much of the tab, we could see the first power satellite by 2023.

Artwork of a microwave ground station and and a vehicle to take 1000 15 ton Skylon payloads from LEO out to GEO to build power satellites.

Ground transmitter size

https://drive.google.com/file/...

Microwave rockets 3 pixs

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

I was in my last year of college when they landed. It's still one of my most intense memories.

It's worth keeping in mind that NASA is not the only game in town. The most interesting work right now is Skylon by Reaction Engines in the UK. Japan has the most interest in a commercial product, power satellites. Between them with China or Norway picking up much of the tab, we could see the first power satellite by 2023.

Artwork of a microwave ground station and and a vehicle to take 1000 15 ton Skylon payloads from LEO out to GEO to build power satellites.

Ground transmitter size

https://drive.google.com/file/...

Microwave rockets 3 pixs

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

https://drive.google.com/file/...

But you can just hard-reset the Chromecast and reconfigure it for the network you want it to use. If the article says otherwise it's wrong.
https://support.google.com/chr...

To quote the manual:
"There are two ways to Factory Data Reset (FDR) your Chromecast: Factory Data Reset your Chromecast from the Chromecast app. You will find the option to FDR under ‘Settings’ or ‘Menu’ or Physically hold down the button on your Chromecast for at least 25 seconds or until the solid light begins flashing."

25 seconds of holding a button, and your device is yours again. It's annoying, but it's not like an attacker is stealing your identity and financial information with this.

https://support.google.com/chr...

There are two ways to Factory Data Reset (FDR) your Chromecast:
- Factory Data Reset your Chromecast from the Chromecast app. You will find the option to FDR under ‘Settings’ or ‘Menu’ or
- Physically hold down the button on your Chromecast for at least 25 seconds or until the solid light begins flashing.

And those corporations are also welfare recipients. As for sources, take your pick. Forbes is probably good.

A lot of us did.. she was pretty easy on the eyes.. then there's Paula Lieberman forever bitching about her.

What treasures there to be found in the Usenet archives. What's the .gif they're talking about?

Android accounts for about 80% of China's mobile, with Samsung having the largest chunk of about 24%. So, iOS's mobile internet use would be less than the remainder. BTW, Samsung's default browser reports itself as iOS when not in desktop mode.
https://www.google.com/search?...

The thing is, she's absolutely right about Kiki and the way NewTek used her to promote their stuff.

Agreed, but if you were there back in the day Paula would look for anything to bitch about with regard to feminism and geekiness. She was always spoiling for a fight, and was generally an unpleasant person online.

I've always been amazed by male geeks' myopia when it comes to booth babes and female celebrities.

Speak for yourself. Those types of idiots (and they do NOT represent all male geeks) are the same people who would date a stripper.

Whenever I see an otherwise intelligent male geek comment on a video with Jeri Ellsworth or Kari Byron saying "yeah, I'd fuck her!" I'm like, "way to go, reptile brain!!"

Oh give me a break. Jeri is pedestrian at best, and Kari is about a 6.5/10. I've sport fucked sales reps hotter than either. Guys like them because their geeky brains add to their attractiveness, which contradicts what you were stating in your post.

Oh, you bought your HTC ONE from AT&T or TMO instead of buying a Google Play Edition, and you wonder why it has AT&T and/or TMO crap on it?

https://play.google.com/store/...

You guys are stuck with a stupid two-party system, all you can do is vote for the lesser of two evils.

The solution is obvious: vote Cthulhu

Yeah, you had a thing for Kiki Stockhammer didn't you?

A lot of us did.. she was pretty easy on the eyes.. then there's Paula Lieberman forever bitching about her.

It looks like England has a ~85% debt to gdp ratio, which is lower than the US, so I'm still not following your logic........

There's probably a lot of stuff that you've looked at over time that changes what they think of you. There's really no way of knowing how interested you are in something, only what you've been interested in. Check your Youtube history - I bet there's a LOT of stuff in there that you really don't care about that's skewing the results. This includes any random YouTube link you've clicked.

Related: Tivo Thinks I'm Gay

Failing that, If YouTube actually doesn't know anything about you, or it can't find more appropriate ads, it will default to mass-market ads for things like cars, sugar-water, and new movies.

Ending prohibition didn't kill the mob. They just switched from bootlegging to trafficking narcotics, and they reached the height of their power in the 50s and 60s, long after the prohibition ended.

Well... by this thinking, the mob continued because prohibition didn't end. They moved from one prohibited product to another, but always a product the people wanted, but couldn't get because of a prohibition, and the mob was in a particularly good position (with their organization and international reach) to supply.

In the same way, while legalizing marijuana might reduce crime here in the US, cartels in Mexico are Too Big to Fail. They won't pack up their things and head home quietly if marijuana is legalized; they'll just start peddling something new.

What might happen if the cartels' market dried up is, at best, speculation. Could be risky, change is scary. But doing nothing and maintaining the status quo is worse. The cartels continue to get better and better at smuggling (they got submarines for fuck sake) and much, much richer while turning Central and South American countries into murderous hell-holes from which children flee to the U.S. on foot, and that ain't no shit.

I don't see how decriminalizing them good possibly be a good idea. The addiction rate for these drugs is 2.5 to 3 times that of alcohol.

I'm also nervous about cocaine and meth easily getting around (like, more than it already is). But the fact is, drug addiction and mental illness is just gonna have to be something that this country has to shut up, knuckle-down and deal with. It's not going away, and prohibition doesn't help. Prohibition only has power to do one thing... throw people in jail. It doesn't cure addiction (drugs make their way into prisons all the time), and distracts everyone from the larger issue of mental illness. It's like taking out the garbage: nobody wants to do it, nobody gets credit for doing it, but it's gotta be done or shit just piles up and gets worse.

Does this mean that the 2012 patent to PKware for high-strength encryption applied to individual members of an archive, #8090942, is ripe for challenge?

Programming has no fuzzy, no irony, no humor.

That is only true, when you are programming (today's) machines

When you are giving instructions to (programming) a human — or anything/anyone else with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) — humor may become available as a construct both for the instructions of the programmer and messages from programmed.

My argument was and remains: algorithms are the most important part of programming. Before you need to put in writing (or even verbalize it), you need to consider all (or most) of the possibilities. Block schemes are language agnostic...

Lie detectors are means of trying to detect a 'Tell' . The specifically try to find a 'Tell' by measuring bodily functions that the vast number of people have no voluntary control over.

You are either completely ignorant of how lie detectors work, or you are hoping that if you wish hard enough, you can make unpleasant realities go away.

That is a common theory, but there is some confounding evidence. For example, the obesity rate is growing fast in the 3rd world which has far less excess food than the west.

Maybe it's a precursor to this awesomeness [1].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?...

They should have used the Plane Finder Free app...

I have AndrOpen Office installed instead.
https://play.google.com/store/...

They can take their sweet time to get there, because I am pretty okay with the Open Office port to Android.

They have 131 reviews on Google+, but 126 of those are from the last week. The 5 from the further in the past seem more favorable, FWTW.

It's coming back in 5.1, in a different, more general form.

For the time being there are two menu installed by default in Plasma 5: Kickoffa "modern" launcher, and Kicker a more classic menu-style launcher.
For the time being you have to switch manually from one to the other.

Il Giardino, 71 Bd Beach, Cap-Ferret meet Streisand

Take controversial topics like child porn, pedophilia, etc. Get on the 'wrong' side of an argument and you may find yourself the target of an angry mob - perhaps literally.

You can't even do a google search about child pornography laws without google accusing you of being a pedo (turn off adblock and see google tell you "warning - child abuse imagery is illegal" doh!). Forget all those flamewars, your permanent google record gets the pedo-flag set to true for innocuous shit like that. Nobody sane wants their real identity associated with that in this climate of fear, when even a kid who takes a picture of their own junk can be convicted of creating child pornography.

I think that you are mistaking misogyny for something else.

Misogyny: "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women"

Misogyny: "hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women."

Misogynist: "a person who hates women"

There are female superheroes, so you couldn't be saying that there the statement indicated that there should not be any of those. And Thor was a male god in the mythos, so are you saying that not changing the mythos is hating women? Perhaps you meant that they were speaking in defense of continuity? Or do you instead mean that they are transexualophobes? (what exactly would be the word?)

Either way, my takeaway from your post is that if anyone were to say that George Washington did not have female reproductive organs, they must be a misogynist.

Misogyny: A self-proclaimed feminist disagrees with you.

The raw data has not been lost in any way shape of form. You can Google it here for a number of different sources.

We usually roll up in a stretch Hummer while they scream out the window "We're climatoligists, bitches!"

Now I know you're lying, because everyone knows that real climate scientists pack gold-plated Desert Eagles (.50 cal), which match their grillz.

When they go rollin down Crenshaw, they are quick to throw their signs and start popping caps whenever the Microbiologists try to font on their territory!

I think that you are mistaking misogyny for something else.

Misogyny: "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women"
Misogyny: "hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women."
Misogynist: "a person who hates women"

There are female superheroes, so you couldn't be saying that there the statement indicated that there should not be any of those. And Thor was a male god in the mythos, so are you saying that not changing the mythos is hating women? Perhaps you meant that they were speaking in defense of continuity? Or do you instead mean that they are transexualophobes? (what exactly would be the word?)

Either way, my takeaway from your post is that if anyone were to say that George Washington did not have female reproductive organs, they must be a misogynist.

There aren't that many "coldest on record" events happening.

Actually, there are: Google: "Coldest on record", first hit is "NOAA: Winter 2013-2014 Among Coldest on Record"

Wow! Google returned the most recent/topical event of something you searched for? That must mean that there are more of those things than a thing you didn't search for?

Google Fight says it's 40:1 in favor of hottest on record to coldest on record.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=coldest+on+record&word2=hottest+on+record

Actually, this same thing has been happening in the US. They say you owe a bunch of money from 50 years ago when your mother got some payment she didn't deserve or something, but they have no paperwork on it. And they expect you to pay it back even though your mother is long dead. And then they just take your whole tax refund even though it is more money than you supposedly owe. Plus, dept is not supposed to travel from parent to child like the IRS was claiming.

So yeah, his story holds up. It was only after a newspaper started questioning about the theft of the tax refund that they got the remainder back. And eventually they stopped the process when enough news and lawyers started getting interested in what was going on.

There aren't that many "coldest on record" events happening.

Actually, there are: Google: "Coldest on record", first hit is "NOAA: Winter 2013-2014 Among Coldest on Record"