1. If you are in business, you can always deduct business expenses. Doesn't matter whether you are a sole proprietor or have incorporated. 2. Have you ever tried filling out an 1120S? It's pretty easy. I got sick of waiting for my CPA one year and did it myself. Fired CPA and never looked back.
From my experience, an LLC is used for partnerships.
In your experience as a... what... auto mechanic? That would explain why you have never heard of a single-member LLC.
In some states, only certain professionals can even form LLC's.
[citation needed]
Corporations are a way to shield owners (stock holders) from liability.
This doesn't work as well as some people might wish it did. If your corporation doesn't maintain itself properly and carry adequate insurance, a judge will wipe his ass with your articles of incorporation.
This is not legal advice. This is not tax advice. If you want legal/tax advice, hire someone to look at your entire situation. For most freelance IT professionals, you should be looking at either a single-member LLC or an S-Corporation. The main differences for you, as a practical matter: a single-member LLC won't need to file its own tax return (it's a form on your personal return) and all profits will be treated as income to the owner. An S-corp will require its own corporate tax return*, and you do not need to take all profits as income if it isn't to your advantage (you do, however, need to pay yourself a reasonable salary if you're going to take some profit as a distribution since you'll be avoiding some tax by doing this).
Another thing to consider is which state to incorporate in. For most people, that will be their state of residence. But talk to an attorney who is familiar with this topic to see if it would be advantageous to you to incorporate in Delaware or Nevada or something.
*The S-Corp return is pretty simple. My recommendation is to have a CPA get you set up with your accounting software, teach you basic bookkeeping, and prepare your 1120S for you for the first 1-3 years. After you have a few returns that you can use for reference, I'd go ahead and switch to TurboTax. It's a straightforward return.
WTF? Is medical insurance extremely location dependent? I live in New York and I pay $1500/month for a family plan. All of the plans I looked at were around the same amount.
Yes, it is very location dependent. It will vary considerably based on your state law. By way of example, some states mandate that health insurance plans cover pregnancy and IVF, which are expensive. That includes for people who can't get pregnant. So if you're a dude (or have had a hysterectomy or something), you still have to pay for the extremely unlikely event that you'll get pregnant or would want IVF.
If you can get yourself a group policy for your company (you'll need an employee--no groups of one member), your premiums should be tax-deductible. Also, you should be able to contribute pretax to an HSA to cover your out of pocket medical expenses. Another option is a Medical Advantage Account, which you may contribute to pretax.
If you think about it, it makes a bit of sense. My wife and I can't have kids, so why should we pay extra for pregnancy insurance that we'll never be able to use?
If that's not making sense for you, consider IVF coverage. Plenty of people know that they don't ever want IVF. So why make them pay for unnecessary insurance to cover it? Would you also want to buy boat insurance when you don't even own a boat?
It doesn't miss the point at all. Plenty of people are parsing the meaning of the phrase "legitimate rape", but Hamblin is trying to answer the question, "When a woman is has non-consensual sex, is she less likely to get pregnant?".
Turns out the answer is "No". But I didn't know the answer to that question one way or the other before reading this article, but I was curious about it. It seemed implausible to me because there isn't really any obvious evolutionary reason for a woman's body to defend against impregnation via consensual vs. non-consensual sex. But it's better to know the answer than to guess the answer.
Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?
24 hours, according to the FAQ.
They also support Import/Export, so you can theoretically ship them a portable hard disk, and they'll ship it back to you with all your data on it. If you have a large amount of data and need it as quickly as possible, this is probably the way to go.
This is possible with any opaque data storage - a blob is a blob, why would they care if that particular sequence of bytes represents some encrypted data or not?
This is correct, by the way. According to AWS's docs (I looked it up because I was curious), they automatically encrypt your data on the backend and keep the keys for you. If you want control over the keys, AWS advises you to encrypt your data before transferring it to Glacier.
I could see another potential problem being that some jerk is going to use this to justify raping women because he "couldn't get them pregnant anyway".
I don't think that's a serious problem. Men can already get vasectomies, and I haven't yet heard of "vasectomy" being used as a defense in a rape trial.
I think what a lot of men who bitch and accuse women of "trapping them with a kid" (because women can control the sperm count and what it does after it gets up in her uterus; let's face it, most women who get pregnant didn't have some master plan to keep the guy around. Some? Sure, but...)
Obviously most pregnancies are planned, but women "forgetting" to take their pill in order to have kids with a man who does not want kids (oh, he'll love the kid once he holds him/her!) happens all the time.
Giving men more birth control options is a good thing. It's good for couples (some women get unpleasant side effects from the pill), and it's good for men who want to be extra careful.
Please not that on this side of the Atlantic, anal rape is not seen as an appropriate punishment.
Well, on this side of the pond, I would agree with you. I've never understood why prison rape is so accepted here that is considered humorous instead of "cruel and unusual punishment".
First, regarding my original thesis of "lumping attempted rape with rape seems stupid to me", I have to say that it still does. In fact, if other studies confirm the findings in the linked report, it may be extra stupid because, in addition to my belief that "completed rape" is in another league from "attempted rape", apparently there are a very small number of attempted rapes anyway.
Regarding the study, it was a phone survey. I skimmed the report, but I didn't note where they accounted for Non-Response Bias. Are rape victims more likely or less likely to sit for a phone survey on rape? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe they're itching to tell their story and a confidential survey is a great outlet. Maybe it's just too hard to go there and victims would be less likely to participate. But it sounds like the paper's authors didn't bother to find out. Not surprising, as the original version of the study didn't even bother interviewing men, as though men can never be raped. Did the authors have their conclusion in mind before the study ever began?
Also, the paper does not support the conclusion that 14.8% of women will suffer a "completed" rape and 2.8% an "attempted" rape in their lifetimes. Only 0.3% of these women experienced an attempt or completion within the previous 12 months, vs. 18% in her lifetime. I'm not really sure what an expected percentage would be for the previous 12 months because we don't know the average age of participants, but as I play with the numbers, 0.3 is just sounding low. Are these attacks ones that happened decades ago? Not to write off their experiences, but you can't extrapolate what women experienced in the 1950s to today. A lot's changed in the last 20-30 years.
Also, I note that minority women were hugely disproportionately more likely to be raped, according to this study. Did these attacks even happen on US soil, or did many occur before the women even arrived here? Life's a little different in Rwanda than it is in, say, Wyoming. I don't think you can take data from Saudi Arabia where women are punished for being raped and decide that might happen to a woman in Tennessee.
Personally, I'm a little tired of the whole thing. There are breathless reports that 1 in 4 women will be raped in college. This one said 1 in 6 were over a lifetime. Obviously rape is a bad thing, but these studies sound just a wee bit useless to me.
I hit "Parent" a bunch of times, but nobody in the "Parent" chain linked to any articles, including the one that you're talking about. Naturally, I can't comment on a paper that I can't see.
You could start by reading some of the CDC studies posted above, understand their methodologies, and then formulate a logical argument of how the study could be done "better" or "more accurately" by changing wording of the questions, categorization of assaults, or something else. Explain how the specific study is wrong, or could be done more accurately, and people might listen.
You're right, I could do that, but I will not. I have many responsibilities, and convincing you, who anyway won't be convinced no matter how much effort I put into the pursuit, is not one of them. No sane person listens to wisecrackers on the Internet, and you strike me as sane.
Looking back at my rant, my thesis appears to be "lumping attempted rape with rape seems stupid to me". I believe that I have proven this point sufficiently, but you're welcome to try to prove that lumping attempted rape with rape in fact does not seem stupid to me, but you face an uphill battle there for obvious reasons.
The purpose of calling it "culture" isn't to write it off, but rather to smear all hackers/geeks by associating them with perverts who get off on crotch-grabbing.
Guys like you should be dressed in a pair of speedos and forced to parade for an hour in a gay bar.Then we'd hear no more nonsense about "political correctness".
Geez. Are all men just complete assholes in your world? What makes you think that gay men would mistreat someone?
I remember reading a few months ago that it's actually a small percentage of men who rape women, but that they do it over and over and over again. This may explain why most men doubt the rape statistics: they don't rape women, and don't really know any men who do so, either.
Now maybe I'm biased because I don't rape women, but I also think that the statistics may be a bit misleading. First of all, lumping attempted rape with rape seems stupid to me. Two reasons: First, "attempted rape" has got to be really hard to define. I bet a lot of non-rape gets lumped in there. Second, in college, there was a woman that I hooked up with a few times who wanted to have sex with me. The feeling was not mutual, which I told her. The next time we were hooking up, despite my already having told her no, she tried to have sex with me (without a condom, which I vehemently did not do back when I was single and HIV was a big concern). I again told her no sex. About 10 minutes later, she tried to mount me again. I asked her if she was nuts, got dressed, and left, never speaking to her again.
So was that attempted rape? I guess I'd have to say yes. But does that make me a rape victim? I don't feel like it does. The extent that this impacted my life was really just my walk of shame home, trying to figure out if I said or did something to send mixed signals.
Most rapes are not at knife/gun point. Rather, they tend to fall into a grey area like my anecdote. Sure, I told her no, but I also was hooking up with her, naked, in her bed. Most men don't make a habit of turning down sex. Was she totally nuts to think I didn't actually mean "no" when I said it? I think she was, but she might have seen that as a mixed signal. Can I totally blame her for having gotten the wrong idea?
In my opinion, rounding that experience up to "rape" is a complete insult to actual rape victims. So yeah, I think that the statistics might be a little misleading.
However some ruby on rails rockstar douche bag is almost required to be grabbing ass and treating women like shit in between going to the gym and downing red bull. But brogrammers aren't just a pita to women, real programmers hate them too. They're a cancer on our culture.
A buddy of mine is active in the local Rails community, and I've gone to some Ruby events just for the heck of it (I hate Rails). I have to say that have never seen any inappropriate sexual behavior at all from this group. Nerd warfare? Sure. But mostly over various extreme programming models and Ruby interpreters that I decided not to care about.
that some attendees, hardcore geeks, what not, may have one or numerous personality disorders. ADHD and Asbergers being a few ive encountered frequently at defcon and scale. Is it possible many of these individuals simply dont understand the ramifications of what theyre doing? that this has less become eschewed into the culture and more an uncomfortable affect of its nature?
Blaming sexual assault on ADHD or Asperger's is ridiculous.
ADHD mostly presents itself as the inability to focus on what the person wants to focus on. Someone who suffers from untreated ADHD just won't be able to resist it. An example would be a person trying to sit for an exam, but there is a fly in the exam room that is grabbing his attention. That person just won't be able to ignore the fly and concentrate on the exam. There is no reason that ADHD would cause someone to go around grabbing strangers' crotches.
Asperger's mostly presents as no natural ability to recognize social cues. Facial expressions, verbal nuance, body language--an Aspie will generally have no instinct for these, but they can learn to recognize them as an academic exercise. The best way to relate to an Aspie on his terms is to be verbally literal and explain everything. Say exactly what you mean, and verbalize everything that you're trying to communicate. Realize that they will probably do the same thing, because they won't necessarily emote like the non-ASD population. It goes without saying that an Aspie can learn not to grab strangers' crotches. Most would have too much social anxiety to be that forward, anyway.
I don't know what is funnier. The fact that someone actually still knows about hankie codes (does anyone still use that? In the BDSM community, hankie codes have been replaced by "just telling people what the fuck you're into because we're not repressed anymore, FFS"), or the fact that my office seems to block specific wikipedia articles, such as the one for "hankie codes".
Some people feel that even light verbal flirting is inappropriate among strangers in a large social setting like a con, let alone actual contact. On the other side, there ARE people who want to be a public playing. Clearly no protocol is going to satisfy both of them.
For someone who thinks that even "light verbal flirting" in a "large social setting" is inappropriate, I think that would be hard for that person. Perhaps this is a residual of being in a fraternity, but what else is a large social setting for, then? Being able to stop unwanted attention and being able to stop giving unwanted attention are basic social skills, and are just a fact of life.
That being said, I think most communities have ground rules. Maybe this feeling is a result of being involved in BDSM groups, which are going to be sexually-charged by nature, because any event or community is going to have published rules. Any one that you'd actually want to be at/with, anyhow. Rule #1 is generally some variant of you don't touch anything that isn't yours, and yes, that applies especially for people. She may be a slave, but that doesn't make her *your* slave.
So, yes, I think that the harassment issue can be conquered, but there needs to be a policy and it need to be enforced. That would be the exact opposite of event staff issuing "punch cards" with various inappropriate activities on them.
Oh God, I wish. The reality is, they're just a different culture; appreciate it, or leave it.
I'm sorry, but randomly sexually assaulting women (grabbing their crotches) and disappearing into the crowd is not "culture". I'm frankly a little sick of people writing off bad/criminal behavior as "culture".
Slashdot Mirror
1. If you are in business, you can always deduct business expenses. Doesn't matter whether you are a sole proprietor or have incorporated.
2. Have you ever tried filling out an 1120S? It's pretty easy. I got sick of waiting for my CPA one year and did it myself. Fired CPA and never looked back.
From my experience, an LLC is used for partnerships.
In your experience as a ... what... auto mechanic? That would explain why you have never heard of a single-member LLC.
In some states, only certain professionals can even form LLC's.
[citation needed]
Corporations are a way to shield owners (stock holders) from liability.
This doesn't work as well as some people might wish it did. If your corporation doesn't maintain itself properly and carry adequate insurance, a judge will wipe his ass with your articles of incorporation.
This is not legal advice. This is not tax advice. If you want legal/tax advice, hire someone to look at your entire situation. For most freelance IT professionals, you should be looking at either a single-member LLC or an S-Corporation. The main differences for you, as a practical matter: a single-member LLC won't need to file its own tax return (it's a form on your personal return) and all profits will be treated as income to the owner. An S-corp will require its own corporate tax return*, and you do not need to take all profits as income if it isn't to your advantage (you do, however, need to pay yourself a reasonable salary if you're going to take some profit as a distribution since you'll be avoiding some tax by doing this).
Another thing to consider is which state to incorporate in. For most people, that will be their state of residence. But talk to an attorney who is familiar with this topic to see if it would be advantageous to you to incorporate in Delaware or Nevada or something.
*The S-Corp return is pretty simple. My recommendation is to have a CPA get you set up with your accounting software, teach you basic bookkeeping, and prepare your 1120S for you for the first 1-3 years. After you have a few returns that you can use for reference, I'd go ahead and switch to TurboTax. It's a straightforward return.
WTF? Is medical insurance extremely location dependent? I live in New York and I pay $1500/month for a family plan. All of the plans I looked at were around the same amount.
Yes, it is very location dependent. It will vary considerably based on your state law. By way of example, some states mandate that health insurance plans cover pregnancy and IVF, which are expensive. That includes for people who can't get pregnant. So if you're a dude (or have had a hysterectomy or something), you still have to pay for the extremely unlikely event that you'll get pregnant or would want IVF.
If you can get yourself a group policy for your company (you'll need an employee--no groups of one member), your premiums should be tax-deductible. Also, you should be able to contribute pretax to an HSA to cover your out of pocket medical expenses. Another option is a Medical Advantage Account, which you may contribute to pretax.
(This isn't tax advice. Ask your CPA.)
Good god, no coverage for pregnancy?
If you think about it, it makes a bit of sense. My wife and I can't have kids, so why should we pay extra for pregnancy insurance that we'll never be able to use?
If that's not making sense for you, consider IVF coverage. Plenty of people know that they don't ever want IVF. So why make them pay for unnecessary insurance to cover it? Would you also want to buy boat insurance when you don't even own a boat?
Yeah, $300/mo sounds very, very low. Either his deductible is in the stratosphere, or he might be mis-remembering that premium amount.
It doesn't miss the point at all. Plenty of people are parsing the meaning of the phrase "legitimate rape", but Hamblin is trying to answer the question, "When a woman is has non-consensual sex, is she less likely to get pregnant?".
Turns out the answer is "No". But I didn't know the answer to that question one way or the other before reading this article, but I was curious about it. It seemed implausible to me because there isn't really any obvious evolutionary reason for a woman's body to defend against impregnation via consensual vs. non-consensual sex. But it's better to know the answer than to guess the answer.
You're probably thinking of JungleDisk.
I've never used it, but anyway, there you go.
Interesting question though: if I submit a retrieval job, how soon do I have to actually download the associated data? Can I wait a few hours or days?
24 hours, according to the FAQ.
They also support Import/Export, so you can theoretically ship them a portable hard disk, and they'll ship it back to you with all your data on it. If you have a large amount of data and need it as quickly as possible, this is probably the way to go.
This is possible with any opaque data storage - a blob is a blob, why would they care if that particular sequence of bytes represents some encrypted data or not?
This is correct, by the way. According to AWS's docs (I looked it up because I was curious), they automatically encrypt your data on the backend and keep the keys for you. If you want control over the keys, AWS advises you to encrypt your data before transferring it to Glacier.
Hopefully, you're doing incremental backups. Doing full 50GB backups each day is a bit of a waste, unless your use case requires it for some reason.
I could see another potential problem being that some jerk is going to use this to justify raping women because he "couldn't get them pregnant anyway".
I don't think that's a serious problem. Men can already get vasectomies, and I haven't yet heard of "vasectomy" being used as a defense in a rape trial.
I think what a lot of men who bitch and accuse women of "trapping them with a kid" (because women can control the sperm count and what it does after it gets up in her uterus; let's face it, most women who get pregnant didn't have some master plan to keep the guy around. Some? Sure, but...)
Obviously most pregnancies are planned, but women "forgetting" to take their pill in order to have kids with a man who does not want kids (oh, he'll love the kid once he holds him/her!) happens all the time.
Giving men more birth control options is a good thing. It's good for couples (some women get unpleasant side effects from the pill), and it's good for men who want to be extra careful.
Please not that on this side of the Atlantic, anal rape is not seen as an appropriate punishment.
Well, on this side of the pond, I would agree with you. I've never understood why prison rape is so accepted here that is considered humorous instead of "cruel and unusual punishment".
Interesting.
First, regarding my original thesis of "lumping attempted rape with rape seems stupid to me", I have to say that it still does. In fact, if other studies confirm the findings in the linked report, it may be extra stupid because, in addition to my belief that "completed rape" is in another league from "attempted rape", apparently there are a very small number of attempted rapes anyway.
Regarding the study, it was a phone survey. I skimmed the report, but I didn't note where they accounted for Non-Response Bias. Are rape victims more likely or less likely to sit for a phone survey on rape? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe they're itching to tell their story and a confidential survey is a great outlet. Maybe it's just too hard to go there and victims would be less likely to participate. But it sounds like the paper's authors didn't bother to find out. Not surprising, as the original version of the study didn't even bother interviewing men, as though men can never be raped. Did the authors have their conclusion in mind before the study ever began?
Also, the paper does not support the conclusion that 14.8% of women will suffer a "completed" rape and 2.8% an "attempted" rape in their lifetimes. Only 0.3% of these women experienced an attempt or completion within the previous 12 months, vs. 18% in her lifetime. I'm not really sure what an expected percentage would be for the previous 12 months because we don't know the average age of participants, but as I play with the numbers, 0.3 is just sounding low. Are these attacks ones that happened decades ago? Not to write off their experiences, but you can't extrapolate what women experienced in the 1950s to today. A lot's changed in the last 20-30 years.
Also, I note that minority women were hugely disproportionately more likely to be raped, according to this study. Did these attacks even happen on US soil, or did many occur before the women even arrived here? Life's a little different in Rwanda than it is in, say, Wyoming. I don't think you can take data from Saudi Arabia where women are punished for being raped and decide that might happen to a woman in Tennessee.
Personally, I'm a little tired of the whole thing. There are breathless reports that 1 in 4 women will be raped in college. This one said 1 in 6 were over a lifetime. Obviously rape is a bad thing, but these studies sound just a wee bit useless to me.
I hit "Parent" a bunch of times, but nobody in the "Parent" chain linked to any articles, including the one that you're talking about. Naturally, I can't comment on a paper that I can't see.
You could start by reading some of the CDC studies posted above, understand their methodologies, and then formulate a logical argument of how the study could be done "better" or "more accurately" by changing wording of the questions, categorization of assaults, or something else. Explain how the specific study is wrong, or could be done more accurately, and people might listen.
You're right, I could do that, but I will not. I have many responsibilities, and convincing you, who anyway won't be convinced no matter how much effort I put into the pursuit, is not one of them. No sane person listens to wisecrackers on the Internet, and you strike me as sane.
Looking back at my rant, my thesis appears to be "lumping attempted rape with rape seems stupid to me". I believe that I have proven this point sufficiently, but you're welcome to try to prove that lumping attempted rape with rape in fact does not seem stupid to me, but you face an uphill battle there for obvious reasons.
The purpose of calling it "culture" isn't to write it off, but rather to smear all hackers/geeks by associating them with perverts who get off on crotch-grabbing.
Well, I guess that's two sides of the same coin.
In this case, however, I was responding to: "Oh God, I wish. The reality is, they're just a different culture; appreciate it, or leave it." That statement is untrue on two levels. 1. Sexual assault is not a part or hacker culture. 2. Even if it was, nobody is under any obligation to appreciate it, as though we were appreciating a fine Italian wine.
Guys like you should be dressed in a pair of speedos and forced to parade for an hour in a gay bar.Then we'd hear no more nonsense about "political correctness".
Geez. Are all men just complete assholes in your world? What makes you think that gay men would mistreat someone?
I remember reading a few months ago that it's actually a small percentage of men who rape women, but that they do it over and over and over again. This may explain why most men doubt the rape statistics: they don't rape women, and don't really know any men who do so, either.
Now maybe I'm biased because I don't rape women, but I also think that the statistics may be a bit misleading. First of all, lumping attempted rape with rape seems stupid to me. Two reasons: First, "attempted rape" has got to be really hard to define. I bet a lot of non-rape gets lumped in there. Second, in college, there was a woman that I hooked up with a few times who wanted to have sex with me. The feeling was not mutual, which I told her. The next time we were hooking up, despite my already having told her no, she tried to have sex with me (without a condom, which I vehemently did not do back when I was single and HIV was a big concern). I again told her no sex. About 10 minutes later, she tried to mount me again. I asked her if she was nuts, got dressed, and left, never speaking to her again.
So was that attempted rape? I guess I'd have to say yes. But does that make me a rape victim? I don't feel like it does. The extent that this impacted my life was really just my walk of shame home, trying to figure out if I said or did something to send mixed signals.
Most rapes are not at knife/gun point. Rather, they tend to fall into a grey area like my anecdote. Sure, I told her no, but I also was hooking up with her, naked, in her bed. Most men don't make a habit of turning down sex. Was she totally nuts to think I didn't actually mean "no" when I said it? I think she was, but she might have seen that as a mixed signal. Can I totally blame her for having gotten the wrong idea?
In my opinion, rounding that experience up to "rape" is a complete insult to actual rape victims. So yeah, I think that the statistics might be a little misleading.
However some ruby on rails rockstar douche bag is almost required to be grabbing ass and treating women like shit in between going to the gym and downing red bull. But brogrammers aren't just a pita to women, real programmers hate them too. They're a cancer on our culture.
A buddy of mine is active in the local Rails community, and I've gone to some Ruby events just for the heck of it (I hate Rails). I have to say that have never seen any inappropriate sexual behavior at all from this group. Nerd warfare? Sure. But mostly over various extreme programming models and Ruby interpreters that I decided not to care about.
that some attendees, hardcore geeks, what not, may have one or numerous personality disorders. ADHD and Asbergers being a few ive encountered frequently at defcon and scale. Is it possible many of these individuals simply dont understand the ramifications of what theyre doing? that this has less become eschewed into the culture and more an uncomfortable affect of its nature?
Blaming sexual assault on ADHD or Asperger's is ridiculous.
ADHD mostly presents itself as the inability to focus on what the person wants to focus on. Someone who suffers from untreated ADHD just won't be able to resist it. An example would be a person trying to sit for an exam, but there is a fly in the exam room that is grabbing his attention. That person just won't be able to ignore the fly and concentrate on the exam. There is no reason that ADHD would cause someone to go around grabbing strangers' crotches.
Asperger's mostly presents as no natural ability to recognize social cues. Facial expressions, verbal nuance, body language--an Aspie will generally have no instinct for these, but they can learn to recognize them as an academic exercise. The best way to relate to an Aspie on his terms is to be verbally literal and explain everything. Say exactly what you mean, and verbalize everything that you're trying to communicate. Realize that they will probably do the same thing, because they won't necessarily emote like the non-ASD population. It goes without saying that an Aspie can learn not to grab strangers' crotches. Most would have too much social anxiety to be that forward, anyway.
seems like this would be a pretty straight-forward solution and cut down on everyone's confusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handkerchief_code
I don't know what is funnier. The fact that someone actually still knows about hankie codes (does anyone still use that? In the BDSM community, hankie codes have been replaced by "just telling people what the fuck you're into because we're not repressed anymore, FFS"), or the fact that my office seems to block specific wikipedia articles, such as the one for "hankie codes".
Some people feel that even light verbal flirting is inappropriate among strangers in a large social setting like a con, let alone actual contact. On the other side, there ARE people who want to be a public playing. Clearly no protocol is going to satisfy both of them.
For someone who thinks that even "light verbal flirting" in a "large social setting" is inappropriate, I think that would be hard for that person. Perhaps this is a residual of being in a fraternity, but what else is a large social setting for, then? Being able to stop unwanted attention and being able to stop giving unwanted attention are basic social skills, and are just a fact of life.
That being said, I think most communities have ground rules. Maybe this feeling is a result of being involved in BDSM groups, which are going to be sexually-charged by nature, because any event or community is going to have published rules. Any one that you'd actually want to be at/with, anyhow. Rule #1 is generally some variant of you don't touch anything that isn't yours, and yes, that applies especially for people. She may be a slave, but that doesn't make her *your* slave.
So, yes, I think that the harassment issue can be conquered, but there needs to be a policy and it need to be enforced. That would be the exact opposite of event staff issuing "punch cards" with various inappropriate activities on them.
Oh God, I wish. The reality is, they're just a different culture; appreciate it, or leave it.
I'm sorry, but randomly sexually assaulting women (grabbing their crotches) and disappearing into the crowd is not "culture". I'm frankly a little sick of people writing off bad/criminal behavior as "culture".