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Batista is not being downvoted because they're expressing a differing opinion. They're being downvoted because they're not taking the time to fully consider the issues and engage in reasonable debate.

As an example, from their first post, they suggest that it's not legitimate to worry about this sort of problem because larger problems exist. This form of argument is not only blindly hypocritical (that is, if the arguer believed it, they would not be engaging in the subdebate but rather be working to resolve the larger problem) but intrinsically ridiculous -- it supposes that it's not legitimate to discuss any issue while "worse" problems persist. It's a self-defeating argument on a specialized forum like HN, and utilizing it indicates that someone isn't actually arguing the topic at hand (in a sense, it's a "universal" argument, and thus like nonfalsifiable theories, completely irrelevant).

They then literally compare their own downvoting to the Salem witch trials (the irony of which is beyond belief, and further calls into question their sincerity), and additionally claim that proportion of women in tech is "not a serious issue in its manifestation or it's consequences at all", and when pressed that many people disagree, compare people who care about workplace sexism to hypochondriacs in order to marginalize their beliefs (this is particularly poisonous and a clear indicator that they're not interested in the viewpoints of others). They also fall into a really standard "I'm just expressing my opinion" backtrack, which is particularly ironic given that their initial complaint was that people were expressing their opinion on this topic rather than doing something more worthwhile.

Regardless of their viewpoint, they're not participating in reasonable intellectual discourse. We're not obligated to argue with someone who's plainly not interested in having an actual argument, and the up/down-voting is working as it should in this instance (I'm certainly not saying it works as it should in all instances, but this is pretty clear).

Right. So why are you wearing your belt (hooked through some fabric loops on your pants) and you're not wearing your phone (resting in a fabric pouch on your pants)?

Do you wear your belt, or is it just always with you, hooked through some loops on your pants?

This isn't meant sarcastically -- the idea of "wearing" something is pretty tied up with the context of the object (e.g. is it "clothing") and less to do with how you're actually carrying it around, which can make "wearable" computing something of an oxymoron depending on how it's interpreted.

Any small portion of the Möbius strip "looks like" a chunk of 2D object, but the entire object cannot be placed directly into 2-space. The surface of a sphere is a similar example.

I spent a ton of time years ago making molds for some of the hard-to-get plastic parts for an unusual car of mine so that I could produce my own spare parts. Simply being able to print them would be amazing.

Of course, many of those parts might have physical requirements (elastic deformation tolerance, heat resistance, et cetera) that would not be met by 3D-printed materials, so it's not a panacea.

Your definition of "government's duty" is not universally agreed upon, and it's intellectually dishonest to predicate an argument on the presumption that it is.

Many did -- e.g. the original G4 Towers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4

The gray oval in the center of the drive door cover is the load of a class 3 lever that pushes the eject button on a relatively commodity optical drive. It was eliminated once the Quicksilver generation came out.

Those early G4s could also be purchased with a ZIP drive, the coverplate to which infuriatingly had a thin section of plastic covering the ZIP eject button, such that you could see the LED in it but not push it. Now that's just mean.

This has sort of existed since the '40s, using radiant heat from the bread: http://www.automaticbeyondbelief.org/

I haven't tested this, but you're probably have issues with e.g. dark rye.

In e.g. physics or chemistry, the sciences are predicated on your ability to reduce problems to simple systems and interactions. In biology most phenomena require a large, complex, highly interactive system, which is difficult to simulate or even conceptualize.