gorkonsine

>I have never encountered anyone near these levels of sexism in many years of working in the tech industry (albeit in Sweden).

Nor have I, albeit in the US (even in the parts that are Trump-land).

You're European, so maybe you know more about French culture than me: is this something that's endemic to French culture perhaps? Over here in the US, I would be shocked to hear about this crap in any place other than one run by a bunch of 25-year-old frat bros.

Not exactly.

Suppose you're living in Saudi Arabia as a woman, and men there are treating you very poorly and in a sexist manner. Should you conclude that "men have a big problem with sexism"? No. The correct conclusion is that "men in Saudi Arabia have a big problem with sexism". Go to someplace like Norway and you're probably not going to see the same dynamic.

The same is likely true here: she's in France. I've never worked in the tech industry in France. However, I've worked in a bunch of different companies, in different industries, as a software engineer here in the US, and on both coasts too. I've never seen behavior like this. So IMO, the conclusion should be "the tech industry in France is misogynistic". The answer for her, therefore, IMO is to get the hell out of France.

Which one will? You can't bring a lawsuit unless you have standing. Does Oracle want to sue? I kinda doubt it: if they did, they would have done so by now. Is the Linux Foundation going to sue? Why would they?

Who exactly would stand to gain from keeping ZFS out of Linux, and would be willing to spend a ton of money on legal fees to do this?

>My kids played with it a few times on long drive to tell me where he spotted the police car(s)

There's something seriously wrong with society when both kids and their parents are working together to evade the police, and obviously have no respect for the police. And the problem isn't with the kids or their parents. Average citizens should not see their police as an enemy group generally working against their best interests.

That's fine, just don't complain about it then.

They have less time to spend it themselves. Sure, they can give it to some charity, or their kids, but when you have a lot of money when you're young, you have far more time to do stuff with that money yourself. Someone with one foot in the grave doesn't. No one's saying they don't have a right to the money if they earn it, just that they likely won't be able to make as much use of it.

You can't do this any more if you're stuck with the very latest infotainment firmware version. It locks out the tweaks. Even if you don't have it yet, be careful because your dealer might "helpfully" install it on there for you when you come in for service or warranty work. Once this version is installed, you can't downgrade to the older tweakable versions. Very disappointing.

In addition, if they find you've tweaked the software, they won't honor any warranty claims concerning the infotainment system.

What chemicals could you possibly need in your water? There aren't any; the only thing you'd reasonably want in there are some minerals to make it taste good (totally pure water tastes pretty nasty actually). If you're talking about fluoride, the answer is simple: brush your teeth regularly and use dental rinse. You don't need it in your water. The only reason they ever did that was because too many people had terrible oral hygiene habits decades ago; people are a lot better about this these days, with quality toothpastes, motorized toothbrushes, flossing every day, fluoride rinses, etc.

It is. People who have to resort to drinking bottled water because the tap water is unsafe do live in a third world country.

Draw whatever conclusion from that that you like.

I'm curious: if you run that substandard tap water through a reverse-osmosis system, how clean is the resulting water?

I fail to see the problem. If you don't like Windows, don't use it. They're under no obligation to support whatever hardware you want to use. In reality, people are going to do whatever it takes to keep using Windows, and if that means having to run out and buy brand-new hardware to do so, that's what people will do. Microsoft could restrict Windows to a small number of allowable systems and customers will happily toss their old stuff in the trash and buy these approved systems just to keep using Windows.

There are some such teachers, but it's a totally mixed bag and for every good teacher, there's a couple of lousy ones. This comes down to the administration, since they control hiring and firing, the work environment, etc.

I haven't asked any that particular question, but I see no reason to think that many religious people, engineers or not, would answer that they believe that unbelievers are incapable of being the best kind of citizens. That's a pretty normal kind of belief for religious Americans really.

>I don't know any scientists or engineers who would be willing to sign on to this kind of bigotry

I guess you don't know many engineers, or you only know software engineers in Silicon Valley or something. Engineers, in my experience, and especially the non-software kind, tend to be extremely religious. In fact, studies have found that many middle eastern terrorists come from engineering backgrounds. The engineers I've worked with have been overwhelmingly conservative, and frequently religious. (Those that weren't conservative were usually libertarian.)

Yeah, your typical Millennial programmer in the Bay Area probably isn't religious at all, but hang around some 40+ mechanical or electrical engineers and you'll see an entirely different crowd, with probably a lot of Trump supporters.

If you're talking about the US, no kids are getting the support and role models they need in the schools.

Writing code in leisure time has given us some really great FOSS applications. But like many things, it's a double-edged sword: it's also given us Gnome3 and a lot of today's unnecessary churn. However, unlike little 1-man projects, Gnome3 isn't just a leisure-time project, it's largely led by paid developers at Red Hat. So honestly, I'd say that the volunteers really aren't the problem, and if you eliminated the salaries of the Gnome devs working for RH, maybe we wouldn't have some of these problems; the volunteers aren't going to sustain all that effort on their own. The commonality I see with UI churn across the industry (proprietary and FOSS) is that UI people are being paid to do UI work. That means they have to justify their pay and their existence by doing more such work, even when it isn't needed and it's downright bad.

The counterargument to this is that Apple does not have a monopoly, or anything even close to it, even in the mobile device space. It's of course the most profitable company there, but its Android competitors sell far more phones than they do, even if you look only at the US. IMO, this basically means Apple's high fees are a "stupid tax" for Apple customers. If you don't like their policies or prices, don't buy an iPhone, it's that simple.

Of course, this might leave you single and lonely, since studies have shown that women are more likely to discriminate against potential suitors based on their choice of phone (if a man doesn't have an iPhone, or their iPhone is too old, the women isn't interested). But this can be a useful way of screening out superficial people who spend too much money and will end up spending you into bankruptcy if you marry them.

BTW, MS is trying to copy them, with Windows 10S and their policy that only software from the Windows Store will run on it.

There's really no way to know without doing an extensive survey/study, but from what I've seen personally in the dating market, I think it's more a case of high-status-career women being overly picky than them running into too many men who refuse to date them because they earn too much. I'm sorry, but if you're 35+, you just can't expect Mr. (or Mrs.) Perfect; those people are already taken, and were off the market sometime in their 20s, probably even in college. The statistics here clearly show women rarely earning more than their husbands, and given how liberal people in large cities (where these high-earning women live) are, I refuse to believe, until I see better evidence, that this is just because of male chauvinism. I have personally seen far too many profiles from these women who specifically say they won't (or are hesitant to) date men without an Ivy-League and/or non-graduate degree, for instance. If you're going to be that snobbish and picky, then no wonder you're still single (esp. these days when women outnumber men in universities, 60% vs. 40%). Believe what you want, but your singular anecdote about one experience with one single man vs. my anecdata about many dozens of women posting their requirements right in their public dating profiles makes me believe I'm right. Moreover, your singular anecdote is easily countered with my own: I have no trouble dating a woman who makes more, yet I've never had any luck dating such a woman, even in a city that's infamous for having a surplus of single women. (FWIW, I'm now dating someone with a good job, but she makes less than me. Honestly, I'd prefer if she made more but I don't make it a requirement in any way, that's just how it worked out.) Of course, you can claim there's something deficient about me, or that I'm aiming too high, but similar can be said of you or the guy who dumped you; a single data point just isn't that useful. But seeing common trends on dozens or hundreds of dating profiles, IMO, is much more so.

As for women primarily making the choice, that's true. Go look at OKC's data: women get FAR more unsolicited messages than men, that's a simple fact. The person who has more options has more power.

Unless you have a private jet, or perhaps you only fly first-class, I'm not sure how you actually sleep or get any work done on one. As someone who's over 6 feet, I'm so cramped in a modern plane that that alone makes it pretty hard to get a computer out and do anything useful with it; add to that people reclining their seats (now I can't use my laptop at all), kids kicking the back of my seat, people crawling over me to go to the bathroom if I'm not in the window seat, and worse, on a short flight, the fact that you're not even allowed to have your laptop out for a large portion of the flight--by the time you're finally allowed to get it out because the plane has reached altitude and you get started with something, now the plane is coming in for a landing and you have to put it away again.

Substitute "on a plane" for "on a train" and you'd be correct. Trains are great for bringing a laptop and getting work done while you travel: the seats have reasonably generous space, there's power outlets (many planes still don't have these in economy), and you're allowed to get your laptop out as soon as you sit down, well before the train even leaves the station, and you don't have to put it away until you're ready to get up and walk off the train.

>any UI that requires clicking "start" to shutdown is in wastebin and rightfully so.

Citation needed. Windows 10 still requires this, they just don't label the button "start" any more (nor does any other UI I've seen in the last 10 years). Mechanically, it's basically the same.

The problem is too many people with too much time on their hands. For the commercial teams, they're in-place and receiving a paycheck, so their managers want to make themselves and their teams look like they justify their salaries, so they come up with New!! stuff to do. For the FOSS people, it's partly the same: the Gnome3 devs are largely employed by Red Hat. For others serving in a volunteer, it's a lack of discipline and too much time on their hands which could be used for more productive stuff (like documentation, fixing bugs, etc.).

>3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3.

No, it's still true. They didn't want to drop Unity at all; they did it because they were forced to. Didn't you read Mark Shuttleworth's blog postings about it? He was clearly unhappy about things. They gave up on Unity and Mir because they weren't working out in the market and it was costing them too much money to pursue that direction. If Mark had his way, Unity would be the most popular Linux DE.

>I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper.

Huh? I don't know what to say to this. Nautilus is Gnome software, not KDE. Why would KDE try to open Nautilus for anything, unless you've explicitly set it up that way? Now if that's what you've done because you like Nautilus, the problem is probably with the Gnome/Gtk devs. As I said before, they're infamous for not being amenable to cross-toolkit efforts. I would encourage you to ask them for their advice on this problem; they'll probably tell you "switch to Gnome3". :-/ I use KDE too, and personally I avoid GTK software if I can help it.

>A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this.

I agree entirely. It's garbage, and it shouldn't be this way. The Gnome devs are entirely to blame for this mess, along with all the distros that push Gnome3. They don't even want you to use a wallpaper with Gnome3; Jon McCann said so some time ago, saying that customization (even wallpapers) is bad because it makes different Gnome installations different.

>It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up.

Oh I entirely agree; all the UI people across the industry have gone collectively nuts. But I expect better from FOSS, for multiple reasons: 1) FOSS isn't for-profit (well, I guess Red Hat is, maybe that's part of the problem), so they shouldn't need to push unnecessary churn to justify pushing customers to "upgrade", and 2) FOSS is usually very resource-limited compared to commercial software, so unnecessary churn is a waste of developer time that's better spent fixing bugs, improving docs, making things more stable, etc. If I want to use the latest fancy BS, it would stand to reason that I'd go for commercial proprietary SW, because those vendors are all in favor of making "new" shiny stuff to get me to spend more money to do the same thing. The same shouldn't also be true of FOSS, but for some reason it seems to be.

>I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too

I don't. I consider it all an unnecessary waste, and I really don't like these new UIs at all. Thankfully I'm still stuck on Win7 at work for the moment, and minimize my use of Windows whenever possible as I do most of my work in a Linux VM (and don't use it at home at all), and I never even see any Macs up close. I put up with Android because it's the best of 2 bad choices, but also IMO it's not that bad: it's a touch UI designed for a handheld touchscreen device and it's OK at that, unlike PC stuff that they seem to be trying to tablet-ify.

>How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?

Whatever it is, the answer isn't trying to tablet-ify PCs, or using garish and nauseating color schemes. Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7 style UI for the most part, and why do we care about grandparents? Today's grandparents were using Win95 and XP, so they're perfectly used to that kind of UI. Grandparents today are not starting to use computers for the first time; that was 10-20 years ago. Anyone left now who isn't familiar with PCs to some extent isn't going to be alive for very long, and isn't interested in learning PCs now. And most older people with simple needs would be perfectly happy with an iPad or other tablet anyway, which is why the PC market is no longer growing.

Liberty versus authoritarianism? I acknowledge such people exist, but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated. At least with the religious people, I can understand why, I just reject the silly premises (that God will smite us like in the story of Sodom). With atheists (presumably Stalinists?), I really don't get it. Besides, we've seen atheistic authoritarian societies before, and they were a complete disaster, not only economically but also as far as having a happy, functioning society. Hint: if you have to have a wall to keep people from running away from your society, and you shoot people who try to climb over the wall, then the fundamentals of your society are not worth preserving. Now it might be obvious that I'm following a fairly utilitarian philosophy here (happy = good), but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society? Generally, societies which do not value the happiness of their citizens are religious, because they claim that they need to "please God" or act in certain ways to have a better afterlife. Remove the afterlife and deity and what do you have left? Either wanting people to be happy (but still functional; not happy as in drugged-out all the time and unable to keep society functioning), or you're running the society on what makes one person happy and to hell with what everyone else wants, which is basically narcissism (which probably describes North Korea today).

UIs don't need to look the same, and there's no reason they should. Choice is a good thing. The problem, however, is a lack of interoperability: Gtk apps look like shit in KDE and vice-versa. There's no good reason for this; it's possible to make it so apps with different toolkits blend in seamlessly, but the Gnome devs are infamous for being completely unhelpful here and having a "our way or the highway" approach to everything.

>Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.

Not true; if Canonical had their way, everyone would be using Unity. Honestly, I don't begrudge them making Unity; it's good to have some diversity, but I do begrudge them switching to Gnome3 recently and abandoning Unity altogether. A lot of people liked Unity and its concepts. Instead of throwing in the towel and becoming yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, they could have adopted KDE, and then created a custom KDE theme or version of Plasma which looks and works like Unity and allows them to continue to explore those concepts which leveraging the existing KDE underpinnings and the superior Qt toolkit. The real problem IMO is the horrible Gtk toolkit: it's in C but bolts on a hacky OOP concept, it's undocumented, and it's constantly changing. I know of at least one commercial project which had to abandon it and switch to Qt because of the constant API deprecation, and there's at least one FOSS DE (Lxde I think) which also switched from Gtk to Qt for the same reasons, and got a performance boost in the process IIRC.

>the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have.

I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs. Lots of people were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but then it was deprecated and they were pushed to Gnome3 and it was terrible and they hated it. As a result, not 1 but 2 new DEs were created, just to satisfy people who wanted something more stable: Cinnamon and MATE. It's a complete mess. A lot of people were similarly pissed when KDE4.0 was released and they couldn't use KDE3 any more because the distros all deprecated it, and the new version was filled with huge bugs and didn't work. At some point, you need to aim for product maturity instead of constant churn. I've been using ssh for many, many years and I don't see that being deprecated any time soon and having to switch to some other standard, but somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?

>I think it makes quite a bit of sense if you're at all interested in having children and staying home with them for any amount of years to worry about the income of your partner.

Sure it does, but these days very few women stay home for that long (out of women with well-paying careers). Also, more importantly, there's nothing stopping women with high-paying careers from marrying lesser-earning men and letting them stay at home with the kids, but as these statistics clearly show, women are simply not doing that: they're demanding partners who make at least as much as they do. (And they seem to be failing at finding such partners, and are then just staying single, and frequently (in my observation) going to a sperm clinic and getting artificially inseminated and intentionally becoming single mothers and hiring nannies to raise their kids.)

>Personally, I know I've prioritized dating men who are willing to stay home themselves since I don't like the idea of being a stay-at-home mom.

That's great, but you seem to be a rare exception. Very few women seem to be thinking that rationally, as shown by these statistics.

It's interesting, but it doesn't surprise me one bit. It's exactly like what the article posits: that women marry equal or up, and men don't care that much. Obviously, it doesn't matter if the men are gay or straight; in both cases, they're quite likely to marry someone with a much lower-paying career.

Also, the premise that women only want to marry up (or equal) really explains why I see so many women on the dating sites in the DC area with high-powered careers (their positions are frequently shown right on their photo in Tinder), who seem to be perpetually single and whose profiles I see over and over. They're obviously not interested in me because 1) I'm a software engineer: software engineering is not seen as a prestigious career at all in this country, despite the pay, and 2) I don't have an advanced degree; many women are degree snobs and won't date someone who didn't go to an Ivy League or doesn't have a Masters or PhD, even though I likely make as much or maybe more money.

I've used Linux on the desktop since about 1999. It's not "great"; it has a lot of problems. But it is indeed better (IMO) than the alternatives, which are MacOSX (proprietary, tied to limited and expensive hardware), and Windows (a complete horror show, esp. now with Win10--spyware, ads, a ridiculously horrible UI when you click "start", and of course the total lack of decent utilities and shell and the horrifically bad-to-nonexistent package management you mention).

The main problems with desktop Linux as I see it are 1) crappy DEs (namely Gnome3, the most popular and pushed hard by Red Hat) and fragmentation in the DE space, video driver problems, and power-management problems (particularly on laptops, esp. with suspend/resume). My laptop also has a lot of trouble going from docked (w/ dual monitors) to undocked and back. This stuff actually works pretty well on Windows, but on Linux it's a real PITA and frequently requires reboots IME, and that's on a not-new Dell business laptop that's generally well-supported.

Paying your taxes funds real crimes too. Should I stop paying taxes?

According to you, the people in the Underground Railroad were doing the wrong thing, and should have followed the prevailing laws on slavery, and it was wrong for slaves to rebel, even when they were being brutalized and murdered. Your position is disgusting and repugnant.

I agree that it's a valid choice to make, and people should have the freedom to make such choices if they want. However, you said before that "It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours." and that's incorrect. It does make a difference, to some people. To those people, they'd oppose it if it were proven to simply be a choice, whereas they'd have more empathy if it were proven to be completely innate: it'd like being mad at a mentally-retarded person for doing something dumb, compared to being mad at or disappointed in a very intelligent person for making a very dumb decision. I'm not defending this mentality (because again, I have no problem with homosexuality and I think people should be free to have whatever physical relationships they want), but I'm explaining it.

Also, remember that a lot of people (particularly religious ones) want to regulate social behavior, even in the bedroom, because they believe this is important for society's survival and prosperity. So in their view, homosexuals should be oppressed (either strongly by the state, or more weakly by social pressure) for the good of society, and to keep their behavior from "spreading". There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us: we don't believe in divine retribution for "immoral" behavior (a la Sodom & Gomorrah) and they do, and nothing's going to shake their belief.

You have to balance what you're doing now with where you want your career to go, whether you like where you are now (work, location, etc.), and how much you're getting paid. If you're getting paid a lot to occupy a niche that's a career dead-end, and probably won't carry you through retirement, you should leave, even if it means taking a pay-cut. If you're terribly unhappy with what you're doing there or your company or team, you should look for something better. If you hate the area you live in, you should look for a way to move someplace you like better. But if you like where you live, you like the company and the work, and you don't see it as a resume-killer and don't see a problem getting a similar job if something goes south with this one, you might as well stay.