singleuse

After reading her blog post and several tweets, her words seems carefully crafted to achieve a personal agenda, and I would take anything she says with a whole salt shaker worth of grains of salt.

For all I know this could very well be PR and damage control from her. I have a hard time believing she had no idea this was a possible and probable consequence of her posting of this picture. This is not an uncommon outcome.

The tweet itself is arguably going overboard but the accompanying picture is the real issue, this is the element of public exposure which made all this going way way overboard.

It's actually a serious offense and even a crime in other parts of the world, the kind that can send you in jail for quite some time, and on many websites and communities this could get you a ban.

It seems to me it was a threat either of being stabbed with forks or sexually assaulted, neither is acceptable.

This guy has all rights to feel angry about what she did, but this is not a welcome comment and he should probably be reported to the law enforcement authorities.

Your analogy is terrible.

The police here would be the pycon would acted responsibly and dealt with the issue accordingly.

But the report was not towards the police but towards a potential mob of vigilantes, namely the internet at large and an opinionated group of followers which would probably be outraged by the way the report was crafted.

It would be closer to printing hundreds of tracts and poster and posting them in the neighborhood and distributing them to concerned people hoping someone from law enforcement would see them than reporting to the police.

The employer is all but neutral in this issue, the neutral party is obviously the PyCon staff and they did their part as expected from reasonable and sound responsible people, respecting the privacy of everybody involved.

I wonder how you can not see how her actions lead to his demise.

She was most probably not shortsighted about the upcoming backlash as she said herself on HN a year and a half ago:

adriarichards 473 days ago

We all should realize it's Twitter, home of public flame wars.

It seems she had a pretty good understanding of what she did, and from this we can assume she acted with intent.

Definitely not. She's clearly in the abuser position and her reaction was disproportionate and inconsiderate, to the like of baseless sexual harassment lawsuits we've all heard about.

I'd even go an extra step and say IMHO what she did was misplaced sexism as she misinterpreted and misrepresented the situation and would probably not have done anything if women were making the same dongle joke.

She publicly posted without consent a picture and an incriminating comment in an increasingly context of being touchy and wary about gender issues at tech conferences.

Of course this has a significant potential for HR to do PR and distance themselves from their employee in an attempt to save the company image and avoid a potential pro-feminist backlash. Though I agree play haven overreacted, from their despicable business activity it's not that surprising, and past similar experiences points towards this as almost predictable and expected.

But for a dev evangelist, this was highly inconsiderate and irresponsible thing to do, it looks like she didn't care about the consequences of what she did, and got fired over it. Which makes sense too, as explained by sendgrid here: http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/ she did it all wrong, made her employer look bad, had the opposite effect of what her job position asks for, render herself ineffective at her job in the future, and inadvertently endangered her employer business.

I wouldn't be surprise if the DoJ actually intended for Aaron Swartz to kill himself. The US government did this before with public right activists.

And I agree that without the twitter post of the picture with the accompanying accusing comment, there would have been no firing involved.

Heck! If I can't crack an innocent dick joke at my friend while attending a conference because others think it is inappropriate, I won't be attending any conference anymore.

Or would it make more sense to use IRC chat to talk to the person sitting next to me ?

It seems the pycon staff acted appropriately, but Adria certainly did not, posting pictures online with this kind of comment is not okay and goes against pycon guidelines.

And to me this report seems arguably abusive in the first place, but taken as a whole it amounts to witch hunting and hurts everybody to the benefit of no one.

Now both PyCon, the python community, women in tech and people working towards a more women friendly tech conference have a bad image that's impossible to restore. All because one single person misinterpreted a comment and found a joke not funny, well done !

You're kinda right here, the twitter analogy is not quite the same, the PyCon incident involved a handful of people and spoken words while the twitter one is much much worse as it is made public to the whole internet and doesn't go away once written.

Apart from this significant difference, both are dick jokes and to me seems to be poking innocent fun but reveals a closed mindedness and double standard from Adria.

To me this looks a lot like sexism against men. Would she have done the same if this joke had came from a group of women ?

Then it is really inconsiderate and irresponsible to post pictures like this online. In other parts of the world taking this picture would send you to court and with the accompanying comment would most probable send you to jail with a hefty fine.

And now PyCon has officially turned into Soviet PyCon where all attendees should self-censor and be very wary of any woman there. Epic fail at creating a welcoming atmosphere for women and gender equality.

Yes sexism and witch hunt are the main issue and going after people who make jokes you don't find funny because they're guys is sexism and a witch hunt.

Would she have done the same if it were women instead of men ? I don't think so. It looks like a personal crusade against men.

1. This is so impractical that I switched to opera as my main browser where it is a press on F12 and a click to enable/disable js

2. When your product does such a bad job that it has to rely on a third party extension to provide functionality to users, maybe you should consider the possibility that you should include these features in your product.

> Why ruin that?

According to the article, it's a move to protect their brand from looking bad when kids click around.

I'd like to know on where the notion that removing features used by only a fraction of the user base is what should be done comes from ?

It is brandished right and left as if obvious, but it is never explained.

Have a look at opera:config.

Though marketing worked hard to push this idea, Firefox is not free software.

Is it worth alienating web developer and power users because they represent a small fraction of your user base ?

Try alienating your power users and wonder your product suddenly start bleeding regular users along with power users.

Start alienating web developer and wonder why suddenly websites start breaking in your browser.

This article is advocating total removal or rendering as impractical as possible as a mean of protecting ignorant people from their ignorance all in the sake of brand image.

It doesn't mean the product was actually good, it simply means it lacked a better alternative.

I think you missed the point here, doctor, lawyers and otherwise supposedly busy non-advanced users will not delve in about:config at all, hence cannot waste any of their time there.

It's only the advanced users who are willing go through this path because they want to tweak a settings. And the question would be, is it really worth making such an impractical tool out of about:config and thus wasting time of advanced users when it was designed for their own use, for the sake of keeping non-advanced users out this setting panel.

Quantity of users is a really bad metrics.

People really disliked being treated as numbers, they'd rather be treated as human beings.

It gives the impression that it's about finding a justification to an arbitrary already made decision.

IMHO a more sensible way to tackle the issue is to make usage cases and find a way to address what ever arise from this scenario wisely. From the nfs case exposed earlier, a "I'm on nfs with quota" checkbox would make more sense than forcing cache manually to 0.

Instead of removing features and hiding options, wouldn't it be preferable to provide options that make sense and make them usable ?

Opera does it and offers an opera:config checkbox to turn the warning off.

Firefox is one the few who does not offer this feature.

With its low profit margin amazon leaves virtually no room for a small size competitor to dislodge them from their share of the market.

Say you want a bite of the tablet market dominated by apple, it's easy, make a somewhat decent tablet for cheap and there you have it.

If you want a bite of an amazon dominated market, well good luck with that, and while at it hope that amazon is not planning to get into the market you're in.

It seems their strategy relies on tiny margins, maybe with a different set or circumstances amazon would change their stance, but I don't think it's currently part of their plans to ramp up prices.

still down from western europe. And to isup.me : http://www.isup.me/amazon.com

What a shameful attempt at surfing the dotcom marketing campaign. Virtually nobody cares who was first, what matters is respect of privacy and secure encryption.