hagios

> OTR is a brilliant and fascinating protocol, particularly because it gives people who communicate deniability, which PGP, for example, doesn't.

This is a point which a lot of people seem to overlook. Sometimes, non-repudiation is desirable. Sometimes it is not.

At the point where you're allowing negative values, 'histogram' is probably a misnomer. Allowing for negative values lets you track things like delta, jerk, and so on, which can in turn reveal interesting data which isn't immediately obvious otherwise.

This is pretty nifty; I'll be tinkering with this a bit for sure! Nice work.

I think that it could be explained away in that Perl 6 was an experiment with enough major changes that it never took hold, and that Perl 7 was moving the language forward rather than waiting for Perl 6 to gain widespread adoption.

The question of 'why' is an important one, indeed. For example, I suspect that the disparity in cooking and ceramics is not due to a [perceived] unwelcoming culture, or a [perceived] pervasive attitude that men who are entering the field are inferior by default. It might be that women are considered inferior in blacksmithing; I'm not a blacksmith, though, so I don't know. I do know one woman who is a blacksmith, however, and from what I've heard from her--women involved in such a hobby tend to be well received.

People who work professionally in STEM fields in the US tend to be straight white males. This is okay, so long as the reason for the disparity is not that the culture in these fields tends to disparage members of the community who don't fit this profile. If we agree that women and men are roughly equally qualified when it comes to development, then the disparity in terms of participation is worth being investigated. This sort of statement (1:1 ratio) implies equality which will hopefully resonate with the community and ultimately tend towards a zeitgeist wherein people--regardless of gender or any other irrelevant criteria--are welcomed based on their merit.

Can't hurt, but I suspect it won't help. I wrote in, and it took less than two minutes to receive a response which basically said "write to legal, not to us."

Here's to hoping I'm wrong and they listen to unhappy people.

Later quote from the article reads:

"Prime numbers, which are divisible only by themselves and one, have little mathematical importance. Yet the oddities have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians."

I've been hearing great things about Gandi pretty consistently from everyone who uses them. I'm in the process of moving my domains over to their service and so far (given, only a few months in) nothing but smooth sailing.

This makes sense, given that water fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we face.

This is absolutely true. It's almost always easier (and certainly less emotionally taxing) to just walk away entirely--especially when [the perception is that] the community will be either passive or against you after you act.

There is a LOT of blatant sexism in the tech sector. The more specialized you get, the worse things get. It's a pretty well documented problem (e.g. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/sexual_harassm... for a collection of security related anecdotes). This kind of culture turns away lots of tremendously talented people, and those who choose to endure a culture which seems to be slanted against them generally either end up targets or else silent lurkers.

It's absolutely accurate to call the general reaction 'denial.' People who complain who are on the receiving end of the harassment are 'overly sensitive' and those who aren't who speak up against the status quo are 'apologists' and 'white knights.' It's difficult to address a mindset which a majority of a community is complicit in at best, or active defenders of at worst.

I don't think it's too hard to "get" Minecraft. The way it was originally explained to me (I purchased it in the beta) was "it's Lego." I played for a few weeks and it was good fun.

What pulled me back into Minecraft was logic circuits. I found Minecraft to be an incredible teaching tool to help impart the absolute basics of circuit design to others. From the first step of turning on a bulb (or, in Minecraft terms, opening a door) with a circuit, to building memory and discovering new ways of state persistence, all the way to building entire machines for the express purpose of computation, Minecraft manages to turn the learning process into enough of a game to leave people associating "logic" with "fun."

I think it's probably only half a decade before we start seeing people in universities who were inspired to be electrical engineers by Minecraft.

Nifty, thanks! Emailed to see if there's a way to earmark my donation for this cause (since it'd be separate from a general donation).

I'd donate at least a couple hundred a year if the FSF/EFF did this exactly.

In my case, this couldn't be more wrong. One needs only wave their hand in my periphery to get my attention--this encourages others to come to me to bounce ideas, get opinions, etc.

Listening to music is definitely helpful to me when it comes to focusing on the task at hand, but it shouldn't come at the price of diminished capacity for collaboration.