...to judge a person by his or her skin color.

So let me get this straight: When I need to fire someone, I should never take skin color into account; however, if I'm hiring for a new position, I should always take skin color into account? OK, got it.

...why is this news? I couldn't care less about Tim Cook'sÃ"or anyone else'sÃ"sexual practices.

However, I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly come out as heterosexual.

While I never hid my sexuality from friends, family, and close co-workers, I decided it was time to make it publicly known in the hopes that the information will help others who don't feel comfortable to do so. "I don't consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I've benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that a Slashdotter is straight can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it's worth the trade-off with my own privacy."

While the U.S. has made progress in recent years toward marriage equality, including polygamy, there is still work to be done. "[T]here are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation. There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being straight, or where we can be barred from visiting sick spouses and sharing in their legacies. Countless people, particularly kids, face fear and abuse every day because of their sexual orientation."

...for about six seconds.

Kudos to Mozilla for fixing a really, really, really annoying bug.

I love that the Tetris site provides a "No Unity required" option that requires Flash.

Uh...the U.S. governement is already bankrupt. I don't think anything can stop the U.S. from being at war.

...when Michael and Jim were "co-managers" and Jo Bennett comes in and says, "Two guys doing one job? We gotta do something about that!"

I just started an upper division CS course at my university (all coding is in C), and it's already lame. Our first assignment is to solve various bit-shifting puzzles while artificially restricting ourselves to a very small number of language constructs (e.g. we can't use if, while, for, most logical operators, functions, or many other parts of C). It's not clear what we should be learning from this, other than that artificially restricting C makes it really tough. Or perhaps that wild guessing is a critical part of software development.

Starting in about 2004, I spent a couple years becoming proficient in Perl 5. I used it for everything, from serious web programming to complex Win32 GUI-based applications "compiled" into stand-alone executables using ActiveState. Somehow, though, I allowed myself to remain oblivious to the fact that Perl was headed absolutely nowhere.

Then I decided to look for jobs as a Perl programmer.

It had never occurred to me that programming languages are living, breathing things that can actually die if they don't get enough oxygen. I suddenly realized that my efforts to develop prowess in Perl had actually turned me into a tumbleweed, blowing farther and farther away from any sign of civilization. The solution, of course, was to do what everyone else did: Abandon Perl.

Now I wonder if my current language, Java, is headed for a similar fate...

...they have experience with this kind of thing.

Looks more like a baby while swimming on its back, extending its flippers in glee. Hopefully the final design will look a little more menacing and bad-A than this ferfy thing.

...otherwise we will notice the difference.

Ask the people in the charity staff, or better yet the kids themselves, if any of them would be interested in developing the necessary IT expertise. Then teach them as you set it up and help them learn what they'll need to know. You might change someone's life.

Amen. For the first time in my life I actually wish I had mod points so I could mod this up.

That's harsh. What compels you to resort to name-calling?

Ahh, I see. That sounds like a frustrating way to learn indeed. And you must have gone through quite a bit of paper.