Feminism, in just about all its various forms, is about relationships among human beings, especially where those relationships concern women and girls. Programming, on the other hand, is about human-machine relationships, in particular about how humans -- who tend to think in very fuzzy ways -- can control and manipulate computing devices that "think" in very exacting ways are are very good at doing what they are told rather than what we want them to do. Feminism is certainly relevant to how programmers interact with one another, but not so much with the programming itself.

At least for universities, there's an alternative way that professors who don't publish a lot can still be productive: they can, you know, teach students. That is nominally what universities are for, anyway.

If you're going to claim that the ThinkPenguin laptops are "garbage," could you at least say why they are garbage, e.g. build quality, feature set, whether one can replace some parts oneself, and so on? Otherwise it just looks like a dumb flame.

From Kevin Drum's blog:

Over the past three years, insurance companies have swapped their plans around so fast and so often that virtually no one today has a plan more than a couple of years old—something that seems an awful lot like a deliberate effort to evade Obamacare's original intent that most individual policies would be grandfathered and therefore remain available to existing customers who wanted to keep them. [Footnote: Plans in existence before March 23, 2010, are grandfathered, which makes them exempt from most of the new requirements of Obamacare. However, if your insurance company switched you into a "better" plan after that date, it's not grandfathered and can be canceled at any time.] Now, having engineered a situation where most current policies aren't grandfathered, millions of people are getting letters canceling their existing plans and being told that the replacement is far more expensive.

So basically, these insurance companies sending out these cancellation notices were gaming the system so that they could both undermine the law and blame it for "forcing" their customers to buy more expensive coverage.

The catch with Matlab is that outside of academia, it is expensive. If one's workplace has the licenses for it, great. If not, it may be better to make do with Octave, or Numpy & Scipy.

Why are you so adamantly frenetic over something you could fix easily yourself, when that's torn down, the response is about an administratively locked down machine ...

Guess where I use Windows? At work, on an administratively locked down machine.

I'd say that the point is more that Microsoft took an interface that worked fine, namely the Start Menu, and replaced it with something that, for the most part, did not work as well. Third-party tools to customize an interface should be niceties, not a cure for someone else's screw-up.

You can fix it yourself if you administer the machine. However, at work, people often can't do that because they are--rightfully--not given the access rights to do so.

Why would you *have* to use Launchpad? I use OS X, and don't use Launchpad at all. The Applications folder didn't go away, and it's easy to remove Launchpad from the Dock. That's far less intrusive than what I've read about the Metro UI.

"I'm sorry, but what in the hell did you expect??"

That the "dweeb" at the phone store would (gasp!) behave professionally and not invade a customer's privacy?

The copyright holders are alleging that Pirate Bay, isoHunt, etc., are engaging in illegal activities, right? Then why not get the proper authorities involved to take down the people behind sites like Pirate Bay, especially since that's already worked against Megaupload? Even if this wasn't completely successful, it would make sites like Pirate Bay less of a presence on the Internet and thus show up less prominently on search engines. Why have Google and Bing be the police when you can just let the police be the police?

No, my brain went to about the same place as yours. I was a bit surprised that no one joked about it sooner.

"Once in October 2008 the interrogators stripped me while I was blindfolded and threatened to rape me with a bottle of water."

So the Iranian government is worried about porn, but it's okay for its interrogators to threaten sexual assault? How does this make any sense?