You can be a good programmer without reference to assembly language by doing proper input validation, avoiding the impulse to be unnecessarily clever, commenting your code well, thinking about all the ways things can go wrong, checking for errors and handling them appropriately, designing sensible interfaces, writing tests, making sure you release resources you've finished with, avoiding clone and hack etc.

Doctor Who actually has equal numbers of male and female viewers, or at least it did the last time I checked.

So when the poor fail to cross an additional hurdle of saving for something which shouldn't be necessary whilst not having enough money to feed themselves properly, which the wealthy don't need to worry about, or simply refuse to go through such unpleasantness in order to obeise themselves in front of the systems which oppress them, you accuse them of lacking self-discipline, and use that as an excuse to deny opportunity from them and keep participating in their oppression.

A perfect example of why suit culture is not just unpleasant, but is actively evil, and anyone ethical should help resist it.

I think the real key is that developers (in common with a few other groups of people like mathematicians) cannot get away with waffling and convincing some person that they're probably right about things. They have to actually get things precisely correct, or their code won't compile or will produce warnings etc. So ideas which depend on illusions, like suits being linked to professionalism, have a far harder time surviving in their culture, because everyone is in the habit of making sure things are right.

One problem with it is that the bizarre notion that a suit is "professional" is a tool of social exclusion, and anyone wearing one where it's expected will support the notion, and hence help to exclude people who aren't interested in them or can't afford them.

Also simply just having to abandon my own personal culture and yield to a hateful culture where we judge people by arbitrary qualities of the clothing they wear is an awful feeling, and if I could do this willingly, I wouldn't be so good at demanding correctness elsewhere, and hence writing disciplined and secure code. You want to be able to be yourself at a place you'll be spending a significant proportion of your life. The suits game is wrong on multiple levels, and utterly rejecting it is part of my being.

Would you be able to answer the same question about your own personal porn preferences? I know I wouldn't be able to answer it about mine.

I'm slightly surprised this is seen to be so universal. Obviously, there will be plenty of guys here who love doing stuff with hardware and will want to make as much as possible themselves. But I'm basically interested in software. (The hardware already does basically what I want it to, but I want to do all sorts of things with software which nobody has written yet, or at least, not in the way I want.) And while I've added drives and memory, I'd rather leave the main and initial build to a professional. I'm sure I could do it myself, and spend less money by doing so, but as an amateur, I'd end up with an amateurish job, and worry that I'd make some subtle error around cooling or power connections or whatever which would render the result unreliable or shorten its lifespan. Plus I value my time, and it would be a means to an end, rather than a joy.

Actually, heroin would be safer than alcohol or tobacco if it wasn't for prohibition. Long term use of tobacco, or overuse of alcohol significantly increases your chance of dying from various things. Long term use of heroin doesn't actually do very much. It's the unreliable doses, sky-high costs, substances it's cut with and injection hazards which make heroin so dangerous under prohibition. None of these would be a problem if it was legal.

How about the entirely unnecessary, bigoted coercion and force used against them by society to incarcerate them, which they wouldn't have to suffer if they were addicted to something mainstream, i.e. alcohol or tobacco?

Having your life ruined merely for being different is something which should attract sympathy from anyone.

Well, someone has to have insurance. The reason passengers obviously don't have to have insurance at the moment is because they can rely on the driver having it. (Or at least they should be able to.) If we eliminate drivers from the equation, we don't eliminate the need for insurance, it just becomes less obvious who should be responsible.

The first question is not actually how you can create such a culture, but whether it's actually a good thing in the first place. You seriously need to evaluate this. One of the primary means of being secure is not trusting others. But trusting others is an incredibly useful tool to get things done, and it may be worth taking the security hit. Stand on a crowded railway platform, and you're trusting so many people, each of whom could push you off and kill you so easily, without even thinking about it. Without trust, society itself would be impossible.

So for example, if everyone believed they were immune to the security risk of terrorism, this would very obviously be such a good thing for society. There have been security economic analyses done of various security measures recommended by security guys, thinking their users to be fools who just wouldn't listen, which established that the users who ignored them were actually completely right, that the cost of implementing these measures was hundreds of times greater than the benefit of preventing the attacks they were effective against.

A security professional who thinks doing things securely must always be a priority just because that's his field, instead of taking the time to gain a more holistic understanding of the situation, deserves to be ignored.

There might be some extra sexism, we don't have enough information to tell. The question being whether the people who have made this decision would have made the same decision if they were teaching boys. We can only guess at this.

I've just constructed my own simple password manager. Attach a short ident for each password to a strong master password, and then SHA512 and base64, truncate the result as necessary. Can be easily reconstructed wherever you want.

The two main criteria for choosing someone to spy on you would be that they are as close to powerless to affect you as possible, and don't share information with anyone more able to exert power on you. Some tiny country I know little about but the name and approximate location is probably going to be the best answer.

Judit Polgar was one of eight players who participated in what FIDE called the "World Chess Championship 2005". Now, the FIDE world championship during the era when the champion wasn't participating was of course a joke, but the winner of that tournament, Topalov, challenged the world champion Kramnik for the title on the basis of his win. This makes the FIDE "World Chess Championship 2005" a de-facto candidates tournament, and hence, the eight participants, including Judit, world championship candidates. Players who were candidates to challenge for the world title.