There's no difference between watching and gawking. Gawking and staring are the same thing, and it's pretty hard to not stare at someone who's intentionally making a spectacle of themselves, with the intention of gaining attention. If you don't want people staring at you, stop making a spectacle of yourself.

The hula-hooping women surely weren't forced to display themselves that way, just like people who sing karaoke aren't usually forced into it by someone. If you don't want to be the object of attention, there's no one forcing you to grab a hula hoop and spin your hips around. You can complain about this being "unprofessional" all you want, but the fact remains that these women did this on their own.

Hey, I invented that!

So the men are supposed to look the other way when women are hula-hooping? Please.

Maybe they shouldn't have brought any hula hoops to the party to begin with. But they did, and women used them; you can't expect men not to look at them when they put themselves on display like that.

If some male in the office got up in front of everyone and tried dancing (in a horrible, Elaine-like way), you don't think everyone would stare at him too?

My Raspberry Pi runs as a permanently connected Tor relay.

I gotta go find out how to do that. Sounds like a good project for next weekend.

At big companies, probably almost never. At small companies, however, anything goes, and nepotism like this is actually very common.

If I were to say "oh, this isn't surprising—most men engage in this kind of rape-y behavior, so it's not surprise," then that would be sexist. Because I'm explaining away one man's bad behavior by saying it's typical of all men, and hence unremarkable and not in need of correction.

The problem here is: this kind of behavior is entirely typical of men, and not of women. It is extremely, extremely rare to find a women who behaves in such a manner towards men (or women for that matter). You'll pretty much only find men acting this way. This doesn't mean it's typical of ALL men, however with women you simply don't need to worry about it. Women, however, have their own problems; the evil/crazy founder's wife in the story acted in a way that many (but again, not ALL) women act.

This doesn't mean that these behaviors don't need to be corrected, but there's no practical way to correct such behaviors. What are you going to do, go beat up the asshole guy on the bus? That's illegal. His actions weren't illegal, though they were horrible and distasteful. Or are you going to go tell the guy how rude he was? You think he gives a shit? He's an asshole. Same goes for the evil founder's wife; you can't use violence with her, because it's illegal. You can try to get her in trouble by publicly outing her, but as Ms. Horvath is probably going to find out, this will very negatively impact your career since America hates whistleblowers. Or you can tell her how bad and hurtful her actions are, but again, you think she gives a shit? She's evil. The people who exhibit these bad behaviors are sociopaths. They have no conscience, and don't care about who their actions hurt. There's really nothing we can do about them in modern society because violence is illegal; in the really-old days, they'd be shunned from their tribes if they pissed off too many people, or pushed off a cliff or something if they fucked with the wrong person. But the smarter ones are really crafty, which is why they get into high-up positions, like Governor of New Jersey or Vice President of the US, and these days there's just no way to deal with them except to avoid them whenever possible.

Anyway, the point I'm getting to is that there's nothing wrong IMO with pointing out that a certain behavior is only done by a certain group, even if it's only a minority of that group. All groups have their Achilles' Heels.

At least you can see the difference between being a Leftist and being a Fascist. It takes a bit of discernment.

Smitty is still in the "your side or my side" division of the world. That does not generally lead to clarity. But he's under a lot of stress, and I believe he's still worth saving.

Because there is no way in dog's green earth that Gran will ever be able to use encryption.

Gran's gone, unfortunately. But it only took about five minutes to set up my wife and daughter's systems to use crypto for our emails and texts. A couple of my friends were already there.

It's getting easier all the time to convince people to use crypto thanks to what we're learning in the news practically every day. And GPG was already pretty easy to set up.

What he needs is open interface specifications to the hardware.

That. Absolutely.

Shuttleworth may be slightly off the mark, but his dislike for proprietary firmware is worth supporting, given what we're learning daily about what people who mean us no good are doing with our consumer electronics.

Sometime you have to tear things down and start all over in order to rebuild something better.