And become a pariah amongst the directors?

Without explicit legislation to make it clear to employers I don't really see how a more general law on discrimination, that is never actually used to protect males in the UK is going to do anything to change societal attitudes. Certainly I've seen companies change their behaviour in general and allow casual dress all around, but I've never seen a company do it on the basis of discrimination law, nor am I necessarily even sure they would win the case. Is it discrimination? sure, but how many successful discrimination cases have there been about males being discriminated against over females? Fathers for justice would've been out of business years ago if the general discrimination laws actually protected males in this manner in practice, they really don't, nor do they seem intended to given the lack of will to make sure that they do.

"Having said that I find that they are generally well balanced and fair in my country, and apply equally to both genders. I have benefited from them, and I'm male (e.g. I now get the same relaxed dress code as women do)."

I thought you lived in the UK too? I've certainly seen no such benefit from law changes. Many of us males still have to wear shirts and suit trousers and often a tie at minimum, whilst women come in wearing whatever they really want to wear as long as it isn't casual to the point of ripped jeans or whatever.

I suspect if you've seen benefit in being able to dress down it's just a company policy. I've not seen any evidence of legally enforced change on that front.

Not at the time I posted they weren't. The rebels were still delaying and stalling.

Nonsense, you're just a classic case of "I never really bothered to learn a proper agile process, I just guessed a bit at it and went on a bit of hearsay and it all went wrong".

Agile has it's place, and it can drastically improve some forms of development. I don't think any Agile processes declare that you should just start writing code without any idea of what you're writing. SCRUM for example encourages use of a feature list known as the product backlog (i.e. list of things we'd like to do) which you then work through in two week sprints. You can setup a burn down chart where you log each item as it's ticked off and build a chart from it that predicts the finish time of the project based on what's remaining in the current backlog.

This means that when someone comes along and says "I want to add this feature in" they can do exactly that, but the point the burn down chart intersects with "features remaining" extends off into the future a bit further so that they have instant rough visibility of the impact of their request to change.

Your understanding of Agile is exactly backwards, it doesn't make things worse, it makes things better by aiding visibility of impact of change and by allowing you to keep control of costs - if that chart looks like it's tending off too far into the future, you can just cut the project short and accept that the lowest priority features will be axed as a result but that at least there will be no cost overrun.

You shouldn't really be re-writing anything much if you develop code competently in a modular manner, but if you do, at least the person demanding the re-write gets to see what other features will be cut, or how much more time and cost there will be from their actions when you use something like SCRUM.

Am I saying Agile is the be all and end all saviour? Not at all, I think SCRUM works poorly for smaller scale projects - a SCRUM team should supposedly be between 5 and 9 people whereas an awful lot of the world's software is still built with only say 1 to 3 developers. I also think most Agile zealots themselves have no idea what they're doing but are mostly just blaggers screaming "Hey, let's all be a bunch of cool hipsters and have stand up meetings randomly and not getting anything actually useful done just because!" but that doesn't mean it's an inherently bad tool overall and if used properly. There are still a lot of large successful businesses and software houses that do quietly just get on with using it properly for what it's worth and who are better off for it.

Agile's biggest problem is this assumption that it's a thing you can just start doing with no understanding or training, that's completely nonsense. Like everything else it's a change that has to be phased in a sensible manner by people who actually understand it. Too many people just try and implement it with about as much clue about it as you've shown just so they too can feel cool by jumping on the bandwagon and say they use Agile and then it fails spectacularly as a result but doing it this way is a bit like sticking someone with zero fighter experience into a fighter jet and watching them brag about how they're going to do a "4g inverted dive with another aircraft" because they saw Tom Cruise do it on TopGun and think they want to be cool like him. It isn't going to end well, it's going to fail spectacularly, though just like Tom Cruise, they will if nothing else be an absolute twat.

Don't really agree, I often use the same languages at home as work and I prefer it that way because I'm more productive due to being intimately familiar with the technologies in question.

Most the work I've done in the last year has been C#, and I've been using it at home also. I'm much better off working like this than using say C++ for game development in my spare time because I can simply get more done. As an indie I'm not writing the latest and greatest FPS so C# with things like Unity, MonoGame and so forth are more than adequate for what I need and also the best option because there's nothing that'll get me up and doing what I want to do any faster. Sure I could use Java and OpenGL, or C++ and OpenGL or DirectX but I want to actually write games, not write engines.

I don't see what using a different language would get me, other than less productivity. I simply use the right tool for the job and if the job is getting game development done then why wouldn't I use the same language as at work?

It seems pointless to artificially cripple yourself by excluding a potentially superior tool for the task at hand just because it's also what you use at work.

I don't really know what you mean by "more easily separate them", I find it easy to know when I'm sat at home rather than in the office, and I find it easy to tell that I'm doing game development rather than business development so I don't see what difference a language change would possibly make. But then, I'm also not sure what you mean by "can the language hate, it's fine for small projects". It's also fine for extremely large projects, so I don't really know where you're coming from there.

But perhaps I've been developing long enough and have used enough different languages over the years (C, C++, Java, C#, PHP, and Javascript for example) that simply using a different language for the sake of it isn't really something that particularly excites me anymore. I just want to get things done using the best option possible after weighing up all the options available, and if that's the same as the language I'm currently using at work then so be it, and so what? The only reason I'd switch language is because it's either a better option, or because my goal is explicitly to learn or brush up on that language.

To me the language is a triviality, it's such an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, it's the design, the problem solving, and the end product that make the difference that keeps me interested in my spare time, I couldn't care less what it is written in, the language is just a small implementation detail, an important initial thing to decide upon, but small in practice once the decision is made. Getting caught up on language and library details is the antithesis of being a productive programmer - you shouldn't be thinking about the language or the libraries at all, the language should just flow from your fingers naturally without thought. It's the problem solving that should be taking up all of your thoughts so I'd wager if you're getting caught up on language details to even notice that you're using the same language as at work or not and that that in some way frustrates you then you may well lack familiarity with the language, its tools, and its libraries more so than you're willing to accept. Switching to something different again will only prolong the time with which it takes you to acquire that necessary familiarity to be productive.

However you may and wish to try and twist the argument to cover up your misunderstanding that's still not what is deemed in law to be criminal infringement because it's still not commercial activity.

You may dislike the word profit but that's generally the key factor, the only exceptions are if you're say doing it to encourage your business to grow in other areas - i.e. you can have this "free" illegal copy if you buy something else from us.

Using BitTorrent in a personal capacity is by definition not a commercial activity.

What laws are broken exactly? I used to work in schools, granted it was some years back now but there was never any such law that said you had to keep children safe, mostly it was just parents/teachers who had no idea what they were doing or how well these things work.

A friend who is still currently a teacher also tells me he's not aware of any laws mandating filters at schools and in fact the advice he's been given by his local teaching advisory service is to start focussing more on educating kids precisely because the feedback from teachers has been that the filters are ineffective.

Just because we got by without computers before Google images doesn't mean that's okay. We also got by without fire, and medicine but it doesn't change the fact we're better off with these things. It's called human advancement. It's kind of a big deal, especially in education.

Source?

What'd be interesting therefore is to know how many of the few percent who opted in later opted out after finding what a nuisance it was. These figures only refer to those who initially opted in and say nothing about whether they stuck with it.

Number of people continuing to use it will likely be even lower again.

No, but the first one will turn out to be a cheap knockoff with out of date hardware that only gets a tenth of the advertised resolution and fails to work when it's cloudy outside.

Also the user manual will be so bad, they won't figure out how to use it until 2045.

Pretty much, yeah. Though I don't actually get to grow a beard unless I'm either on leave or deployed overseas, so I guess you got me there.

Of course, if you had a functional sense of humour you would have realized that my "manliness" comment was tongue-in-cheek. The fact that I do cut down trees with an axe and light them up with a blowtorch is just an amusing coincidence.

Sure, just go ahead and deny my experiences. Next you'll try to tell me that I deserved it because I was wearing a kilt. Victim blaming is always popular, especially when the victim is male.

I've never denied the evidence. You may have me confused with a strawman you constructed. If you're going to argue with him, why address your response to me?

Assuming a completely unwilling and unaroused victim, yes, I very much suspect it would be. However, feminists and victim-advocacy groups have spent the last couple decades telling us that "rape is rape" and that they're all equally bad, so it would be a bit hypocritical for them to now start screaming "BUT WE HAVE IT WORSE!".

Very true. So when that happens to me, is that because of the matriarchy trying to keep my manliness in check?

Because that's what we do when people are wrong?

I've noticed when people bring up the idea that the holocaust never happened, they get 100% complete denial and blame the messenger. Hrm ... I wonder why.

Nobody is denying that the problem exists. That's the kind of absurd strawman that always ends up derailing these discussions. What people are telling you is that:

1. Everyone gets harassed at some point. You don't see me going around talking about what an unsafe environment comicon is just because some chick grabbed my ass.
2. Problems caused by a small subset of individuals should be dealt with INDIVIDUALLY, rather than by writing long-winded articles about how the whole system is horrible. Only an idiot attacks an entire community over the actions of a few individuals. We usually call that "bigotry".

Because it's insignificant. I've caught more flack for having a slow connection than most women catch for being women. I've seen far more men bending over backwards to help "women in tech" than I've seen trying to tear them down. Men tend to be far more cruel and destructive towards each other than they do with women. If harassment in the tech community is a problem then it's a problem for everyone, and it's absolutely ridiculous to single out women as being some special class of victim.

That's feminism for you in a nutshell. The "skepchick" website rose to fame in no small part thanks to putting out a (artistic-ish) nude calendar of their members, and encouraging male adoration. Then once they had enough of a following, they decided it was now misogynistic for men to comment on their appearance or think of them in a sexual way. Lots of women have gained prominence by using their sexuality to their advantage, only to later go on long-winded rants about how nobody should be "objectifying" them.

Oh, geeze, don't let a feminist hear you say that! Every time someone suggests women maybe aren't suitable to being firefighters or combat soldiers, the wymins go apeshit.

According to the newest stats, not really that much more often than men are abused or raped by women. Domestic violence cases split almost 50/50. Sexual violence victims are still mostly women, but men come in very close behind now that we've stopped defining "rape" in a way that makes it impossible for women to be rapists.

And men being abused by men ... holy shit. If we took your approach, every man in the world should be "more sensitive to the imiplicit or explicit threats of violence", to the point where we'd pee our pants as soon as another man looked at us funny.

Difference is, men don't try to justify freaking out and overreacting by pointing to statistics. And neither do most women, for that matter; the ones who do are just a very loud minority.