Viewing profile — ta82828

Human languages don't work like programming languages, you can't always derive the meaning of a phrase from its parts. There are large groups of English speakers among whom, men an…

So if your neighbor is offended that you wear blue shirts and insists that you should wear green shirts, will you change your behavior? After all, they are offended and you care ab…

If you think "werewolf" is sexist, I would recommend "lycanthrope" as an alternative, rather than "manwolf". I did not say "mankind is fine" I said that it's etymology is not sexis…

Automatically changing your behavior every time someone is offended is not rational. Sometimes people are unreasonable in taking offense: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25680655/ns/us_n…

Well, it's judgement call, but offense alone is not enough to change behavior IMO. There was a case where a person reading a history book about the KKK in the presence of blacks wa…

Well, OP is implying that a single woman finding something sexist or offensive makes it so. I've presented two counterexamples upthread and grandparent here presented one, that's t…

The etymology of the word "mankind" is not as sexist as most people think. The word "man" used to mean "person" and the words "wereman" and "wyfman" used to mean male person and fe…

I've never actually heard an algorithm called hot. If I did, my first instinct would probably be confusion, not that the algorithm is "sexy, sleek, or elegant". If I had to put a m…

I will accept many corrections for the benefit of diversity, but when even the majority of the disadvantaged group uses the word in a non-hostile way, I stop feeling like I'm being…

People do it because it's shorter and more colorful. Count the syllables in your suggestions.

I am male. When I was in school I was on a project with two women. I asked them if the term "guys" bothered them. They both said no. I even used it when there were only women in th…

I've read that the primary motivation is to allow intelligence assets in other countries to communicate with the agencies they work for. https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/96791e…

Tor is funded at least partly by the U.S. government. https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en See: * Radio Free Asia * US Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human R…

it wasn't so easy I think you meant "it wasn't so hard"

Is "they're tasty" a valid justification? Perhaps you're a vegetarian, but if you aren't there's a logical inconsistency there. If you are, kudos for walking the walk.

Would it help if someone pointed out that wild animals will eventually die in pain whether hunters shoot them or not? There are no vets in the wild to give them morphine to put the…

Maybe it's not a basic phobia, but the grandparent poster implied that anyone who likes target shooting and owns guns for that purpose is "odd/unhinged". I don't understand why peo…

It's supposed to be for code snippets. But yes, I always manually add the line breaks when quoting text. It's annoying and it would be nice if there were a real quote feature.

A contributor can have legitimate reasons for not wanting their code re-licensed. For example, the Linux kernel deliberately did not move to GPLv3. Would such a contributor be "hol…

They're a government service, and are not - theoretically - supposed to charge market rates.

Well the article disagrees with that claim, "Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is t…

The article is about state schools though.