cygnus

Every state or social group has its shibboleths - the American one is just to performatively pretend they don't have any.

I hate that they get to label this a "hack". It was sheer negligence - they stored these images in an unsecured bucket.

HP is probably the worst offender in this regard - their website is almost unusable. Lenovo is a close second, and I say this as a compulsive ThinkPad buyer.

Edit: I think a lot of commenters here aren't reading the article. This isn't about your favourite laptop, it's about why manufacturer websites suck.

Oh wow, thanks for the recommendation. This looks perfect.

Thanks for taking the time to explain - that does make a lot of sense, if you coisider being trans or gay a learned/chosen behaviour. That hadn't crossed my mind, which is why the premise seemed impossible to me. The difference, of course, between being gay and being a gambler is that nobody is born a gambler, therefore the comparison doesn't really hold up. That's why I used the creationism example: Carbon-14 is what it is. LGBT people are who they are. They didn't choose to be that way any more that C-14 chose its decay rate. I suppose that doesn't matter all that much in practice - if more people thought like you rather than being homo- or transphobic, the world would undoubtedly be a better place than it is.

I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan

I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice

I applaud you for supporting same-sex marriage, but - apologies if this sounds like I'm picking on you, I'm really not - this is like someone who claims to be a young-earth creationist but agrees that radiocarbon dating is accurate. I don't understand how these mutually-exclusive thoughts can happily coexist in your mind. I wish we could discuss this over a drink because I'm very intrigued by whatever epistemic process led you there.

he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible,

but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla

How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? "I respect you so much I'll pass a law to make you illegal"?

Not really. Mandarin for example has different characters for "he" and "she", but they are homophones ("ta", or "tamen" plural) so you can't tell who's who in spoken language. Hungarian doesn't use gendered pronouns and Finnish doesn't either (actually, now that I think of it, that may be where you borrowed yours - isn't it "hen" too?)

Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the "political" reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don't like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he's a bit like Brendan Eich. I'll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

Interesting, thanks for the correction! I thought it was a medieval form that stuck around.

Masculine being the default was the case for English (and French) too, but not anymore, and certainly not by implying anything other than the masculine is "political".

I’m hoping it’s a cultural misunderstanding due to his Swedish background.

Jag pratar inte Svenska but I know enough that it has gendered pronouns just like English. Actually, it's better than English in that it preserved the neuter singular pronoun (which used to be "thou" in English) so there's even less excuse in terms of linguistic background.