ta82828's comments

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 and women alike, "you guys" is an idiom independent in meaning from the word "guy", and is used as a gender neutral plural second person pronoun. If one is in the company of such speakers there is nothing wrong with using it.

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 about them.

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 sexist. The word is not "mankind" because only men count, the word is "mankind" because when it was made up "man" included all people.

That said, it's frustrating when perfectly good words like mankind are labelled as offensive because people either misunderstand their origins, ignore the intent with which they are used, or are simply looking for reasons to be offended.

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_news-life/t/univers...

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 was accused of harassment because the picture on the cover depicted: the KKK. That's just ridiculous.

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 three. OP presented only two, and one of them is a man who makes his point by conflating the singular and plural forms of "guys".

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 female person respectively (hence werewolf). The word mankind was in use in a gender neutral way concurrently with different terms that meant "group of male humans".

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mankind

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 meaning to the phrase, it would make me think the algorithm is either CPU intensive, or very fast.

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 asked to be helpful and start feeling like I'm being micromanaged and controlled by people who refuse to take into account the obvious intent of my words that the majority of listeners understand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You#Informal_plural_forms

  Informal plural forms
  Despite you being both singular and plural, some dialects 
  retain the distinction between a singular and plural you 
  with different words. Examples of such pronouns sometimes 
  seen and heard are:

     ...
  you guys – U.S.,[2] particularly in the Midwest, 
             Northeast, South Florida and West Coast; 
             Canada, Australia. Used regardless of the 
             genders of those referred to
     ...

(I live, work, and went to school in Northeastern U.S.)

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 the group. Guys is the plural of you in some dialects of English.

"Hot" has many many meanings other than "sexy". When not referring to a person's attractiveness, it means "popular, being paid a lot of attention to" or "high in temperature", or "fast" or "contains a lot of energy".

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/96791ee9-98d5-44a0-b0a9...

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 Rights, and Labor

* Naval Research Laboratory

   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 them down when they get too old to survive. They will either get sick, starve, or get eaten.

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 people can say, "oh he's a farmer, so he's not insane for having a gun" but the moment someone's not a farmer, they're suddenly unhinged or obsessed with violence, as opposed to perhaps, a target shooter or other kind of hobbyist. It's like they have this mental pattern "grandpa with a gun" where it's ok, and everything else just sets off alarm bells. It's odd, because it's usually liberals (in the US this is a liberal/conservative thing) that have more "openness to experience" but for some reason they are rarely open to the experience of growing up with guns, considering them dangerous but useful tools, using them for sport and hunting, and not being insane while doing so.

Weapons of war have historically become objects of sport: it happened with fencing and archery - firearms are no different.

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 "holding the project up" or would they be rightly demanding that the license under which they contributed code be honored?

Obviously the devil's in the details of the terms of the CLA. I had previously thought the purpose of the CLA was to allow the projects organizers to make copyright claims in court, not to allow them to re-license.

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