ManFromUranus

>I had previously thought that maybe hunter gatherers practiced polygamy but it faded away as we become more agricultural.

I would have thought otherwise, there is very little incentive for you to labour for the tribe if you have no skin in the game, so to speak. So they would give you a wife otherwise, why fight for them? Why hunt? Why do anything to benefit anyone other than yourself? Since you have nothing to lose, you can even steal from them since no one you care about suffers.

Fortran is not used at most businesses. I doubt Fortran is used much anywhere outside of possibly engineering. Even then Engineers probably use some type of AutoCad like software that does modelling, and therefore nobody needs to know FOrtran anyway.

>The price of the privilege and prestige of being a member of the oppressive majority

I disagree with this assertion that I belong to an oppressive majority, or that the majority is oppressive.

>Sure it's inconvenient, but politeness doesn't cost much effort. Eggshells is a good way of putting it.

Tolerance goes both ways. Why should 100 people modify their behaviour so that 1 person doesn't get offended, when 1 person could modify simply raise their threshold for offence, and save a 100 people a lot of hassle.

>If you or anyone you see steps over the line

There is no way to know what or where the line is. The line is totally subjective and unique to each individual. So it would simply be easier and less risky (remaining employed wise) to avoid interacting with the person than spend the time to learn how to avoid triggering their offence reaction. I guarantee the path of least resistance is the one that will be followed.

Well for starters, COBOL and FORTRAN are effectively ancient technologies are far as much of modern business programming is concerned. I would omit them from your resume. State them for interest sake only.

Also they are not a charity organization, the business goal is to get value out of you. Perhaps you did not demonstrate sufficient value, or seemed out of touch with current technology. I have found that programmers are a fairly meritocratic group of people, but you do have to stay up to date with tech, and that is a battle that gets harder and harder as you age.

>and forcing them to choose between having a family or a successful career

This is not true. There are always trade-offs in life, even for men. Almost everything has an opportunity cost. You focus on your family the career suffers, focus on your career family suffers. The same is true of men except they don't have a biological clock.

>Add on top of this any sort of general sexist behavior that is rampant in offices like unwanted advances, inappropriate touching, etc.

I hear this, but have honestly only ever been present for a single awkward comment in my 10+ year career. I think "unwanted advances" is going to be a continual problem because most of the guys in tech are socially awkward, unnattractive nerds, so any advance they make is going to be by definition, unwanted. However these guys have no way of knowing that before-hand, unless they make "nobody wants me" their default assumption.

>they face all sorts of discrimination and sexism that men don't even realize they're doing

this is what bothers me the most, there is no concept of "mens rea" in issues of discrimination, you are guilty even if you try not to be. People choose to be offended or not, that's a voluntary choice. So if your SO is offended by people who have no intention to commit offence or cause harm, then what can I say? What can they do? Everybody will have to walk on eggshells around your SO so they don't offend her I guess. Doesn't sound like the problem is with "tech" to be honest.

Why don't men want to be elementary school teachers? Well nobody really cares that much why, but they definitely don't. I think they don't because it's a low-pay, low-respect job and there's a risk of being called a pedophile.

Why don't women want to be in tech? Full of nerds, full of people they don't really want to be around. Hard work, the pay is getting lower every day, have to compete with low wage offshore workers. There are lots of men with no social skills in tech. Women can probably earn more money outside of tech, and have more networking and social outlets in non-tech jobs.

I think that's the easy answer.

"but it was pretty obvious I was too old to work there"

Who said that? Did they say that to you? If they did that was definitely wrong. However it sounds more like you imposed that criteria on yourself, and then attribute the blame to them.

If gender diversity in tech is a good thing, why not age diversity? Sounds like they needed you there.

This is the sort of trite, self congratulatory "socially conscious" type of comment that is appearing all over the place. What does it have to do with Sony getting hacked? Nothing really. It does reveal the personal sentiments of the author somewhat, and also your own. Did the comment help anybody? I doubt it. Other than stoking resentment what possible purpose could stating that the executives were "overwhelmingly white males" possibly have?

This probably has more to do with undermining WP (which is competing with android in the low end phone market) than anything to do with browser support. They would block iOS too if they could, but they can't so that's why safari is 'supported'.

number 2 has an extra .99 percent, so I guess in point 2, only 0.01 percent of people will have it (whatever IT is), vs 1 percent of people having the thing in point 1.

There are windows design guidelines, most developers/ISV's adhere to them.

Another point: many companies don't want to spend any time or effort on design, as for most applications, it won't translate into additional revenue. I would argue that many customers don't even care what the app looks like so long as it works and they can figure out how to use it.

Also you don't want to have to re-learn how to computer for every single application you open because somebody got bored with the current state of design for a network traffic monitoring tool.

What about roman concrete, I heard they also had the steam engine, but steam technology was regarded as useless because of the abundance of slaves.

Wikipedia seems to indicate that they were responsible for a number of technological advancements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_technology

It's pointless to create more jobs by lowering the minimum wage (or eliminating it) if no one could possibly live off of the wages of the jobs this created. So the answer is to only have jobs that could support someone without government having to feed them (minimum wage), this in my mind eliminates jobs that really shouldn't exist, and stops employers from having government subsidize their workers.

He's just "invented" live tiles for iOS. T

I agree, his whole iOS blocks, is simply windows live tiles.

You made them feel stupid, so they made you feel unemployed. Do not criticize management openly in front of others, this was your mistake. I've also made this mistake, I was right, I was also ended up unemployed. You were right about everything you said, but it's probably small consolation. It may even have been illegal to fire you, however how likely is it that somebody who makes $8 an hour can afford a lawyer to right that wrong? You can go to some kind of labour dept lawyer and make a case for wrongful dismissal, but the bureaucracy behind such organizations is slow, by the time they act (if they ever do) you will be long past caring.

All MS platforms yes, why would MS care about OSX or Linux.

Why would they want to help you provide content for Android?

>Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation

Fix what? What are they "fixing"? They seem to be fixing the problem of people being able to do better than default. Exiting times we live in...

Your analogy is flawed because in this case nobody purchased or requested anything. If your analogy was accurate it would be better stated:

If I go into your garage and take your snowblower, and rent it out while you're not using it, without asking you, or giving you any money, how is that stealing?

I think HN, much like Slashdot, loves to hate on MS.

All you have to do is ask yourself, if you were getting this basic sum, would you be content to do nothing? The answer is probably no. I would do something, some kind of job, as would many people. If only for their sense of self worth / self esteem. I believe that almost everyone would get a job even though a basic income means they don't have to. Also keep in mind, that no matter what you do, there will ALWAYS be people who refuse to work. You could make unemployment punishable by death, you still wouldn't be able to force those people who don't want to work to do something. That's just the way it is. So the only thing you can really do is pay them to stay out of the way and not cause any problems. This is cheaper than buying a gun and being eternally vigilant, or paying for security measures.

Severe disincentives to crime aren't as useful as you think, because those committing the crimes do so because they don't think they will be caught. Look at some of the absolutely medieval penalties they have in the middle east for various crimes, and yet they still have criminals.