Hi, I'm the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I'd like to say I'm sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone's repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said "I would fork that guys repo" The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.

My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact.

I will be at pycon 2014, I will joke and socialize with everyone but I will also be mindful of my audience, accidental or otherwise.

Again, I apologize.

What just blows my mind, is that Adria keeps referring to this as an issue against females. The comment (as clarified by the terrible perpetrator elsewhere) was about a part of male physiology and not directed towards any person, male or female. She just keeps repeating how this is some sort of female issue. I frankly don't see the connection. I do see how some puritanical folks could be upset, because you know, sex is terrible. I could see how the humor is crass. Adria didn't rescue some poor downtrodden female in distress, she took a sexual innuendo that offended her and blew it up publicly.

She mentions a few times playing cards against humanity at Pycon. http://instagram.com/p/W3htw7gaR5/ I'm not sure how "mecha-hilter", "dead babies", "afterbirth", or "eating all of the cookies before the AIDS bakesale" are less offensive than "big dongles". I guess I have to trust her as a the "Joan of Arc" that she is.

I will be honest with you, she scares the crap out of me. Who's next? What's the next juvenile comment that ends someone's job with a publicly posted picture? I don't want to work with her - how do I know my picture won't end up on twitter with some "This guy was talking about mounting his scsi" caption.

This isn't activism, this is emotional terrorism.

As an aside, I feel like the women in tech might misunderstand a lot of us - which is nothing new, who DOES understand us. We didn't grow up the jocks, the cool kids, or the prom king. We larped. We played D&D. We played MUDs. We sat up late coding. We were the dorks. We got wedgies and swirlies. Our chocolate milk was constantly taken by bullies. We got knocked out cold in dodge ball. We were tread on for most of our lives. I think coming into the tech world with the attitude that men need to be stood up to and knocked down is just going to come across to many of us as the same bullying attitude we grew up with. I think if most women in tech sat down with just about any neckbeard I can think of, they would be amazed at how friendly and awesome we are. We are not "the man" you're trying to overcome. We're simply people, who program, and we are happy that other people are entering the field. And really, we don't want to be crass or offensive. We are actually well known for our extremely awkward social skills. Just pull us aside and ask us kindly not to do that - you'd be surprised how nice we want to be.

But what do I know, I'm no longer an engineer, I'm just a (male) housewife. My (female) partner is the software engineer.

(person I know) worked for GE (General Electric) on their industrial diamond production process back in the 90's, and I got to hear lots of fun stories from this.

Diamonds that are man-made[1] are stronger (fewer imperfections) than those that are mined from the earth. Because of this, industrial diamonds tend to be man-made. (for reference, industrial diamonds when cutting hard materials, such as metals).

While working on these diamonds, GE decided to start investigating making consumer level diamonds that could be sold for jewelry. They were able to produce diamonds that would have excelled when compared to natural diamonds (when it comes to the 4 Cs). One of the fun things was they could add various gases to the manufacturing process to create diamonds of various colors. There is still a decent cost associated with producing diamonds this way, so they probably would have still been expensive, but not at the levels that De Beers was charging at the time.

At this point GE started to look into what would happen if they would have actually gone down this line, selling consumer-level diamonds. After a little investigation, the GE lawyers and upper-management decided to kill off the idea as it would not have been worth the hassle. De Beers started a small campaign that was discrediting man-made diamonds, and it would have gotten a lot worse if GE even tried to enter the market. GE decided it was not worth the hassle, and killed the consumer-level diamond project.

De Beers has created an artificial market and they are doing what they can to prevent anyone else from entering their market. Most companies don't want to deal going up against them, so they just leave De Beers to run around gouging consumers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#High_pressure...

An open note to Nick's Employers -

1) If you are a technology company, this is Harakiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku). You are alienating every developer who is worth her salt. If you have a recruiting arm, and they are trying to recruit, god be with them. Ofcourse, you think people will never come to know, but this has the potential to be a good story and press will pick it up. I will not be surprised if Techcrunch or Wired Enterprise picks this up first.

2) Strategically, this is so uncool. You could have leveraged this open sourcing in several ways. Made the codebase part of your official Github ( ever heard of Bootstrap?) and drummed up participation. If THIS was the product, you could leverage the free PR to accelerate user-acquisition. Nick had some amazing documentation, and he even got SUCH a cool domain for you guys.

3) Eventually, you will lose Nick, who seems quite competent, who will move on to do better things under the umbrella of better employers.

Pretty lame, on several counts.

I really liked this bit from the decision:

> Third, Wiley and the dissent claim that a nongeographical interpretation will make it difficult, perhaps impossible, for publishers (and other copyright holders) to divide foreign and domestic markets. We concede that is so. A publisher may find it more difficult to charge different prices for the same book in different geographic markets. But we do not see how these facts help Wiley, for we can find no basic principle of copyright law that suggests that publishers are especially entitled to such rights.

FINALLY! Someone's finally seen what Robert Heinlein wrote in Life-Line and essentially just paraphrased it:

> There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.