FlemishBeeCycle

Exactly. Being offended in and of itself is worthless (I'm sure we can find that Stephen Fry quote somewhere in this thread), it is not a motivator for a behavioral change, at least for me, unless I care about the person being offended.

When I do offend people, I often like to probe as to _why_ they're offended. In my experience, most people seem to be incapable of defining any concrete reasons as to why a given statement is offensive other than circular, "it's offensive because it's offensive" reasoning.

You're placing entirely too much importance on particular categorizations, "comfort" has much more to do with "what you're used to", than the idea that people are constantly fretting about how population densities in their environment match up to their own self-identification.

As a bi-racial male of the darker persuasion (which in America is basically "not-white"), I find myself much more comfortable around predominantly "white" groups because that has been the most common environment for myself throughout my life.

Why do you believe the github style guide to be the authoritative source for JavaScript style? There is no benefit for avoiding use of semicolons other than not writing semicolons, whereas there are several detriments for their omission.

> It gives Twitter, or whatever other start up, an opportunity to replace an outdated piece of software by a nut case!

I don't know where this ad-hominem is coming from, but Douglas Crockford is hardly a nutcase.

My guess is that rather than give an exhaustive list, the author wanted to give an example of a familiar language _without_ static typing. As Haxe is more similar to ECMAScript than Python, Ruby, Lua etc. - it's the most appropriate comparison.

As a person who likes (the good parts of) JavaScript, I read it as trying to appeal to me with promises of less debug time.

While I disproportionally use Ruby and JavaScript on a daily basis, this statement is referring to a specific type of (common) error, which is largely alleviated by the use of static typing, and therefore not exactly untrue.

I didn't take it as a disparaging of dynamic typing.

That's been one of my concerns, the best way to circumvent that issue is to do something like the following:

   <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
   <script>window.jQuery || document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/path/to/jquery.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script>

This way it will fallback to a local copy if Google's goes down.

[Edit: simonsarris replied with something similar as I was replying, however, the advantage of using unescape is that you don't get invalid markup warnings]

And what if you both sit in a life drawing class drawing the same model? What if for some odd reason you decide to sit behind one of the participants and draw a portrait based off their drawing?

I certainly understand what you're getting at, but everything that we do today is based off of some idea that came before us. Is a certain level of indirection required for an expression to be considered appropriately unique?

From the article, "..there is a line between copying ideas and copying the original expression of ideas...", I would consider that opinion to be both myopic and absurd. We stand on the shoulders of giants - nothing created today can ever be considered to be truly "original".

As individuals, we don't act the same way around our peers, our friends or our family. While we certainly present ourselves differently in different contexts, I wouldn't call these different "identities", rather the same identity applying the rules of the given context to their behavior.

Where it becomes tricky is when one is strips away the context isolation. For example, at your friend's bachelor party, some behavior might perfectly normative within context and participants, but the next day when people outside of that context can watch a video of your behavior - you might feel a little shame/embarrassment/regret/etc.

The internet, for better or worse, allows a complete breakdown of context isolation. While the rules of posting on 4chan or HN greatly differ, a person adhering to rules of a given context, will still be judged across both contexts by outside viewers.

The solution here is to create context isolation - which is very easy to do with anonymity.

Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50 proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to men) lest they be labeled sexist?

Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the "old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular modern idea is just one more).

But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of "man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.

I understand your position, and perhaps I should have better clarified my own. I did not mean to imply that photography was not a technical or creative field, rather by "mechanical process", I meant the physical act of creation.

I put a brush to canvas, or a pencil to paper. My gestures are effected by micro muscle movements, the interplay between the grain of the canvas and the camelhair in my brush, the way I personally perceive my subject. No two lines drawn by my hand, no two drops of ink flecked from my pen will ever be the same. My emotional state at the time will felt in my brush strokes.

All your points I agree with, but ultimately photography (by its process) has less potential for a physically variable and personal experience (for example the connectedness that a sculptor feels with the work physically formed by their hands) specifically in the dimension that I am talking about.

Also, your points on composition (perspective, framing,focus,exposure) are present in other visual mediums (although focus and exposure aren't generally terms that I hear a lot of painters use, it's still there), and arguably more under your creative control.

Finally, with photography you are limited to that which exists already in this world (once you start getting heavily into post-processing, it's hard to call keep calling it "photography").

> Merely reproducing something is not art, it's direct reproduction. Introducing unique style would be art.

One could then argue that photographs are merely reproduction of reality, and therefore not art. I fail to see why you think photographs introduce unique style but pixel art does not.

> The photo in question was beautifully captured, and the flippant way it's being treated is rather sad.

I apologize for suggesting that you dislike pixel art, but that's how I this sentence reads to me.