Depending on the person I'm talking to, I have two approaches.
1. Do you trust the government that will be in place 20 years from now? Most of those people are now teenagers.
2. We don't know what law changes may happen in the future. The data gathered can make you look like someone who will break one of those laws. Ex post facto (protection for someone who broke a law before it was in effect) has been overturned by the Supreme Court in specific cases in the past.
Public health issues like vaccination aren't like other issues. Vaccination decisions aren't made in a bubble where only you suffer if you get sick or become a carrier.
There will always be a certain portion of the populace that cannot receive a specific vaccination because of allergies or a weakened immune system that cannot handle it.
The whooping cough epidemics that have been sweeping through anti-vaccination areas in recent years are an example of how a decision that you make for your kids can result in other people dying.
At any point before the firing, she had the power to put a halt to a lot of this. She could have gone on Twitter and her blog and posted, "I'm so sorry this has happened. The person in question has apologized. I would like to request that Play Haven rehire him, and institute a policy to avoid incidents like this in the future."
Everything so far has been about punishment/vindictiveness. Nobody is interested in trying to address the problem, move forward, and make the world a better place. I don't see how the outcome could have been worse. Everyone handled this badly except PyCon itself, yet PyCon is who will be remembered as the problem.
I love dasher. It was very helpful for me in writing emails when I was unable to use one hand. One handed keyboards were actually slower once I got used to both of them. It just doesn't work well for coding, but it's great for other English.
I've experienced something similar to what you describe.
There are times when I am new to a group, that I will be constantly told how very valuable to the group I am, how awesome I am, how happy they are to have me, etc; often before I've been in the office for an hour or written a line of code.
After this sort of thing, I tend to be suspicious of praise from that group of people. Do they actually mean it? Did they even look at my code?
I've heard from many women a concern that they haven't worked on any "real" projects. They might be a college grad who did a very complex senior project, they might have built websites for a volunteer organization, there was even one that had been on a team which developed an app for a contest. They seem to think that unless they've been paid to code, the work somehow doesn't count.
I'm one of the owners of this blog, and genuinely interested in your input on the font size. I don't have great vision, and tend to browse everything at 110-120%, depending on the site. Is your complaint the specific pixel size, or do you think we should have used a different measurement?
As for the developer argument, the problem is that there is no hard line. How big of a project must one complete before they're a developer? You said even a small one, but Hello World is a small "project" and certainly isn't enough.
I completely agree that there is a difference between learning to code and calling yourself a developer. One problem here is that the industry uses developer, coder, and programmer interchangeably, although programmer seems to be currently falling out of favor. (I was once at a party where someone thought that I meant I was a "party programmer" or something.) Obviously they don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of like arguing over the difference between a geek and a nerd at this point.
It is absolutely not too sensitive of an issue to discuss openly. If we can't talk about it, it just festers and creates anger.
The problem with this kind of thing is the the people that got in solely on merit assume that people who fit into any of those categories got in without having any merit. This is rarely true except in the case where it is extremely difficult to find that particular set of things.
When that assumption is there, people are treated differently. It's often not even on a conscious level. It's going over to help the new female that showed up at a meetup assuming she needs help getting started with Python - while ignoring the 5 new males that came in before her. It's assuming that the black woman over there got her job because who ever heard of a black coder? She probably sucks at it.
Discussing it is different than dismissing someone's accomplishments because they appear to be privileged.
I think the majority of people are not against women in tech.
Most of the issues are fairly unconscious bias. Some people just assume women aren't as good at tech jobs as men are. Some people assume pretty women are stupid. Some people are simply uncomfortable around women, so don't put themselves into a position where they will be around them.
Issues with actually getting women into tech jobs range from their manner of speech (for example, raising their voices at the end of sentences) to being overly modest about their job skills.
Google has been doing a bunch of research on this lately.