Many here have said that she was suing just to get money, and that is likely true.

However, as a woman in tech I can tell you that even though this lawsuit might have been a scam, it doesn't mean that there is no discrimination out there.

There's a lot of comments here saying that the pay gap is only due to women going out of the workforce during their child-bearing years. It is not just that. Sure, women that go on maternity leave may "lose time" and thus be paid less than their colleagues that didn't, but that's not the only reason. Men are promoted on expectations, whereas women are promoted on acomplishments. This means that a woman needs to go do more and prove herself more than a man in order to get the same promotion.

Several studies have shown that when faced with the SAME RESUME changing the name from a female to a male one will raise the intended salary. When faced with the same performance review, changing the name to male will raise the overall score and the monetary bonus. The gender of the person selecting the salary or bonus is irrelevant, women and men equally discriminate against women.

Some comments mentioned women not studying CS because they weren't interested or similar stuff. Sure, some women might not be interested. But a lot of women leave the tech industry every year, at all the stages (students, graduates, employees, managers, etc) due to the constant pressure to prove that they actually belong there. It's in the small stuff that accumulates over time, like a female conference attendee (or even speaker) being taken to be someone's girlfriend, a female programmer getting handed all the admin work for the team, a female engineer being told that she would understand a certain solution to a problem because it's too complex. It's in larger things like a new hire being told by her peers that she only got hired because she's a woman, in promotion processes that require assertiveness (a trait that most women find hard) even though the job itself doesn't call for that, and a culture that values hours in front of the monitor over actual results (in general, women value their free time more, and they will work harder in order to leave early, but this is not something the tech industry in general appreciates).

And all of this is without mentioning harassment. There's a lot of harassment towards women in the tech industry. And not only sexual harassment (of which there is plenty and hopefully you don't need examples of this), there's also plain anti-women harassment, i.e. people telling it to your face that you are not good enough because you are a woman, managers refusing to give their female employees big projects because they don't believe them capable, thus making them unable to prove that they are... And to top it all there's the GamerGate.

Most women leave quietly, there's plenty of those. For the few that don't, there's thousands of male voices eager to shut them down, claiming over and over that they are exaggerating or directly lying, and then threatening to swat them, rape them, kill them... No wonder most choose the silent path.

So, please, even if we agree that this suit was absurd and just a grab to get money, do not take this to mean that there is no discrimination. There is. A lot of it. And the vast majority of those discriminated just take it silently because they know that it's the safest route. And it will still be until we as a society do something to change this.

Here's a video of the actual thing, not just an animation.

It's how the Internet works. To quote directly from the experts: A target's phone call, e-mail or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path.

Physical distance is not as important as congestion on the routes. So it might very well be that your data takes a much longer path that what you'd think, simply because it uses the fastest way, not the shortest.

Angela Merkel's approach is pretty idiotic, and it cannot fix the problems. First of all, most emails are routed through the US either because the sender or the recipient has an American email provider (Germans love Gmail, too). Secondly, even if that is not the case, can you be sure that the NSA doesn't spy on traffic in Frankfurt? It wouldn't surprise me.

Only true end-to-end encryption can be a solution. The government in Germany is currently pushing for DE-Mail, which relies on transport encryption only. So that means that your email provider can still snoop and so can the German government, which is probably the reason why they designed it like that in the first place. End-to-end encryption would have been possible, especially since the German government is spending much money rolling out their own PKI, with keys for every citizen right on their new national ID card.

There's a presentation about DE-Mail from last December's Chaos Communication Congress, it's worth watching (video also has an audio track with English translations).

Compare it to any violation of rights you wish. The GP's assertion that corporate profits trump rights is pants on head crazy.

Well, the money is flowing along that highway. Hope you are willing to financially wither for your unrealistic and unsustainable ideals.

You could have said the same thing about slavery, child labor, anything OSHA regulates, etc. What's good for corporations is not the same as what's good for people.

We would have LOVED to support the standard and commit code back, but the restrictions on our own code were unsustainable

In other words, your project could not be viable without oppressing your users. Sounds like good riddance.

While theoretically GPL could subsume BSD code produced from the collaboration

Yeah, ask Theo DeRaadt about that.

Today's anti-missile systems will be useful for many years to come.

Are today's anti-missile systems useful? Or are they just meant for posturing? I remember during the first Gulf War that not a single PATRIOT missile shot down a SCUD. Is there anything better today?

Slashdot has long been in decline anyway. They are taking the risk of driving everyone away, in the hopes of attracting a new audience. It won't work, but I can see how it is at least a rational attempt to recover some of their sunk costs.

if you think they're ticketing for something they *know* isn't a crime

Whether they know it or not is irrelevant. Every person falsely accused deserves compensation. If charges are dropped, dismissed, or you are acquitted, you deserve 100% of any costs you incurred because of the accusation.

This ruling won't stop cops from ticketing you, forcing you to leave work to appear in court, and paying the court costs after the ticket is dismissed. Cops can and do write invalid tickets simply to be dicks, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Our justice system needs to ensure that the victim of a false accusation of a crime is made whole again.

So, hook the nuclear power plant up to batteries, a flywheel, or pump some water uphill for hydroelectric when needed. Or shit, just provision for maximum capacity and release waste heat when it's not all needed. This is not a serious practical objection to nuclear power.