"Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.

It's certainly true that my not-far-post-1984 CS degree was focused pretty much on computing itself; computer architecture, automata, algorithmic complexity, database internals. Not so much on applications; the article suggests that pre-1984 there was more focus on what you can do with computers. I'm not so sure this particular explanation holds up, because the drop in women in CS is mirrored by a drop in women in business computing, which by definition remained focused on applications.

To throw out my own hypothesis, the PC revolution also caused a huge increase in the number of prospective majors in the field. Overwhelmed departments responded with "weed-out" classes and restrictive admissions policies; this may have had a disparate impact on women.

It's certainly true that the first drop in female enrollment happened shortly after the PC came on the scene (the second drop happened after the dot-com crash). I'm not sure that's sufficient evidence to blame the PC (my post title is a formal fallacy, after all), but at least it has better support than the prevalent "smelly misogynistic nerd" theory.

The industry won't cater to female gamers until there's a value parity between different demographics.

On the contrary, the industry already is catering to female 'gamers'. It's just that the industry isn't going to stop catering to male 'gamers' as well. And the industry (or industries), unlike the summary writer and some of the more disingenuous commenters, realize that despite that both consist of people who play video games, there are significant differences between the markets.

Most of these women (who play a bit of casual games) don't even WANT to be called gamers, so I don't understand the push to call them so.

It's just an oblique attack on men. They would like game companies to not only stop catering to teenage boys, but to actively exclude them in favor of catering to women. Of course, the game companies are not that stupid and realize that equivocating over the term "gamer" isn't going to change a thing.

Import talent from abroad? Yes, it definitely works. You only need someplace to dump stupid americans into, to make room for the talented immigrants.

So where are the Einsteins, Fermis, and Von Brauns of today?

I think you're right. Being smart isn't a liability. It's an extreme advantage. Being an arrogant prick is a liability because you aren't stronger or more powerful than those around you. But as you said, if you were smart you'd figure that out.

That's odd, because I see a lot of successful arrogant pricks who aren't particularly bright; in fact, it appears to me that being an arrogant prick is more likely to lead to success than intelligence.

The cops just didn't know that dinosaurs were extinct. Now, if he'd written that he killed an honest cop, they'd have known it was fiction.

...That said Microsoft would have to get the clue that developers have zero interest in Metro/Modern/Whatever apps, the environment is so limited that porting a Win32 app is basically as much work as porting a Win32 app to Android (esp. with stuff like Xarmarin, Qt, and other great cross platform libraries available to help) and nobody wants to pay MS 30% of their revenue and limit their distribution channel so strictly.

Sorry Microsoft management, I know leveraging market position in your core product line to push yourself in to a new market is one of the oldest tricks in your book. In this case, its trying to use regular Windows to push developers in to building software that is compatible with WinPhone so you have the catalog of 3rd party software needed to make WinPhone successful. Thing is in order for it to work this time Windows on tablets would need to be the universally preferred tablet OS. 10 years ago legacy Win32 compatibility would have been all you needed to be the preferred tablet OS, but since you gave the competition 3-4 years to build up a nice back-catalog of touch friendly 3rd party software Windows is NOT the preferred tablet OS, Android and iOS are.

You have nobody to blame except yourselves for giving your competitors that much time (well, maybe your former now retired CEO.) At this point just take a page from your buddies over at Intel, they made it so installing any arbitrary .apk on a x86 Android device just works (even if it has ARM native code.) And look, consumers are buying x86 Android tablets without a second thought since everything just works, hell a lot of the time an x86 Android tablet isn't even labelled Intel vs. ARM its so seamless. Make it so you can install Android .apks on Win8/RT/Phone, that will give you access to the software catalog you need to break in to the market. It would be even better if you could work about a deal to get Google Play on Windows... but I doubt Google will want to "play" with you at all :) The preferred route of making everyone else bend and do things your way its pretty much a non-starter at this point because you waited so long.

This would be a much more interesting technology for Windows RT as it would make those devices actually semi useful if the Windows back catalog was available on them.

Get your own training. If I have to train you to do your job properly, I damn well don't want you.

If I wanted to run a training program, I'd open my own version of DeVry University or University of Phoenix. I am in business to do what my business does, and as we are not a vocational education institution, get your freaking vocational education somewhere else.

What you say is partially true.

Companies are not interested in making over someone who isn't a good employee into one. It's the same reason you don't buy burnt out light bulbs, and remanufacture them into working light bulbs yourself, when there are perfectly good light bulbs sitting on the next shelf.

The idea that companies should provide vocational training to potential employees because the educational system has failed to provide them with the ability to be an asset to a potential employer is wrong headed. It is not the responsibility of the employer to make a person employable, it is the responsibility of the person to make themselves employable.

IF we were talking about blue collar manufacturing jobs, or sales/cashier/hamburger jobs, then yeah, apprenticeships and on the job training make sense; in technical areas, it doesn't make sense, any more than it would ti hire someone at a hospital, and on-the-job train them until they were a doctor.

Just because cancer has been around for a very long time, should not make us defeatists.. I spent 5 years working on DNA sequencers and cancer cell sorting robots, and still consider biology to be hundreds of years behind other branches of science because we have not, until very recently had the tools to study the differences between cancer and normal cells at the DNA level. The Illumina machine can images two flow cells at once -- one for cancer, and one for normal cells. We can now study what happened to make the DNA replication fail and mutate, etc. Apparently it's now possible to do this for $1000.. The human genome project originally cost about 2 billion dollars.. The reduction in infrastructure and cost has been extraordinary.

We can now better identify specific cancers to take out some of the guesswork. In the journal Nature a few years ago , doctors used a DNA sequencer to identify a misdiagnosed cancer (muscle cancer in his lung, producing large tumors) who had only weeks to live, and brought him back from the brink with the right treatment. We've spend the last 40 years developing specific cures, and it was only just guess work to decide what actual cancer a patient had.. This was circa 2007-8..

One thing that really encouraged me a few years ago was a documentary from PBS called Cancer Warrior, that outlined the work of Judah Folkman and is work on angiogenic inhibitors.. Apparently tumors can trigger a persons body to grow veins to connect it to a blood supply , and that you can pick up unique chemical signatures of individual tumors in a patients urine..Strangely enough, large tumors send out chemicals that inhibit the growth of other tumors, and is why we often see many more tumors after removing one large tumor. We now have drugs that form angiogenic inhibitors ... Perhaps in the future we will understand how to create custom tumor growth inhibitor agents that have been tailored for a specific patient by analyzing the signatures in their urine.... An interesting application of synthesis and analytical chemistry.. I wonder what is the current state of research..

It's a BOMB (known to antiquity) in a CAR (a German invention). You can't just put the two together and claim it's a new invention... what is this, the patent office?