Why else would someone decide the only way to deal with someone texting in a theater is to blow their fucking head off?

Yeah, because that happens all the time. It's socially acceptable. When I come into work on Monday, my co-workers and I talk about all the fucking texters we shot over the weekend.

Or to deal with someone who's music is too loud is to put a gun through the window and start shooting?

Yep, because a singular case which makes national headlines is evidence of a greater culture of acceptance of such things.

It swings both ways. If they want to track my every move via a cell phone then I'll use it as an alibi when I go out and commit crime then tell them I was home the whole time because I purposely left my phone on the kitchen counter.

Nice idea, but you also have to deal with license plate recognition, EZ-Pass, tire RFID, shoe RFID, facial recognition, and the like.

What's innovative about AirBnB and Uber and the likes is figuring out how to do something blatantly illegal to gain a competitive advantage over legitimate businesses that do follow rules and regulations (which in many cases exist for very good reasons), without getting immediately shut down.

Ha ha, yes, "legitimate businesses" in the Fat Tony sense. Legitimate businesses that long ago used those rules and regulations to put competition out of business.

*People* are different, and like different things. Men and women, however, aren't that different (roles in reproduction excepted), so a statistically significant difference points to a social or psychological cause, not biology.

Well, you can go ahead and take that on faith... but there are gross physiological differences between men and women, even besides those directly implicated in reproduction. Women are smaller on average, have longer legs proportionally, have different normal hemoglobin levels, etc. So why assume everything's the same neurobiologically?

Blechley Park and earlier research projects employed female "computers" before they developed electric ones because women worked hard and worked cheap.

You're kind of missing the obvious there: men were in short supply due to the war.

The slashdot editors apparently think it's a problem. I feel like I see this same topic on slashdot every month...

There's a general push from a few groups to try to push men out of the field. Well, a few of those groups want to do that, but the ones who are getting things accomplished along those lines (mostly white males in upper management or executive positions) actually just want a stick to beat up their low-level male tech workers.

"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.

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?

Once they've confirmed that I'm willing to pay, how many times will they come back?

You know the answer to that... once you've paid the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane.