Because HP went so well!

Everyone knows, there are no female customers at RSA conferences. (/irony)

I'd restate as "harder to invade but easier to lock valid personnel out", which seems a classic problem with any secure location. As such, there has to be existing solutions. Having two crew in the cockpit at all times is a good start but not a complete solution. (You could probably think of at least three ways around this.)

If there is one truth in the world, it's this: Nobody wants to see me in hot pants.

Never mind, I'll just read the literature and save myself a plane ride.

> Vendors are still willing to objectify women to have a chance at winning business.

...and certain women are willing to be objectified (at least a little bit) for money.

> If so, are you saying that attractive women are not allowed to represent a company or product?

That appears to be the case, yes. No fun allowed here.

You beat me to it. I was going to ask "What part of 'turn on' did you not understand?"

Obviously what they'd need to do is take a poll of attendees ahead of time, and then revise the rules to something that doesn't turn anyone on.

To prevent lying on the poll, a polygraph would have to be involved.

Earth-size moons of gas giants are definitely a possibility. I think we've already found gas giants in the "goldilocks zone". But I thought I read recently (maybe in Slashdot?) that although rocky planets orbiting close enough to red dwarfs to have liquid water might be fairly common, there was some other reason why life was unlikely in that scenario. I don't remember the details, though. Radiation, perhaps?

> Imagine being bombarded by quasars and blasted by supernova. Life is very possible in that environment, but it would be equally difficult for any life form to organize into something more complex than bits of matter capable of replication.

I've been thinking of this point in particular, and I suspect that if intelligent life happens at all (other than us) it's probably most likely (or least unlikely) out on the edges of a galaxy, where low density of stars vs empty space reduces the odds of nearby supernovae and other types of stellar catastrophe. I suspect (although I have little to base this on except statistics) that the closer you get to the inner, crowded parts of the galaxy, the less likely you'll find life that's managed to have a stable enough environment for long enough to develop intelligence.

Agreed, agreed. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

The vastness of space actually counts against us in this particular case, I think. The stars, especially out in the backwaters of the galaxy like us, are fairly distant from each other. I agree that as numbers increase, the chances of anything happening, no matter how unlikely, tend to approach certainty. But if as I suspect we're radically off on how likely it is for civilization to happen, the chances become vanishingly small that it will have happened anywhere nearby (as interstellar distances go).

So, we're looking for other civilizations, haven't found any, even though we estimate that life should be common. After all, if it happened here it should be able to happen in a lot more places.

But perhaps the set of circumstances that would create an environment that lasted long enough for life to be created and evolve to this point are wildly, vanishingly improbable. Perhaps the only reason we think it should have happened lots of other places is that we are the ones doing the looking, and we don't realize just how rare we actually are.

But that's a little depressing.

...or the girl in the red miniskirt, if they need some extra emotive factor.

So... inappropriate for spacecraft, then. Oh well.

It is, and serves the employers right. The problem is, there are other employees who weren't party to these decisions (or were vocal against them) who have to live with them, after said decision makers have collected their bonuses and embarked on book signing tours.