This article is almost two years old now, so it's quite out-of-date. And Android still is not under any real control by Google; Google has so little control over Android that the large majority of Android devices are running hopelessly out-of-date versions of the OS, because the device makers don't give a shit about security updates and customers don't know better and don't have much choice (they're just told to buy a new phone).

Meanwhile, we have alternatives popping up, such as CyanogenMod (and CyanogenOS), FirefoxOS, etc.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next couple years.

The part that's really interesting is that usually the same people complaining about the disparities show little awareness of the sociocultural forces involved, attributing it completely to bigotry

Exactly.

I do find it really interesting that Indians and Chinese--two much more traditional societies than ours--have far higher numbers of women in engineering than our own western societies. However, there's some big differences I see between these societies:
1) eastern societies don't have Disney teaching little girls that they're all princesses. However, I don't think Disney is such a big deal in European culture either, and it seems they have the same problem with gender disparity in engineering and computing (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
2) engineering is seen as very prestigious in eastern societies, much more so than in western ones. Here in the US, medicine, law, finance, and business (including management) are seen as prestigious; being an employee engineer is not. So I do, for instance, see lots of very smart women in the medical field. There's tons of female doctors these days. My primary care physician is female (which is nice when I need a full-body physical; I'd much rather drop my shorts in front of a woman than a dude), and I just had a minor surgical procedure done by a woman. In fact, I've had a bunch of surgical procedures (such as the root canal I had to have done a while ago) done by women over the years, now that I think about it, many more than by men. So it seems to me the smart women are skipping engineering and going into other professions.
3) engineering pay isn't that great compared to other professions, or at least it isn't commonly thought to pay that much. It's also subject to foreign competition with outsourcing and also H1B visas. With medicine, doctors have to get a license and pass licensing boards locally. There's no such restrictions with engineering; anyone can just make up BS on a resume and get an engineering job. Also, doctors aren't subject to mass layoffs, while engineers go through them commonly these days. I don't know how this compares to eastern societies, but it seems to me that the way companies operate in Asia is entirely different, and not subject to the shortsightedness (worrying only about the next quarter's financials) common to American corporations.

WTF are you talking about, "marginal"?

Tell me, what is the #1 most popular OS in the world right now? Most likely, it's Android. Where does Android get its kernel? Linux, an OSS project. Everyone and his brother has an Android phone now (iOS usage has gone down in recent years, thanks to Apple being too expensive and also screwing up a lot, such as with the Apple Maps fiasco), and there's lots of Android tablets out there. In addition to that, countless devices have embedded Linux (which means a full Linux OS and GNU ecosystem, not just the kernel) running on them: car infotainment systems and checkout lane payment terminals as two examples off the top of my head.

Also, what browsers do people use? No one uses MSIE any more except morons and unfortunately corporate drones who have no choice. Everyone else uses Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Firefox is a highly successful OSS project, while the other two both use Webkit rendering engines, which come from KHTML, a component of the KDE project.

And finally, what do most webservers in the world use? (Don't count all the domains parked with MS IIS since MS is paying sites to use IIS in those cases just so they can inflate their figures.) Countless small websites for innumerable small businesses run on Linux, plus lots of large ones too.

Android is not desktop Linux, and has almost nothing in common with it other than a kernel.

But linux use on the desktop is growing? ...
I mean if we want to include android it's one of the most popular OSes in the world.

Android is not Linux, nor is Android a desktop OS of any kind. Yes, Android probably is one of the most popular OSes in the world, but we're talking about Linux on the desktop here, which is an entirely different animal. The kernel is the only thing they have in common.

It is hard to say whether it's growing or not. You say it's growing, hairyfeet says it's shrinking, who's right? What I do know is true is that desktop PC sales are shrinking, thanks to mobile devices and to people hanging onto their hardware longer.

For the average PC user the Linux desktop is a crappy experience

Bullshit. The average PC user has never even seen a Linux desktop let alone tried one. The average PC user hasn't even ever used MacOS. All they have ever seen or know is Windows.

For people that try it, Linux works great on the desktop: no viruses, no screwing around with antivirus software, no forced reboots due to updates, I could go on and on.

use a desktop that is clearly inferior to the alternatives.

How much is MS paying you for your troll posts anyway?

Its because of guys like you that Linux usage has dropped soooo damned low its now listed as "other"

Wrong. While you're correct about your criticism of his behavior (complaining about specific problems is absolutely justified; if my car nearly got me killed because of poor design or manufacturing, I'd complain about that loudly too), that isn't why Linux usage is low. Linux usage was never high to begin with, and if it has dropped (which is probably nearly impossible to determine, since Linux users don't buy their computers pre-loaded with Linux), it's likely because of the rise of tablets. Anyway, the real reason Linux usage is so low is because of inertia and marketing. Go into any Best Buy and the computers all have Windows and MacOS, so that's what people use.

So if I drive a Ford and it catches on fire when someone rear-ends me at low speed and I narrowly escape burning alive, all because of a faulty design, it's "childish" for me to continue holding a grudge against Ford?

(Note: I haven't had any such problems with Ubuntu (nor have I ever used mainline Ubuntu, only derivatives), so note I'm just making a point here, not bashing Ubuntu for any reliability problems.)

Paying tuition does not mean a University or college never prevents anyone from failing out of school.

Apparently, it does, as this case proves.

Full paying students fail out of school quite frequently and are not "bailed out" in an effort to create future alumni.

Apples and oranges. Those are individuals, this is an entire class.

This is no different than the Big Bailout of 2008. If it were just one bank, the government would have let them go bankrupt (and in fact, IIRC there were one or two banks that did die out). But because it was so many banks, the government bailed them out.

Yes, universities frequently allow individual students to fail out; it's expected, and par for the course. They wouldn't be respected institutions if they just passed everyone; the whole idea is to "weed out" poor students so that only the good ones graduate. But this case is about an entire class failing at once. They won't allow that; it's too much of a disruption to their scheduling and income stream. They're set up to have a small number of students fail out and either leave the school, or retake the class, or switch majors. But a whole class means now that many students don't have the prerequisite needed to proceed to some other classes, which hugely affects their class scheduling. It's too much of a disruption to the institution's operation, just like having too many big banks fail at once is too much of a disruption to the economy, so they get a bail-out.

The exact same thing has happened here: these students pay lots of money in tuition to this school (plus it's hoped they'll become generous alumni later), so the school bails them out for failing miserably in this class.

If this were a free public school (as in no tuition or other costs for students, just a free education), this wouldn't be happening.

There's nothing wrong with being inclusive, and in fact, any elements in STEM groups which are actively keeping women out or making things hard for them due to sexism should be addressed and punished if necessary. I really wish there were more smart engineering women out there; I would really prefer to work in a 50/50 environment with both male and female engineers (hell, I'd be happier working in an all-female-engineering workplace, with me as either the only or one of a few men; I'd probably have a much better sex life if nothing else, and have an easy time finding a really good marriage partner; lots of people meet their spouses at work, after all).

The problem is that very, very few women seem to have any interest in the field, and those that do seem to all come from an Asian background. (Not that there's anything wrong with Asians, it shows there's something wrong with westerners actually.) You just can't make people interested in something they're not interested in.

From what I can tell, this lack of interest comes from the way little girls are raised in our society; parents and schools just don't encourage them in these things, and traditionally these things are seen as "geeky" and derided by everyone. Boys want to be jocks and girls want to be cheerleaders early on. So the boys who are quiet and smart and not-jocks go into computers and engineering, while the girls who are smart go into something like medicine.

Exactly, and there's more to it than that. Firethorn adds that the same can be said for most engineering work. But all this CS and engineering work is what gives us the technology to solve problems. Without engineering, we wouldn't have planes to fly to Africa to do NGO work, we wouldn't have vehicles to transport workers to where they're needed, we wouldn't be able to build bridges or dig wells or filter water. We wouldn't have computers to help coordinate all that work.

People deride a lot of computing work, but much it has some value to making the world better. Look at Google Maps and other GPS navigators; how much fuel has been saved by people using these services/devices, and being able to drive directly to their destination in the most efficient manner possible, rather than taking wrong turns, taking slower/longer routes, stopping to ask for directions, getting lost, etc? Multiply that by 100 million cars in the US, and the numbers are staggering.

What's blindingly obvious is that both sides are horrible. I was only saying that I could see why the Catholics wanted to prevent commoners from doing their own interpretation, because it leads directly to fundamentalism; I never said the Catholics were models of virtue themselves.

The best answer is to not have any "holy books" at all, because as soon as you believe something like that, you get all kinds of twisted logic and justifications for stupid and horrible things. ("It says XYZ here, and we can't question that, so it follows from that that we need to do ABC in this situation.")

Hey, if you want to screw hairy-legged women, go right ahead. Don't pretend it's normal though.

A few points:

The 2A argument is a bit different. Personally, I can see both sides. Some of that may be my American (and southern) upbringing and environment, but to me, I can see both sides. One side argues that society is safer with guns because police can't be there in 5 seconds and you can protect yourself with one, the other side argues that a proliferation of guns is what makes society unsafe and that adding more guns to the mix just makes it worse. Both are valid points. Both sides, from what I've seen, have made valid points at times, and stupid points at others. This to me makes me think that the whole issue is far too complex for a simple binary choice, and also that our society's problems are a lot more complex than whether people have easy access to guns or not. I could go on and on about this subject, but at the very core, both sides have the exact same goal: a safe society for everyone. Neither side wants a society plagued by crime and violence, they just disagree on whether having legal access to guns helps or hurts this.

Gay rights is rather different. At its core, it's about equality: should homosexuals have the same rights as everyone else? Should they be allowed to live their lives peaceably, or should they live in fear and hide their orientation for fear of being ridiculed, harmed, or murdered? I honestly don't see how it's any different than civil rights for minority races. The only justification for oppressing gays is purely religious, and not based on anything rational at all. People hate them because they're different, and that's it.

That said, as for various smart people you listed, everyone does stupid stuff from time to time. I like to believe that we should *try* to be smart in our actions and beliefs, rather than being content to be dumb, but even the smartest of us do stupid things sometimes. Also, not everyone is smart in every subject. Being good at math for instance doesn't mean you've seriously thought much about ethics.