One organization provides licenses for lawful public performance of music to justify its existence. I'd expect that at least 99% of their business is quietly collecting small amounts of money, granting licenses, and distributing money to songwriters, and none of this involves lawsuits.

Except for "songwriters", you've described the Mafia in that second sentence. When someone doesn't pay, the Mafia breaks bones and shoots people. BMI uses lawyers instead. Restaurants, on the other hand, don't have lawyers (or legbreakers) on staff, typically. Going to court against BMI is playing on their home territory. Unless you also have a tough legal staff, you've lost already.

He's always been aggressive and blunt. He's "irking more and more people" because those people want to take away what Linus has and he's not about to let them.

And that's the end of any sympathy they might have had coming from me. No matter how ridiculous the lawsuit is, if you don't answer it, you deserve to lose.

One organization sues people to justify its existence. The other makes food. No point in the second bothering to answer in court any more than the BMI lawyers should agree to a cook-off. The outcome in either case is pre-ordained, and answering can only drive up the costs.

It kind of doesn't work worth crap for bioinformatics or machine learning.

What's so special about a college classroom that you can't learn bioinformatics or machine learning anywhere else?

Ride the most extreme excesses of the bubble you can, pulling in ridiculous amounts of cash and equity. Convert it to reasonably safe (e.g. money markets) and counter-market (e.g. gold) investments. When the bubble pops, don't worry about being laid off: take some time off and live off your reserves. And invest some of them in those tech firms which have a solid business but whose stock prices were brought down in the general crash, to set you up for the recovery (or next bubble.)

Nothing ruins the world for parent, child, and innocent bystanders like making everything a teachable moment. Let's leave the teaching for the classroom and let the rest of the time be free of the tyranny of pedagogy.

Dude's got "trouble with girls" because "three things happen". Got that? These aren't things that are possible, these are things that happen so often that they cause old Mr Hunt "trouble". One is that he falls in love with them. Because the old horndog never got the memo that you don't shit where you work.

The common advice of not dating where you work is more honored in the breach than the observance. That's just reality. Dr. Hunt, who likely met his wife in just such a situation, knows this very well.

The second is that these "girls" fall in love with him. Because of course they would. He's clearly irresistible.

I'm sure some found him so, in his younger days.

The third thing that "happens" is that he criticizes them and they fall into an hysterical heap of crying femininity

He actually just said they "cry". And that may well be his experience. Personally I've run into very few women at work who cried when criticized... but no men. He wasn't talking about Ph.D. defenses.

Everyone is against the boss hitting on a subordinate. The whole point of this article is that we have a Nobel-winning scientist who claims he is unable to resist hitting on female scientists when they work in his lab.

Isn't it fun to just make stuff up?

I've seen a man cry at work exactly once. He was the CEO and founder, and he'd just been unable to get sufficient funding and had to lay off half the company. I've seen three women cry at work due to work stuff, so still pretty unusual.

If, as you say, it's a generalization, a stereotype, then why are you comfortable with a highly-trained scientist making such generalizations, such stereotypes, in a speech to a professional conference?

Because most of us know the difference between informal after-dinner remarks relating personal experience in a not-entirely-serious way and the presentation of a formal paper.

"Let me tell you about my trouble with girls: three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry."

Let me as you a question. This is a scientist, who claims that every single woman who has ever worked in the lab has either become an object of his love, has fallen in love with him, or has cried when they were criticized.

Reading comprehension fail.

Sure. Guys are socialized not to cry. A boy over a relatively young (somewhere in the single digits) age cries, and he's told to man up and stop crying, and/or he's hit, and/or he's derided as a "crybaby". A girl cries, and she's comforted and/or men rush to her defense. So of course girls cry; it works for them, as it doesn't work for men.

What idiot can be so humour-impaired as to not realize that Hunt was just kidding?

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY

The whole speech apparently was not recorded, so all we've seen is the cherry-picked remarks. Maybe he's really a misogynist of Marc Lepine's level. More likely, though, it was British humor.