So what is an acceptable probability (cost/benefit wise) for a loss of one life?
So what is an acceptable probability (cost/benefit wise) for a loss of 1 million lives?
So what is an acceptable probability (cost/benefit wise) for a loss of an animal species?
So what is an acceptable probability (cost/benefit wise) for a loss of an insect species?
So what is an acceptable probability (cost/benefit wise) for a minimum 10% loss of viability in biomes?

I can go on, but you get my point. Of course economics play a huge role in how to tackle it, but the economics of not tackle it doesn't look good at all.

End the end, the ones usually doing the cost/benefit analysis is also the ones holding the purse...

Uhm, but there is no real consensus what the magnitude of the possible problem is. When lives are at stake you mostly plan for the worst case scenario, unless you are a cynic of course.

And I'm far more concerned that we choose wrongly and the whole climate becomes counter-productive which means we only will have one goal: survive.

Not really, since if there is no man made climate change we at least need to clean up our environment anyway. If on the other hand the skeptics are wrong and they win the argument humanity is up shit creek and it's going to cost a ton of money and lives in the near future.

So, to be on the safe side isn't it better to deal with a possible man made climate change now regardless of it's true or not?

I'm not advocating we use misleading "advertisements", I'm advocating that with the same education you can do more than you think and that message has to be clear, and even more so if you want to attract women to engineering that has the cultural stereotype of being a job for men.

I really don't think that the courses need to change, as I said in my first post it's all about how you sell it and if the stated goals of the curriculum indicates societal beneficial engineering knowledge you will get more women to apply even though there is no change to the curriculum itself.

Where do you get that the goal is to get a 50/50 gender-balance? You read 50/50 and assumed that was the goal. What they did was to showcase an example where they made a new program geared at societal meaningfulness which garnered a 50/50 balance.

And the conclusion was that you can increase the number of females in engineering by changing or rephrasing the goal of the curriculum, ie. "Learn engineering and save lives" vs. "Learn engineering and design a reverse osmosis plant".

I see a lot of negative comments about the op-ed. I really don't get it though. A lot of posters complain that it's wrong to alter the curriculum so you can attract more female students, that it's all liberal or/and feminine hogwash.

Most universities tweak their curriculum so they are up to date and attract more students that way. So what is so wrong with making a curriculum more attractive to women? We are not talking about excluding males here, but if you feel that way maybe your ego is a bit fragile.

The whole op-ed it can be summarized in one question:
Do male engineers want to work with more female engineers? If yes, make the curriculum more attractive to women. You don't even need to change the curriculum, you only need to change the description so it shows what good engineering can do for society. It most instances, it's how you describe something that makes a sale.

I see some have answered "Because they can" and it seems I was too obtuse...

When has common knowledge stopped academic research into things.. :)

Time for another beer!

So, after they have solved this conundrum can they then focus their attention on breeding out the need for dogs to lick their balls?

But given the state of the competitive behavior in academic circles we will instead end up knowing WHY dogs lick their balls...

Over and out!

So you say that Netflix as a company shouldn't try to get the best deal they can they can when signing with an ISP? Interesting theory...

Any ISP signing a contract with Netflix should realize what a bandwidth hog Netflix is. If that incurs extra costs for the ISP it's THEIR problem. If someone downstream throttles Netflix because users on that ISP uses a lot of bandwidth it's still not Netflix problem, the users ISP has oversold their available bandwidth.

It's a fact that the internet provider market in the US lacks competition and is more or less monopolistic or duopolist with hints of cartel agreements. When a market is dysfunctional in that way someone has to step in and sort the mess out since it's obvious the market wasn't interested in fixing it.

And by the tone in your post you rather have a dysfunctional internet provider market that abuse and gouges it's customers every day than some weak regulation that will at least try to fix the worst problems.

And FYI, it's because of progressive world views that we have a modern society but you are welcome to stay in the past while moaning about the progressives wanting progress (because without progress things stagnate).

What if you take photos of you flying a drone and a magazine buys the right to use your photos in their magazine, does that constitute commercial use?

If someone makes a painting of you flying a drone and then you sell the painting, does that constitute commercial use?

Both examples above would constitute commercial use of technology according to the FAA's definition of it since you get a monetary gain from flying your drone.

Which leads me to ask this: Isn't there model flying competitions where you can win prizes which is worth a lot of money, does that constitute commercial use of technology too???

Your analogy doesn't work. Here is a better one:

Somebody breaks into a combination-lock factory and steals the list of serial-numbers and their associated codes. They then proceed to use this information to break into peoples homes and rifle through all their belongings.

Don't you think that a home-owner who bought this lock thinking it was secure is going to do something about it?

The company selling the locks now has a couple of problems: the public image of their company has been tarnished, all the the locks they have sold are now insecure and a lot of customers now want their insecure locks exchanged for secure at no cost. All this will hit the company hard financially.

If Apple felt like it, they could probably patent "It holds a smart phone against your ear for hands free operation" and get away with it. (If someone doesn't get what I'm saying just think rubberband)...

I do hope they have included nethack-el in that Emacs then, otherwise it wouldn't be feature complete!

The problem is that people doesn't want to think, they just want things to "work".

For my non-technical friends I usually recommend that they use Ninite (https://ninite.com/) for installing the most common apps they need.