But from what I understand, there can be effeminate men and there are masculine women. Gender has passed the stage where it is treated as just a binary. And it is often not completely correlated from the actual biological sex of a human.
So while we have artificial constructs based on historical practices, both men and women find themselves discriminated when they fall on either side of the spectrum.

It's not about being interesting in engineering. We are moving to a world where we are able to create interdisciplinary domains of work. Pyschology, Neuroscience, and computer science are now interlinked. We are being inspired by biology in many engineering applications.

I think that we need to look beyond the current to the possibilities. How can we utilize the large talent pool, with diverse strengths to increase the potential of engineering in solving problems. Women are half of our human species, and I bet we are losing out on a lot of diversity by sticking to archetype engineering stereotypes.

Another point I would like to make, albeit a little disconnected, is that a young child looks at its adults to be able to dream possibilities of what kind of future they might look for. Having less women engineers right now, will decrease the probability of young girls having a role model to emulate. Even if we spend extra resources to mine out as many rare female engineers as we can, it will be worth it in the long run.

Bullshit!

Policies are not all myopic decisions that affect just a single generation.

When you make a policy, you are looking at its impact in the long run. By having more women in the workplace you are encouraging more diversity of gender in the work place for future generations.
This is something you need to consider. Does diversity in a workplace help? Is it an ideal you wish to work towards in the long run? If you think diversity is unimportant, and you rather wish to reduce current costs in searching for labour, then so be it.

I think a large part of policies deals with compromising people's present value vs. future value of a decision. It is why, we humans are floundering in solving problems in the world.

Greenland shall no longer be a misnomer with word-roots lost in time. It shall take its place amongst geographical locations whose names describe their characteristics, such as Iceland and that town in Wales.
It shall finally be green.
Greenland. Now actually green.

They'll have to battle the five-foot-high Selenites before they get to do so...

Are UFOs out of fashion now? I miss the old days of government-related conspiracy theories.
And X-Files.
The truth is out there.

I like how it ends with - "Definitely a cool step forward." Have we reached a state where summaries, in their attempt to be succinct, end up (rather ironically) stringing together meaningless superfluities which give us no real information?

...... is still not understood by most. And I think we are stuck in an odd place here.

Insects evolution is faster than animals like dodos. We can't walk around beating them with a club till they go extinct. Mosquito nets used to be the most effective form of protection, until now. The mosquitoes are getting smaller. And adapting to chemicals is an inevitability. Too many of them reproducing at very high rates. Making them infertile seems to be best way around this all.

But more importantly, we still have absolutely no clue what role the mosquitoes play in ecological niches. Will their extinction lead to irreversible changes that affect the very fabric of nature? Humans vs. mosquitoes - who is more important to nature. Does anyone want to answer that question? Does the increase in human population directly correlate with the increase in mosquito population? We are their food after-all ....

I think that this is the way to go. Every organization has different motives and the captchas can be tailor-made to utilize user-time in that direction. It works well in atleast one direction, if not in both. Depends on who the user is.

If it is a profit-maximizing organization, it makes sense to monetize these few seconds of user attention. If it is an organization working for human-rights, replace the captcha with the image of some charity or some news item that they wish to inform the user.

Get the captchas to help you read books, solve world-hunger problems, solve NP-hard problems, whatever you wish. But seriously we need to move on from random letters that do waste A LOT of time, with little productivity for anyone.

Oh Yes.

Come down to India and China, where we have no goddamn lives any more. We work more than 12 hours a day on menial tasks at odd times. Forget work-life balance, because we really have no lives. And we work because that's how poor we are, with little choice in life and no government looking out for us. Train us. Use us. Abuse us. Talk to us in racial undertones. Marvel at our ability to take crap for little money.
Get away with your profits.

Welcome to the bright world of outsourcing.

"A study done by me has found that of the billions of websites and over a trillion objects on the web, any given two are separated by no more than 2 clicks. Distributed across the entire web, though, are links to search engines such as Google —that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. Google serves as the "Kevin Bacon" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 3 clicks."

I need my PhD. Now.

No seriously.

http://www.hl7.org.au/docs/Australian%20Patent%202001100012.pdf

Internet poker going brink-and-mortar is just plain old poker. Something that never did go out of fashion.
Unless out here people are sitting in a casino on terminals, playing with each other. That might work. Internet poker in a closed sealed room. I await movies made about this.