I'm using a PC, it was assembled in the UK, but as you point out, the components were surely made in the far East.
So what? Is your point that because we all use computers, and wear clothes that were made by workers in terrible conditions, that it is wrong to criticise those conditions?

I never said Apple were the only company that does this, but they are the biggest, and they have the largest gulf between their polished, doing-good-for-all image, and the reality.

$18 billion profit, but they can't afford to make their phones in a country with decent labour laws. Nope, can't do it. The numbers just don't add up I tell you. Apple are the apotheosis of psychopathic corporate greed, at the expense of any human decency.

Then where are they? Where are all these "dual talent pool" success stories? Why don't some of these diverse talents get together and trounce the white male at his own technological game? As a white male I would honestly give them a standing ovation if they did - nothing would make me happier than to see their success. But there's precious little sign of it, so what's stopping them?

Something new - a conceptually new type of device. Not a slightly thinner tv screen, or a slightly faster / bigger phone. Those evolutionary improvements don't warrant all that razzmatazz. Not a curved tv screen or bendy phone, neither of which add any value that I can see.

I think VR headsets are more exciting, trying the latest cutting edge models would be good - I'd love to try one of the laser-in-the-eye projection headsets (alarming as lasers in the eyes sounds, it surely ought to make a vivid image).

The Thync sounds exciting too - that neuro-brain tickling mood adjuster that had an article on slashdot yesterday. More exciting new concepts like that, please! :-)

Or could it be that women tend to be olympic champion complainers, and will not let an issue go until they get their way, whereas men would often rather shrug and go and do something else instead?

That isn't to say that women don't have anything to complain about - they surely do. But so do men - and male gripes get orders of magnitude less attention paid to them.

Maybe girls / women just aren't as interested, statistically. Why is that not an acceptable conclusion?

But why does this diversity necessarily have to involve both sexes? Why not just let the best, most motivated people participate in stem? Diversity may be better than a monoculture, but a politically enforced enforced diversity will be worse than either.

I agree completely, however it won't happen. A voluble minority of the female population will never accept that they're no longer oppressed, and will whine and complain and protest in perpetuum. Men, desperate to make them shut up for ten minutes, will cave in to their meritless demands, and boys will suffer even more.

I think there's a disadvantage with having languages designed solely by language design experts, and that is a tendency to over complicate things. They all understand it, and appreciate it's elegance, so it must be the best way.

To draw an analogy, consider the musical excesses of prog rock / jazz fusion. The musicians themselves may appreciate a Locrian scale played against an AbSus13th arpeggio , but the audience can easily end up excluded. Then a musically simple but catchy band like the Sex Pistols comes along and steals their audience.

I reckon languages need to be really really simple to understand, in order to become popular. For most people they're a tool, not an end in themselves.

I'm not sure there's anything particularly new about taking a grievance to court, however I daresay its warmer than marching around waving placards in the snow.

Assume they have numerous cameras on the surface of a ball, with significantly overlapping fields of view. The reconstruction phase would be where the difficulty lies - normal image stitching wouldn't work, because it assumes one single optical centre for all shots, and treats deviations from this as an error to be smeared away. However in this case you need to use the varying optical centres of the cameras, to gain parallax / depth information. So it becomes a photogrammetry problem, recovering 3d points - with points beyond a certain distance mapped to a distant sphere. Then on playback the data could be reprojected correctly.... somehow. *waves hands* It's definitely not simple to do correctly.

How do these scientists know what will be realistic?

If you make the analogy with ocean going vessels, and naval warfare, humanity is at the stage of making a small raft with logs and rope, and gently pushing it out onto a lake, hoping it wont fall apart. If we can't make spaceships well enough to even vaguely contemplate a space battle, how can this lot possibly know what is realistic to expect in some far future space conflict?

This isn't science, it's futurology.

I could say the same thing to you, Mr Coward. There's the trap you see - complain about the tidal wave of no-added-value pundits, and someone hits back accusing you of hypocrisy, for making the comment. I've tried ignoring them, I'm afraid they don't seem to be going away.

Blah blah, here are 8 reasons why Apple should do this and that, but wont, and 5 reasons why Microsoft will never beat Google at 'X'. Blah blah, read my blah blog.

The world has too many commentators. Go and do something useful. Stop talking about what other people are doing, and go and do something amazing yourself.

Don't worry, they'll only use this to track terrorist cells.