Interesting. I work in Texas also—and lived here full time since 1997—and I've found the environment at my employer to be very mature and inclusive, with women at all levels of the company. That includes my previous boss. When she retired (after 33 years at the company), she had risen to the rank "Fellow," which is a fairly high title at the company.

However, I don't know that the fact we're in Texas has all that much to do with it. One startup I interviewed with here definitely had a culture that was tilted in more the direction of a frathouse mentality, I think. They offered to take me to lunch at Hooters for an informal interview, and hinted they sometimes do lunch as more interesting places. *wink* *wink* I didn't join that company.

I see your point about my use of the term "rise". Overall, things have gotten more inclusive, not less. The specific moniker brogrammer is a recent one, and is perhaps more indicative of programming / development appealing to a wider range of personality types, including extroverted "bros", as opposed to shy and/or introverted geeks. Just the term itself is inherently gender biased.

Key word there: CONSENT. Harassment is inherently non-consensual.

"Everybody knows boys will be boys." Bullshit. Treating creepy, gross, harassing behavior as somehow normal, and that "everybody knows" it'll happen just perpetuates it. Not acceptable.

Read some of the horror stories from DEFCON 20. Whether or not you're there to get laid, none of that shit's acceptable, period.

The goal of diversity initiatives is to make the pool of qualified candidates more diverse. But it doesn't say anything about the differing attributes having anything to do with how qualified you are. Yes, diversity includes gender diversity. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the (correct, but meaningless) assertion that people don't program with their genitals.

My statement was meant to be read as "We need more vaginas in here programming, as if vaginas have some role in the process of programming." They don't. And to suggest "diversity initiatives" imply that they do is a strawman.

And you know what? 30+ years will have been a pretty good run for "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu."

It sounds like your workplace is respectful, and that race and gender rightfully don't factor into your opinions of each others' work. It sounds like your workplace happens to be diverse, which helps keep everyone centered on what does matter (technical chops), as opposed to what doesn't (gender, race, age).

But what are your feelings on the rise of brogrammers? Sexual harassment at conferences? Companies with cultures that do fixate on gender / race / what-have-you? Typically these cultures arise when the population is too insular, too homogeneous.

Diversity isn't about saying "we need more vaginas in here programming." What an irrelevant strawman. Rather, it's about preventing the myopic echo chamber that can result when things are too homogeneous.

Right. But DerYeghiayan's testimony is just testimony, not factual evidence. The whole point of this cross examination is to discredit the testimony. Testimony doesn't rise to the same level as fact by default, as humans are unreliable. It's not the same as hard evidence or accepted facts that are undisputed in a case.

I would ask a SpaceX engineer about this first. The ones I've talked to about this very point have cringed with even the mere suggestion of this idea. And yes, they've been asked.

No, SpaceX could not duplicate the flight of Apollo 7 tomorrow. They are gearing up to be able to duplicate that flight though in a fashion, so no doubt they will get there somewhat soon, but the Dragon 1 capsule as it currently stands is not crew capable and neither is the Dragon 2 capsule prototype.

You are confusing science with technology. The equipment necessary to send a crew into orbit simply doesn't exist right now in America. Yes, the science in terms of how it can be done has been created and you can look at previous designs to see how it was done in the past can be done, assuming of course that some of the really critical steps done by previous engineering teams was even recorded and documented.

It also helps to know that previous designs were successful, so you are attacking this engineering challenge with the knowledge that somebody has solved this problem before and that it can be done. That doesn't mean that any particular design will be successful though. It is also far more than political issues right now. Going into space on any current American spacecraft would get that crew member killed. Period.

Considering that both launch pads 39A & B have been completely dismantled for new rockets, that the Shuttle processing facility to get the vehicles ready for launch has been also rebuilt to do other things, and there are no external tanks available nor even a manufacturing plant capable of building them, I'd say those Shuttle orbiters are going to stay mothballed permanently.

At this point, even the engines have been torn apart and are currently being repurposed and reworked for use on the SLS.

No, there is no way they will ever launch again and it would be years of effort to even try with billions of dollars spent in an effort that would be akin to building a whole new Shuttle by the time you are done. The capability of launching the Shuttle is definitely gone.

The Dragon has no life support right now and is very much incapable of carry a human crew. Elon Musk jokingly said that you might be able to get a ride with a cot and a scuba tank, but it definitely would not be capable of bringing a crew into orbit with its current configuration. The Dragon 2 (which still isn't flightworthy by any stretch of the imagination) is going to be crewed and like I said, some effort is currently underway to get that crew capability to return. I think you are underestimating the effort that SpaceX still needs to take in order to get people into space.

And no, I'm not just talking flight worthiness standards either where you might say NASA is being too cautious. That might be a legitimate gripe as arguably the Space Shuttle also failed to meet those standards too. It also isn't just the FAA-AST nor a NASA flight certificate as the Dragon capsule that just flew into orbit would literally kill a crew member if somehow somebody stowed away themselves inside that capsule. While docked to the ISS the capsule uses the ISS ventilation and life support system with merely a couple of fans inside of the Dragon that help to circulate the air. That is definitely not life support equipment.

As it stands, the Dragon capsule can't even be used as an emergency escape devices if somehow the Soyuz was damaged in a disaster like depicted in the movie "Gravity".... even assuming that the ISS crew could improvise something to act as emergency couches by stuffing in a bunch of soiled clothing and odd soft parts of the ISS. It is a nice thought experiment though.

No doubt that SpaceX is close to the caapability and having the capability to do downmass of several metric tons of supplies is definitely a key step to crew capability. It will be happening in the next couple of years, but SpaceX is still definitely incapable of sending or even recovering a crew from space even in an emergency.

The Dragon can't carry a crew right now, so you are wrong.

I have better memories of Win98 SE than Win95 OSR2. USB was actually stable, at least on my machine.

With WinXP, it finally was reasonable at SP2. Prior to that... glitch-tastic!

I'm currently using Win7 SP1 on my work laptop, configured to use the classic interface. To me, it's like WinXP SP5 or something. ;-) For the most part, nice and stable. Although the WiFi network detection is still slow, unreliable and occasionally requires reboots to work.

Haven't touched Win 8.x and don't plan to any sooner than necessary. I hope to skip it entirely, as I did with WinME and Vista.

It didn't help that Sergei Korolev died right before the Apollo moon landings. It was even apparently due to a poorly trained surgeon for what should have been a routine medical procedure that caused his death. Had Korolev been around to provide strong leadership to the Soviet Moon program, I think there might have been an outside chance for a Soviet crewed lunar landing to have happened by about 1970 with the N-1 rocket becoming successful.

The funny thing is that the N-1 engines that should have gone to the Moon ended up being used by Orbital Science for sending supplies to the International Space Station. Then again, when one of those engines exploded shortly after launch, it destroyed one of the cargo modules and a couple of satellites... so the disaster of the N-1 seems to keep repeating itself.

America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard. There are some efforts to try and build some new spacecraft that might actually be useful in the future and they are currently under development, but none of them are flight worthy. If some alien creature was discovered orbiting the Earth and simply asking for somebody from the Earth to meet with them in orbit in exchange for huge amounts of cultural and scientific data, it would have to be done right now with a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft or with a Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft. America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that.

Yes, the technological capability of going to the Moon has been lost in the past 40 years and needs to be rebuilt from scratch. All we know is that it was done in the past, where sadly an entire generation of kids are starting to believe the Moon hoax guys because the technology to get to the Moon no longer exists.