Crystal Skull was, by most accounts, indeed crap.

It was funny as hell. For all the wrong reasons, sure, but still funny as hell. Basically it was an unintentional self-parody.

Yeah, herd immunity is just a card played against the freedom argument. It can't exist even theoretically for flu vaccine (where it's often proposed to exist) because flu vaccine is not effective enough, and it can't exist for pertussis. Why not? Because the acellular pertussis vaccine results in a substantial population which can spread the disease asymptomatically. It doesn't matter that the vaccine protects them from systems, they don't contribute to herd immunity because they can still pass the disease on.

Protip: Vaccines don't protect you from bacteria.

Pertussis (whooping cough) is caused by a bacterial infection. So is diphtheria, so is tetanus -- all of which the DTaP is made to protect against.

It's not anti-vaxxers responsible for the whooping cough outbreaks. It's the DTaP (the 'aP' is acellular pertussis) vaccine, which just isn't very good. The old DPT vaccine provided very good protection against pertussis. The new DTaP provides weaker protection that doesn't last as long; it can't provide herd immunity in any case.

It's easy to implement OO in C *badly*.

Sure, and the canonical example of this is C++. C++ is a bad implementation of objects in C, along with a bad template language, now along with some bad functional constructs, all of which fit together badly. And then there's the STL which uses all of that; it's the proverbial dancing bear of C++.

And that is why you are not buying the software. You are buying a usage license for a copy of the software.

No, I'm not. I'm buying a copy of the software. I need no license to use my copy of the software.

React they did. Overreact, probably not so much. BS corporate emails should cause far more quitting than they usually do. How else is management going to learn?

In general, management can't learn. If you quit, they just assume the problem is with you.

And once they find Dr. Mann, he's (golly gee) gone nutso and of course has a sabotaged base waiting. Nobody but Hollywood would do this. An unstable astronaut like that would never get into space.

Yeah, never.

But that's OK, later on the hero steals a ship from the far future and somehow knows how to fly it, too.

Did you actually watch the movie?

File it with flying cars, fusion power (or thorium cycle or pebble bed or whatever nuclear power suits your fancy), batteries or caps with extremely high (approaching that of liquid chemical fuels) energy and power density, practical large-scale solar power, and a cure for the common cold as stuff we'll always talk about but never ever get.

So we can enginer our way out into space and through wormholes. But we can't cure* a crop blight?

Of course we could. But we didn't, so we won't. Typical SF causality loop.

If that were true, then she should say that.

Yeah, she should. Doesn't mean she will. The noise is an acceptable proxy complaint for the real complaint, which she feels will cause strife. Which means that if he solves the noise problem in a way which doesn't solve the real complaint, she will either find another proxy complaint, or will act irritated and upset without saying why.

If you really think that, try to tell a police officer to go fuck himself.

Been there and done that. Well, I told him to rot in hell, but same idea. I can't say the result was pleasant, but I was not convicted of a crime as a result.

The worst physics didn't involve strong gravity fields or high velocities or accelerations. Just Newton's Third Law and an energy argument. The second-worst bit of science was biological, but also involved an energy argument.

Spoilers:
1) Matt Damon's spaceship just would have been gently pushed away when he opened the airlock. Maybe gently pushed to one side or another depending on the partial seal. It certainly would NOT have set the entire Endurance vehicle spinning like mad.

2) The blight was better adapted because it utilized nitrogen from the air instead of oxygen? Yeah I don't think so; what do you combine with N2 that yields energy instead of spending it?

But what is definitely outside of the range of a statistical fluke is the resulting level of "fem-bashing" on Slashdot. It appears like the majority of postings addressing problems with the study as such combine this criticism with a load of prejudicial bile. That does not point towards "this would call for a larger sample size" or "it would be good to exclude some systematic errors" but rather "we don't want such studies performed".

Not sure what you mean by "fem-bashing". If you mean bashing women, no. If you mean bashing feminists (particularly a certain sort who advocates not equality but female superiority), yes.

It appears the reason this study was performed was not to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge, but to produce a pre-determined result (because of the systemic errors included) in order to bash men. We really don't need that sort of study at all.

Centipede (Dona Bailey, later driven from the industry by male co-workers)

Really? That's not what she said. She specifically said she was NOT intimidated out of the industry.

BTW, why didn't you mention one of the most well-known women in gaming: Roberta Williams?

Back in the early 80's something like 40% of CS graduates were women. Why do you think they seem to have collectively chosen to avoid it and related fields? It clearly wasn't a problem earlier, after all.

You're looking at it backwards. In the late 70's and early 80's, female participation in CS shot up much faster than female participation in other traditionally-male STEM subjects, and fell back down just as fast. Why did it shoot up so fast in the 80's? Something was different in CS, and the "computer geeks are more misogynistic than any other group" hypothesis fails to explain it.