Want to get unpaid product placement on BBC? Boycott Mozilla! I suppose that not watching Ender's Game is already not enough.
News for tomorrow: Kazakhstan Airlines cancel flights to Vatican quoting lack of official support for gay priests from the Pope.

I'm bit suprised at bad reputation HFT has at Slashdot. In many ways, it is very interesting subject for geeks - how often do you have to care about speed of light and benefits of straight-line microwave link over curvature-of-earth fiber... but most importantly, without HFT, you were able to win the market by either social networking (moving at the border of legalities regarding front running, insider trading etc), sheer amount of money or dumb luck. With HFT, you can win because you have best programmers.

I personally enjoy battle of programmers throwing algorithms against each other a lot more than shady agreements done by cabal of elitist traders agreeing over the phone whom to s***w over today. Maybe because I'm a programmer and I haven't managed to get into cabal of elite traders. I would expect most of Slashdot crowd to be on same side?

Or is it because somebody here had this wrong idea that before HFT a random person actually meant something on the market and was not being abused by Powers and that only after advent of HFT, poor private investors lost possibility to game the market? That 'technical analysis' actually meant more than 'how to win the lottery' systems?

This is war. Computers are rifles. Enemies are other big banks/hedges funds. Money is gunpowder. Stocks are bullets. And people... people are empty cases which get discarded from side of your rifle. And yes, HFT means that machine guns are now in play instead of bolt action rifles, but does it really matter matter to ejected cartridge...

If I could only remember the name of the book... it was collection of short stories, centered about certain drug which was allowing people to transfer conciousness to next body. One of the stories was about usage of that by totalitarian government, which was catching political rebels and torturing them to death repeateadly transferring their mind to new body after each time - until they finally changed their opinions to the point of being able to convince everybody they have been reeducated.

But this camera is not mounted on the device, but rather looks at you in Kinect-style.
So, unless you are talking about Augumented Selfies, it is not going to help.

Or do I have to read TFA?

I don't. I'm saying that it is next to impossible for any company to stand against the woman playing the harrasement card, regardless of what was happening there. And reactions to saying "we should know the story as seen from other side" are "poor woman, it is obvious she is a victim, because she says so, we don't need to listen to other side, because woman is always a victim".

Yes, "she says". If you look at greenshirt post in their magic forum, it looks quite the opposite - he (or she?) claims that Julie has "history of raging against professional criticism" and other bad things. If what greenshirt says is true, then all of us are being just manipulated by drama queen.
Now, given that entry, ask yourself, why do you believe her side of the story by default?
1) Because she went to the press first and started smearing her coworkers in public, while they stayed on private forums?
2) Because she is a woman?

This is my point. Even if she is wrong, they would have to pretend she is right. There is no way of them saying "She overreacted and tried to play 'harrassed woman' card when in reality she was just bad'.

And regarding 'influential developer'... "influential developer known for helping make GitHub a more attractive place for women programmers to work". Sounds like she was known for being women activist and influencing the view of the company in female circles, rather than influencing the code base/architecture/whatever. She _might_ be a very good developer - I just don't see it claimed anywhere yet.

Issue is that it is not any longer possible to say "this particular woman is horrible and crap programmer" without being understood as "all women are horrible programmers and I'm chauvinist pig". And while I agree that industry is quite sexist and in many cases attacks are underserved, I refuse to give special handling to a worker doing bad job just because he/she comes from some opressed minority.

To be honest, I would find it a lot more sexist to give the hell to the guy producing bad code routinely, while being all time calm, smiling and forgiving to woman doing same thing. I'm probably 'chauvinist' enough to put a line at physical violence (like effectively defending myself against physical assault of man versus assult of women), but I'm not going to hold back on opinions just because of gender (or color of skin, disability or sexual orientation).

Again - not saying she is bad. I'm just stressing that in current PR climate, we will probably never learn, because it will be always better for company to sacrifice a good male programmer than try to fight to expose bad female programmer publicly.

So we know one side of the story. But what about the other side? Maybe she was really bad worker and used 'discrimination' card each time to defend her work? "You are saying that this code is bad not because of the code, but just because I'm a woman". It would be nice if somebody could anonymously 'leak' some of her pull requests plus entire conversation around it - and then we could see how much harrasment was from reviewer and how much unfair pushing from her side.

Problem is that GitHub is at lost position. However bad she was, they will be always painted bad boys for throwing dirt on her, so they will probably keep silent...

Seen it on one of the forums discussing this technology.......

Generally I agree - but it will not work if you have less than 2 children per woman. Regardless of how 'fit' your single child is for survival, unless it is immortal, it won't make up for both parents in population. EU has something around 1.5 at the moment AFAIK - and this is including all the pro-life subcultures we have mentioned above.
Having less then 2 babies per women WILL lead to extinction. Best we can hope for is 'poaching' population from pro-life groups and reeducating them into mainstream thinking - but not all of them, or the spring will run dry.... ;)

I would say - in most _successful_ religions. My point was that this is evolution in action - ones which are saying otherwise are not passing their memes to further generations. Skoptsy comes to mind, even if their downfall was hastened by politics.
Feminism/women rights is probably first that widespread mindset which has negative birth rate correlation. I would risk saying that it will go extinct in few hundred years, unless technology will step in - with children being genespliced, grown in artificial wombs and educated by robots. But at that point, it won't be homo sapient anymore, but something transhuman.

You will be suprised. Highly educated women from 'normal' societies, with careers, life plans, knowledge about birth control etc will have a lot less children than these poor girls kept in the dark. Evolution is about penalizing speciments which produce less offspring. Keeping women uneducated, 'happy' to bear 10 children is the tactic to win evolution game.

So, in 3 generation, it might turn out that 'society' which you are talking about will be 5% of population, rest being dumb-things-down-forbid-birth-control-abuse-women cults/religions.

I think that everybody's patience can get a bit thin after 60 years of waiting... I would probably spend a lot more money in 4th gen fission research rather than chasing fusion holy grail.

I hope they will do the needful to make sure probe can kindly revert with gathered data.

On serious note, what does it mean that "mission would be around Earth"? Are we talking about some small sattelite orbiting Earth, which happens to have lenses directed at Sun? And this is "Mission to Probe Sun"? In such case, Hubble telescope was a mission to probe thousands of galaxies and millions of starts...