"Boys fall in love with computers as machines; girls see them as tools to do something else," said Barbara Ericson, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who tracks the AP exam.

What does this have to do with self-confidence? This is women approaching computers from a different perspective (on average).

"Then girls think, Ãfmaybe I don't belong because I don't love them like the boys do.Ãf(TM)"

And they'd be right. Why do they belong at a company passionate about technology if they aren't passionate about technology? They don't belong there any more than I belong in a doctor's surgery as anything but a patient - I'm not passionate about healthcare and didn't take exams to become a qualified doctor.

Yup, I have no need for home Wifi, but then I don't have a laptop. Just a wired desktop. Quaint in this day and age.

Number of birds OR humans killed by nuclear power? More like "thanks you ignorant greenies", who are ironically the ones probably complaining about this solar plant.

I've been looking for ways to reduce my time actively playing Farmville for a while now.

Unfortunately that doesn't quite work either - look at the Twitter trolls, who spew forth such abuse that several high-profile twitter users cancelled their accounts.

I don't get this - doesn't Twitter allow you to just totally ignore users? Or maybe even only pay attention to users on a whitelist basis? If not, why not use social networking services that do? I don't really see how trolls could defeat that mechanism.

I'd quite like to lose the spammers too.

I don't get the point in these super-super-fast speeds over copper. In the UK right now we're aiming for FTTC which leads to speeds of 20Mbps - 50Mbps. 50Mbps should be enough for anyone. :-)

Nope, if both sides play pretty much perfectly they'll always draw, I think.

On the other hand, there is a definite shortage of women CS and engineering grads

There is only a "shortage" if you assume the numbers should be 50/50. Have you considered that there may be real differences between male and female brains that make men and women just want to go down different lines of work, and men are more likely to be interested in those subjects? Factor that in and the numbers may be perfectly alright.

The experience was fantastic. after a single-level phone tree, the phone was answered on the second ring by a very nice man in india who answered all my questions. it turned out i had a technical problem rather than a licensing problem, so he connected me with another very nice indian man who solved my problem within 5 minutes.

Did the "MS technical department" ask you to install Ammyy Admin on your machine? If so, you may have a bigger problem than you thought...

I used to be entirely pro-nuclear on a scientific basis. Now I see how humans behave in practice when it comes to the trade-off between safety and profit/reputation. I see how much nuclear power is really reverse Hollywood accounting, where you hide how much of the real cost is borne by government. And I would prefer a transition from fossil directly to renewable

And could you explain how your "renewables" will be significantly cheaper than nuclear? Or not take up shitloads of space for the same amount of power generation? Or generate a significant baseload of electricity as the wind and sunlight fluctuate?

Microsoft just needs to make an OS that delivers what end-users actually want, with a solid XP emulator so people can continue to run their mission-critical stuff that still requires it.

They could call it something like "Windows 7 with Windows Virtual PC".

If it were, why is no-one doing it and making a fortune?

Opposition from the greens, and lazy people who buy into their BS?

And they tend to oppose nucelar power which is our best way of actually getting enough "clean energy" for modern society.

Actually, it would be more like "va te faire foutre". :-)