I do. It's not that difficult, it just requires an attention to all the details from the software to the Quantum Mechanics. It doesn't make me a genius, but it's not that hard.

No that's not what I said. By "public benefit" I mean the government (state local federal) can't provide a right or a benefit (education, social security, medicare, unemployment) to a segment of the population. If Microsoft wants to provide their own after school programs or summer camp that is their right (and we could argue separately if that would be a good thing.) I'm specifically talking about things our government provides.

No it's still not acceptable. If they are doing that it's not acceptable. Make opportunity and programs available to all. If there are resource limitations then have a process for selecting beneficiaries that is gender neutral. Skills based testing or lottery.

Actually I was. I had no role models and no encouragement. I was ignored. I was ostracized by my peers. In high school I was told I didn't have the math skills to continue in the honors math track. Not once, but twice. I insisted I was going to stay in that track. I had to take summer school to so. I was also moved from honors biology to regular because "I wasn't honors material". I ended up get a 93% after I was moved. There were universities to which I wasn't accepted. I was touched inappropriately by my professor when I tried to get help with a class I wasn't getting. I've failed classes. I've been told I couldn't take classes that I needed to graduate. But I didn't give up or quit. This is what I want to do and I'm good at it.

No, we get it, we just don't think it's OK for you to accept funding for a public benefit with the condition that it discriminates against a part of the population. It wouldn't be acceptable to do this for boys it's not acceptable to do it for girls.

Yes and this is important. We need bad examples to teach people that bad things can happen and you want to do the right thing to avoid them. For instance you don't want civil servents to collude with politicians to jack up their retirement benefits to unsustainable levels so that they can get a benefit in collective bargaining agreements with politicians who will be out of office when the benefits are due. Too big to fail is likewise a problem with wall street. The fear of a city failing is what ought to keep retires from taking an "I don't care" attitude to city management. If civil workers and retires know that their failure to encourage a responsible path for their government will mean possible loss of their retirement they will be quite effective advocates. Besides their already was a safety net for retires who loose their pension. They'd still get social security. True that's not great but it is meant to keep them from starving and the undesirable outcome is necessary for the feedback system to work. I find it problematic to advocate that we need to prevent people from investing so we can protect them from bad outcomes because we lack the resolve to let them fail. Failure is an important part of many systems and our failure aversion doesn't benefit us as a society. If we're going to eliminate the down side to market based systems should we really be surprised when they don't work? Bondholders should have lost money and lots of it. After all they were investing where there is always a risk of loss of investment.

If they borrowed money in the form of municipal bonds to get this done and it doesn't pay off and they default or declare bankruptcy why should the state bail them out? The creditors who bought the bonds should take a haircut for making a bad investment. Why should the state bail out those investors? Isn't that how municipal bond markets are suppose to work? Isn't that why they're private, won't private investors look at what the bonds are for and make a judgement if it's a good investment of their money or not? Who are you to tell the bond holders how to invest their money?

I don't see this as that different from a municipal water system. The town, through it's elected officials, chose to implement this plan. Perhaps the citizens voted for this system knowing that initially it wouldn't break even but think that it was good for the town as a whole. Much as I might vote for a municipal water system even though I get my water from a well and don't want to subscribe to the water system. I realize that it's good for the town and therefore good for me indirectly even if I don't directly take advantage of it. I support bond measures for schools even though I don't have children and don't plan too and so do some who send their children to private schools. Who are we, not part of the town, to question their wisdom and judgement from afar. Perhaps the town made the judgement that as the internet grows and government services migrate to the net, more people will sign up and it will be revenue neutral or even make them money down the road. I support the idea the local government is the best and I see no reason to over turn their judgement here.

Yawn, the mail, calendar and contacts apps on my iPhone already work pretty well with the change server at work. Every now and then they stop syncing but I simply turn off the syncing of those 3 items and then turn it back on (I don't even have to delete the account info just flip 3 switches). Wait a few minutes till the phone sucks down the data again and I'm off. It's not outlook that's indispensable, it's Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Why would I pay for Outlook, the only thing I really miss is the ability to set my out of office messages from the phone. Filters are another things missing, but that's something that's complicated enough that the once every year I set one up I would just do it from my laptop. Am I gonna switch apps for that? Nope.

I call BS on this. No one is abridging anyone's freedom of speech when they advocate regulating corporate communications. The share holders can still band together and say anything they could as a company and they could spend just as much money if not more. What they can't do is spend the money of all the shareholders on a viewpoint that they don't all necessarily support based on a majority control and call it a business expense which they get to write off. People have free speech rights not corporations and not unions and not churches.

Bull. Levy a fine larger than the market cap of the company (or even greater than the assets.) When they can't pay the company as a whole can go into bankruptcy and the government can be awarded the company as a whole functioning intact corporation (if they don't get it all they can get enough to control it). There is no reason the company needs to be broken up, it's a working functioning corporation. As the now largest owner the government can fire several high level employee including the CEO, dissolve the board and sell all shares to the public. Low level employees with no connection to the crime can continue to work. A functioning profit making concern continues to exist and the shareholders and bond holders get zero'd out, thus providing them with incentive not to be so passive and allow a corporation to do shit like this again next time. The government gets money in the end. It's a win-win-win!

"The information involved is typical ad-related analytic data?" Are there ads on the government run healthcare signup site? Why are there ads?

Guess what, men get discouraged from engineering too! If I quit every time, I failed an exam or a class or or was told I wasn't right for the honors program or was touched inapproriately by a professor I wouldn't be an engineer.

Women of all ages should know that they can and should pursue their interests in ANY field. The fact that you've been discouraged doesn't mean it was a gender thing, plenty of us males in engineering did to. Lots of my male colleagues were told they weren't good enough; for some it was true and for others it wasn't but they didn't really want it enough. Having seen how many men it happened to and seeing it wasn't a gender thing for them leads me to believe that in many instances it isn't for women either.

I'm kinda curious why you think video games, socializing with coworkers after work and bowling are qualities that women will hate and day care, family culture, lack of crunch time and brining your kids to work don't appeal to men?

Perhaps it's just me but that seems rather sexist to me.

They all seem like positives to me.

Further, going to "meet ups" related to your core field or technology seems like a very efficient way to find people with the skills you need.

Good grief I wish for the return of the sanity of those days!

That's just not true. While he may own $20Billion worth of assets, they surely don't pay that much in income (dividends) something in the neighbor hood of 1% to 5% would be close which puts him earning somewhere between $200M and $1B. A $70 million a year tax write off is very valuable. I don't understand why he should get any write off. He bought something that he believes will make him money knowing full well that the physical assets and cash of that entity are far less than the purchase price. He is not a naive investor. If he sells it and loses money let him take a loss and write it off otherwise why should the rest of us subsidize him.