I agree the primary reason for gender inequality in a profession like programming is that broadly it appeals to men more that women. There will be other factors, for some a male dominated field will be a barrier, others may have been biased by their parents. But really, apart from actually forcing women into a job they haven't chosen to meet some quota I dont see a solution there.

I believe a women should have the same potential as a man to succeed in the profession SHE chooses HERSELF. It maybe a harder task becoming a coder than going into nursing or teaching, but I think that would be clear to anyone seriously considering it.

Personally i have seen women fit well into roles that require more people and management skills than pure coding. For example the "Scrum Master" role for any agile team (sorry for the buzzwords) bridges the coding-people skills gap.

However i think there is a major factor that seems to be overlooked in these discussions -- gender equality in politics. If there is any area where women should be encouraged to participate it is here. After all they are 50% of the electorate and more representation here would give the real instances of inequality a stronger voice.

Germany gets to run their manufacturing and exports hot while Greece cools the fuck out of everything. The only reason Germany does so well in comparison is because they had the existing manufacturing base, which is now benefiting from permanent cheap exports.

The GP is just a typical karma whoring attempt that worked out rather well:

"Windows admins are stupid" -- check
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" -- check
"Microsoft writes buggy shitty software" -- check
+5 Interesting -- sigh

I think the easiest way is to start getting security researchers to use ridiculous names, like the new SSH vulnerability "Smelly Fart".

I see nothing foolish, my taxes provide, a police force, heath care, education, public transport and roads, energy, water, etc. all of which contribute to a stable society where were business can flourish.

Google takes advantage of the police force, health care (by default fair enough), education, public transport and roads, energy, water and a society that enables enough wealth for people to have a disposable income.

They are quite welcome to move their operation to the Congo or Syria and see how well their corporate HQ runs. I'm sure they will get a great tax rate. Here they can pay tax the same as me.

It's quite simple, the money is made at the point the product is consumed, we are living in a consumer society after all.

Everything else falls apart when the consumer stops buying (or looking), if Starbucks or Google want the favourable tax agreement from Luxembourg to stand, then that counts only for profit on sales made to the people of Luxembourg.

I'm not so sure, you can reduce travel sickness to almost zero by gradual exposure. For instance, many years ago I went without watching TV or even looking at an electronic screen for 2 weeks or more. When I returned TV made me feel distinctly travel sick for about 1 hour. I expect the VR effect will be worse, but with enough exposure i believe you can train your brain to stop the sickness.

The exact exploits used to gain root i guess no one outside Sony or the hackers will ever know. As for the owning of the client PCs and network, this seems pretty credible. http://securelist.com/blog/res...

Except that the internet was an unregulated wild west at that time, and pretty much still is. The worst that would happen on Napster is you downloaded a NIN track over your 56k, and it turned out it was renamed Nickelback song.

The worst that happens if you use Uber or any service that interfaces the digital with real world -- and tries to apply the rules of the digital one -- is that you get raped or murdered. Hence the reason the "stuffy" regulations Uber want rid of.

It is possible to do advertising well, the reason people use adblock are all the obnoxious "pop-over" adverts, or adverts that destroy the flow of a site.

Youtube does adverts pretty well, the 5 second skip works perfectly as you can skip almost instantly if you have no interest or just don't want to be hassled at that moment. But if someone looks interesting to me or funny then often i will let it play by CHOICE.

Contrast that with channel4.com in the UK who have been fighting a war with adblock for a few years to stop it working. They have 2 minutes of "unskipable" adverts before you can even watch a show, then a further 3 forced periods of 2 minutes during a 1hr show! It is just laziness trying to apply broadcast TV rules to on-demand internet consumption.

I'm sure the housewives and concerned community members seen here leading protests will be pleased to know they have risen above the rank of "minons".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Hehe, sadly it looks like it's the way things are going. I still prefer Firefox to Chrome simply because i don't want to feed Google any more data that i have to, and having 3 major browsers is important for an open web. Also don't like Google's tactics of deliberately making there sites run slower on anything other than Chrome.

However it seems to me that Firefox has a problem, HTML5 and a lot of the new protocols around that mean that they have to keep up by adding support -- "bloat". But it is as yet unclear how useful these will be. In the Phoenix and early Firefox days when FF was stomping all over IE it was just HTML+Javascript and 3rd party plugins, and they optimized that perfectly.

Now FF has to deal with what new features they need to add to keep up. When the feature creep slows and we see which protocols have won the next generation web maybe a Phoenix-like browser will emerge from the FF code.

I also know someone who moved from a janitorial job to IT successfully. He was around 33 or 34 i think. We worked together for a bit at an old employer of mine. He didn't pass probation at that place, mainly due to a boss who was demanding to say the least. However last i heard he had no trouble finding another position and is now a support desk team leader.

One thing you will know if you have been in IT for a while. If you are simply competent and care about the work you are already miles ahead of most of your peers. The IT Ops/Support teams i know that support high availability zero downtime (as close to as possible) systems have staff that are mostly over 30. These are of course established businesses, not startups formed by some college friends.

Given the first movie of the Start Trek reboot was surprisingly good, and got the feeling of an updated "TOS" pretty spot on I'm hopeful for this too. However the second Star Trek movie went downhill rapidly into "typical Sci-Fi blockbuster", and I'm expecting the same from Star Wars unfortunately.

Most annoying is when random files become invisible through MTP. I was backing up internal phone memory recently and noticed that a number of recently written files where visible in my file manager but missing when mounted through MTP on my Windows machine.

It took at least 30 mins of web searches and another 30 to try the different possible fixes. In the end i had to clear the cache on the Media Server background process, and then use a play store app to rebuild this cache, which took another 15 mins.

I would just like external SD cards to mount and stay mounted, my S3 with Cyanogenmod refuses to keep my SD card mounted, and then freezes the phone trying to remount it. Maybe this is just a Cyanogenmod issue though.