Canadian, you're probably with Bell or Rogers. Yes, they suck. Try Teksavvy. They're actually pleasant to deal with.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Teksavvy employee or shareholder, but I am a very satisfied Teksavvy customer.

ISPs have no incentive to offer spam filtering, and indeed very little incentive to even give out email addresses. Email is a huge PITA and there are plenty of free providers to choose from : Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and probably dozens of lesser-known ones.

Also, ISPs have a pretty small profit margin on consumer service, so any costs they can cut, they will cut. So don't bother with an ISP email account.

I firmly believe that any women should have the right to enter the STEM field if she so chooses, just as I believe that any man should have the right to become a fashion model or a ballerina if he so chooses.

This. Thank you! That expresses it perfectly.

Absolutely girls and boys are different. They definitely play differently and prefer different toys.

But that doesn't mean that every girl is into pink frilly stuff, building blocks that make a kitchen, dolls, makeup, etc. And not every boy is into muscle cars, soldiers, violent games or spaceships.

Unfortunately, manufacturers rigidly enforce the stereotypes. I was out with my daughter one time at a department store and we were in the kids' clothes section. They might as well have put up a fence where the "girls'" t-shirts ended and the "boys'" t-shirts began: Girls' were pink or flowery or featuring hearts, ballerinas, kittens, puppies, etc. Boys' featured snarling superheroes, bad-ass trucks, etc. and were generally dark-colored. My daughter rolled her eyes at all of this; although she's a perfectly feminine girl, she still feels most comfortable in comfy dark sweatpants and a plain t-shirt.

There are many boys and girls being forced into unnatural stereotypes by society and by manufacturers. Here's a radical idea: Just make kids' toys and let the kids themselves figure out if they like them.

Nonsense; you don't need any kind of "faith" to be an atheist. All you have to do is say "I reject the notion of God as unprovable and unnecessary."

"Probabilistic" does not mean "unpredictable". We can confidently make statements about probabilistic things that we know will happen. For example, it's possible for all the air molecules in this room to spontaneously congregate in one half of the room, leaving the other half in a vacuum, but I confidently predict this will not happen in the lifetime of the human species.

Sidetracking a bit, "deterministic" doesn't necessarily mean "predictable". The entire field of Chaos Theory arose from this realization.

Science has faith in the scientific method, in the reproducibility of experiments.

Yeah, true. I'll take that faith over religious faith any day of the week. How about this: I'll book a ticket on a commercial airliner that has been designed by competent engineers using sound scientific principles. You strap a couple of wings to your arms, have them blessed by your favourite priests/pastor/rabbi/imam/whatever and leap off a cliff.

Let's see whose faith is misplaced.

If you read past the flowery language, you'll see that the Catholic Church's position is based on misogyny and the denial of women's rights to control their bodies. Mind you, so are most religions so don't think I'm bashing Catholicism particularly.

Specifically in the Catholic case, it's also highly hypocritical. We have this "divine gift" from God, yet priests are not allowed to enjoy it --- all so the Church will inherit their property, of course, rather than natural living heirs. How conveeeenient.

Don't mythologize native Americans. They were very few in number, yet did manage to hunt a few species to extinction. If everyone in North America were native American today, our ecological footprint probably wouldn't be much different.

Yeah, Europe definitely has a problem with antisemitism. Not sure that explains what the article postulates.

Oh, you mean like Siemens, Philips, Ericsson, BAE Systems, STMicroelectronics, and Logitech? Or possibly much smaller ones like Raspberry Pi, Nginx, AVG Technologies and F-Secure?

Mostly, the big European technology companies actually make stuff.

"After 20 years of programming..."

Seriously? What language did you program in? HTML4? That's a programming language, right? Just like Pearl and F.O.R.T.R.A.N?

I think I may have come across your resume...

A nuke is unlikely to have much effect on anything big, other than to break off additional chunks that are harder to stop and track.

I have a friend who was a drone operator. He suffers PTSD because of intense guilt. He says he knows for sure he was responsible for killing innocent civilians in Iraq, either because of bad luck, faulty intelligence or technical problems.

I'm not saying my friend should feel guilty. Civilian casualties are an unavoidable part of war. But it's easy for me to say that because I'm not the one who pulled the trigger.

I can't believe the posters who think that people can go around killing others, even if remotely, without it having psychological consequences.

The paper is interesting, but I doubt it's very effective. An awful lot of the malicious URLs we seen in our filters are legitimate web sites that have been compromised and had malicious content inserted. We have thousands of malicious URLs containing "wp-content", just to give you an idea...