This subject tends to make men believe they are being accused of being sexist. That somehow the imbalance is a consequence of deliberate or perhaps inadvertent sexism. The thing is this: there doesn't need to be overt sexism for an environment to be uninviting.

Any situation where there is an existing gender imbalance leads to this imbalance being reinforced simply because it is less comfortable for the minority and more comfortable for the majority.

So when it is suggested that we need to make special efforts to attract women to the IT industry it is not necessarily to redress a active sexist attitudes on a matter of principle or to be PC, but rather a simple and pragmatic approach to getting the other half of the population to contribute to the IT industry.

You're cute when you are naive. When the DMCA passed its implications for free speech were clear, and since that time have been used to control what appears on YouTube and many other sites. Corporations now control speech. When the PATRIOT act passed it was almost unanimous. Now you get to be virtually stripped naked every time you fly; a gross invasion of privacy. The NDAA sweeps away the last vestiges of any of your rights to a trial. Corporations now assign their cronies into critical Government roles at will while the Police permit execution of innocents in the streets if they belong to a minority. Meanwhile Corporations have purchased the media to openly indoctrinate and control the population. They don't even try to hide this agenda any longer.

The last time the US were considered the defenders of freedom and justice was a long time ago. The OOXML business was another example of corporate interests corrupting genuine efforts to create a genuine standard to help users. Again the object was to control and restrict people. Now we have the US exporting legislation like the DMCA via ACTA and TPPA to other countries to extend their iron grip of cultural death.

Wake up America - this is not a case of "one day" ending up in 1984 - you are there now. Just look at how the Occupy movement failed through control of the media. There will be no revolution of the people while corporations can control the discussion and the media. Wake up - you have already lost your rights.

Sounds like a opportunity to reverse engineer it and make it available more generally for those in a similar situation.

The interesting thing for me was that the description in the article was an excellent CV. We have had many discussions here about whether a Computer Science Degree really prepares you for the IT industry, and in my opinion they are at best a primer. I am also "unqualified", but have made a successful career in IT. I have also been making hiring decisions for several years in several organisations.

When you get past the skill set required what I am looking for is independence in terms of being able to take a task or feature and deliver it without overt oversight. Are you able to analyze a requirement, come up with a solution, and deliver it? Do you have professional disiplines? I'm talking about use of version control, working inside a team environment.

One way of getting exactly these kinds of skills is through open source teams. Open source provides a low barrier to entry for those looking to make their mark. It will give you excellent practical experience, that in my book is approximately double the value of commercial experience because it shows commitment and passion for software development.

In short the original description above reads better than most CV's I get across my desk. University qualifications do play a part, but not as much as you might think.

"He'll be our President because we put him there"... I think maybe Democracy is broken. If regardless of who you vote for the result is the same you are living in a Dictatorship. It's not just patents either - Gitmo, Iraq, Patriot Act, Health Care, seems that even when the Republicans aren't in office they are. No wonder the focus has been on security - they are gonna need it when the people find out they have been duped by the DemoRepublican Party for so long.

And what about the countries unlucky enough to be situated below the equator?

This is an interesting question because it brings up a serious problem with how poor the common domain has become. Maori have a culture and cultural artifacts which they own collectively. It is their culture. No single Maori can claim it for themselves, but they together own it. Today virtually all the cultural artifacts of our period are owned by someone else. Try and use the artifacts of your own culture in a new work and just see how fast you will find yourself in court for copyright violation.

Sing a popular song, draw a picture of a Coke can, or copy a tattoo from someone who is famous, and suddenly it's a huge problem. But it is clearly a double standard. They can copy cultural artifacts, but we cannot copy them.

I'm not really standing up for pirates - outright duplication of works for profit - but I do think that there should be a liberal ability for individuals to copy segments in order to create new works.

In other news coming to hand, "Free Software" doesn't mean the software is free of cost.

And exactly are they going to control a robotic vessel with it's rudder and propulsion at the bottom of the ship covered in tons and tons of cargo? Hell - they will need gear to cut into the hold just to get access to cargo, and then they need some way to carry it away. The ship won't stop, and if you do manage to disable the control systems you won't have any easy means to actually control the ship. It would be much more difficult to pirate such a ship.