Another vote for the Graph Gear here. I managed to stupidly break one a couple of years back so am on my second with a third spare one in my desk if I need it. Coming from a maths background I've always favoured pencils, only using ink if required. I think it might be the P in the INTP personality type coming through. ;)

Oh Lord it's hard to be humble, when you're perfect in every way...

Ah, but you're forgetting that Cisco have lots of $$$ to afford expensive lawyers.

Wait. You didn't actually think that that law was supposed to apply to Mega Corps did you?

This is why I don't like the whole booth babe thing. If you regularly attend conferences that use them, then it's easy to fall into the mindset of thinking that all attractive, young women present are there purely for decoration and, on the rare instance where a tech company has a woman engineer on board, barging past them to speak to one of their male colleagues.

I remember reading this article by a guy who wants to discourage the use of booth babes. Here's one of the suggestions that appealed to me:

The Tactics: Actually, this part is pretty simple. When the first person at a booth approaches you, treat him or her exactly the same way you would a sales or implementation engineer. Ask questions regarding the technology. Ask about planned life cycles of the software, on use counts, and other things. Treat them exactly as you would an equal.

If this person is a booth babe (or a clueless marketing droid), they will inevitably hand you off to the lead technical (or sales) person at the booth. Here comes the important part: Demand to know why they wasted your time with manning the booth with clueless people. Don't discuss sales or tech with this person (which is what they will desperately want to do at this point). Ask why their company wastes everyone's time and their investors' money using people who provide no value. Tell them that you will not be doing business with them, regardless of their technology, because you believe that any company that needs to hide behind tricks, gimmicks, and sex appeal, can not offer you any value. Point out that a great number of their competitors don't need to use flimflam to sell their wares. Then walk away.

So as a concerned UK citizen, which government department(s) should I be writing to, to request that they prosecute themselves for running an illegal website?

Not just a US problem; I've been seeing the same trends in the UK for the last twenty years. Still, on the bright side it means I'll probably have a job for as long as I want one, so....

Remember kiddies, math is hard! Go off and do something more fun and easier instead with plenty of time for parties and shopping. Everyone knows the world needs more people with media studies and art appreciation diplomas. That's the ticket.

...then please include an option that would cover a sizeable chunk of the likely respondents. I'm guessing the a lot of people would have ticked something along the lines of "in-house using software developed or adapted by people other than me."

I work for one of the smaller ISPs in the UK serving mainly business customers. From time to time we've had emails from various sources purporting to represent the rights of copyright holders. These have all appeared to originate in the US and quote US legislation, an allegedly offending IP and the time at which they state the incident occurred. A few of the IP addresses have even fallen within our address ranges. Where this is the case I've always replied back asking for more information and pointing out that the legislation they are quoting is not relevant to UK law and asking for the UK equivalent under which they propose to press their claims. I've never heard back from any of them.

Alright that would give you close enough to a 50/50 male / female split. Now to solve the difficult problem. How to stop the male agents saving their 50% female quota for use on young, attractive females?

It's 6016 years (give or take a year), and I agree this so called "scientific discovery" offends religious beliefs and so all articles about it on the interwebs should be removed immediately!

I'd write more about it, except I've got to get back to drawing my cartoons of Muhammad and writing rude limericks about the Thai royal family.

And the answer from me is "Thanks, but no thanks". I'll spend my tourist dollars somewhere else that doesn't pull stunts like this.

On the subject of "unlimited" deals, I've taken to asking people trying to sell me broadband what their "unlimit" is.

One of the best introductions to good programming practice that I know and it instilled in me some good habits I've managed to hang on to.

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