First, equal treatment is a myth. Nobody wants it (not quite nobody, but very few people). Everybody wants their gender, religion, race, etc. to get preferential treatment.

Second, they should just rephrase it. New parents get 8 weeks parental leave and the birth giver gets a further 8 weeks to recover from the major medical procedure they underwent.

Life is not fair. Never has been and never will be. Trying to make everybody the same is pointless and stupid.

So the average female employee is going to get between 8 and 16 weeks more leave than her male colleague over the course of a lifetime. Life is so unfair.

Excellent point! I am by no means a frequent gambler, but on the odd occasion that I have been to a casino that is pretty much how it has worked for me. Put in money, push random buttons and hope for the best. I once won a fairly decent amount of money, but had absolutely no clue how the game worked (what the rules were) that I was playing.

If you notice that a dealer is having a bad day (stressed, tired, angry with his boss) and overpaying players and you choose to sit down and play at that table, are you a criminal? I agree that you are unethical, but are you a criminal?
Alternatively, let's say you accidentally pushed this sequence of buttons and were overpaid, but did not know how it happened. What should you do?

That works well for you, but my journal article only cost me (ZAR) R100000 to produce, including research, grad students, overhead, etc. That comes to about $11000. So while your publishing costs is only 6% of the cost of producing the research, for me it is 27%. That really hurts my budget.

Joking about bombs, especially at airports is perfectly normal. Almost every single person I know that has ever flown has joked about it. Almost all of them mentally try and focus not to joke about it when they go to the airport because they are aware of the potential for trouble. Not joking about bombs at airports is abnormal behaviour.

Good point! I have a very nice very expensive flash-light. I often mount it on a rifle when I hunt vermin. Being very expensive, I only have one. I got pulled over by airport security because they wanted to check for explosive residue on my flash-light. Luckily, I had two flash-lights in my bag. My nice expensive one and a brand new Maglight I bought as a gift. They picked the Maglight. I asked what would happen if they found residue on it and they refused to answer. I quickly realised that shutting up and walking away was the way to go.
Upon sharing this with friends I heard what happened to one that got a hug from a mutual friend that works in the explosives industry. You are guilty until proven innocent and even then you are stuffed around because you embarrassed the system.

Why not just make noise cancellation headphones for the telescope? Relying on people not accidentally (or deliberately) "jamming" these very expensive instruments seems crazy, especially when there is a technological solution.

I thought this was a well known truth. As a kid we would guestimate the expected life expectancy of critter (species, not individual) by listening to how fast its heart beat. We would then confirm it later by checking the literature. You had to make an allowance for the fact that the critter was usually stressed and therefore the heart rate would be a bit higher than normal. I always just assumed that a muscle could only contract so many times before breaking down.

I am not a huge fan of North America sports, but I always get confused by ESPN highlights. Why do they dedicate so much time to showing coaches and officials talking to each other or looking at monitors? They always show some guys in animated conversation or staring at a screen. How does this contribute to the highlights? In other sports (rugby, cricket, soccer, etc.) they show the actual on field highlights.

I thought the correct spelling was Bruce Lee, not Bruce Li. Maybe they thought this was one of his relatives.

I guess these well trained officers of the law were justified to taze her if they were unable to restrain a 40-odd year old woman. Maybe policemen should train in karate so that they wont need tazers any more. Lucky for her they had tazers. I remember a few years ago when we were told that tazers will only be used as a non-lethal alternative if a gun would previously been used. If it was not for the tazers she would have been shot.

You have the wrong definition of diversity. If all speakers are East Asian or Black or any other ethnicity other than White or female or gay or transgender then there is no problem. It is only a problem if they are all White male.

You left off another problem:

3. It never ends. There is no mechanism for saying that AA has been successful, therefore it can never end.

No country [*], no matter how homogeneous the population, has ever had true equality in the sense that jobs were distributed proportionally amongst genders and race and in the real world it will never happen. The mere fact that more women than men give berth to live offspring alone prevents this from happening.

* Maybe something like the Vatican (someone told me it was an independent state and I am too lazy to google it). If they had an all white male population and all the jobs were occupied by white men, then maybe they had true equality.

Well done Osama! You haunt them even from the grave. Way to leave a legacy.

What seems like a sudden blow out normally starts as a much slower leak. For example, a little stone gets stuck in the tread of a tyre. Eventually it works its way through the tread, causing a slow leak. Driving on the under inflated tyre causes it to flex excessively and heat up. Eventually, it fails. To the inexperienced driver this feels like a sudden blow out. Same thing with nails, glass, etc.

Obviously if you kiss a brick or a large stone with the side wall of your tyre and it rips a fist size hole in your side wall, this system will not help. However, if your pick up a nail or something, this might be able to keep your tyre pressure high enough so that you don't get a sudden failure. If you are lucky you will make it to your destination and wake up to a flat tyre the next morning.

With trucks, you have (multiple) double axles. This means that if one of your tyres deflate, you often don't notice it until the tyre completely fails and rips to shreds. I suspect this will save the trucking industry millions in lost tyres, never mind fuel.

I have to agree with you. I have been using Linux since the early 90's and it has been my preferred OS since the mid 90's. It has always done everything I needed and I use it on my personal machines. At work I have Windows and OS X machines, but I only ever use them when, for example, I have to format a document in Word.
I have no need for Linux to dominate the desktop. In fact, using Linux gives me an advantage over most if my competitors, so I don't really want them to use Linux.
I don't understand the need to use the dominant product. If Linux does not do what you want it to do, either don't use it or change it.
Do you marry someone because she is your soul-mate or because she is popular with your friends?