Oh, please. Large parts of America and Europe haven't even entered the 20th century on this one. If you think Americans, or Europeans have 'gotten over' doing bad things to innocent people out of sexual prejudice, you are really missing out on a lot of important news.

I don't see any reason why I can't be angry and fired up about both, not to mention Britain today. But the difference is: I'm not a citizen of any country run by Islamic fundamentalists. I am (partially!) responsible for the actions of the government of Britain, because I vote here. Fundamentalists (of any religion) do not "get a pass" from me. But their existence in other countries is not an excuse to ignore prejudice in my own.

(Gay people still do not have equal marriage rights in the UK, and until five years ago didn't have any marriage rights at all. That deserves an apology. But any step in that direction is a good idea.)

Governments suck at apologizing. They should be encouraged to practice.

Well, yes, but GP's entitled to argue the toss... since most movies have plot holes because everyone in charge is too @#$& stupid to notice or care. Sadly, especially with SF movies.

Well, the Nazis did have a number of weird and stupid theories about biology. But nothing's as vestigial as the grammar checker on GP's final sentence. Clearly the AC's long since evolved past punctuation.

We wish... Oh, how I miss those days.

(For those not in the know... we've had over a decade of government spending nearly as reckless as in the US, combined with underinvestment in infrastructure and industry. Our currency's recovered from the worst of its crash... but only compared to the dollar; the Euro is kicking our collective backsides. $39 is currently about £24.)

ObOnTopic: My CD-Rs from the early days with my £200 2-speed drive have mostly died. But none of the data from back then was still important to me anyway. My CD-Rs from a couple of years later have actually done better than several of my cheap pressed audio CDs from that period.

Because Draconian is the correct adjective for laws which demand disproportionate punishments for minor offences.

Vampires, sadly, have nothing to do with it. Although, most articles on DRM make me want to impale someone, so I suppose there's a connection.

I didn't say I wasn't affected by them. Said they don't benefit me. Very different.

Also, I do live in a very small world. But that's a different issue.)

Nothing. Of course MS wants to make a profit, and good luck to them. But I don't work for them, so MS profits don't benefit me.

Wild optimism, IMO. We've figured out a marginally less bad base system for governance. It's clearly much better than all previous options - but most of the previous options consisted of 'feuding tribes', 'theocracy' and a lot of variations on 'military dictatorship'. And it's not as if we've done a lot of experiment into better alternatives; it's an almost entirely unexplored research area.

If there isn't a better way out there waiting to be discovered, it will be both surprising and extremely disappointing. The strength of the system is those 'adjustments'; it has the potential to be incrementally transformed into something better, without the junk-it-all-and-start-again approach required for most other systems. But so far it's frequently been incrementally transformed into something worse. Cuts both ways.

The problem is that it's easy to start a new corporation, with a new name and the same people running it. Charter revoked? No problem. Start a new one.

(Language Fascist side note: You mean capital punishment. Capitol punishment would be 'imprison everyone in D.C.' Which might not be such a bad idea, but I don't think it's what you meant.)

Yfrwlf is absolutely right here. One of the huge things holding linux back is how much work it is to just get the software you want running with your favourite distro.

If we ever want to bring the Windows users over into Infinite Fun Space, we have to get over this.

Somebody mod parent up, please.

Well it's a nice theory, but in practice courts hate excluding evidence for any reason, and there's lots of nice justifications they can use for allowing it in cases much more egregrious than this.

The material they grabbed will be allowed in evidence.

On the contrary - the greatest argument for the jury system is that it places a limit on the judge's ability to decide what law applies; thus placing a limit on what the legislature (and judiciary) can get away with. Sometimes the law is stupid or unjust. Sometimes the law is good, but the judge is stupid or unjust. On these occasions it is the duty of the jury to tell the court to get stuffed.

I don't know the US well enough to come up with an example, so I'll use an obvious UK example - the Clive Ponting case.

Fortunately in those cases there's no need to 'change the system through the proper channels' instead. The proper channel has been built into the system; it is called the jury.

(It doesn't always work well, but that's a different discussion.)

Sorry, I was the one being unclear here; I meant the same as you. The figures for the UK show exactly what you suggest, a slow but steady rise in the percentage of female applications in maths. (Over the last fifteen years, from just over 35% to a shade under 41% last year.) But the changes in higher education over this period mean there are many possible explanations for this. Again, the same trend does not show up in the physics figures. Your guess is as good as mine why.

I wish it was some weird fetish of the supervisor; that would be more explicable, and less shocking, to me, than what actually occurred. But I can't discuss the details, as I don't have permission from any of the parties concerned to publicise this one.

Open discrimination is almost unheard of, and publicly ridiculed, here too. But subtler bias and sexual harassment are sadly not rare at all. This is as shocking to me as it is to you, but I can't claim it's not true.

Can't judge; most women I knew, and most men, worked harder than I did - I'm a very lazy person. Some women I knew seemed to work harder than many male students... but also did better. This doesn't prove anything more sophisticated than 'hard work causes greater success', which I think we both knew, and it certainly isn't helpful data.

I agree with you there; this hypothesis shouldn't be 'banned from polite society'. (It isn't, around me, but clearly my experience differs from yours here.) It should, however, be treated with the extreme caution normally reserved for anything else which been has dangerous and badly misused in the past. I wouldn't accept it until any alternative hypotheses had been thoroughly tested and discarded.

Yet again, you're just conveniently assuming - wrongly, and ridiculously - that women 'don't feel the desire to succeed' in maths. I say for the third (and last) time: Back this up with facts. (So far you haven't managed even anecdote, much less data. Have you ever met a female mathematician who hated her research career but felt she'd been 'shoved' into it by undue pressure to be a scientist? Of course not, and you never will; you can't make someone be a mathematician.)

Even if your claim were true, your argument would be false: you wouldn't have to 'shove women into science and engineering careers that they won't enjoy'; you could change the unjust social structure so that future generations have an unbiased opportunity. This is, of course, exactly what we've already spent the last century doing... but the job's not quite finished yet. (How exactly would you go about 'shoving' someone into science anyway? I certainly have no idea, perhaps you can suggest a mechanism.)

Not in any company I've ever worked for, but then I'm over in the UK. Possible the US is different.

LMAO. This picture is deeply hilarious.

But Monty Python sketch != actual argument, and now your own bias is showing... did you, by any chance, once work in some technical field with a woman who was 'hired first and laid off last'? Again, anecdotes != data - although so far you haven't even provided the anecdotes.

The many women I know in science and engineering careers are neither miserable nor lacking in desire to succeed, and the idea that any of them could have been 'shoved', or even 'lightly pressured', into doing it is simply laughable. (I do know one who was angry because she had too much desire to succeed in maths; she feels - with good justification - that in order to have her career she had to compromise family life in ways that her male colleagues simply were not required to do.)

I will plead guilty to trying to 'shove' women into medieval fencing, but that's off-topic, so I'll shut up now.

My fault; in hindsight I wrote that in a way that was very easy to misread. Sigh. Must use more emoticons. Or less sarcasm.

I'd love to believe that, but consider it strongly unproven. The biases are certainly less visible; this isn't the same as 'gone away for good'. Perhaps older heads than mine can weigh in... have the career path requirements significantly changed since, say, the seventies? Because if not, then the old biases are still built in, and will remain so. (Certainly, all female mathematicians of my acquaintance claim that the career path is endemically biased in favour of men and of people who don't want families. But that's not a statistically significant sample.)

In my country the number of applications was and is climbing, but that may be statistically meaningless due to a general expansion of higher education and several other external changes. So no hard data there.

I don't find this misogynistic at all - it's a reasonable description of people you actually met. (It's anecdotal, but you knew that.) Equally anecdotal: Grades for female undergrads in my department averaged slightly, but not significantly, higher. And the women I knew in my brief stint as a postgrad included several of the most brilliant minds I've ever worked with. The best of these had to endure an enormous amount of unjustified crap from her (male) supervisor, which held back her career, and still does... and which her successor as his student did not have any trouble with. But then, her successor was a lesbian.

Hmmm... I'd agree, actually. But I'm not sure whether that supports your argument or mine. If any.

I believe there is evidence that men rate more highly in spatial awareness... but I'm no biologist either.

This is where we part company again; if the history of gender/ethnic group/national/whatever relations tells us anything, it's that '[group X] are innately less talented at [activity Y]' is a natural, but extremely dangerous, default assumption. There too many easily concealed social biases for this one ever to be safe without strong, direct evidence. We know for certain that there were very strong social factors preventing equal opportunity for women in sciences, until (at best) recently. So any claim that these factors are now safely gone requires a strong burden of proof... it's certainly easy to name other areas where the biases have definitely not gone _anywhere_.