You were in Europe and people spoke English in the office and not their native language? This only applies to (some) subsidiaries of US corporations in Europe and maybe a few companies like Nokia or Ericsson who despite being Finnish/Swedish have opted to use English as their working language. Do you seriously believe that if you are in a random office of a Dutch/German/French company, people will speak English to each other - except again, on special occasions, if it's a department dealing with international customers, or similar.

How come noone seems to address the issue of the very high cosmic radiation exposure at such a high flight alitude? Sure, because of the shortened travel time, the effect would be somehow mitigated, but would it be enough to complete compensate? Seems to me passengers will have to wear space suits :p

" - The quality of research in general would go down dramatically, as some of the best and brightest possible scientists (i.e., the few who make it, now) would choose other fields." A lot of the best and brightest have been ditching STEM research for decades and becoming quantitative analysts for Wall Street, the City of London etc etc. So this would be nothing new :)

Similar phenomena occur in smaller cities (like Troy, NY) that host big engineering universities and companies and at the same time are not geographically close to bigger/more balanced cities. I've lived in such a city in Germany for several years (200.000 people and two HUGE engineering universities). The problem is less than in ages 20-35 men significantly outnumber women, but rather that virtually all men come from a similar background, have above average intelligence, are well educated, good in math and analytical thinking etc. The result is -especially if we are talking about a 'top tier' university- that a single guy's competition in such a place are freaken bodybuilders with PhDs in electrical engineering who also play 2 musical instruments. And these guys are everywhere. So you can only imagine what kind of entitlement women in such places develop...

This is indeed a golden opportunity which should be seized by Jolla (of ex-Nokia/Sailfish fame) as a purely european manufacturer to market high quality phones that are immune to all sorts of NSA backdoors/gag orders/NSLs etc etc. I sincerely hope they are smart enough to jump on it!

D..dexter morgan...is that you?!

This is true. And yet, suddenly, sometime in the 1960s, the male Proto-'brogrammers' of the era realized that there was a LOT of money to be made in computerizing the world and the last thing they needed was competition from women. Give high paying, 'real' jobs to women? Impossibru! So women started to get systematically sabotaged[1] when they looked for programmer jobs. This created a vicious cycle: Fewer women -> More ogling/harassment/adulation from male 'geeks'->Even fewer women etc etc. So you can thank those Don-Draper types of the 60s for their major contribution to today's sausage fest that is IT/Software development. [1]http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D

Ditto that! This applies IMHO to other 'areas of endeavour' where former soviet countries have an unusually strong presence. For example....fashion modelling. It's not like that russian/ukrainian/whatnot women have some kind of ..."hotness gene" -although their phenotype does often help when it comes to modelling e.g in terms of height- but due to the flaky financial situation, a good looking girl in these countries if a *lot* more motivated to try a lucrative international carreer as a model compared to an equally attractive girl from a rich 'western' country. Just my 0.02 €

I was taken aback yesterday to switch on my TV to a major German broadcaster (ProSieben) and stumble upon a commercial for 'Internet Explorer, the most fun and secure way to access the internet"...it seems that microsoft has realized that in certain markets (especially in Europe), it just cannot rely on IE being preinstalled... That's (one of the) commercials in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKweh7ZD86A

Can we AT LAST boot linux without using any boot loaders? I have a 2 year old UEFI laptop and I can't even figure out how to boot Ubuntu on it :(

Easy there tiger...please remember that most engineering universities are extremely male-dominated, campus-wide. The problem becomes even worse if the institution is the only university in a small to medium sized city and has attracted a truckload of tech companies around it as well. So essentially from the moment you enter such a place you are pretty much toast unless you invest inordinate amounts of energy into competing with the other guys over the few single girls on the campus or unless you have been blessed with an extensive social network in a different city or in a different university than your own - with all the logistical problems this might entail. And no , 'dance classes' and other activities that 'attract women' in a place with skewed demographics don't help. Heck in my university you can't sign up at a dance class unless you bring your own (female) partner due to the catastrophic oversupply of guys.

Your swedish is wrong : "Idag skriver jag ett brev. Imorgon skriver jag ett till" is a lot closer to how it should be like. (although I'm not really sure if swedes use the present as a future replacement so lightheartedly...maybe some native speaker would comment on that?)

For this experiment, electrodes had to be *surgically implanted* into the test persons' skull. It's not like they remotely measured their electrical brain activity. So for now you can relax ...

And do not forget the even peskier radius of geostationary orbit at ~3.6*10^4 km altitude.

Funny how nobody mentioned that guy ;) http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Mordac%20The%20Preventer