Well there is hope. According to at least one economist, the potential availability of resources from space (including materials, information, energy, etc.) could improve the mean standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10 within 100 years.
No, they're just offering to help US companies avoid conflict with other US companies (where by "US companies" I mean "entities that for whatever reason, whether launching from the US, using US-made vehicles, using US tracking stations, etc."). This doesn't prevent conflict with, say, a Chinese company. But it does establish a useful beginning for cooperation between orbital-capability nations, to jointly prevent conflicts between their respective companies.
Some very good space lawyers disagree with you. Not all, but this is an area of strong debate. (The Moon Treaty was never ratified by any nation with an orbital space capability - I presume you mean the Outer Space Treaty). And what if a corporation is incorporated in one of the several dozen nations that have never signed, or have signed but never ratified?
The FAA presently administers space flight to/from the US already - if you want to launch a rocket with more than small-hobby capability you have to get a permit. You may also have to get NASA to sign off on the equipment to get that permit. So FAA is offering to extend this to provide a reasonable alternative to the 'Wild West' for at least those companies with some US component - residence, launch, tracking, lots of other aspects, IOW almost every rocket flight from almost any country. IMHO it's a reasonable offer.
I foresee other nations establishing a cooperative agreement for each of their aerospace agencies to cooperate in this, taking responsibility for their own parties and working together. In general cooperation has been the case for most space operations - viz. the continued launches of rockets from Russia, carrying satellites from the US and elsewhere despite the various international goings-on. This type of international cooperation is analogous in some ways to the way that patents and other IP rules have gradually evolved to a modicum of international normalization.
Well put, thanks. I'm glad you took the time to write this. BTW - my group (spacefinancegroup.com) is looking for a competent lawyer with space and ITAR knowledge and experience. PM me if that's of interest.
FAA has legitimate authority over anything that flies through the atmosphere, and at least exerts its authority over near-Earth space. It can and does require permits for launching and landing rockets from/to US soil. It also has some authority over US made equipment flown anywhere. Until it is feasible, and in fact common, for space 'inhabitants' to get along without any dependence on Earth, Earth authorities will have some level of control/
It could also be the beginning of a fairly useful cooperative agreement between the major/all spacefaring countries to apply such enforcement in a cooperative way, much as patent law has gradually evolved to be more or less workable. The biggest counter argument is when national interest conflicts, such as the present situation in the South China Sea. But in this way it may be that the wording of the Outer Space Treaty could actually turn out to be beneficial. Since no nation can 'own' anything in space, but they all agree that (as one major interpretation of the wording says) private entities can, all these nations could find it beneficial to work together to avoid conflicts between their respective private parties.
This is an area of unsettled law. The wording of the Outer Space Treaty did not contemplate non-governmental entities. It also leaves ambiguous the status of material removed from a body. Some experts believe that because every corporation is a creation of a government, the prohibition on possession governments extends to corporations. Others disagree, leaving it open for corporations to take ownership. If there is no ownership, then the other ambiguity implies that, while nobody can establish, for example, a mining claim, any material removed and processed does belong to the miner. This could create a 'Wild West' scenario where protection of a mine requires the miner to exert whatever force is required.
In the long run, most folks whether libertarian or otherwise, believe that as soon as it is feasible to operate in space without the need for constant replenishment from Earth, the legal system will fairly rapidly evolve to a pure space-based law, established and managed by those who live in space. I.e. a new revolution. The best way to prevent that would be for Earth authority to have a very light hand, and to emphasize the advantages of things like a single mine registry. Corporations, all other things being equal, generally prefer a stable and reliable legal and economic structure within which to work. But such an authority would not have any teeth to enforce, unless there is a fleet capable of arriving at any necessary locale and exerting the necessary enforcement activity.
Two and three engine planes are quite safe, but I suppose the President's plane is more likely to be the subject of hostile action that could take out one or more engines. Also I would think that the Secret Service would not want the President's plane to have to land suddenly at an unexpected emergency airport, which is generally OK for everyone else.
Most of what was in the Patriot Act was already in force under the War on Drugs, for use against Evil Drug Lords - wiretapping, etc. The Patriot Act just expanded those provisions into a much larger portion of society. IIRC, that is.
So this raises the question, "what if I use a VPN just to route around the snooping, domain-snatching, ad-insertion and cookie shenanigans that my ISP is perpetrating?"
That is the essential difference between the Stasi (East German Secret Police) and what some in the NSA want to do. The Stasi had to work with paper and actual human informants.
Hmm. Tests by a Navy cyber defense unit back around 1999 showed that the average cost of getting a poor SOB sysadmin into allowing physical access to a Fortune 500 server room was around $7000. Which ties back to an XKCD cartoon - "Let's use this $5 hammer to beat on his head until he gives us the password." So we convince poor SOB to allow us to put a tiny camera into his glasses to watch while he types.
Actually the sociopaths tend to go into management, not programming. From my own experience I would say that programmers are very rarely in the psychopathy spectrum, more typically going toward the autism spectrum. I was curious as to what value psychopaths had in an evolutionary sense (both individually and in society), and I learned that they can be valuable. In an experiment with spiders, an equivalent to psychopathy was indicated as a group survival trait, as without it nobody defended the group against external enemies. In society, some level of psychopathy is to my mind almost essential to being a successful politician - imagine a President who could not lie ("No, we have no intentions of invading next week."), and truly did "feel our pain" when he ordered thousands of soldiers to kill, and die. I wouldn't want a surgeon to "feel my pain" either.
Incidents of sociopathy/psychopathy increase from about 1% to 4% as you go up in the corporate (or government) hierarchy. (I would say the incidence among executives of big financial institutions is probably more like 20%, but that's just me.) It's also high among surgeons but not other doctors. Sociopaths are often natural leaders. In fact in that sense it is can be a positive trait. This book was recommended to me, and I coincidentally saw an article also recommending it - written by a neuroscientist who discovered in the course of his research that he had psychopathic traits: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath.
Psychopaths are assertive. Psychopaths don’t procrastinate. Psychopaths tend to focus on the positive. Psychopaths don’t take things personally; they don’t beat themselves up if things go wrong, even if they’re to blame. And they’re pretty cool under pressure. Those kinds of characteristics aren’t just important in the business arena, but also in everyday life.
The key here is keeping it in context. Let’s think of psychopathic traits—ruthlessness, toughness, charm, focus—as the dials on a [recording] studio deck. If you were to turn all of those dials up to max, then you’re going to overload the circuit. You’re going to wind up getting 30 years inside or the electric chair or something like that. But if you have some of them up high and some of them down low, depending on the context, in certain endeavors, certain professions, you are going to be predisposed to great success. The key is to be able to turn them back down again.
So I applied my newfound knowledge to the US Constitution. I realized that, having dealt with royal and other psychopaths and seen both their use and their risk, the founding fathers tried to construct a system that essentially pitted power-seekers (which to me is mostly psychopaths) against each other, allowing the system to make use of their talents competitively while never allowing any single one or group to take complete control - and always have a way for the system to re-stabilize away from any monopoly of power over time. This is an interesting new perspective.
My company doesn't have a strong policy - we all try to keep costs down, but we don't go crazy. There are two primary reasons I won't go to a hotel that blocks my use of my phone +/or ipad as a hotspot:
1) security - this is actually pretty much a company policy. We never use public wifi anywhere except in a few rare cases where there was no choice (typically because the cell signal was too weak). If we had a corporate VPN to run everything through it might be less dangerous.
2) bandwidth - in the few times I've actually tried to use the hotel's wifi, or a convention center's wifi, the bandwidth was so bad that it was unusable.
and also, 3) they actually charge for this? Every place I've been to in the last year has had free wifi, and in some cases free hardwired ethernet. Hmm. I am a member of Hilton's HHonors, so I get the wifi for free if I want it. I guess they do charge otherwise. HHonors doesn't cost anything so there's no reason I know of not to be a member. Same goes for Marriott, etc.
Your example reminds me of a powerful understanding I came to a while back. Every program we write defines an "application specific language" that is composed of the text, or the actions if a GUI, that the application supports. This linguistic approach to user interfaces can be a very useful viewpoint from which to define how a user interacts with our program. (where "user" may be a device, or software, or actual person, or whatever). We are constructing a language by which that user "talks" to our program.
Funny, back in the 1990s I purposely didn't learn Perl beyond the minimal amount I needed to maintain an early web app. To me it all looked like somebody sneezed on the page. But in the last 1/2 decade or so I've become pretty proficient at PCRE - Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions, the very essence of page-sneezing.
I once idly wondered how hard it would be to build a parser/compiler for another language using PCRE. PCRE-Perl? PCRE-PHP? PCRE-Ruby? Of course, PCRE-C could be the first one, and the others just built running GCC through PCRE-C. I'm a sick puppy!:P
Yes. For one, the true value of having two different block begin and end tokens is similar to the value of double entry bookkeeping. In Python there is only one "token" denoting a change of block (in this case the token is just the change in number of indent spaces). As a result, ambiguities and outright errors can be impossible for the parser to recognize.
As a long time developer, I would say that nobody should be planning to use C for anything but where it's apparently still considered almost mandatory - kernels, device drivers, maybe compilers & interpreters. Application coders (your "in-between") should almost never waste time and mental effort making up for the lack of memory management and features like bounds checking of more "modern" languages. And I would argue that with most hardware being designed using advanced CAD, the hardware design should be well enough characterized that even device drivers may soon become something that could be almost automatically generated from the hardware specification, eliminating that job.
* footnote: In the 1960s, Burroughs Corporation used Language-directed design for their computers. For at least some of their designs, the entire system was defined and modeled in a high level software language (typically ALGOL) and internal specification language, and then the hardware/software interface was defined according to performance requirements and the hardware was built to implement the originally software-defined low level functionality.
Regardless of other aspects, if you want to learn something new, I would suggest trying one of the functional languages, such as Erlang or Haskell. Not because you actually want to get a job doing that, but because it will rearrange your brain and get you thinking about programs in a different, and I would argue, better way. I have never gotten around to becoming proficient in either one, but the limited effort I made to learn Erlang has greatly changed the way I write in other languages.
Sigh. Maybe we -- or I, at least -- just need a new 'ism.
Your -ism is wrong.:) Sorry, they all are. Every -ism is an attempt to impose a (usually) rational construct on an inherently arational system to which measures of rationality do not apply. IMHO this is especially true of any social or biological system. The best models of these are more closely related to neural networks and similar bottom-up decision systems based on convergence toward an apparent/semi-local optimum. As the number of nodes increases, the math increasingly looks like fluid dynamics.
NSA's Information Assurance Division (not the spooks) works hard to help and to convince Big Corp to clean up their act. They recognize that financial IT security is fundamental to national security. Also, the FBI has a group that works to help companies improve security. So you might reach out to one of them.
The fundamental problem is typified by Home Depot's management - as a Redditor noted, when IT asked for budget to implement essential security, their upper management said, "We sell nails and hammers. We don't need that." Now it may well cost them $1 billion.
Here are a couple of rules of thumb you can tell your management. These are straight from web security and biometrics people I work with. A website breach (e.g. Target, Ebay, Home Depot, JPM) costs the company an average of $178 per customer (not website user - _customer_). That is a number that should invoke heart palpitations in the CFO - multiplied by the number of customers, it's probably more than the value of the company.
In the healthcare industry, a single lost or misplaced laptop will cost a minimum of $2.5 million in fines (HIPAA violations), liability, paying for patients to get identity theft insurance, etc. - even if no data is actually compromised and the laptop is recovered! If data actually makes it into the black hat world, the price goes up by multiples.
JPM's audits have been "qualified" by PWC for the last couple of years, because (despite inhouse reports) the CIO has refused to implement proper controls. People in JPM who have reported these problems have been fired - from what I've heard, three heads of Risk Management have been fired in the last three years, each time after telling the CIO that he needs to fix these before their pension fund clients have to take action.
When I went back to school in 2003, the CS department had a grand total of zero (0) US women in the graduate program. There may have been one woman in the undergrad program. This despite the following: the department head was a woman; almost 1/2 of the instructors were women; about 1/4 of the foreign students were women; and the _founder_ of the department in the 1970s was a woman. There weren't that many US men either - probably 3/4 of the grad program were foreign students. These folks were there, paying full tuition and working hard, because coming from other countries they knew that for them this was the difference between a comfortable middle class life, and dirt poverty. The plain fact is that engineering, if taught correctly, is hard, and many people don't feel the need to work hard for a distant goal, especially when that work involves technical knowledge and analysis. Plus, not everyone has the analytical bent, and that's OK. We need other talents as well.
It's easy for me to think / assume that part of the problem lies in the way education is done. If a real engineering and analytics approach with the self-discipline to think the hard thoughts were imbued into students early - primary grades, at least - perhaps the pipeline would have something going in the front. I'm hoping that our future robotic/AI childhood learning specialists that will be replacing much of the education system will be able to make a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there is hope. According to at least one economist, the potential availability of resources from space (including materials, information, energy, etc.) could improve the mean standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10 within 100 years.
No, they're just offering to help US companies avoid conflict with other US companies (where by "US companies" I mean "entities that for whatever reason, whether launching from the US, using US-made vehicles, using US tracking stations, etc."). This doesn't prevent conflict with, say, a Chinese company. But it does establish a useful beginning for cooperation between orbital-capability nations, to jointly prevent conflicts between their respective companies.
Some very good space lawyers disagree with you. Not all, but this is an area of strong debate. (The Moon Treaty was never ratified by any nation with an orbital space capability - I presume you mean the Outer Space Treaty). And what if a corporation is incorporated in one of the several dozen nations that have never signed, or have signed but never ratified?
The FAA presently administers space flight to/from the US already - if you want to launch a rocket with more than small-hobby capability you have to get a permit. You may also have to get NASA to sign off on the equipment to get that permit. So FAA is offering to extend this to provide a reasonable alternative to the 'Wild West' for at least those companies with some US component - residence, launch, tracking, lots of other aspects, IOW almost every rocket flight from almost any country. IMHO it's a reasonable offer.
I foresee other nations establishing a cooperative agreement for each of their aerospace agencies to cooperate in this, taking responsibility for their own parties and working together. In general cooperation has been the case for most space operations - viz. the continued launches of rockets from Russia, carrying satellites from the US and elsewhere despite the various international goings-on. This type of international cooperation is analogous in some ways to the way that patents and other IP rules have gradually evolved to a modicum of international normalization.
Well put, thanks. I'm glad you took the time to write this. BTW - my group (spacefinancegroup.com) is looking for a competent lawyer with space and ITAR knowledge and experience. PM me if that's of interest.
FAA has legitimate authority over anything that flies through the atmosphere, and at least exerts its authority over near-Earth space. It can and does require permits for launching and landing rockets from/to US soil. It also has some authority over US made equipment flown anywhere. Until it is feasible, and in fact common, for space 'inhabitants' to get along without any dependence on Earth, Earth authorities will have some level of control/
It could also be the beginning of a fairly useful cooperative agreement between the major/all spacefaring countries to apply such enforcement in a cooperative way, much as patent law has gradually evolved to be more or less workable. The biggest counter argument is when national interest conflicts, such as the present situation in the South China Sea. But in this way it may be that the wording of the Outer Space Treaty could actually turn out to be beneficial. Since no nation can 'own' anything in space, but they all agree that (as one major interpretation of the wording says) private entities can, all these nations could find it beneficial to work together to avoid conflicts between their respective private parties.
This is an area of unsettled law. The wording of the Outer Space Treaty did not contemplate non-governmental entities. It also leaves ambiguous the status of material removed from a body. Some experts believe that because every corporation is a creation of a government, the prohibition on possession governments extends to corporations. Others disagree, leaving it open for corporations to take ownership. If there is no ownership, then the other ambiguity implies that, while nobody can establish, for example, a mining claim, any material removed and processed does belong to the miner. This could create a 'Wild West' scenario where protection of a mine requires the miner to exert whatever force is required.
In the long run, most folks whether libertarian or otherwise, believe that as soon as it is feasible to operate in space without the need for constant replenishment from Earth, the legal system will fairly rapidly evolve to a pure space-based law, established and managed by those who live in space. I.e. a new revolution. The best way to prevent that would be for Earth authority to have a very light hand, and to emphasize the advantages of things like a single mine registry. Corporations, all other things being equal, generally prefer a stable and reliable legal and economic structure within which to work. But such an authority would not have any teeth to enforce, unless there is a fleet capable of arriving at any necessary locale and exerting the necessary enforcement activity.
Two and three engine planes are quite safe, but I suppose the President's plane is more likely to be the subject of hostile action that could take out one or more engines. Also I would think that the Secret Service would not want the President's plane to have to land suddenly at an unexpected emergency airport, which is generally OK for everyone else.
Most of what was in the Patriot Act was already in force under the War on Drugs, for use against Evil Drug Lords - wiretapping, etc. The Patriot Act just expanded those provisions into a much larger portion of society. IIRC, that is.
So this raises the question, "what if I use a VPN just to route around the snooping, domain-snatching, ad-insertion and cookie shenanigans that my ISP is perpetrating?"
That is the essential difference between the Stasi (East German Secret Police) and what some in the NSA want to do. The Stasi had to work with paper and actual human informants.
Hmm. Tests by a Navy cyber defense unit back around 1999 showed that the average cost of getting a poor SOB sysadmin into allowing physical access to a Fortune 500 server room was around $7000. Which ties back to an XKCD cartoon - "Let's use this $5 hammer to beat on his head until he gives us the password." So we convince poor SOB to allow us to put a tiny camera into his glasses to watch while he types.
Jefferson explicitly recommended that the government might need overthrowing occasionally.
Actually the sociopaths tend to go into management, not programming. From my own experience I would say that programmers are very rarely in the psychopathy spectrum, more typically going toward the autism spectrum. I was curious as to what value psychopaths had in an evolutionary sense (both individually and in society), and I learned that they can be valuable. In an experiment with spiders, an equivalent to psychopathy was indicated as a group survival trait, as without it nobody defended the group against external enemies. In society, some level of psychopathy is to my mind almost essential to being a successful politician - imagine a President who could not lie ("No, we have no intentions of invading next week."), and truly did "feel our pain" when he ordered thousands of soldiers to kill, and die. I wouldn't want a surgeon to "feel my pain" either.
Incidents of sociopathy/psychopathy increase from about 1% to 4% as you go up in the corporate (or government) hierarchy. (I would say the incidence among executives of big financial institutions is probably more like 20%, but that's just me.) It's also high among surgeons but not other doctors. Sociopaths are often natural leaders. In fact in that sense it is can be a positive trait. This book was recommended to me, and I coincidentally saw an article also recommending it - written by a neuroscientist who discovered in the course of his research that he had psychopathic traits: The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath.
See also The Pros to Being a Psychopath. Quote:
Psychopaths are assertive. Psychopaths don’t procrastinate. Psychopaths tend to focus on the positive. Psychopaths don’t take things personally; they don’t beat themselves up if things go wrong, even if they’re to blame. And they’re pretty cool under pressure. Those kinds of characteristics aren’t just important in the business arena, but also in everyday life.
The key here is keeping it in context. Let’s think of psychopathic traits—ruthlessness, toughness, charm, focus—as the dials on a [recording] studio deck. If you were to turn all of those dials up to max, then you’re going to overload the circuit. You’re going to wind up getting 30 years inside or the electric chair or something like that. But if you have some of them up high and some of them down low, depending on the context, in certain endeavors, certain professions, you are going to be predisposed to great success. The key is to be able to turn them back down again.
So I applied my newfound knowledge to the US Constitution. I realized that, having dealt with royal and other psychopaths and seen both their use and their risk, the founding fathers tried to construct a system that essentially pitted power-seekers (which to me is mostly psychopaths) against each other, allowing the system to make use of their talents competitively while never allowing any single one or group to take complete control - and always have a way for the system to re-stabilize away from any monopoly of power over time. This is an interesting new perspective.
My company doesn't have a strong policy - we all try to keep costs down, but we don't go crazy. There are two primary reasons I won't go to a hotel that blocks my use of my phone +/or ipad as a hotspot:
1) security - this is actually pretty much a company policy. We never use public wifi anywhere except in a few rare cases where there was no choice (typically because the cell signal was too weak). If we had a corporate VPN to run everything through it might be less dangerous.
2) bandwidth - in the few times I've actually tried to use the hotel's wifi, or a convention center's wifi, the bandwidth was so bad that it was unusable.
and also, 3) they actually charge for this? Every place I've been to in the last year has had free wifi, and in some cases free hardwired ethernet. Hmm. I am a member of Hilton's HHonors, so I get the wifi for free if I want it. I guess they do charge otherwise. HHonors doesn't cost anything so there's no reason I know of not to be a member. Same goes for Marriott, etc.
Your example reminds me of a powerful understanding I came to a while back. Every program we write defines an "application specific language" that is composed of the text, or the actions if a GUI, that the application supports. This linguistic approach to user interfaces can be a very useful viewpoint from which to define how a user interacts with our program. (where "user" may be a device, or software, or actual person, or whatever). We are constructing a language by which that user "talks" to our program.
Funny, back in the 1990s I purposely didn't learn Perl beyond the minimal amount I needed to maintain an early web app. To me it all looked like somebody sneezed on the page. But in the last 1/2 decade or so I've become pretty proficient at PCRE - Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions, the very essence of page-sneezing.
I once idly wondered how hard it would be to build a parser/compiler for another language using PCRE. PCRE-Perl? PCRE-PHP? PCRE-Ruby? Of course, PCRE-C could be the first one, and the others just built running GCC through PCRE-C. I'm a sick puppy! :P
Yes. For one, the true value of having two different block begin and end tokens is similar to the value of double entry bookkeeping. In Python there is only one "token" denoting a change of block (in this case the token is just the change in number of indent spaces). As a result, ambiguities and outright errors can be impossible for the parser to recognize.
... and slide rules! And use Mayan or Aztec measurements. Although Register Standards would also be acceptable. (actual data starts at about 1:45).
As a long time developer, I would say that nobody should be planning to use C for anything but where it's apparently still considered almost mandatory - kernels, device drivers, maybe compilers & interpreters. Application coders (your "in-between") should almost never waste time and mental effort making up for the lack of memory management and features like bounds checking of more "modern" languages. And I would argue that with most hardware being designed using advanced CAD, the hardware design should be well enough characterized that even device drivers may soon become something that could be almost automatically generated from the hardware specification, eliminating that job.
* footnote: In the 1960s, Burroughs Corporation used Language-directed design for their computers. For at least some of their designs, the entire system was defined and modeled in a high level software language (typically ALGOL) and internal specification language, and then the hardware/software interface was defined according to performance requirements and the hardware was built to implement the originally software-defined low level functionality.
Regardless of other aspects, if you want to learn something new, I would suggest trying one of the functional languages, such as Erlang or Haskell. Not because you actually want to get a job doing that, but because it will rearrange your brain and get you thinking about programs in a different, and I would argue, better way. I have never gotten around to becoming proficient in either one, but the limited effort I made to learn Erlang has greatly changed the way I write in other languages.
Sigh. Maybe we -- or I, at least -- just need a new 'ism.
Your -ism is wrong. :) Sorry, they all are. Every -ism is an attempt to impose a (usually) rational construct on an inherently arational system to which measures of rationality do not apply. IMHO this is especially true of any social or biological system. The best models of these are more closely related to neural networks and similar bottom-up decision systems based on convergence toward an apparent/semi-local optimum. As the number of nodes increases, the math increasingly looks like fluid dynamics.
NSA's Information Assurance Division (not the spooks) works hard to help and to convince Big Corp to clean up their act. They recognize that financial IT security is fundamental to national security. Also, the FBI has a group that works to help companies improve security. So you might reach out to one of them.
The fundamental problem is typified by Home Depot's management - as a Redditor noted, when IT asked for budget to implement essential security, their upper management said, "We sell nails and hammers. We don't need that." Now it may well cost them $1 billion.
Here are a couple of rules of thumb you can tell your management. These are straight from web security and biometrics people I work with. A website breach (e.g. Target, Ebay, Home Depot, JPM) costs the company an average of $178 per customer (not website user - _customer_). That is a number that should invoke heart palpitations in the CFO - multiplied by the number of customers, it's probably more than the value of the company.
In the healthcare industry, a single lost or misplaced laptop will cost a minimum of $2.5 million in fines (HIPAA violations), liability, paying for patients to get identity theft insurance, etc. - even if no data is actually compromised and the laptop is recovered! If data actually makes it into the black hat world, the price goes up by multiples.
JPM's audits have been "qualified" by PWC for the last couple of years, because (despite inhouse reports) the CIO has refused to implement proper controls. People in JPM who have reported these problems have been fired - from what I've heard, three heads of Risk Management have been fired in the last three years, each time after telling the CIO that he needs to fix these before their pension fund clients have to take action.
... then nothing comes out the back.
When I went back to school in 2003, the CS department had a grand total of zero (0) US women in the graduate program. There may have been one woman in the undergrad program. This despite the following: the department head was a woman; almost 1/2 of the instructors were women; about 1/4 of the foreign students were women; and the _founder_ of the department in the 1970s was a woman. There weren't that many US men either - probably 3/4 of the grad program were foreign students. These folks were there, paying full tuition and working hard, because coming from other countries they knew that for them this was the difference between a comfortable middle class life, and dirt poverty. The plain fact is that engineering, if taught correctly, is hard, and many people don't feel the need to work hard for a distant goal, especially when that work involves technical knowledge and analysis. Plus, not everyone has the analytical bent, and that's OK. We need other talents as well.
It's easy for me to think / assume that part of the problem lies in the way education is done. If a real engineering and analytics approach with the self-discipline to think the hard thoughts were imbued into students early - primary grades, at least - perhaps the pipeline would have something going in the front. I'm hoping that our future robotic/AI childhood learning specialists that will be replacing much of the education system will be able to make a difference.