In the blog (via the link), there is a side-bar quote "People mistakenly assume that affirmative action is about granting minorities undeserved privileges. In it’s purist form, affirmative action is about allowing minorities natural talents to flourish by removing artificial, unfair barriers and decoupling the true skills required to succeed in a profession from the cultural baggage that builds naturally within an insular community." This may be the intent and it may be your belief and that of the blogger; however, it frequently not the manner in which Affirmative Action is implemented. All too often, Affirmative Action is implemented by either actually or figuratively adding "points" to the actual score earned by someone simply because they are a "minority" and, therefore, assumed to have been previously oppressed with the result that they would have scored better if they hadn't been oppressed. I am a male IT professional and I can tell you that I have experienced reverse discrimination in the name of Affirmative Action. I have been told that the reason I wasn't hired was that the company needed to achieve a certain "Affirmative Action Score" (apparently, there is a point system for rating the minority vs non-minority employees). I have also been called a Male Chauvenist Pig both for holding a door for and not holding a door for the same female programmer. I have been accused of discriminating against a female programmer because I found and corrected flaws in the logic and implementation of her code. Affirmative Action is a form of discriminating in favor of someone because a real or perceived limitation of opportunity, prior oppression, or previous discrimination against that person. Unfortunately, discrimination for one person, by definition, means discrimination against another. To argue otherwise opens the door to the claim that discrimination against blacks in the last century was actually not discrimination against the blacks but discrimination for the whites. I have always assumed that there is no reason to expect that anyone can't be an excellent IT professional simply because of their race, color, creed, sex, etc.; I have also assumed that there is no reason to expect that anyone can be an excellent IT professional simply because of their race, color, creed, sex, etc. Perhaps, if there are fewer women entering the ranks of the IT professionals, the fault doesn't lay at

_Maxxx_ Given some of the references in your post, you will probably understand this one. ;-) In 1980, I was sent to Old Windsor for some training at the ICL facility there. In the process of learning a financial modeling language (which, by the way, was a quite nice product) and being the only Yank, I was assigned to a small team tha had been sent by a nearby governmental body. When we had to create a sample project, we decided to try to simulate something that they could use, so we created a simulation of the SouthEast Watershed Effluent Region System . . . which we dutifully abbreviated to the SEWER system. ;-) The whole thing was full of similar plays on words and acronyms. ;-) Also, my favorite initial test message for any messaging system is "Please ignore previous message." That was the first meesage sent via a fax server to an associated company in the UK from the Memphis, TN, office where I was working. The Welsh owner of the company found it humorous but it totally confused his British office Manager. ;-)

My watch has gears, not code. ;P