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Comment At my mom's (Score 1) 410

My mom spends most of her year in Michigan and then snowbirds down to Arizona for the winter. She refuses to upgrade from dial-up because she doesn't want to pay for a connection in both places, nor do the research to see if there's someone who can provide her with a connection in both for one fee or something similar. I think she's got fed up with her own dial up connection; she was leeching internet from a neighbor before they locked down their router and now goes down to the McDonald's or whichever fast food restaurant she gets wi-fi at.

Comment Re:Not trying hard enough... (Score 1) 441

In high school, it would have been entirely possible for me to get more than a 4.0, if it weren't for my grades in Band and Gym classes. It was because certain college prep classes were slightly weighted - Calculus, Advanced Placement English 12 and Physics, as I recall. Presumably this was to make up for them being so much more difficult than people taking either the "normal" twelfth grade classes, or the people who were behind for that matter.

Comment Lab (Score 1) 445

IM works great, except when a tester wants to talk to you from the lab, where they don't have a personal machine. I don't travel, so there's no reason for the company to give me a phone. I'd rather there wasn't a compiled list of people's personal cell phone numbers for anything other than emergency on-call purposes.

Comment Re:Missing Option (Score 1) 525

Huh, we certainly don't get unlimited overtime. Though I think OT is authorized at the moment as we bust our butts to finish some changes for the new material release of our software. I assume "Beltway bandit" means people actually working around DC, which hardly applies to my location, in the midwest.
Biotech

Artificial Wombs In the Near Future? 367

New submitter DaemonDan writes "The first successful pregnancy by IVF was accomplished over 50 years ago, essentially creating a multi-billion dollar industry. Many scientists are trying to take it one step farther with a 100% test tube baby brought to term in an artificial womb. 'Cornell University's Dr. Hung-Ching Liu has engineered endometrial tissues by prompting cells to grow in an artificial uterus. When Liu introduced a mouse embryo into the lab-created uterine lining, "It successfully implanted and grew healthy," she said in this New Atlantis Magazine article. Scientists predict the research could produce an animal womb by 2020, and a human model by early 2030s.' The author of the article seems to believe that birth via artificial wombs could become the new norm, but is it really feasible, desirable or even affordable for the majority of Earth's population?"

Comment Class of '95, Midwest US (Score 1) 632

My elementary school was pretty cutting edge - we had computers at all. They backed the wrong horse, however, as what we had to start with were TI 99-4/a computers. The idea was sound, but there weren't enough for an entire classroom, so it was a case of privileged students being given computer time as a reward for good work and/or behavior, which was then mostly spent on games. I think that they might have changed to something else by the time I left, but I don't remember whether it was Commodore, Atari or Apple, since I had unlimited access to similar machines at home. We had to take a keyboarding/word processing course in junior high; first, we learned to type on electric typewriters, and then learned word processing in MS Works. In high school, I had a programming class that was in qBasic on 286 machines. There was a theoretical follow on class that didn't have enough interest to happen that would have, I believe, been a Pascal class.

Comment Not a problem with them being geeks (Score 1) 278

There are several problems there, but I don't think I'd say any of them are because they're both programmers. 1) Romance within a team is fraught with peril 2) Er, she tried to two-time her boyfriend? She lied a lot? I'm female programmer (oh, shut up) and my ex-husband is a male programmer turned "entrepreneur" or small business owner. Our marriage didn't end because we had too much in common, it ended because of our differences, none of which had to do with work, but with differences in our fundamental goals for the future. I'm dating a man who has a degree in art, and we are together because of how well we relate together, not because "opposites attract" - I may be more left-brained than he is, but we are in no way opposites.

Comment Re:What kind of cloning? (Score 1) 350

I assumed it was the traditional bizarre SF choice of physically identical, or at least adult, and with full memories and picked A Parent. If I thought it was with a blank mind, I would go with either a pet or no one, as I think having a copy of my boyfriend, a parent, etc that was just an identical physical shell would be creepy beyond all belief.

Comment Re:Terry Pratchett (Score 1) 1130

Glad to know I'm not the only one - I read all of the Xanth books out (through Golem, I think) as a kid, and then moved on to his less humor based work, and then came to a grinding halt after some of the Mode books, Shade of the Tree and the second half of the Adept series made me seriously question the morals of the person I was reading. Particularly mortifying given his apparent attitudes toward teenage girls while I _was_ a teenage girl. Ick.

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