My kids recently moved from public school to Catholic school, and without even bothering to address all the "tolerant" anti-Catholic bigots posting here (they'll get theirs), I'll say straight up that the Catholic school curriculum and (especially) academic and behavioral standards completely leave the public school system in the dust. My kids were both near the top of their grades in public school, but have found this transition year very challenging. They had to work much harder than the year before in public school, and still both ended up in the bottom half of their classes.

Jesuit schools are even tougher; this one is just a regular parish school.

You can get a secular private school education that is academically (if not ethically) as good as a Catholic education, but you'll pay far, far more to get it.

I've been a Comcast subscriber for nearly 2 years and unlike many of you, have always been happy with their service, despite having misgivings about Comcast behavior which I believe to have been truthfully reported.

However, my respect for Comcast has now soared. They not only grew a pair, but they're big and they're solid brass :D

Setting aside the fact that a wedge shape doesn't sound non-obvious, I had an old DEC laptop with a 486-DX4, and IIRC it was wedge-shaped. It may have been the battery that gave it the wedge profile, but a wedge is a wedge. I wish I had some pictures of it. When I left Japan in 2002 I gave it to someone. It was so sleek looking even then that it would have looked perfectly at home on a shelf next to a brand new Vaio, which was far and away the sleekest looking notebook of the day. I ran Red Hat on it, and later Debian, with Window Maker.

They may feel like the job isn't as described, or that they aren't paid enough, or be unhappy because they are required to do work that is (way) outside of the job description and put in 60 hours/week, every week. But you don't hear people complaining with "This job sucks! It's just like they told me it would be at my interview!" Or at least if you did, you'd tell them to bugger right off.

It's like a mailman complaining because of having to walk around with a mail bag. Don't like that kind of work? Don't apply for it.

It's not that they should like it, but c'mon, nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to be booth babes. They're the ones who chose to make their living primarily with their looks, combined with the ability to stand around and smile all day and act like they aren't bored.

$100 - $130 for 2 hours work? That's pretty good money. Being a booth babe isn't full-time work, but for the hours they work, they make more than most software engineers. I bet strippers don't make that much, either. If the job is so onerous, they are free to quit and find some other job that uses whatever other skills they possess.

WRT the standing in heels thing they talk about, they just aren't spending enough. My wife is a hair stylist, and she usually wears heels. She says you have to really spend to get comfortable shoes. I can tell you that her shoes are pricey, as are the tools of her trade. I view the shoes as a tool of the trade. You wouldn't believe what a good shears costs. The shoes are cheap compared to that :p

As to whether having booth babes is sexist or not, I'd say that it's not. Sexual? Sure. But that's not the same as sexist. Sexist is denying someone a promotion, raise, or job because of gender. Hiring a couple hot women to wear cocktail dresses (or handsome men to dress like Chippendale dancers) and stand around holding your product at a trade show is sexual. There was nothing sexist about the Asus tweet, or even untrue. The model does, in fact, have a nice ass. But there is no requirement (as far as we know, anyway) that their customers must have nice asses to be allowed to buy the product, or that their employees must have nice asses to get raises or promotions. Such a requirement would be sexist.

Was that tweet stupid? Yeah. But what is Twitter, if not a service to assist in proving to the world that you're dumb? Was it sexual? Yeah. Was it sexist? No.

This is a good point, I'd mod you Insightful of I had mod points and you weren't AC :)

The fact of the matter is, most of us guys probably wouldn't put up with women except for three things: tits, pussies, and the fact that most of them can cook better than most of us :-) Smiley, but serious all the same.

On the other hand, most women probably wouldn't put up with guys except for dicks, and the fact that we can lift heavy stuff and unscrew really tight jar and bottle caps.

It's only our differing abilities and needs that enable us to tolerate one another enough to get married :-)

And I fully expect that once sex robots are perfected to the point that they've passed the uncanny valley (or maybe before, for some people), there will be a percentage of guys who will just buy a sex robot (or two or three) and flip the On switch when they want to get laid, then send the robot back to its storage location and get a good night's sleep.

A few women might buy them as well (after all, what guy could match the stamina of a sex bot), but I do expect it will be a mostly male thing.

I don't buy this.

There wasn't much in the way of computers when I was young (we had a dial-up system with a DECWriter II at my middle school, and I spent a lot of time on it once I got there. Before middle school and after (since my high school had no computers), I spent my time on fishing and cars, two things that few girls were interested in, then or now. I also read a lot, something girls do a lot, too, but it's a solitary activity, and my reading interests didn't align with girls (I was Lord of The Rings; they were ponies, Nancy Drew, etc.)

Despite having a mostly geek childhood and adolescence, I grew up, dated, had girlfriends, got married, had kids, all the usual things that most people do.

Video games? Was never heavily into them, but did play when I was single. Have a Wii now, but the kids use it more than I do. My wife uses it more than I do, too.

Porn? Not much time for that, either. I watch it now and then. Usually with my wife. The article acts like women don't watch porn, but I can assure you that many of them do.

In short, I think TFA is a load of crap.

I agree with you, but like one of your respondents said, even that doesn't always work. I know a dude who, in the opinion of both my wife and myself, is still basically a kid. Despite being generally responsible, having a decent job, being a home owner, having two normal kids, this he's still at the center of his universe, and awfully cocky about it, too.

How he became a home owner is telling. He and his wife recently made the decision to buy a house. Not long after the decision was made, out of the blue he hit her with "Let's buy one in this resort area that I go to really often (side note: usually without her or the kids) to do this sport that I'm really into. I'm sure my company will let me work remotely." Surprise.

He's the dominant one in their marriage, so she quit a good new job that she's been doing for a few months and at which she's already had a promotion, which of course was to the great surprise and disappointment of her employer. The kids were uprooted and moved to a new school in the middle of the school year. There's little to no tech work in this resort area, so it's going to make it hard for her to find a new job, compounded by the fact that she quit her old one after only about 6 months.

My choice for exactly that same thing was - after years of not wearing any watch and just looking at my phone - a fully mechanical, automatic (AKA self-winding) watch. There's nothing greener - its all metal except for the crystal, and is thus fully recyclable should it ever come to that. It tracks the time and the date, that's it. It uses no batteries. There's nothing greener this side of a sun dial for telling time.

I wish I had some mod points for you, SRV is the first thing that popped into my head, too :-)

I know who SJVN is by his full name (but thinks he's something of a windbag; the Rush Limbaugh of tech, if you will), but missed the abbreviation entirely. My first thought was that the N must be for Network and this is just YANTA (Yet Another New Tech Abbreviation) :p

How dare you inject logic and reason into this conversation?! :p

Everyone is busy dumping on the police, who had - so far as TFA indicates, anyway - nothing to do with his being barred from being alone with his kid. That's all the doing of whatever they call Child Protective Services over there - an organization that is well known for going ridiculously overboard in both directions (restricting or removing contact with children from people who have done nothing wrong, whilst on the other hand letting people who should have zero contact with any child go happily on their way) over here in the US, too.

It's not the police that I, as a parent, fear. It's CPS, an organization that means well but is, in far too many cases, utterly incompetent.

If games were cars and Shilling were a car company CEO, buyers of used cars would find that the factory stereo, nav system, and rear entertainment system would no longer function because they only worked for the original purchaser of the vehicle. Maybe a couple of cylinders would be disabled on the engine, too. And forget about overdrive gears; you'll have a 1:1 top gear, like in the old days.

No, that's not true at all. KDE 3.x was a quite good UI. KDE 4.x has (finally) matured to the point of being >= 3.x (at least in every area that matters to me). Gnome 2.x is decent out of the box, and let's me tweak it to be really good. My only beef there is that the tweaking is harder/requires more expertise than it should. Fortunately, I have that expertise. A new user might not, or even know where to find the info.

With GNOME 3, it's not that it's necessarily a bad UI per se. It has some interesting ideas, and some things that will seem fairly familiar to Mac users. My big complaint with GNOME 3 is that it's almost completely non-configurable, which means that I can't take the points about it that I don't like and change them so that I do like them (and no, writing extensions does not count as "configurable"). Granted, KDE 4 was like that in the beginning, too. I regarded it as pretty much unusable and eventually moved back to GNOME because of that. It's possible that GNOME 3 is also just in that young-and-incomplete space. It might be much better 2 or 3 years from now. In the meantime, we have Cinnamon and Mate as alternatives.

Or it might not be, in which case Cinnamon and Mate will be alternatives for a long time to come.

However, it is simply untrue to say that Linux hasn't had a decent UI yet. If you still doubt me, go spend some time using Windows, then come back and use Linux again. Among the three major OSes, Windows has by far the worst UI.

I like something that stands between OS X and Gnome (or KDE). In Linux since the late 1990s, I've used FVWM 95, Window Maker, AfterStep, GNOME 1.x, KDE 2 ~ 4.something, then back to GNOME 2.x because of some specific weaknesses in KDE which seem to have since been fixed. At work, I use a Mac (mostly) and a Linux machine running Ubuntu 10.04/GNOME.

I like the OS X dock a lot and use Avant Window Navigator on my Linux machines. I also moved the window buttons to the other side (Mac-style) for consistency. Any app that I use much, I put in the dock. For ones I don't use much, I like having a menu rather than the Finder->Applications approach on the Mac. On a small screen (laptop) I like the Mac-style menu bar. On a big screen (like the 24" dual monitors I use) I like the menus in the app window (Linux/Windows style).

Overall, I think OS X is the best desktop, but it would be better if it had an app menu and if it allowed me to configure whether the menu bar was global or in the app window.

I like having the notification area in the dock (AWM style) rather than in the menu bar (Mac style).

Since Apple is unlikely to either change their UI or make it configurable in that way, I find myself generally able to get closer to my ideal on Linux, and applaud the Cinnamon and Mate projects. These recent moves by GNOME (3) and Ubuntu (Unity) to create UIs that tell me how it's gonna be and that I ought to shut up and like it, instead of giving me a UI that I can configure how I want it to be, are wrong on so many levels, the greatest of which is that it's just not the Linux Way.

If you have to preface a statement with "I'm not into fat chicks, but..." -- you're into fat chicks.