...Between what the research proves and the conclusions drawn from the research. I missed it the first time in the summary, and think this deserves highlighting:

The research concludes: "While math and science majors drew the most interest initially, not many students finished with degrees in those subjects...The students switched out [of math and science majors] because they were dissatisfied with their grades."

The author concludes from the research: "“If more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study science."

That's quite the spin. If I could be so bold as to suggest a different conclusion...

Kids these days don't understand the meaning of the word fortitude.

Perpetual exponential growth? Good luck with that.

I would expect this to be obvious to the casual observer, but I guess not. So, let me enumerate:
Primary reasons for the decline:

1) The PC has been around now for over 20 years. It no longer possesses excitement and consumer appeal.
2) SMARTPhones and tablets are better meeting the needs and desires of the consumer; their increasing sales are supplanting PC sales.
3) The PC market is saturated, either due to consumer need or financial constraint. (Plenty of foreign markets have consumers but lack capital to meet the saturation levels of Western countries.)
4) Digital product producers, online retailers, and brick & mortar stores have all been significantly marketing tablet and SMARTPhone devices to consumers while ignoring their traditional PC products.
5) Tablets and SMARTPhones have much shorter average lifespans than traditional PCs, creating more consistant and continual demand for their replacement.

Ergo, you have a very simple recipe for the decline of PC sales.

Just one more piece of evidence showing how our government is at war with its citizens.

No, in this case, punishment absolutely has to be a concern. The next time another pompous asshole considers to perjure himself in front of Congress, I want him to remember this guy serving 5-10 years and then reconsider the real consequences of his actions.

But it ain't gonna happen. You know it, I know it, the world knows it. Congress holding liars accountable? Ha!

When you look at our history over the last fifteen years, we've learned that it's OK for the government to lie almost anything...data collection, terrorists, the economy, the banking industry, election financing, the health and general welfare of our armed forces personnel, who has yellowcake, aluminum tubes, and weapons of mass destruction...

But don't you dare lie about getting a blow job.

It has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person.

Not quite. He is still a citizen of the United States and can contact the US Embassy for assistance to leave the country, though it would mean his surrender to the United States. If he publicly made that intent known, officials from the US Embassy in Russia could travel to the airport, use diplomatic powers to pass into where Snowden rests, issue him temporary travel documents to escort him out of the airport and to the embassy, and arrange for travel home.

He's not stateless, but I'm sure he likes to think of himself that way.

1) I completely concur on government staying out of marriage. For sake of argument, let's call "marriage recognized by the state" as "civil union". Two people who enter into a civil union are recognized by the state as having certain benefits, including tax and legal.

2) The question citizens should ask themselves is this: Does allowing homosexual unions into the definition of a "civil union" harm or benefit society? If there's clear evidence that homosexual unions harm society, then let's ban it. But, in the absense of such evidence, the state should not restrict liberties of its citizens.

The reason why I bring up the subject of harm is this: if we allow homosexual unions to be recognized as civil unions, then what is there to stop advocates of other taboo-unions from petitioning for the same opportunity, such as unions of incest or bestiality? Using harm to society as a metric for evaluating these other relationships allows us to allow the former while filtering out the latter. It can be easily argued that incest harm society by its affect on the human gene pool, and bestiality can be negated for either animal cruelty or risk of exposure to disease. But I have yet to see clear justification (beyond biblical refernece) as to harm inflicted upon a society for permitting homosexual unions. Norway and Sweden have allowed them for over a decade, and quality of life in both contries appears to be substantially high.

How come you have such a high /. ID? Were we "too hip" for you, old man?

I've always seen geeks as individuals that are "supersaturated" with knowledge of a particular discipline. There can be math geeks, computer geeks, star trek geeks, movie geeks, car geeks, sports geeks... But just because one is a geek does not in-and-of-itself mean one is a nerd.

Nerd is a title granted to individuals with two characteristics: high intelligence combined with a complete absence of social prowess. It's the latter trait that often distinguishes the geeks and the nerds. I've seen plenty of geeks in my life that are not nerds; as intelligent individuals with the ability to socialize, they are quite pleasant conversationalists. I have seen some nerds who aren't geeks; those individuals possess great intelligence not isolated to a particular discipline, but are very difficult to communicate with.

The problem with justice is determining who deserves it. Measuring culpability is no simple science.

If we're talking about murder, then let's consider motive. Who is more culpable: one who kills in cold blood or one who kills in passion? Let's be more specific: murderer A robs a bank, and during the robbery, shoots the teller; murderer B is a law-abiding citizen whose daughter was raped by a depraved individual, and in a moment of passion, he hunts down and kills the rapist. Both committed murder, but who deserves justice?

I think as a society we would agree that while both murderers are responsible for their actions, murderer B is less responsible than murderer A, as his emotional state, induced by a signifantly emotional and personal event, led to a crime of passion rather than murderer A's act of cold blood, and that murderer B is much less depraved than murderer A. As such, we would apply a significantly lower punishment on murderer B than on murderer A.

Now, no matter what the circumstances, murderer A's going down. But let's see how this plays out sans the 5th for murderer B. Without the Fifth Amendment, one of two things happen: Either he/she lies about committing the murder, or he/she tells the truth about committing the murder. And here's where the fifth amentment makes the difference...

Say murderer B lies about the killing, and is caught doing so. The act of committing a lie will very likely prejudice the measurement of their culpability by the judge or jury. (The human thought process would be something along the lines of: "If he's capable of lying under oath, what else is he capable of?") This would negatively impacting the sentence given.

On the other hand, say murderer B admits his guilt. Then there's no need for a prosecutor to measure culpability. Why does the state need to know why it happened, when it has an admission of guilt served up on a silver platter? The motive for the crime is now irrelevant and moot. While a plea deal might be worked out to reduce the sentence, murderer B will get stuck with likely the same punishment as murderer A. This then also negatively impacts the sentence given.

Pleading the fifth forces the state to carry out a trial, find facts, analyze them, and deliberate on them. This will provide a much more accurate measurement of culpability, allowing the state to offer murderer B a more appropriate punishment to best fit the individual's crimes.

I would consider the 4th Amendment a critical tool as well. I guess it's just a matter of choosing which tool is right for the job.

No one said the machines didn't work. The point is that going back to old voting machines is an epic failure of the political system in the 21st century.

Electronic voting is very simple, as long as it follows one cardnal rule: include the paper trail.

1) Create a PoV (point-of-vote) touchscreen machine w/ touchscreen that's networkable. When the user is done voting, the machine sends an electronic tally to a state / national database to keep count.
2) PoV machine also prints out a receipt for every voter after voting is complete, with detailed results that the voter can read and visually verify. Receipt includes a machine-readible 2D barcode.
3) Receipt gets fed into an on-site audit machine that's not networked. It reads in all the paper receits, scans the barcodes, and keeps a separate count on-site. It's count is audited against the count in the state / national database as the first layer of verifying vote integrity.
4) A random sampling of polling places perform paper counts of the receipts, which are then matched with both the machine-audit count and state/national database count as a second layer of verifying vote integrity.

Bam, there you have it. Electronic voting with instantaneous results providing continual updates regarding vote counts which still require two levels of auditing including a paper-trail to preserve vote integrity. And all this could have been done with technology that's been around for 15 years.

But capitalism has messed it up. Diebold gets contracts, palms get greased, and citizens get screwed.

Allan Savory gave a really good Ted Talk a few months ago backing up that claim with a substantial amount of science and experience. I hope you're not too lazy to watch all twenty-two minutes of it, but if you are, let me give you a quick synopsis. Dr. Savory states that the majority of our global warming issues are due to desertification (the destruction of grasslands and their transformation into desert areas), and he claims that 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere can be removed simply by ceasing unsustainable agriculture practices and converting these lands into grasslands for grazing.

I believe this is the news article you're looking for.

sometimes the cheapest (and *correct*) option is to stay on an "outdated" platform.

Has anyone ever tried to leverage Microsoft into creating an IE6 emulation environment within Win7 & IE10? Wouldn't this do a better overall job of providing upgrade paths with a modern platform?

If Microsoft can keep adding newer .NET libraries without removing the older ones, why not just include old IE libraries and call on them when necessary from newer versions?

Even a small portion of the money saved over the years could be used to upgrade ancient systems to modern standards.

Last November, I made my last $237/month student loan payment. Imagine how much money I could be saving now. In fact, I could've use a small portion of that money to help pay off my credit card.

Guess what I did in November? Bought a new car. $300/month payments.

You know very well where that money went. On other things. On new company cars, and other things. Lined a few pockets and greased a few palms too, I'm sure. Didn't get saved, though.

(For the record, I needed to replace my 96 Olds Ciera...237K was pushing it. Didn't need a car that expensive. Wanted it, though.)