UPS makes millions of dollars a day by implementing approximations to an NP-hard problem. Perhaps they should just stay home and naval-gaze.

I'd like a wife. I'd like her to be a colleague. I'd like to think I'm not the only one.

Opposites attract. And possibly reduce the incidence of autism.

Has anyone, you know, *asked* women why they don't go into CS?

When the last story came out, a friend of mine posted it and called it [effectively] bullshit. She said she went into computers despite it being a social death sentence at the time (she would have been the target age when those ads were running). Programming a computer was high geekery and something only a true nerd would take on.

She credits (hold on to your hats, Slashdot) - Bill Gates with making computers cool. Because he was well-known, a complete nerd, and, oh, a multi-billionaire. That last part has some sway with the popular culture still. Jobs may have made Apple cool again, but she sees the swing before that.

Anyway, her point was that her generation of girls avoided computers like the plague because they cared about social standing, by in large, more than males did. Certainly many males did too, but more males didn't care than females didn't care.

I think you have to go back a few hundred million years to find a point where some percentage of adolescent male primates didn't stray from the social group in larger numbers than the females. Blame the culture, I guess, and maybe the marketing people reinforced it, but I don't think those ads were largely seen outside of the target groups anyhow.

People will go on about popular culture promoting boys in computing, but - come on, Wyatt and Gary weren't the center of their social order - they were nearly outcasts before they made Lisa. More girls heard "only freaks use computers" while more males heard "you can have a lot of fun with computers". But, yeah, we should ignore any biological basis and probably shame the chimps for their social orders while we're at it.

I agree with you 100%, but the history of civil asset forfeiture would seem to indicate the courts beg to differ.

Of course they do - they're an essential part of the corrupt system, not objective arbiters.

Then there's another Jihadist who attacked two police officers in NYC with an axe: ... But these two aren't reported as heavily because they didn't use a gun, and the liberal media are against guns.

No, they're not related because they're not related.

This "jihadist" thing is just a hook for a certain slice of the crazies to hang their hat on. We will always have crazies doing antisocial things. Ordinarily they would be called "crimes by crazy people." But as soon as a crazy says "jihad", it's "terrorism" so the government needs to further infringe on liberties.

Just say no to "jihad" as a serious thing - it's popularized to speed along your enslavement. There may be a few actual jihadis operating in the Middle East, but going nuts on some cops with a hatchet is not jihad, it's assault.

But, it makes the equations balance...

that only exist to give housewives/househusbands something to do with their time

Definitely not - they're there to get people to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make, usually bad ones.

People love to get something for nothing. "$1 off a "premium" bag of wavy potato chips! Hell yeah!" No matter that the generic wavy potato chips are still fifty cents less and taste the same - it's a DEAL!

Kohls is famous for marking up their goods by 300% and then having a 30% off sale. The lines are out the door for "the savings". JC Penney tried to do away with that scheme and nearly went bankrupt. They went back to it this year and are returning to profitability.

If you don't have a concrete estimate of value for what you're purchasing, you can get wildly abused by the marketeers. That value will be subjective, but you better darn well know what it is if you don't want to get taken. I buy clothes at Kohls, but unless I'm desperate I limit myself to the 70% off clearance rack. That's where I find my valuation meets their prices. YMMV.

Except they're only doing this to their USB VID/PID - which IS THEIRS.

No. They're doing it to property that other people own. Just because that property advertises a fraudulent USB ID does not transfer ownership of that property to FTDI. They are intentionally breaking other peoples' property and even crowing about it.

FTDI is taking an end-justifies-the means stance, and implementing a vigilante approach. It's drinking the imaginary property Kool-Aid that gets people drunk on ideas like this, and they seem to lose all judgment.

"If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay you for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means. Will you still say that means do not matter?" - MK Gandhi

At 120 hours a week you don't have much time to spend any of that windfall, and by the time you do have time to go shopping you're spending it in India.

There's not even enough time left to sleep, eat and shower - one ought be skeptical of the claims.

There's a rapid diagnostic test that is developed and can be at West African airport departure gates in less than three months if the FDA gets out of the way. I know, it's only nutters like the NPR health sciences correspondent going on about this - was Dr. Paul also saying crazy things like the government is making the situation worse? Instead, they should totally go ahead and implement a travel ban so people sneak into the country with ebola instead of coming through the airports.

Meanwhile nobody in the US is infected with ebola and cattle are still far more dangerous, right? Wait - fear, fear, fear! Give us power and ... fear! Talk about cult leaders.

it couldn't be measured if it weren't a distinct genotype. That says nothing about speciation, of course.

If it's in-house software then it can be fixed - no excuses. If people don't fix problems they know about and can fix then they get what they deserve.

Show me somebody who has a huge investment into a physical machine controlled by some proprietary software where the vendor has gone out of business and there's no source available and then I'll have a bit of sympathy, but even then put it on a VM on its own VLAN - these are not extremely difficult problems.

and since there are no historical examples of a non-abusive government, minimizing taxation is the only way to minimize abusiveness.

why? Because the interior minister's uncle wants a new boat. Oh sure, launder the cash through a few welfare programs, but more complex explanations are not required.

Solvent? There is nothing but IOU's in the "trust fund" - future taxation is the plan for paying out SS. Between that and Medicare for the boomers, each non-retiree (man , woman, and child) is on the hook for $900K in additional taxation over the boomers' retirement. Gene therapy will be banned and age wars seem possible. Arithmetic is inflexible that way.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/06/...