Agreed. I use layers of scotch tape and black permanant marker to dim them, works _ok_ but a damned dimmer would be great.

I think you just described 38 studios, only it was a baseball player, a business executive, and two authors.

Lloyd Doggett is a stand up gent and the only elected official that I am proud to say represents me. He sponsored the bill to close the NSA "backdoor", and he's typically on the right side of these issues. I'm not surprised he voted against this faux reform bill.

Ignoring the known effects of certain drugs, there is more than I expected: specifically with toxoplasmosis and increased risk of car accidents for humans. Mind control is a fact for some insects and rodents, how much more exists is an interesting question. This entertaining talk goes into it a good deal.

https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_y...

Hyper motivated and extraordinarily smart people tend to succeed regardless of the circumstances. Your anecdotes do nothing for 99% of the population that stands to benefit from structure and a well rounded education, particularly in their late teens. Clearly, businesses see the value such that they're willing to reward it.

I don't think that most folks would disagree about "very high end" talent. However, people like that are a needle in a haystack, and there's a limit to how much hay to import before we start asking if we should just grow our own hay. Most of us that work in the industry have seen the reality of H1B "talent", and by and large, it ain't. I'd rather poach talent from a US graduate majoring in finance because it's seen as more lucrative than technology, and suppressing the wages with foreign labor isn't helping the situation.

It takes a remarkable amount of gall for non-americans to judge americans on their own immigration policies, and then stereotype them to boot.

All of your arguments are predicated on poor regulation, all of which is fixable. International trade is about balance, and there is very little resembling balance in the labor trade currently.

America ignoring imperialist invasions by a nationalist leader in eastern Europe by a country humiliated as a result of a previous war. No precedent for that going wrong.

I think I see your problem. Most companies don't make the developers write code on the board every day, as boards are very inefficient compilers and the intellisense is just atrocious.

I don't understand why we make interviews so uncomfortable for the people we want to work for us. Give a programmer a goddamn keyboard, if you really want to see what they can do. The board is for visualizing high level interactions, not writing modules.

SAT scores to correlate with a lot of good metrics (higher income, more degrees) but I'm not certain specifically about college dropout rate. I would hazard a guess there would be a strong correlation.

The same argument would have applied to email inboxes a little more than a decade ago. When storage/price isn't an issue, it's not worth the bother of curating so long as the data is easily searched. A decade from now 20 TB will probably be the average thumb drive size.

Max Planck Leipzig? I hear similar stories from there.

I think that was actually Christopher Hitchens that had the awakening to anti-theism because of his teacher talking about the colors being green.

My own education was stultified because of that nonsense. I read several quackish books on evolution trying to resolve the disparity between nature and my religion, when I could have been learning something useful or at least been exposed to some valid texts on the subject. With the wide availability of the internet it is probably less a problem, but I still resent the fact that no useful counter-arguments were made in science class to rebut the garbage spewed from the pulpit.

When you say something as generic as "generating value" then paying sufficient taxes could be considered an investment in the solvency of your target market. Any number of rationalizations could be made in either direction. You are correct though that the problem is not with Apple though, it's the citizens fault for not requiring a modicum of fairness in the tax code or at the very least shaming and boycotting corporations who are leeching.

Your "hater" phrasing does actually piss me off. Would you say that about your corporate friend you brought to dinner who doesn't leave a tip at a restaurant because it's not legally required? Since we've decided to co-exist with these financial constructs having human like qualities, it's time we started enforcing social norms on them so they can learn how to be a bit less autistic.

I think the graphic on the NYT showing the enrollment of both genders is informative:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepa...

I wasn't in the field in 82, so don't know much about that time, but interest from both genders spiked around the dot com bubble, which from my experience correlated to more folks who were less interested in Computer Science and more interested in the anticipated salaries. I do think there are more few factors at play, but the respective spikes seem more like aberrations than norms.