A good friend of mine wound up with an aerospace engineering degree from Auburn ('88). He wound up programming at a .com in the 90s and cashed in his options around '98 (a couple million). He still works (software development) on projects that interest him but at his own pace and when he wants too. I find that people tend pigeonhole science and engineering degrees too much. I'm a geologist but I've managed projects, coded (exclusively) back in the 90s, worked as a geographer/GIS analyst/cartographer, worked in labs, worked in the field, SCUBA dive (for work), and have supervised subordinates and subcontractors. Studying a STEM field prepares you for a myriad of future options, especially if you prepare by taking a few classes outside your immediate major (e.g. a couple extra chemistry, programming, language, accounting, or statistics classes if you normally aren't expected to). I took a bunch of programming, logic, and business classes in addition to my geology curriculum...definitely paid off for me. Studying "difficult" STEM subjects instills discipline, builds confidence, teaches problem-solving, hones critical-thinking skills, and prepares you for an amorphous future.

If you read the article, you will find that "NASA's Curiosity rover is poised to settle the question as early as this week." No findings have been released as no data has been acquired (at least nothing acknowledged in the article). In any case, the presence of methane is of less interest than the concentration; it is found in interstellar space http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991ApJ...376..556L

I read the article and it sounds like this guy is debugging and QCing by submission. He sounds like a sloppy programmer. Microsoft rejected his app and gave him the technical reasons why. He failed two more resubmissions. The first two comments on his blog sum it up nicely:

"We had the opposite experience. We ported a complex WP7 XNA game to Windows 8. We got invited to the App Excellence Lab. We won an early access token. We submitted to the store in July and passed on the first try. To date we've submitted to the store 3 times and passed all three times."

"Makes me wonder if his code is very inefficient"

Personally, I'm glad they are rejecting apps that don't work or perform as required.

Why not? Microsoft is a *software* company at its core.

Of course. At least until the priests of the temple of Syrinx take over a week later.

Buy two baseball gloves and a ball. Give him one glove. Throw the ball back and forth with him. He will probably appreciate and remember that more as an adult than programming books.

Pretty much every government is in debt to one degree or another. Who controls the money supply? The governments.

Dilution is the solution.

Hold it, hold it. Why build? You're better off leasing at a buck and a quarter, a buck and a half a square foot. Take your down payment and put it into CDs or something else you can roll over every couple of months.

Well, for starters all the charts and figures have been omitted from the pdf. Makes it kind of hard to trust/verify what he says.

The chain of command and rank structure takes care of decision making. Someone is always in charge, even if it is the last person standing.

Does it detect box cutters?

The paper finds that: "These findings together with the trends revealed in long-term CGCM runs suggest that large-scale summer temperatures were some tenths of a degree Celsius warmer during Roman times than previously thought." They aren't talking about 2 to 5 C warming, rather a few tenths of a degree.

Nothing new. "If that's the only thing that's stopping war then thank God for the bomb" ---Ozzy

The military runs on coffee. I used to wash raw coffee grounds down with a swig from my canteen on road marches (no hot water) when I was an infantryman. Plenty of people with non-desk jobs drink coffee, especially in colder climates. That's what Thermos bottles are for.