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Comment National debt (Score 5, Informative) 395

by MillionthMonkey (#49602617) Attached to: Bernie Sanders, Presidential Candidate and H-1B Skeptic
Obama has cut the budget deficit in half since 2008. (Bush left it at $1.5 trillion per year, and now it's about $750 billion). Since $750 billion is still greater than zero, the national debt continues to rise, at about half the rate that it did during the Bush administration- when, if you recall, no one seemed to be complaining about it at all.

Comment Re:Safety valves (Score 1) 309

Point taken on property, but unlike other property where ownership is an inherent right, copyrights are granted by Congress to benefit society (talking about US here), and the terms of copyright are set by congress using powers laid out in the constitution. Would the Supremes interfere too much with this power?

If specific copyrights were wiped out using eminent domain, then I agree the owners would have to be confiscated.

Comment Re:They should be doing the opposite (Score 1) 309

Copyright is a restriction of freedom of speech. The livelihood of the artist is not the only consideration.

We don't need to guarantee that any particular kind of author or musician can profit from their work. Look at the amount of books and tracks produced at this time. This is the golden age of making it as an artist. I really don't think society would be hurt too much if our output was slashed by 50%.
Education

How To Increase the Number of Female Engineers 634

Posted by Soulskill from the other-than-million-dollar-signing-bonuses dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Lina Nilsson writes in an op-ed piece in the NY Times that she looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of engineers in the work force are women. But there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts. "An experience here at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves," writes Nilsson. "That applies not only to computer engineering but also to more traditional, equally male-dominated fields like mechanical and chemical engineering." Nilsson says that Blum Center for Developing Economies recently began a new program that, without any targeted outreach, achieved 50 percent female enrollment in just one academic year. In the fall of 2014, UC Berkeley began offering a new Ph.D. minor in development engineering for students doing thesis work on solutions for low-income communities. They are designing affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions.

According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good. She notes that MIT, the University of Minnesota, Penn State, Santa Clara University, Arizona State, and the University of Michigan have programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality that have achieved similar results. For example, at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female, reflecting the overall club composition. "It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important," concludes Nilsson. "It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all."

Comment Re: Yes - Facebook quit too soon (Score 1) 161

by JebusIsLord (#49563137) Attached to: Has the Native Vs. HTML5 Mobile Debate Changed?

C# has actually evolved into a wonderful language. The async stuff, lambdas and especially Linq are great.

Xamarin-wise, there is a lot of code sharing possible using portable class libraries, and Xamarin.Forms shows promise, if immature. The project in working on has probably 95% shared code and appears completely native.

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