Nearly every study I've seen shows STEM fields as some of the most consistent returns on investment for a college degree. Essentially only MBA's, Lawyers, and Doctors do better, and those are either a much higher up front cost, or are a strong tournament system (with the top people making out, and lots of people failing at the bottom).

I think STEM is broad enough that it's difficult to make general statements.

CS is generally considered STEM. My wife and I had no problems finding jobs to put us in the top 10% of our area and pay off the college debt in a couple years. We're doing much better at this point in time than our friends with medical degrees (although I'm sure they will catch up).

Because every time I hear that buzzword, I expect to see a middle aged man in a bad super-hero costume trying to rap about particle physics...

When they read "engaging students in a fun way."

You don't need gimmicks, people! You need interesting experiments that kids can connect with.

It's hands-on science experiments. Let the kids blow stuff up, get dirty, smash something, or shock each other and they'll be interested. The gimmicks don't matter.

Use someone *else's* face as your unlock.

Like Teddy Roosevelt.

And then put that picture as your login screen, so it'll log you in if you point at a mirror.

It'll still be a problem if Zombie Teddy Roosevelt steals your phone, but how likely is that...

Indeed. It's not as though there are no non-GM non-Monsanto seeds to buy and plant. The Monsanto ones are just that much better.

I'm sorry for you, living in a fantasy world where you think you are safe, and the police will protect you.

The US's level of violent crime is lower than in the UK, where they have banned guns entirely, and when there are riots in the street people have to buy baseball bats and hope that they can defend themselves with them.

I don't expect to have to use the gun on my hip, just like I don't expect to need the medical kit in my car, or the fire extinguisher in my kitchen. But if I do need it, I'm going to be very glad it's there, and with basic safety precautions the chance of it being more dangerous to me than not having it is almost nothing.

Then your statistic is entirely incorrect. In the US there are over a million defensive uses of guns every year. The chance of your own gun being taken from you and used against you is *incredibly* small. Every study that claimed to find otherwise was counting suicides as "being used against you."

"almost certainly help".... do you realize how little the existing gun registries have done to actually help solve crimes? Canada had a long gun registry for 14 years - it was never used to solve a single murder.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291304/death-long-gun-registry-john-r-lott-jr#

All this is ever going to tell you is that "hey, this guy was shot with a gun someone reported stolen five years ago." Just like almost every other gun used to shoot someone was.

That assuming that the stamping is still legible. With current technology, after just a few hundred or thousand rounds through the gun (ie, one or two trips to the range), half of the case stampings were illegible.

It massively fails the cost benefit analysis test. Is that good enough for you?

It imposes significant costs and annoyances on every single legal gun owner, while only catching a few of the dumb criminals.

Yes, because the majority of non homicidal gun deaths are suicides...

Given that people in gun-banning countries manage to find plenty of other ways to kill themselves, I'm not sure that's a useful statistic.

Phlogiston: how else could there be fire if stuff wasn't made of it?
Spontaneous Generation: Or do you want to believe in invisible animals?
Telegony: Are you saying that previous husbands *don't* influence their ex-wifes?
The Four Humors: Questioning this is certainly only someone with too much black bile would do.

Questioning theories is the very heart of science. Because we are *always* wrong. That is the nature of science. We're hopefully less wrong than we were a hundred years ago, but we're still *wrong*.

The important thing is that these questions come in a form that accepts the main principle of science - that every theory be testable and observable by someone else.

I think if more teachers understood this and taught it instead of handing down scientific wisdom like Moses on the mountainside, we'd have fewer of these issues.

I think that "people skills" is really too vague as far as it actually matters for development.

You don't care if most of your IT people can give a good presentation or talk to clients. You care if they can work with the other developers without making them want to strangle each other. You care about whether they're going to derail meetings, or never share what they're working with their code.

People skills as it applies to a successful programmer or IT worker are very different from people skills as they apply to a manager or a salesman.

Exactly. It's not an instantaneous thing. Eventually, if those really are mission critical processes, they're either going to pay more to hire someone with expertise or find someone with less expertise who'll take the money.

This is exactly what market-driven wage increases look like.

It's the way the system works. Even if you want to get anti-lobbying legislation passed, the only functional way to do this is to start an anti-lobbying lobby.