You would think so, but experience has shown that without a working proof of concept exploit, software vendors dismiss the vulnerability as theoretical, downplay the severity, or outright ignore it. Sometimes they even ignore vulnerabilities with working exploits, if it isn't actually being exploited in the wild (that anyone knows about). And a working exploit is useful for testing your own systems.

XHTML serves a purpose. It adds the eXtensibility so that XHTML can be encorporated into other XML documents and visa versa, and it allows you to parse, generate and manipulate it with XML tools. The fact that browsers still have to deal with non-XML HTML doesn't take away from it's advantages.

If you're generating HTML, there's no reason to not generate XHTML -- it's only the code that consumes it that has to deal with HTML. And what, besides a browser, consumes HTML? (Whatever it is, it's probably doing it wrong.)

Absolute moron or not, I think you misunderstood him.

That comment makes sense if "Subsidies" means money given to the student to pay tuition, which he's claiming raises the willingness to pay. I assume that's the correct interpretation, since that's what TFA is about. You're talking about subsidies given to the school, which by the same logic would raise the willingness to sell.

So there are subsidies on both the supply and the demand side. I'm pretty sure the subsidies to the schools (supply side) completely dwarf the subsidies given to the students (demand side), and this proposal would have little effect.

But the premise "prices are determined by where willingness to pay meets willingness to sell" is flawed anyway:

• 1. Community College tuition is usually set the state legislature, so there's that.
• 2. International enrollment is high and increasing, and would be even higher if it weren't limited by policy. International tuition is double or triple what in-state students pay, so we already know tuition is kept low despite high demand.
• 3. Most private money also goes to the supply side. That's why University of Washington has "The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering."

There's nothing magic about it. Inflation raises the price of everything, including labor.

I hope you're right, but you might be underestimating the stubbornness people are able to maintain in regard to AGW. We're far past reasonable doubt already.

Many people will only be convinced by an argument that goes like this: AGW is real, but don't worry we've solved the problem in a way that allows you to not make any sacrifices to your god-given way of life, and your taxes aren't going to go up.

We've been tinkering with the climate for a hundred years, that's why we're even talking about this.

And yet all that work is the reason it's destined to be patched.

In my quarter-century professional career I've seen just as much one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid in the workplace. What I haven't seen much of, in the places I've worked, is women.

A quick search shows there really was something better about their concrete:

Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture

Discovery of 'Lost Recipe' for Ancient Concrete Provides Foundation for Future Cities

The Riddle of Ancient Roman Concrete

Even given the short(er) lifespan of modern buildings, most of the buildings we tear down are torn down while they are still structurally sound and useful. They just aren't useful enough. We tear them down because they are not the building we want on that site any more. For example, consider single family houses in the middle of a crowded city. They don't have modern energy efficiency, safety or ease of maintenance, and they don't house enough people to justify the forgoing the alternative uses of the land they are on. A few rich people will live in them anyway, an we keep a few around as historical sites, but the rest we tear down to build something we want more.

Computers are even worse. If we wanted to, we could build a smart phone that would last a century but nobody wants that. It won't even be 5 years before we won't want the phone we have, because there will be better ones by then. Centuries-old buildings were built in a time when technology and society itself were relatively static. With today's pace of technological and societal change, it doesn't make sense to build much of anything to last that long because what we will want in a few hundred years or even a few decades is unknowable. Forget about thousands of years. Anything we build today is not going to be what we want anymore long before that. I suppose that some day, when the pace of change stabilizes, we will start building more permanent things again. In the mean time, there's a balance to be struck between construction/manufacturing costs, and what we expect the thing's useful lifespan to be.

That's the price you pay for a completely uncensored forum. Personally, I think it's worth it.

You don't have to read at -1 (you should if you're modding, though.) You're also reading and posting when the story has literally been here 15 minutes. There hasn't been time for quality discussion and moderation to take place (jokes, trolls and spam begin immediately, real discussion takes longer.)

I was a CS/EE double major in undergrad. In the first two or three years, there were plenty of women who were engineering majors. By the time I was a senior, there were 2 or 3 left in my class. I don't know the reasons why they dropped out or switched to other majors, but from what I saw, I suspect they were put off by the constant one-upmanship and trying to make other people look stupid that goes on. Kind of like Slashdot. I think most of us (men) are guilty of it to to varying degrees.

Ok, maybe that's a way of being less interested. But they didn't start out less interested.

I vaguely remember a recent story about Google not wanting experienced developers in some entry level CS classes they were offering. The first thing that occurred to me was that the experienced people (likely men) might be disrupting the classes with the kind of thing I'm talking about.

In the past few years I've been taking biology and chemistry classes out of personal interest. There are more women than men in those classes. I hope I'm not being sexist, but it seems to me that women are both more bothered by that kind of behavior, and far less likely to do it themselves. In fact they're more likely to do the opposite: when someone is struggling with a concept, they try to encourage them, e.g. by saying "yeah, that was a tricky idea, I finally got it when I looked at it like this...", rather than saying "oh come on, it's simple, just look at it like this..."

If civilizations similar to our own were common enough, we would see evidence of their radio waves that were emitted during the brief period in their history where radio waves were used for communication. Also, lots of things we do other than communication also emit radiation. Finally (and most compelling) advanced civilizations might be emitting radio waves intentionally (like we have done and maybe still are?) in order to be detected.

They would not be built to absorb 100% of the stars radiation. According to the wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox:

"[A Dyson sphere would] drastically alter the observed spectrum of the star involved, changing it at least partly from the normal emission lines of a natural stellar atmosphere to that of a black body radiation, probably with a peak in the infrared. Dyson himself speculated that advanced alien civilizations might be detected by examining the spectra of stars and searching for such an altered spectrum"