1) Whole Foods is a grocery store, the Creation Museum claims to be a museum.

2) Certain states aren't trying to teach children the "controversy" surrounding dandelion root extract supposedly curing my ailments. There isn't a national debate surrounding gluten-free pancake mix. Politicians don't get elected to office by appealing to the "this organic sea salt is only 4000 years old" crowd.

You obviously ignored the sarcasm tags.

But to play ball: in the US as in many other developed nations you can't discriminate against employees because of things like that. If I have diabetes you can't discriminate against me because I may have low blood sugar one day and have to go home. You can't discriminate someone with a propensity to get the flu every winter because on average that person misses more days than someone who doesn't get the flu. Furthermore you can't just lump all women together and generalize about them. Some choose not to have children, should they be punished because some women do choose to have children?

Were you really trying to say that there is such a disparity between the number of men and women in software engineering because they may take more time off? Or were you just waiting for your chance to get in a cheap shot against women?

You may not be a misogynist, but you do have some silly thoughts regarding women.

Humm, if only there was some economic event that happened around that time that could explain why large amounts of people would switch careers. It is almost as if there was some kind of recession in the number of software jobs available that caused female CS grads to pick different careers.

Every time some neckbeard opens his mouth and allows the misogyny to flow out it just reinforces the notion that there needs to be more incentive for women to get into software. I know this is /. but you probably just made some femnazi's panties crawl up her ass....dammit.

I know it is impossible, but I just want there to be honest discourse about this supposed "STEM shortage / gender gap". There is no STEM shortage just like there is no Lawyer shortage. The gender gap in software engineering isn't a problem just like the gender gap in nursing isn't a problem. Corporations want to turn software engineers into a commodity. Period.

The first sentence of the abstract:

The virus uses the AP's web interface to trigger a firmware upgrade, and then provides a malicious firmware that contains code that spreads the virus. If this is the first time someone did that I'm going to kick myself for not going into security research. Given the plethora of open source AP firmware that already supports many commodity APs it should be trivial to do something like this. All you need is a sufficiently dense collection of APs that are compatible with your malicious firmware. We all already know that a poorly secured AP is a great attack vector, even without malicious firmware you can redirect all of the client's traffic through your own routers and you have your self a classic man in the middle.

The main point of this research is to show that they developed better detection methods that don't compromise any of the AP's client's expectation of privacy.

It is impossible to speak in generalities about STEM. The fields that fall under STEM are so diverse and even within one of the letters there is such a stratification of positions and educations that any comparisons are difficult to make.

Is there a shortage in Computer Engineering Eng.Ds? Or is there a shortage in Computer Engineering B.S. degree holders? Your average B.S. isn't going to jump right into an advanced research position and write a new distributed computing algorithm. Your average Eng.D. isn't going to be happy working under an architect writing Java for a corporate back end system. What about your Information Systems graduate? Can he write C++ for embedded systems? Would your average embedded engineer be happy configuring ISS and Active Directory? Even though those things are drastically different they all get lumped together under "coder" or "programmer".

Take Mechanical Engineers. You have your B.S. Mechanical Engineers slaving away over Solid Works creating widgets. Your have your Eng.D. mechanical engineers developing new engine systems. Which do we need more of?

I think the reality is that when companies complain they need more STEM graduates they are saying they either want extremely talented B.S. graduates to make the business run (example: embedded engineer writing industrial control software, you dont need a PhD but your average B.S. couldn't do it) or they want extremely talented Eng.Ds to develop the next processor architecture that takes over the market. But they don't want middle of the road B.S. graduates that don't understand OO even though they only language they can write is Java, and they don't want Eng.Ds who have experience in far out research but aren't capable of doing practical work that makes a company money.

I'm genuinely curious: What position are you looking for? Are you trying to continue to do research?

When I spent time at a university it was a common complaint that a lot of really really intelligent advanced degree holders couldn't find positions in academia or the corporate side of things. Maybe it was just my field but I observed that there are a lot more jobs for Computer Engineers with B.S. and M.S. degrees than there are for Computer Engineers with Eng.D or Ph.Ds. It actually seemed easier to get a job if you didn't' have anything above a M.S. It is unfortunate but it just doesn't seem like the economy can accommodate thousands of people doing research. It can however support thousands of software engineers doing average (relative to post-doc research) work. For every engineer at Google and Amazon developing advanced algorithms and distributed computing platforms there are probably 100 software engineers writing less advanced software while still making a great living.

Assmasher I really think we are in near agreement. I guess we just disagree about the definition of the phrase "as policy". If the President condones it, leaders in Congress condone it, the Attorney General condones it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff condone it, the directors of the FBI, CIA, and other 3 letter agencies condone it, then I consider it standard policy of the government. Just because they didn't make a press release announcing they were going to violate the constitution doesn't mean it wasn't the policy of the government to violate the constitution.

There has always been a war on terror, it was just called something different. Replace terror with communist. Replace terror with drugs. I agree that the US government uses "war on X" to justify criminal acts. I just believe that it started long before 9/11.

I agree that no country is perfect. And honestly I think we do pretty well compared to some of our fellow 1st world nations. I also agree that our nation needs to do some soul searching and address the moral crisis we are currently facing.

This is the only part that confuses me. You seriously think that we upheld the values of our constitution up to 9/11 and then just threw them out the window? You really think the US Government didn't violate due process and habeas corpus before 9/11? You claim that people of the WWII era would be disgusted with the current state of things. I completely agree. They also would have been disgusted with the state of affairs 50 years ago too if they had knows about it. I guess I just disagree that things got dramatically worse after 9/11. Things have always been very very bad. But as time passes we just forget, gloss over, and move on; we end up romanticizing the past and start pretending the present is much worse.

Unethical Human Experimentation
Eugenics
Torture
Drug Trafficking

It is really important to be critical of our current government. It is also really important not to ignore or forget that our previous governments have violated the constitution and our laws on a massive and criminal scale. Most of the time they acted with impunity.

Sorry to break it to you but we have very rarely held the moral high ground. We systematically killed off the Native Americans. We locked the Japanese in internment camps. We carried out medical and military experiments on US citizens and military personnel without their consent or knowledge. Some of these people died and it took decades for the Government to apologize to the families of the victims. Our government put MLK on surveillance, planned to discredit him and smear him in the public eye. The CIA facilitated drug trafficking. Our government hatched plans to attack US cities to try to drum up support for an invasion of Cuba. The US has a long and rich history of violating human rights in the name of security.

TL;DR: We have been doing this shit for a long long time. Because of our dominance we get to write the history books and therefore your average person is ignorant of the crimes of the US government. It would disturb the general population so they just don't discuss it. Anyone who would care already knows, anyone who doesn't already know probably wouldn't care.

Well we used the MLA, and when my teacher didn't know something we would write to Dianna Hacker ask her to answer our confusion. What happens when teacher is asked about student loans? Does she ask Sallie Mae for advice? Personal finance is much much more subjective than grammar.

Well what I mean by "fighting evolution" is those states that are fighting to remove evolution from biology classes.

Pre-prepared refers to slides, homework assignments, and tests pre-prepared by the textbook companies to remove any need for the teacher to actually teach. It is in contrast to the old fashioned method of a teacher preparing their own lesson plans, homework assignments, and tests.