Or maybe life is just an inevitable outcome when the right conditions are met? Why science has such a hardon for panspermia is beyond me.

"get's" ?? I think you meant "gets"

Ich danke Ihnen

>> This is a function based on how many males vs females there are, and how often a male needs to, er, sit.

No it isn't.
The logical thing to do is the minimum possible - ie leave the seat where it is when the operation is complete. When the next user comes along they may - or may not - have to adjust it.

Or are you suggesting that women reverse blindly into a bathroom and sit down?

Yeah - how come nobody ever asks "Why can't women put the damned seat up after them? They are so inconsiderate."

Maybe someone could hack one of those dopey toilet seat closers?

The nVidia Shield has a SD slot, and rumor has it that it's the fastest selling Android tablet on the market (basically nVidia cannot keep up with the demand and every single tablet is sold before leaving the production chain).

At $300, it's also the best performing tablet on the market and, according to the Anandtech benchmark reviews I've seen, it even surpasses the unreleased Nexus 9 in tests. Let's hope this comes as a wake-up call to to the other players in the tablet market.

Disclaimer : I don't work for nVidia, I'm just an extremely satisfied Shield tablet owner.

Can someone explain to me why the images have such bad quality and resolution? Satellite images of the earth are good enough to spot someone sunbathing on a roof. I would think that the price of top-notch optics and sensors would pale compared to the cost of just making the trip to the moon, so why aren't the pictures as good quality as what we get from the earth-orbiting satellites?

Yes, that's just the same as being told by the government and society that you can't marry that cute redhead in Accounts Receivables because she's 5'2", or being told you're going to burn in Hell for eternity because you're over 6' tall, or being beaten up because you're exactly 5'9".

No you have not.

More important is - why aren't men going into teaching? Much more concerning.
We seem to be entering a world where everyone is being taught to be female.

Males - in my experience - work well alone, can delve very deeply into things. Females are better with group work, and tend to take a broader approach.

We need both, sure.
But as people tend to go for jobs and careers they think they might be good at ... maybe we should let them choose?

Overly sexually biased workplaces tend to be painful - over female and you get bitch city and bullying, over male and you get macho posturing and bullying. A mixture is nice. We used to have male occupations leavened by admin assistants, invariably female, and traditionally female occupations usually had males about for some stuff.
But with the automation of many tasks, thing get more concentrated. And we have lost that mix.

Just a thought.

Has anybody investigated why so few women work as garbage collectors?

I started my Computer Science degree in 1973 (yes, yes, get off my lawn, etc ... but I'm still coding and quite well paid so there).
There were very few women - two I think, maybe three in a class of maybe 30. And they were terrible. I recall explaining arrays to one girl ... in third year. (Mind you, many of the blokes were equally terrible, but some were brilliant).

Over the years I have encountered few good female coders - not zero, but few.
I have encountered a number of female sysadmins - and good ones, at that.
But project managers - lots more women, and good ones to boot.

So maybe, just maybe ... different sexes tend to be good at different things. Just like our parents assumed.

Gosh. How about that.

Let the trolling commence.

Sex always sells.

No, no, you're looking at this all wrong. Apple stayed out of the Phablet market until they were "cool/hip/trendy". The vast sales Samsung had were merely to unimportant people. Apple, on the other hand, entered the market exactly when phablets became cool, because, by definition, phablets became cool only once Apple had entered the market.