6. Not Christian, so does not apply.

I think that a hardcore theory person who hasn't touched code in years should totally answer that ad just to teach the poor sap a lesson. I think almost every programmer can relate to having a friend/relative/stranger ask them "hey, can you program my website for me" even when said programmer has had no real experience with web programming.

I bought my phone 'cause the case was rubber and it came with a carbuncle, so I don't see what's wrong with buying a phone based on it having some random feature built into the design that's highly useful for the person buying it? Especially when just a few years ago most phones had comparable features as far as the buyer is concerned.

This is ridiculous.. You cannot expect people to travel that far for work.. wtf are you guys smoking, cause you need to pass it this way.

My mom commutes for something like 2hrs (3 w/traffic) each way, hell grandma commuted for an 1 1/2 hrs til she retired in her early 70s, because we all live together so moving would have made the commute worse for one person or another (living separately wasn't a great option for a number of reasons) and all of grandma's friends live in our neighborhood and my mom didn't want to pull me at out of my high school 'cause it was one of the best in the country. Granted, both of them made/make far more than 8 dollars/hour, but it's the whole family thing that makes moving non-trivial. And looking for other jobs isn't an option for my mom 'cause she's got on of the few (programming!) jobs that comes with benefits and a pension.

All their jobs are taken
Hi, graduated with a BE last year and I'm thinking you've just been seeing lazy grads.
I'm a self-admitted slacker, but I've been working since I was 14 and my even more slackerish twin brother since he was 15. And I don't think it's the jobs we choose, as between us we've worked in most of the standard teen fields; he's worked in retail and movie theaters, I've done childcare and tutoring, and we've both done clerical work. The hardest part of getting most of the jobs was filling out the applications and writing the resume/cover letter. It could be 'cause we're in New York (though in theory that would mean even more opportunities for jobs to be taken by illegals) or 'cause we're first generation or have a single mom, but it was always a given that we'd have to pay for our own toys and most of my friends (including people who aren't first gen/have both parents/etc) have to pay for for anything that's not a staple-like trendy clothing/bags-out of their own pockets.

Full disclosure: I have haphazard job skills, but that's cause I'm taking the PhD/research route so I stayed in labs over the summer instead of doing internships. That's probably a separate issue though, that many of the people who in theory have some of the skills would rather stay in school than work in a job that makes use of 'em.

Or any barbies really; my teacher barbie had a noble prize in some science. Having been a little girl and interacted with lots of little girls, I can say from tons of experience that dolls push girls creativity to all sorts of awesome places. I learned to sew by making my barbie's dresses out of old tights and I learned to follow instruction manuals by putting together all my barbie kitchens/bedrooms/etc. (a skill that came in handy most recently for installing a real stove/dishwasher/over range microwave) 'cause my brother and dad couldn't be bothered to read the instructions and therefore messed up.

Most of the fun of legos is playing with the thing you built. I used to build houses with a full set of furniture as set pieces for the soap opera my lego pieces were always embroiled in.

But the Potter books have all those hallmarks of "great" literature-themes, structure, symbolism (actually super structural symbolism), character development-that are shoved down people's throats when they take literature courses, it's just often done in a some-what obvious/accessible way so that the target audience (children!) can pick up on at least some of it. I don't think that children's literature is somehow any less worthy of being considered "great" literature as adult books, as it's just targeted towards a different audience.

I'd mod you up if you weren't already at 5. I go to CCNY so I'm all for their group getting as much recognition as possible 'cause they've been really active in advocating open source tools in a school that's been really meh/haphazard about it.

But they generalize back to the hypothesis that they were testing in the first place: basically they have a situation, they try to recreate the situation, they make a statement about the situation based on the results they get: hey that sounds like just about any academic paper I've ever read that's not a meta analysis.

I make fun of my friend for being in an EE master's program where something like %40 of his coursework is non-EE. He likes the material, but he's also in it 'cause the job market is so lousy that a masters is becoming somewhat standard.I also know plenty of guys in the masters program 'cause they want to become management. Then there fields like education or psych where a masters is required for most positions. Basically it may be that money, not interest, is the motivator for being in a masters program.

Why would they need to? The average American grad student doesn't cost that much, and undergrads are even cheaper/free.
Also, most of the grad students in the sciences are Asian. I think about half my class is from China, and there are maybe five Americans (most whom are 1st generation) including me.

And filtered down to entertainment sites/it's own site. I tried looking up "direction Jews pray" on it and it kept returning some entertainment article. If the religious search engine can't even pull up answers to religious questions, I think it fails on multiple levels.

I play games at pizza shops, movie theaters, and the like, spent a ton of coins on area 51 at the Chinese takeout place by my elementary school, and I've only really been to arcades if I was going to a birthday party thrown at one. There's a teeny one in the basement of Queens Center Mall, and it might have something decent buried behind the DDR (haven't had a chance to check) and I've seen some boxes at the local comic book shop.

Academia works on a similar system, as a lot of money is tied up with grants which require piles of exploratory work to see if the research can ever be a viable application. The exploratory work is often done by grad students/professors who are either paid by the university or out of some other grant. Basically, as in most of your examples, most everyone involved in some kind of contract bid is usually a salaried employee, so at the end of the day most everyone gets paid for the amount of time he or she spent working on the bid and it's just the firm/owner who loses out if the firm doesn't get the contract.

b/ and my brain is broken from accidentally scanning it while pulling the link. It's not safe for work/children/adults/humans/animals etc.