I think the main problem is not just that top talent is no longer going into science and engineering, but that poorer talent is entering. Every university you can think of now has a program where you can graduate with a bachelors in science. It used to be that top schools were the only ones producing anyone who can reasonably call themselves scientists, but now everyone is doing it. It's even worse for engineering. Here in Canada we have very strict regulations on the certification of our engineers to make sure that they all have the same basic knowledge, but I know people who went into engineering programs that had required entrance averages a full 20% lower than mine! I wouldn't trust them to engineer a toaster, but they're in fields with a lot more responsibility, like aerospace for example. And that's /with/ our strict regulations, I know places in the U.S. have lower standards and the people who graduate from those programs will one day call themselves engineers.

Like the fact that an acceptance of an offer need only be sent, not necessarily recieved, to make the contract binding. I.e. as soon as the acceptor mails off the acceptance the contract has been accepted and the offerer is bound by it.

In theory, yes, but in real life the "mailbox rule" is usually contracted around--the offering party will expressly state the method in which the offer can be accepted.

Except that 10% of nurses are now male, rising every year. On top of that 20% of current nursing students are male, again, rising every year.

Is it really so hard to believe that more men find electrical engineering interesting and more women find psychology interesting? Do we really have to be the same to be equal? I hope not, that would be pretty boring.

...Up the water spout,
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain,
Wave did the spider to the surprised proctologist,
And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.

Headhunters will change and brand your resume! It's happened to me many times. The also will demand a Word formatted resume -- which is ironic for a web developer position!

If Android phones don't step up to the plate app-wise, AND touch-wise, accelerometer-wise, GPS-wise, compass-wise, iTunes-wise... then you're just going to have a lot of companies betting on the wrong horse.

But other handset manufacturers can't make iphones. They have to make phones with an OS that somebody is willing to licence to them. In itself, this guarantees that plenty of non-Apple phones will be manufactured and sold. Manufacturers have no choice but to compete.

It's just like how Mac can't kill the PC platform. Thousands of companies make PCs. One company makes Macs. If you want to build computers, they have to be PCs.

Glossy v. Matte is not a definitive advantage either way, IMO.

Glossy has some very interesting advantages offsetting the reflection problem. Reduced glare for one, which lets glossy screens have darker blacks. They also are easier to clean, although they are quicker to show the need.

I have a Macbook and an old Toshiba with a matte screen, and the screen on the macbook is much more useful when, say, outdoors as long as I don't have the sun directly at my back and I don't wear a bright shirt.

If I were looking at a new notebook, I wouldn't rule one out off the bat just because of the screen. They simply require different habits and have different advantages. For me, the change was not onerous, so I would definitely recommend actually trying out the two screen types for a little while first. That goes for Macs or PCs with glossy screens.

The ultimate gateway "drug" is prohibition. The more you ban something, the more some people are interested in try it. That is when the real danger occurs. Then when they find out something, such as pot, isn't as bad as it was made to be (again reference the movie Refer Madness), the more they are willing to try other things. That is why simple drugs, such as pot, can lead to bad things such as meth or coke, but it is because of the outrageous claims and prohibition. If society is going to speak of the psychology of gateway drugs, they need to look at the whole picture, instead of villainizing something that is probably safer to use than alcohol.

The main problem is that, for a system to be sure, at least one part of it has to be strict. Since Windows is fairly permissive, security requires a sysadmin to be something of a hardass- a position which is not often appreciated by users. At my office, for instance, people constantly complain that our sysadmin doesn't allow them to install *anything* on their PCs, assuming that they even have full PCs (about 1/2 of them are Citrix thin clients). On the other hand, as I explain to them, I've worked in IT for a long time, + I've never seen a network as securely-run as ours; much of this is due to our sysadmin's being a hardass. If, on the other hand, people are given the freedom to install their own s/w, they often wind up installing trojans and so forth.

>My issue is that Apple is intentionally making it more difficult to use iTunes with a non-iPod music player. Perhaps you don't find it inconvenient to use two pieces of software to manage one music collection but you aren't the average demographic either. Every other week slashdotters are complaining that most people think Internet Explorer is the Internet. That's the demographic being taken advantage of.

But you do realize that they DO allow other vendors to integrate directly into iTunes? All they have to do is license a plugin and it will sync directly in iTunes interface just like an iPod. Apple is a business. Not a charity. Vendors have the option of buying direct integration, or simply writing their own solution. I doubt the price of this plugin is prohibitive. Obviously the vendors that have taken advantage of it don't think it is prohibitive either.

These barriers as you call them are insignificant since there are other avenues into iTunes. Apple didn't do anything wrong here. Palm broke the standard and their device didn't work. This should be no surprise. You might not like it. I would suggest your time is better spent yelling at Palm for being too cheap or too lazy (or both).

This is the reason no anti-competitive lawsuit has been brought against Apple for this issue. Because it would have no legal leg to stand on. An inconvenience of having two windows open is simply to minor to be a barrier to entry when Apple themselves provide sanctioned means to get the same end result that do not violate the USB standard.

With the IE fiasco, there was no alternative. MS said it's our way or the highway. Apple provides alternate methods willingly. It's up to the vendors to opt in, or write their own.

For your information, and that of anyone interested, this is simply not permitted by French law. No punitive damages, only compensatory ones.

To state roughly the philosophy behind it: punishment is a job for criminal courts, not civil courts.

That depends on which way you are crossing and if you are a citizen of the nation your are crossing into. If you are an American citizen then the laws about search and seizure do apply so there are some limits. That said I don't think that these would in all likelihood violate those limits.

Also, magic faeries could cure us all with here magic dust~

We will be growing organs in 20 years, and pretty cheaply. It's the exact kind of process that scales well.

we are seeing some great leaps in understanding the brain. Once we hit a certain point where the brains stops being a magic box and becomes boring to study we will figure out a way to fix any problems.
This point will probably be in 30 years; of course that's with bumps of understand along the way.

Aging is a curable disease.

I live in a rural area that grows a significant amount of sugar beets

What this article and the judge are missing is that sugar beets are not like corn. They don't go to seed until the 2nd year.

A farmer has to plan to raise sugar beets for seed. Growing seed is an expensive proposition. Most of them don't do it on speculation, they do it only if they have a contract to produce the seed in advance. They are working with a seed company to produce the specific variety that the seed company wants to purchase. It is planted one year, winters over and then will flower and produce seed the next year. This is true of many root type crops.

It would seem fairly straight forward for the seed company to do their seed contracts by geographic region. This region will produce GM seed, this region will produce un-GM seed.

Growing GM plants in an adjoining field to non-GM plants has no risk of pollen contamination for the normal sugar production process.

The problem isn't the pollen, the problem is the processing. From what I have seen in my hometown, is there isn't a really good segregation process that would keep GM beets seperate from un-GM beets once they got the the dump site. The dump is where all the local farmers bring their beets from the field and the Sugar Factory reps weigh the trucks, analyze the sugar content and purchase the beets. It is a 20 acre dirt area. Once the harvest is over, the dump personnel load the beets into rail cars or over-the road trucks for transportation to the sugar factory. If John the Farmer is raising GM crops, and Frank the Farmer is raising non-GM beets, once they get to the beet dump, it is extremely likely the loads are getting mixed into the same pile.

First, it is important to note that I was not referring to infringement; I was talking about legitimate interest in commercially licensing the use of the name, voice or other personal aspect (likeness) of a deceased person, and the financial implications of any agreed upon legal use for the decedent's estate.

Second, not every asset mentioned in my post was meant to be classified specifically as IP (although many people use the terms "intellectual property," "intellectual work," or "intangible asset" interchangeably, despite the distinctions between these categories). The ability to control the use of one's name and likeness is part of a person's right of publicity. This is state-determined right that is an intangible asset, but, yes, distinctly different from (though related to) the copyright and trademark categories of IP. Intellectual property is a subset of the overarching class of intangible assets, so there is a broad range of monetizable intangible assets that factor into estate planning in terms of value or taxation that are not strictly classified as IP. Here is a good explanation of the relationship of one's right to privacy and rights of publicity to copyright, and here is a good case study on the estate of Marilyn Monroe that shows the interplay of these issues. As you can see from that case study, these post-mortem rights can be of significant value to the estate of the decedent.

(If you are interested in taxation issues, one one of my previous posts in this thread links to some good search results on that topic.)