Can they do magic, too?

Where do you connect wealth, power, and presence with the ability to draw more women into the IT pool? How would you respond if someone tried to convince you to become a nurse because "there aren't enough men in nursing"? Furthermore, why is it Google's responsibility to get women involved in IT?

Perhaps I've just never seen these amazingly compelling PowerPoint presentations, but I'm going to have to disagree with you there. At least HyperCard had Myst -- I've yet to see a PowerPoint that comes close to that.

Just to make sure I wasn't sticking my foot in my mouth, I even YouTubed "Amazing PowerPoint Presentations" and I didn't find anything interesting. I find the super-animated artsy PowerPoints to be more annoying than the boring, static, bullet-list crap my boss slaps together. Our customers want to be wowed by numbers, statistics, and a few pictures. They couldn't care less about how artsy the PowerPoint is.

I think that's the flaw in the point you're trying to make, and especially with your Word analogy. When writing a story in Word, the story is the product and it must be polished and ready to be published with minimal changes. PowerPoint presentations are a way to communicate ideas; a super-duper-polished PowerPoint, in most cases, represents a poor use of one's time as it's an inefficient way to communicate ideas.

It should be. It's unfortunate that attitudes such as yours and the electric car hype may prevent it from being so.

I live in the midwest and our electricity primarily comes from coal. Unlike gasoline cars, burning coal emits mercury, which then falls into rivers and lakes, and is then absorbed by aquatic plants that are then consumed by fish, which are then consumed by eagles, bears, and people. Because the mercury stays in the organism until its death/decomposition, the animals higher on the food chain end up with higher and higher amounts of mercury than the organisms they consume. The ecological damage of coal goes beyond the greenhouse gasses.

We don't have smog in most places around here. Plus, we have roads that are real fun to drive on.

See why this idea horrifies me?

This is one of the problems with the utilitarian model. People in the big cities have this or that problem and then the country folk have to suffer because population-wise, we're the minority. Our problems are different and we generally require less regulation rather than more.

I get that there are good intentions behind the regulation, but I don't think this is the way to do it. If California wants to get the ball rolling on green energy and reduce smog then they should invest more into hydrogen fill stations, push bivalent hydrogen cars, and build more trains. I see a future of electric cars as just another problem -- it could massively increase energy costs, possibly cause supply problems (leading to more coal burning) and, hell, they're no fun to drive.

Well, your suggestion is pretty ridiculous and it does sound like a very bleeding-heart liberal thing to say. Personally, I'd probably fail a "psychological compassion test" but I'm still pragmatic enough to realize that our current prison system is a terrible way to deal with criminals and does nothing to reform them. Your solution is very micro and does nothing to change the overall structure of the prison system. It also doesn't do anything to cull the prevalence of sociopaths among prison guards -- a defining characteristic of sociopaths is that they're pretty good liars (lying is easy when you lack a conscience), which makes subverting a "psychological compassion test" pretty easy for them when they realize what they're being tested for.

A macro solution would be removing private industry from the prison system so prisoners aren't merely livestock for a company that lobbies to incarcerate more and more people. Turn prisons into educational facilities rather than controlled housing facilities that sometimes offer bits of education. Reduce prison populations by legalizing marijuana, improving public education, and get rid of prison sentences for most non-violent crimes.

About the only thing psychology is good for is advertising. It's an embarrassment to science.

Anymore? This is the way it's always been. The good old Catch-22.

Have you?

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/B...

So is it only a problem when repressive regimes use surveillance software to oppress their population? When first world nations use such software, they're also violating the rights of their citizens. Just because it "benefits law enforcement" doesn't excuse its existence. Parallel construction also benefits law enforcement.

You can't steal what's free.

Yeah, I'm sure he still lives in the ghetto. Perhaps you should at least check out the guy on Wikipedia before you make some ignorant comment about him. For the past decade+ he's been more of a producer/businessman than rapper and he was the first to leave Death Row Records in the 90s because he didn't want to participate in the stupid gangster shit they were involved in. Dre left the ghetto twenty years ago.

Perhaps we have a different understanding of the word 'engineer,' but I don't think that's true.

Boo hoo. If people want to kill themselves for stupid reasons I'm not going to stop them. The world is better off without pussies who can't deal with a little hardship.

1:10 where? San Francisco, the United States, the world? I'd like to see an objective source that validates that statistic. I hear people throw it around a lot but I've never seen it verified.

Any organism that actively engages in a behavior that inhibits its ability to reproduce is an anomaly. That's just a basic understanding of how natural selection works. Humans, with our self-reflecting consciousness, have a great tendency to do anomalous things as our behavior is more than mere impulse, so I don't mean it as a disparaging remark. I personally don't want to reproduce because I don't think the human race needs to increase our numbers at this time, and this type of decision makes me an anomaly among organisms.

I can't stand the California attitude that evolution is a hardened fact yet being a homosexual is like being born to a ultra-special race that must be cherished and insulated from anything that might possibly be misconstrued as a slight against their amazing specialness. Do I believe that homosexuals should be discriminated against? No. Do I think they should be able to marry? I don't believe that marriage should be a legal status among straights or homosexuals. Call your partnership with your significant other whatever you want to call it. Do I think that every TV show and movie and video game should have token gay people? No. At a certain point the pursuit of inclusiveness makes a spectacle of those included. It used to be the token black guy who always had something snappy to say. Now it's the token gay guy. I guess next up will be the token tranny.

I see what you're saying. I'm not sure if I totally agree -- I think that the money's there if we're willing to make sacrifices elsewhere (such as that stupid plane, which I believe is only still being worked on because important parts of it are produced in a certain congressman's district), but the political hurdles to make those sacrifices probably aren't possible.

I guess you could say we agree that, for whatever reasons, putting a man on the moon isn't a feasible option for the U.S. government at this point in time. The Chinese, however. . .

I would think the main constraint would be economic. What nation wants to commit so many resources for so little in return. The lunar missions were more important for political reasons (the Cold War) during their time than anything else. Would that thirst for adventure have existed had we not been competing with our red adversaries? It certainly wouldn't have had the urgency if not for the competition.

The main thing the lunar missions gave us was the various technologies that were produced as a result of them. So far the moon hasn't proved to be worth mining and it certainly has no appeal for colonization.

I could spend all my money on a giant diamond encrusted neckless. But my girlfriend would probably be real pissed and kick me out when I can no longer contribute. Similarly, our government could go back to the moon. But the electorate would be pissed because like an oversized diamond encrusted neckless it doesn't do anything but costs a shit ton. I guess it always sounds good to vilify the word bureaucracy and to make fun of nancys who are overly concerned with safety, but I just don't think it's a sound argument in this case.