Can the TI be a good educational tool to help teach programming concepts? Yep, it sure can be. Better tool than the iPad? Probably, yes.

But that's not really the educational niche for which Apple is pushing the iPad in the classroom. It's basically being sold as an electronic textbook, which isn't necessarily a bad concept. Having one very portable device to haul around instead of four to six heavy books is great. Not having to print a massive number of new textbooks every year? Also nice. Videos and audio embedded in the text? That can be a real asset, and that's not achievable with traditional textbooks. Being able to start at a high level with a complex multicellular organism and drill down to the sub-cellular level? Pretty nifty.

There are also things like real-time quizzes, where a teacher asks a question, the students answer on their tablets, and the teacher gets immediate feedback about both the group as a whole and the individual students.

I'm not saying that tablets are a cure to our educational woes, nor do I think they are a huge educational revolution. But I think they are tools that can be used effectively in an educational setting. Personally, I think part of the problem is that kids spend too much time with their heads in books, e- or otherwise, focusing on theory and not enough time getting their hands dirty applying those theories. The TI calculator is an example of a tool that can help with the latter. But that doesn't negate the value that a properly employed iPad-or-other-tablet can also bring. It just means using different available tools in conjunction with one another.

There are good realtors that provide a service (note that I say good -- it's important to research realtors like anything else). If I'm buying a home in a new town that I don't know anything about, I want to work with a realtor. I can give them a list of what I'm looking for (price, safety, convenience, features, etc), and they're going to be much more efficient about finding possible matches than I would. As for selling homes, most people only do that a handful of times in their lives. A realtor is going to help set reasonable expectations for a seller (cause let's face it, most people don't have reasonable expectations) and provide advice for getting a home ready to sell (because again, most be are unable/unwilling to actually learn what to do to put their best foot forward).

That said, there is too much cruft in the real estate system (depends on where you are, of course, as to exactly how much), and it could be streamlined made more open. But considering all of the legal issues that are involved with buying and selling homes, the enormous amount of time it can take a novice unfamiliar with process or market to do all of that research, etc, I think there's definitely a place for experts with a large amount of working knowledge to provide professional services.

Sounds to me like a contract issue between the dealer and manufacturer (I'm guessing that terms about the opening of competing branches of the same franchise within a certain geographic area are standard for just about any type of franchise). There shouldn't be legislation about it outside of standard contract law.

There are actually plenty of imaging studies showing sex-based differences in the brains of men and women. We do have to question whether those are hard-wired differences or different patterns that emerge due to development and socialization, but there could potentially be an answer to that by looking at images of female vs male brains across cultures that have different expectations of/roles for women and through development studies, as well as correlating those differences with behavioral differences. It's interesting to note that there have been imaging studies on men-who-identify-as-women and women-who-identify-as-men, and their brains structurally match the gender with which they identify, not with their genitalia.

I suggest listening to this story. I'm not saying there's isn't some biological difference at play, but this study and others like it demonstrate that gien the right conditions, girls are just as likely to show interest in STEM fields as boys, so your assertion that it's only biological seems very unlikely. We need to determine just what conditions keep girls from showing as much interest, or more correctly stated, losing interest. We can then work to eliminate those conditions.

It's important to ask the question because we need to determine reasons for the lower number of women in technical areas. Do biological gender differences play a role? To an extent, probably. But does institutional sexism play a role in discouraging girls early on from pursuing technical careers? Very likely. The key is determining what can't be changed (biology), what can be changed (societal attitudes and expectations of girls vs boys), how much each contributes, and what can be done to change the ways in which girls are discouraged from STEM subjects. We can't just assume that making sure HR departments aren't practicing discriminatory hiring practices is enough. It hasn't even been 100 years since women received the right to vote. It shouldn't be surprising that there are still differences in the ways boys and girls are treated and that it shapes how they view the themselves. It's often subtle and unintended, but it's important for us to question whether it's happening and how best to correct those types of inequalities.

It also costs more for the Japanese ad-free service. From what I can tell, it's a little under $20 in Japan. It's $8 in the US with ads. If they offered a $20 ad-free in the US, I'd still probably go for the cheaper service.

Not true at all. I've been programming since I was 6 (now 37), have a degree in CS, and spent the first 13 years of my post-college career doing C++ programming. I transitioned to web development because I find it interesting. I work with other highly intelligent, skilled web developers. Web development has moved beyond putting together a blog. Some people, such as myself, think the challenges involved in putting together a scalable, responsive, functional, secure web app are interesting, and after reaching a bit of burnout in my C++, I feel a bit renewed. Not to mention the fact that learning how best to utilize a new set of languages and technologies has made me a better programmer all around, even benefitting the times I need to switch back to C++ mode.

I don't think it is irrelevant. If someone found a unique splicing from three different areas of a gene, a splicing that is not produced by the body, it's not "natural". The body doesn't produce that particular variant, even though it's composed completely of coding regions from a gene. The researches constructed that sequence from bits of an existing gene. They created that particular sequence. To go to the extreme end, one could say that any sequence is going to be an alternative splicing of individual bases. I think there has to be room for people to create particular molecules that are based on sequences found in nature -- the kicker is that the specific molecule in question isn't found in that organism. Not in that particular form as a single entity.

If the researchers do isolate a particular strand of cDNA that does not occur in that particular form, by which I mean you're not going to find that piece of cDNA existing as a standalone entity within a cell and that particular sequence as a stand-alone provides functional, therapeutic effects, I think that's a gray area.

Which is why I said a form of copyright. I don't think this type of innovation falls cleanly under either patent or copyright law, but I think a case can be made for some time-limited protection for the work.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Blindly creating cDNA is one thing. Identifying particular cDNA that can be used for therapeutic purposes is a whole other thing and requires a lot of research. I can understand protections for the first researcher/group to identify a particular sequence that can be used for gene therapies. It's fair to address exactly what those protections should be. We need protections from people who want to patent sequences willy-nilly. There needs to be a strong reason for why the particular sequence in question has been identified for protection. Perhaps a form of copyright may be more appropriate there than patent.

"Appeal to authority" isn't always a problem. It can be a problem when the "authorities" aren't actually subject matter experts, and it's a fallacy when applied in deductive reasoning (not inductive, however).

There are thankfully many places that still respect maturity and experience. I think the "no old programmers" meme is a result of the start-up mentality. Luckily, start-ups don't make up the entirety of the market. More established companies (like a Fortune 50 company) value the stability and continuity a more established, mature workforce can provide. Older workers aren't just looking for the next shiny thing to come along, an advantage the youngsters don't always recognize (I'm in my late 30s, pretty much transitioned out of the whippersnapper phase). A good work environment should have a mix of ages. The older workers provide perspective and can train the younger ones. The younger ones bring energy and fresh perspectives. I'd be wary of a company that's wary of older programmers.

They care about three thinks: cost, results, and risk. Don't waste time talking proprietary vs open source. They don't care about software ideologies. They need to know what infrastructure upgrades may be required (in both networking and hardware). They need time estimates. Get their requirements first. Then do your homework and put together a proposal. Then go into pitch mode, not instruction mode. Be ready to defend your decisions, but don't spend alot of time upfront explaining your decisions. Focus on what the software is going to accomplish, not on the details of how it works. Focus on asking what they want. Perhaps you can already tell that a major network upgrade is going to be required. Fine. Be ready to speak to that, but have ONE high-level slide ready to describe what they need. If you make it into a seminar, then you've already lost your audience and your project is off to a horribly rough start.