The problem is that the government has pay grades. Fixed tiers of compensation. Those tiers work fine for most people. They're fucking useless for anyone exceptional that must be paid significantly more.

Why? Regular large corporations do pretty much the same thing with their engineers, and it works fine. They have "Engineer I", "Engineer II", "Engineer III", "Senior Engineer I", "Principal Engineer", etc. When someone gets promoted to a higher level, that puts them in a higher pay grade. Yeah, the corporations have pay ranges for those positions rather than fixed, exact dollar amounts, but the principle is the same. The government could do exactly the same thing.

No, this won't work for positions which are entirely up to negotiation. Most technical positions do not need to be like this. They just need to have pay grades and actually pay competitively with private industry.

Quote me, bitch. ... Can none of you fucks

Yeah, that's a great way to converse with people. Do you talk this way at work?

The exception is high demand labor of any kind. Someone able to run a company as CEO is going to get more money in the private sector than in the government's employ.

I don't think we're talking about overpaid suits here, we're talking about engineers and other technical people. The government is not known to pay them well either.

All those office workers are being paid better in DC than anywhere else in the country.

So basically a bunch of incompetent paper-pushers are being given largesse by the rest of the nation, and the economies in the rest of the nation would be better off if they seceded from the federal government, since they wouldn't have to spend so much funding all that waste?

If you don't get the employees you need for other parts of the organization to work properly, then people die (because the military missions fail). You don't get the employees you need if you don't pay enough.

What do you think feminists (or anyone, for that matter) can realistically do about women living in oppressive conditions outside of the West?

What are you talking about? FGM is done in the west in huge numbers, by immigrants from those countries sending their kids back there to mutilated. No one wants to do much about it because it's "racist".

No, men need to be prepared for dangerous jobs like working on crab boats and oil rigs, and in general kept away from society. At least, that seems to be the goal...

The no-sports part is a good thing, because American schools tend to over-emphasize sports to an absurd degree. The rest is bad, especially the lack of music. IIRC, there's a lot of evidence of high correlation between people gifted in STEM stuff and musical ability.

It would be nice if they could have some sports, the way for instance prestigious English universities have them (such as with rowing). But we just can't seem to do that over here; it's all football and basketball, and then it becomes all-important, with leagues and competitions between different schools, and then cheerleaders. If I were setting up a school, I'd ban football and basketball and only allow sports like rowing, track & field, cycling, and other sports which don't seem to draw large crowds of drunken, rowdy, moronic fans.

I'm not a feminist, but if a someone wants to start a girls school...what's the problem?

There's two big problems:

1) This appears to be a *taxpayer-funded* school. If you want to establish some weird-ass exclusionary school and fund it all yourself, you have that right: lots of wacky religions do exactly this. It sucks for the poor kids being brainwashed by that BS, but at least it isn't condoned by the government and the rest of us taxpayers.

2) This entirely smacks of "separate but equal". What's next, separate public schools for blacks and whites? Aren't we supposed to be progressing from the backwardness of the 1950s?

And, honestly, if I could send my daughters (of which I have 3) in the hopes that they appreciate tech more than cheerleading, boys, and fashion, I would do it in a *heartbeat*

If you're worried about that, the answer is simple: private school. There's usually good private non-religious schools around that you can send your kids to where they don't have a lot of that crap. The reason you get all that crap is because public schools have to take everyone, so it's a by-product of the overall culture of the community you're in. It's no different than why The Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo are popular TV shows.

Just overcoming the "helpless-fashion-model-princess-homemaker" mental conditioning is hard enough

How is that hard? You're the parents, and kids get this mental conditioning mostly from their parents and their relatives. So if you don't agree with that mentality, don't teach your kids that way, don't let them be around any relatives like that, don't buy them Disney movies that teach this, and don't get involved in any religious groups that teach that crap. You're the ones in control; start acting like it.

Wait, the school is pushing him to stay *out of* STEM just because he does poorly in English and Spanish?

And who gives a shit about Spanish anyway? That's probably the most useless language there is for STEM. How many Spanish engineers have you ever met? Latinos are infamous for not going into STEM fields, even worse than blacks probably. If you want to learn languages to help your engineering career, the languages to learn are English (of course), Mandarin, Japanese, and German (not necessarily in that order). That's where all the engineering is being done these days. Spanish is a great language to learn, however, if you want to make a career in drug trafficking. Did your son have a choice about that, or is Spanish now required in school?

The women are discouraged by their parents and relatives from the time they're born. They're told that their role in life is to get married and have children, and that's it. Their parents never buy them LEGOs or any other toys that encourage technical thinking, instead they buy them dollhouses. From birth to adulthood, this brainwashing has a huge effect; even if a women is mentally inclined this way, she gets zero support from her parents and doesn't really have much of an opportunity to go into a field she might have a lot of interest in.

I don't really see what can be done to fix it. Some special schools at the high-school level are much too late to make much of a difference; by the time a child is that old, it's unlikely you're going to fix them. They need to start at the pre-school level, but our education system is much too incompetent to really make a difference there.

However, it is interesting that the people whining the most about this problem are people who never went into engineering themselves.

Exactly, it starts with their parents. You can't easily fix that with special schools at the high-school level; by that time, all that thinking is ingrained. Let's face it: our parents in this society all suck. And all these people who really want to fix this problem, are they having any kids themselves? Doubtful. So what we have is all the most conservative people are having all the kids, and passing their values on to them.

[Stupid Slashdot, not letting me edit...]

This girls-only school isn't the answer. The problem is our culture, which is fundamentally backwards and broken. By the time you get to high-school level schools, kids are already set on the track they're going to take. If they really want to fix this problem, the solution is to end private parenting, and have all the parenting done by the state. This proposal has more than a few problems with it....

I think we just need to be honest with ourselves and admit we as a culture aren't really much better than ISIS and other Islamic extremists. We hate intellectualism, we hate education, we hate learning (unless it's religious in nature), we love driving around in pickup trucks with guns and smashing things and setting things on fire.

Children don't just do what they want to do; they're molded by their environment, and at early ages, that means their parents.

There's lots of women in STEM jobs in other cultures, notably Indian and Chinese societies. Not so in American society. The answer is simple: it's the parents. Our parents are pushing girls to avoid these subjects. This shouldn't be surprising when most of the people actually having kids in our society are ultra-conservative religious nuts.

IANAL, but I don't think that's correct at all. Offing a security guard is still "normal" murder, and just one step below premediated murder.

As I understand it, "felony murder" is where someone dies as a result of your felony crime, even though you didn't intend it (this is the key). So, a good example is that you and your buddy go rob an armored car. You don't actually want to hurt anyone, but you look to the armed guards like you might, so they shoot at you in self-defense. Your buddy gets killed by shots from the armed guards. You survive, and you're now prosecuted for the "felony murder" of your buddy: even though it was the armed guard who actually killed him, your felonious actions led directly to his death.

Another example would be committing some crime with your buddy, and he gets killed totally by accident during the crime; maybe you're breaking into a bank or something, and he gets killed by shattered glass in the process.

Actually, it gets better: 3 of those 4 years is only because he didn't register the aircraft properly (according to TFS). Violating national security airspace is apparently only a misdemeanor, and worth only 1 year in prison at most.

The only areas where proprietary drivers work worse than Open Source drivers

What about kernel mode setting? Can I adjust the resolution, or plug in an external monitor, on my Linux Mint KDE system with the proprietary Nvidia driver, using the KDE tools, or do I have to use some shitty proprietary program which isn't built into KDE?

Right now, with my Intel system, I can plug in an external monitor and I don't have to do anything at all to use it. Does the proprietary driver do that? If not, it's unusable.