He's claiming women are poor at spatial relationships as measured by some (pretty arbitrary) objective standard. You're claiming they're just find in fields where success is a matter of fashion. Was that really the argument you wanted to make?

I don't think basketball has much to do with spatial relationships myself - I'd think athletic ability and hand-eye coordination would be the dominant factors (well, and height can't hurt). But then, what do I know about it?

Plus this ignores the upside. I'd expect several staff per wealthy occupant of the dome, and so many poor enjoy the nice environment for each rich person. For Dubai, that's a step forward.

It sure would be nice to have some standards there!

Because there were some firm standards for terminals, vendors could make clever ones, PCs had emulators, and you could make simplifying assumptions. And I guess if you stick to some basic HTML (which you would for non-AJAX anyhow), maybe we're already there with HTML5 (or XHTML, if you go that way).

Hmm, a modern server-side framework that sticks to the basic, non-AJAX world - does it exist? It would sure make all the geeks who use noscript religiously happy!

If it weren't for all of this fake controversy and bogus righteous indignation, I would have no idea what this book is. Perhaps it just didn't sell well at Costco. It's a warehouse store you know. You can't depend on an item being there the next time you visit even if it was there the last time.

These Tea Baggers seem to be missing the whole "Warehouse Club" concept here.

TFA should have mentioned that Simons has given large amounts of money to Brookhaven National Labs to keep the RHIC running.

I wasn't referring to any side. But to answer your question... well, I'm not sure I can. Certainly it was understandable for the Iraqi military to fight back against the US invasion. But as for terrorists/insurgents... are they necessarily acting on behalf of or under the orders of their country? Are they legitimate war combatants? Hard to say. There is a government in Iraq, for whatever it's worth, and any attacks on an invading or occupying force should, it seems to me, occur at their behest.

I might not be able to build a skyscraper but I can nail some boards together, plunge a toilet, wire a room, or lay some tile.

Basic home maintenance is something that everyone needs to understand regardless of whether they own their place or not. People need to know enough to be able to delegate to experts and not get robbed in the process. People need to understand what they are buying.

People need to be able to fend for themselves on a very basic level.

This American love of stupidity only serves to make for easier victims.

Born into a family with money which encouraged his education, he went on to make more money.

"Complex" is not for laymen. There is only so much that you can do with any "appliance". Beyond that, you actually have to know what you are doing. This "problem" has nothing to do with programming.

Once you get into "complex", you really do want something along the lines of a profession were people have to be licensed and they can be held accountable for their failures. For the "complex" stuff, we should be striving MORE for something comparable to real engineering or medicine rather than pushing for trained monkeys and amateurs.

Right tool for the job and all that...

Most of what was written in COBOL looked very much like any non-AJAX web app. Sure, there were the batch programs you describe, but mostly it was apps for terminals. Send a form, the terminal posts a reply, hit the database, send the result fields. Same-old same-old. But it was all server-side code.

There are a few WYSIWYG web editors out there, but for some reason they were never that popular. People seem to want to muck around with JavaScript and frameworks and otherwise dick around with the client side code, as if the bit that paints the screen were the important bit. That was the difference in the COBOL years - you wrote the server side and let the client take care of itself, instead of trying to do that backwards.

But it doesn't address the 27 degree angle screen. Round is the only way to go.

I have QWERTYUIOP on my Android phone. It pops up when I need it and it goes away when I don't - which is most of the time. I, too, used to insist on smartphones with physical keyboards, but I have come to find that a virtual keyboard with Swype is just as good if not better.

BS. That's sophomoric laziness and extremism. The goal is to be able to make a solid argument, not philosophical certitude!