I've used online dating sites, and found them quite effective. My girlfriend of over 2 years and I met on an online site. A close friend of mine met his wife on an online site. So, they do actually work.

I remember when I gave that idea a go and found I generally sent out tons of emails but rarely got any responses.

This probably means your emails sucked. Did you send a one-sentence email? Something like: "I saw your profile and you seemed interesting so I thought I would say hi." Where was your effort? If you want to meet someone, you need to demonstrate you are interested. Did you point out your similarities, common interests or things you both enjoy? You need to show that you aren't just some random guy spamming a hundred girls to see what will work. Does she have a cat or a dog? Even if you don't have one, you can mention that you used to, or you've wanted one, or ask how much the darn thing sheds. Just something showing it's personalized and, most importantly that you read her profile.

While I have met people online, I've definitely found my chances are significantly higher in person, face to face.

Again, that's probably because your emails sucked. There is no tone of voice, no body language or dimension to an email, so you have to do it all with words. This isn't easy, and a lot of people suck at it because they've never had any practice. However, most people (although not all) have a lot of practice interacting with people in real life - even if it is just to order something from Starbucks - making them better at communicating in real life than in an email.

If I were to become single again, I would be back online right away. It's a fast way to find people who are interested in similar things, and to meet a lot of people that you wouldn't in your regular routine. (When was the last time you went to a coffee shop on the other side of town just to see if you could meet someone new?)

And the US Navy made a 12-year-old the Captain of a prize ship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut So, making a senior cadet - who figured out what was going on, and just saved your ship when the rest of the fleet got destroyed - the First Officer isn't that big a reach.

That's why it has a rocket deployed parachute.

His authority as the head of the Executive branch.

He is responsible for enforcing the law. (Or not.) If Congress objects, they can impeach him. However, within his bailiwick, he is the supreme authority.

It's how the checks and balances of the three branches of government work. None is beholden to the others, but they can be stopped, blocked or removed by the others.

And while tuition is going up, technology has driven the prices of course materials down significantly from the old days, when you were stuck with the single College bookstore selling at full price.

You aren't paying enough attention to textbook prices - or tuition. The rapid increase of tuition is far more than a full set of books would cost. Even a bad semester would be less than $1k of books, and tuition is going up by double digit percentages every year. In addition, while you can get a deal on some textbooks, the publishers are out to maximize their profits and spin new editions, or make sure there are shortages of old editions to offset the difference. Plus, sending free copies of the new editions to any professor who uses them in their class is a nice way to make sure used books are a dead end.

Except obesity also reduces life expectancy by 6-7 years. link

Therefore, you get 6-7 years of productivity from healthy people, which is worth far more than$31k. Plus, you probably get more productivity for all the other years as well. (Obese people have higher rates of absenteeism and disability claims. link)

But the big problem that the summery overlooks is that its just about as hard to put a laser range finder on a target as it is to put a bullet on target.

Not really. With a laser range finder you don't have to worry about wind. You don't have to worry about range (by definition). You don't have to worry about the smooth trigger pull since laser range finders don't usually have a multiple pounds of pressure activation button. You also don't have to worry about properly absorbing the recoil to avoid jerking the round off target.

If you can do your work from home, it's probable that someone else can do the work from the other side of the planet. For less. So be careful what you wish for.

It's called a part-time job, and a cupboard is all you will be able to afford.

It means manufacturing based on the geographic location desired by a politician instead of where it would make the most sense from an engineering standpoint. i.e. - You can't put all the high tech space jobs in the same place as each politician wants some of the money to create jobs in their own district.

If you need a problem solved quickly, and better than what all your competitors can do, he's your man.

You have provided one criteria (quickly) but you still haven't defined what "better" is.

Here's an analogy. If you need to perform an amputation, or other rapid operation to keep someone alive (like on a battlefield), is the doctor who can perform that amputation the fastest "the best"? What about if their operation to keep the person alive causes problems with follow-on surgeries or other body functionality? Are they still "the best"?

What drives me insane is that people forget that the vast majority of source code ends up being a living thing. Features are added (or removed), bugs are fixed and it is used in ways not envisioned in the original development. That means someone has to go in and make changes. If it isn't easily understood then (a) it takes longer to make those changes, (b) it is more likely new bugs are introduced and (c) it may be used in a manner that is unexpected (large-scale instead of small scale, and the code is inefficient). What this means in the long run is your code is more expensive to modify and maintain, and it probably won't be as good. How is that a win for the customers, the company, the new developer who has to make changes and our profession in general?

We need to stop glorifying the "gods" of programming, but the average guy who just gets shit done on a regular basis. More analogies: A fighter pilot gets the glory, but the poor guy changing the fluids is just as important - and works on a dozen planes. Same with a quarterback - if an offensive lineman doesn't keep up their end of the work, the entire offense will crumble. It's supposed to be about being a team, and accepting that you have to provide support for the average guy - it is extremely unlikely you will always have a team that is 100% superstar material, so don't act like you do.

Yes, it is slow. When I have used it, it gave me slightly better than dial-up speeds and, on occasion, I would lose connectivity for a few minutes. Basically, good enough for email and light surfing. I also downloaded a few PDFs.

On the other hand, I am sitting 7 miles in the air, moving at several hundred miles an hour and able to access the Internet! Sure, it isn't a great connection, but I'm 7 miles in the air - so I think it's pretty sweet.

Huh? Where is this happening? Maybe private sector teachers, but deficiently not public sector ones.

Here is a link that has real numbers for layoffs. It says there have been 150,000 public teacher layoffs due to the recession. It also mentions Bureau of Labor Statistics which says 33,500 teachers were hit by layoffs since September. (Article was written in June.)

So, you may not have noticed it happening - but it is. Also, and this is a guess, it is affecting lower income schools since higher income schools generally have parents that are able to complain, hire lawyers, call their city/state/federal representatives, etc. So, if your kids go to a "good school" they might have kept their teacher numbers by shifting the burdens to schools that aren't performing.

Also, talking to teachers that I know, finding a teaching job is next to impossible right now. So, it might be less about layoffs than not filling positions as people retire/leave the field/whatever.

Sorry - I didn't realize you assumed a reality where corruption and mismanagement were unheard of in a giant project. The reason I called it $100+ billion is we are dealing with transforming miles of coastline. And not just the coastline - but 1-2 miles inland for the infrastructure. Have you even looked at the scale of the port facilities in and around New Orleans? The project would be an order of magnitude bigger than the Big Dig and I scaled appropriately - from real-world numbers.

Yes - all at the same time. Bare - not much grows there so it's a lot of surface rock. However, it isn't perfectly smooth, so you get large areas of shallow march in the depressions. I also like the hand-waving "we'll drain it!" Draining thousands of square miles and making it ready for farming may be beyond our ability. Look how hard it was to dig the Panama Canal. Or, watch a documentary on building the oil industry in Alaska. Making a single road to the fields was a nightmare and you want to transform the entire landscape.

You are also off by orders of magnitude for your migration stats. Moving within a city, or even the next city over is not a migration. According to this article 2 million left California over 10 years. That's 200k/year and California has 12% of the US population. So we get 1.8 million as a rough estimate - far below your tens of millions.

Urban decay has not been successfully ignored. It is being ignored - and forcing cities to consider bankruptcy. I'm sure all the people who will lose their jobs or get pay cuts won't successfully ignore the problem.

Good luck with your hand-waving away of big problems - I hope you live somewhere away from the coast and pack heat to protect what's yours from those who don't have anything and are starving. (Also: Read up on the Dust Bowl - it caused hundreds of thousands of people to move and was one of the most horrible times in our nation's history.)