Not my experience. It used to be the case in Windows 98 but I haven't found my systems to be slowing ever since I bought an SSD. SSDs solved all of my problems and they're rediculously affordable.

I also have a cluster of windows machines performing raytracing and other extremely performance driven tasks--I can't tell the age of an install based on performance.

This is all just superstition at this point without numbers. Yes if you install a third party anti-virus solution and you have a bunch of auto-installers running in the background your computer will run "Slower" than it did without anything running in the background but that's not Windows' fault and that's true of every operating system regardless if it's *nix or Win*.

Quick trip to a federal court for extortion.

Most United Frequent Flyer awards though aren't claimed though. Except for really popular routes at popular times you can get a Saver Frequent Flyer ticket almost anywhere. Your assertion assumes that Award tickets are always completely filled. Especially considering that most Airlines can now sell out entire flights most of the time that means they are missing out on some revenue.

Frequent flyer programs do cost money but they also do make a lot of money too. Both through Credit Card fees and because if you do legitimately concentrate on one airline you will spend a little extra for the miles. For instance I'll fly a preferred airline even if it's $120 more on a $1,000 ticket because the miles (Especially status miles) are worth $120. So not only are they making more on their sale than a competitor but they're making the sale in the first place. If you fly randomly on random airlines, almost nobody will earn enough reward miles on any given airline to ever redeem them at all.

Try 10 times and assume that there isn't a cap after that. Much easier on the servers than 9999 password reset attempts.

This is a huge security vulnerability and they should patch it. But he also blatantly broke the rules.

>" they'll be asked to make Yahoo their default search engine on Chrome (and Internet Explorer, for what it's worth)"

I guess that means Firefox is the best choice... yet again!

>"We are a tired, stressed and overworked nation

Part of the reason is the low number of people actually working full time... and they have to pay the taxes to cover all those who don't, and those who don't earn enough to cover their cost to society, and the rich who seem to have the means to protect their income.

Oh yeah, let's just throw some more on the national debt to cover it, raise the minimum wage, and start up some more socialized programs and entitlements, that will fix it....

Agreed, we could make hundreds of different combinations of acronyms for different stuff! But I will say, your "FATAPJ" stack is a little hard to pronounce.... thus, you should change some components as soon as possible, preferably with another vowel near the end :)

Never heard of "MEAN" before now, but that doesn't align with the term "LAMP" which describes the entire server/platform. "LAMP" includes the operating system (Linux) and web server (Apache) in the name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

While MEAN does not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So would it be "LAMEAN" perhaps? :)

Types "Microscope Toy" into Amazon and the first few results are:

http://www.amazon.com/Educatio... Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/Educatio... Girl.
http://www.amazon.com/Educatio... Girl.
http://www.amazon.com/NSI-150x... Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/My-First... Neutral.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning... Boy.
http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Sc... Girl Girl Girl Boy Girl.

The only one of the entire lot that *is* gendered is gendered purple for girls. "Nancy B's Microscope".

To be clear % is a bullshit statistic. In the 1980s CS was teeny tiny. In the 90s all of my friends wanted to go into CS because they wanted to make video games. So in the 80s there was probably a broad academic interest which attracted both men and women just like chemistry or biology or engineering. And then in the 90s you suddenly had a huge influx of video game geeks wanting to learn how to make a video game. That large influx of programmers who probably would have been screwed got the luckiest break in 100 years and an entire industry exploded around them giving them employment opportunities outside of programming game engines.

I can't think of anyone who went into CS who I went to highschool with who was talking about how excited they were to go into CS and learn how to program mobile apps.

In my degree program (Visual Effects and Animation) it was almost exclusively male. The women in the program joined because they loved pixar movies and wanted to do animation. The men mostly loved star wars and wanted to blow shit up. Almost all of them will end up green-screening corporate talking heads. A lot of these niche industries like CS are similarly bait and switch teasing a career in something awesome and then delivering a homdrum run of the mill job.

We need to find the CS equivalent of "Video Game Developer" to attract women. Because "Hey you can work on the database that drives Facebook!" isn't really attractive to highschool boys let alone higschool girls looking to pick a major and doubling down on recruiting using purely practical factors doesn't work.

So to answer the original headline's question. I would say no, probably not. CS has successfully attracted a lot of men by using Boy-Focused games (guns and explosions). So I would suspect the best approach to women is exactly the same... deception and trickery to make CS seem relevant to the things they already like.

There is a great article on how you shouldn't get a degree in the 'hot' career field because most likely by the time you graduate it'll have been devalued. I disagree since generally that takes more than 5 years. But the point is dead on.

The reason tech pays well is because a bunch of geeks got lucky. Tech pays well *because* of the social status was 0 for programmers. Social status was so low for programmers that almost nobody pursued it. So when suddenly there was demand for tens of millions of skilled workers in a field that was ostracized the handful of people who accidentally happened to have the skillset in spite of the lack of social status made a shit ton of money and gained a lot of social status.

By the time we get the gender balance equal there'll no longer be any money to go along with it because it'll no longer be a lack of labor.

I think everyone should have strong skill with technology, technology isn't going away--it is a new form of literacy. But if someone is in highschool today or even worse as the OP is talking about, play toys for toddlers--don't expect a high paying job for knowing how to program just like knowing how to read and write is no longer a shortcut to a better paying job out of highschool.

Notice how nobody complained about the lack of women being pushed into computer programming 20 years ago. Why? Because it was a low paying job with no social status. Now in retrospect that it happened to explode it's something that should have been important 20 years ago. No shit. Hindsight is 20/20. But it's a bit like saying that it's unfair that a bunch of comic book nerds have 1st edition Superman comics and it's unfair that they're making all this money. Yeah... I wish I had a 1st edition million dollar comic book--but they deserve every penny for being uber nerds with no promise of reward for half a century. It's ultimately a lottery.

Trying to predict though the winner is ultimately a losing strategy because even if you could pick as soon as you made the magic winning formula public then you would have to share the pot with 10 million other people. It's like stock picking, you can't successfully pick stocks and if it was possible then everyone else would also pick that stock and you still wouldn't get rich. A nerdy low-status activity won a bunch of geeks a lot of money. But as soon as everyone starts doing it (and they will) the money and the status will disappear.

Yeah I got into a debate with my Fiancee who is a professional dancer about Homeopathy because she insisted that she took a homeopathic medicine regularly for joint pain that worked great and I insisted it was just snake oil. She showed me the bottle and I read the ingredients list and it had Arnica Montana in a 50% concentration and was like "Oh, this isn't homeopathy, this is straight up mainstream medicine."

I'm not sure if it's a case of Manufacturers trying to cash in on the Homeopathy hype, or homeopathy manufacturers cynically trying to toss in some working examples to sell more snake oil.

>"Palm scanning? Jesus. It's bad enough to have the little germ factories all touching the same scanner with one finger. Having them put their whole hand (that they just took out of god knows what mess or bodily cavity)? Scary thought."

It is not the whole hand, just palm. The fingers don't touch anything. So this actually much less likely to spread germs than fingerprint scanners.

Kids have little to no understanding or appreciation of hygiene, anyway. You could keep their fingers off the device, even wipe the device and their hands with cleaner first, and it will make no difference. The moment they leave the cafeteria and go to the bathroom, they will place their entire hand on a push plate, door knob, flush lever or whatever and then stick their fingers all over their face, mouth, nose, eyes, floor, etc. Hand washing, if done at all, will be done improperly, infrequently, and they will still touch SOMETHING on their way out, re-contaminating them.

This is unacceptable. Not only because the Fed should have nothing to do with this. And not only because the gov really shouldn't need to track which people are participating or even possibly what they are eating. But because the gov should not have fingerprint registration data (which will be horribly abused) .

Stand up for your rights, people... and the rights of your children. Once you give this data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want.

There is only one safer and practical biometric I know of- that is deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.

Example: http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein...

But we also need to realize that IT IS NOT EVERYONE'S BUSINESS WHAT WE ALL DO. The first step in securing freedom is privacy. When you are tracked, you are losing your freedom, whether you realize it or not.

I also detest the recent change. But some things to note- unlike Google, you can go into settings and change it right back to the old theme. And most importantly, still none of that annoying Google logo animation ***t, ever.