It's pretty simple to me. Women tend to prefer careers where they interact with people. Men tend to prefer careers where they interact with things. When I worked at a hotel, the vast majority of applicants we got for front desk clerk or event planner were women. The vast majority of applicants for maintenance were men. CS just happens to be an extreme form of interacting with things. (The earlier comment about beta males fits too - part of being an alpha male is being able to interact well with other people.)

You'll see this disappear in low-income jobs (e.g. assembly line workers), where finances make the job a necessity. But by the time you get to mid- and high-paying jobs, the person has the luxury of choosing what he/she does, and this gender-based self-bias exerts itself.

Most women don't strive to immerse themselves in a culture that is predominated by socially awkward beta males. I don't understand why nobody accepts this obvious explanation for the lack of women.

Let me throw that right back at you: Why do you think the culture is predominated by socially awkward beta males?

You admit that non-misogynistic factors cause the field to disproportionately attract one type of person (socially awkward beta males). Yet when considering a different type of person (women) you immediately shift the blame to misogyny rather than assuming those same non-misogynistic factors are what are deterring women. This self-contradiction is why it's not an "obvious" explanation.

The federal gas tax currently stands at 18.4 cents a gallon, where it has been set since 1993, when gas cost $1.16 a gallon.

Since the gas tax is ostensibly for the construction and maintenance of roads and highways, it should be compared to that. The cost of maintenance and construction scale mostly according to CPI, not the price of gas. I can't think of any reason why you'd compare the tax to the price of gas unless you're deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking it needs to go up more (political arguments about energy taxes aside).

Putting $1.16 into an inflation calculator yields $1.90 in 2014 dollars, or a 64% increase. 64% of 18.4 cents is 11.7 cents. So a 12 cent increase is exactly what's needed for the tax to keep pace with inflation.

Up to now, they haven't wanted to. Japan, however, is threatened by not one but two nuclear-armed nations.

Three nuclear-armed nations. Part of the Kuril Islands are contested by Japan and Russia. Russia (the Soviets at the time) won control of the entire chain (plus Sakhalin) at the end of WWII as a hedge by the Allies. Basically we weren't sure if Japan would surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped. So we begged Russia to violate their non-aggression pact with Japan and invade after the bombings to put further pressure on Japan to surrender. They did so, and have claimed those territories ever since. Japan gave up most of their claims following WWII, but still claim four islands that Russia currently administrates.

I wonder if this ought to invalidate crap like the infamous Amazon one-click patent.

Unfortunately, you have to (1) be sued by Amazon for violating the patent (else you have no standing to challenge it), and (2) pay the expense of multi-year court battles with practically no hope of recouping your costs even if you win.

OTOH, I actually like the one-click patent even though I think it's a stupid and invalid patent. It prevents other online stores from putting in a button which can cause you to instantly buy something if you accidentally click it (this has happened to me on Amazon).

The person it's deriding gets to decide if it's offensive. That's kind of how it works. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Nigger is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Chink is a bad word. The white guy doesn't get to decide if Redskin is a bad word. Etc etc etc... This is plain common sense, and everyone arguing against it is an ass.

I completely disagree. It's common sense that the person using the word decides if it's offensive. If someone says "negro" referring to the color of a couch, it's not offensive even if a black person takes offense at it. If a child calls the black paymates he adores "niggers" because that's the only word he's ever known for them, that's not offensive. His black friends may request that he use a different word because they take offense at the term, but the child meant no offense by using the word and it'd be a serious miscarriage of justice for him to be chastised for using the word.

The important thing is the intent of the person using the word. If the person is using it to denigrate someone or a group, it's offensive. If the person is using it out of ignorance or in an unrelated context, it's not offensive. The person feeling offended has nothing to do with it other than in the general social context that certain words are known to offend certain groups.

The problem comes about when the person using the word is using it to be offensive, but claims he's not. In that respect it's better to avoid using words known to be offensive. But it's just plain wrong to assume that any time an offensive word is used, that offense is intended.

You Ignorant Redneck Honkies. -- See what I did there? Doesn't seem offensive to ME... It's up to YOU to decide, because you're the ones I'm deriding.

When someone uses a derogatory word without intent to offend, and someone else is offended by the use of the word, it is a misunderstanding. Not an offense. However, in this case you clearly demonstrate that you knew the term could be offensive, and thus indict yourself that you wrote them with the intent to offend.

I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.

It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.

Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.

Some will call me a troll, but as a gamer I'm no longer interested in 4K video since I know Occulus Rift (and competing VR set) are coming.

Why spend a shitload of money of a new 4K screen and the video card necessary for an acceptable game experience when I'll be able to do VR with a fraction of the cost and with my existing hardware setup?

You're making a fundamental error many people make when it comes to display resolution. What matters isn't resolution or pixels per inch. It's pixels per degree. Angular resolution, not linear resolution.

I've got a 1080p projector. When I project a 20 ft image onto a wall 10 ft away, the pixels are quite obvious and I wish I had a 4k projector. If I move back to 20 ft away from the wall, the image becomes acceptable again. It's the angle of view that matters not the size or resolution. 20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair with 1 arc-minute separation. So within one degree (60 arc-minutes) you'd need 120 pixels to fool 20/20 vision.

This is where the 300 dpi standard comes from. Viewed from 2 ft away, one inch covers just about 2.5 degrees, which is 150 arc-minutes, which can be fully resolved with 300 dots. So for a printout viewed from 2 ft away, you want about 300 dpi to match 20/20 vision. If it's not necessary to perfectly fool the eye, you can cut this requirement to about half.

In terms of Occulus Rift, a 1080p screen is 2203 pixels diagonal, so this corresponds to 18.4 degrees to fool 20/20 vision, 39 degrees to be adequate. If you want your VR display to look decent while covering a substantially wider angle of view than 39 degrees, you will want better than 1080p resolution. I'm gonna go out on a limb, and predict that most people will want more than a 39 degree field of view in their VR headset.

That actually gets to the real heart of the matter. Going after Google for this or the European right to be forgotten thing is shooting the messenger. Google doesn't actually host the content in question, and removing it from their index doesn't actually make the content disappear. The only reason it ranked highly in a Google search is because lots of websites linked to it, so removing it from Google's index won't stop people from getting to the info via the intermediary sites. It is literally like sticking your head in the sand in hopes it'll make the bad thing go away.

Starbuck's CEO Schultz is a smart cookie. He realizes while raising the minimum wage will ameliorate the problem, it is ultimately not a solution. Wages for low-skill jobs are low because of simple supply/demand economics. Too many unskilled workers + not enough jobs for them = low wages for them.

Schultz recognizes that the ultimate solution is to change this supply/demand balance. Technological progress means low-skilled jobs are disappearing, so the only avenue available is to reduce the number of unskilled workers. We need to educate them so that they are no longer unskilled or low-skilled.

So the whole point of this program is to educate people in a medium-skill or high-skill job. That way they are able to get a better, higher-paying job, removing themselves from the supply of unskilled workers, thus helping to naturally increase wages for unskilled workers.

The point of this program is not to let you get a degree in something you think is "fun" or "always wanted to do" with zero regard for its applicability or usefulness to society (the mistake most kids make when their parents are paying for their education). You're supposed to study so you can get a job which takes some skill, but is readily available and useful to society, and hopefully you enjoy doing.

You see, while raising the minimum wage alters the income distribution, it is a zero-sum proposition (possibly even negative-sum, as it eliminates some low-end jobs). It does not increase the net productivity of the population, so it is merely dividing the pie a different way. OTOH, educating people for a higher-skill job increases their productivity - it makes the pie bigger, and is thus the preferable solution.

I've stopped buying consumer electronics that take the markedly ANTI-consumer and needless action of making non-removable batteries.

That was true about 10 years ago, but I don't think it's true anymore.

• 10 years ago, devices typically used the full capacity of the battery and topped off when full. Consequently it would wear out quicker. After a year of use, it would probably only hold half the charge it did new. After 3 years it would probably only last 5-15 minutes. Being able to replace the battery was important then for the longevity of the device. Today most manufacturers do not use the battery's full capacity. They typically allow it to be charged only to 90% of real max capacity (the software just reports this as 100%), and discharged to 10% (reported by the software as 0%). The batteries on all my newer devices which are 3-5 years old are still lasting 70%-90% as long as they did new.
• 10 years ago, laptop batteries in particular would only last 1.5-2.5 hours on a charge. Anything over 3 hours was considered long. Today, 4-5 hours is typical, and many will operate 6-10 hours. So there's less need to have a second spare battery you can swap in.

I empathize with those whose usage patterns fall outside of these cases, and who could really use a second battery to swap in. But in general I think the extra capacity and smaller size that comes from molding the battery to fit in limited space and not having to encase the battery in a protective plastic housing are a worthwhile tradeoff. Bear in mind that when user-replaceable batteries were common, they were substantially overpriced and probably represented the biggest rip-off in the tech market after $100 for an extra 16 GB of flash memory.

In the end, if the game plays out correctly, low income individuals will still payer higher taxes, large companies will pay less taxes, but it will sound a lot like the opposite is occurring. You'll be happy and the economy will be slightly less screwed than if we listened to you and made companies actually pay 30% - 40% of their income directly to the treasury trough.

Taxing corporations doesn't really gain you anything. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to individuals, they give up x% of their money to the government. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to corporations, the people still give up x% of their money to the government, just in the form of higher prices and lower wages. Income (money) is just a representation of productivity, and the only source of productivity is people. Corporations are just organizational groupings of people. Remove the people and the corporation's productivity is zero.

There are good reasons to tax corporations - excise taxes to pay for regulation enforcement, VATs to discourage middlemen, etc., and in this particular case to prevent shifting of tax revenue out of countries where the purchase transactions were actually made. But taxing corporations doesn't magically increase government revenue or the purchasing power of individuals. Corporate taxes are still paid for entirely by you and me - we just pay them indirectly via higher prices and lower wages, instead of directly to the government.

pretty sweet to be in a politically connected union and have no ambitions other than riding your current job into a fully-paid retirement at age 55.

This used to be called "middle class."
You're so far divorced from the way things used to be, that now it's some kind of offense for people to retire while they still have their health.

Not sure where you get that idea. "The way things used to be" when the Social Security Act of 1935 was passed was that you retired at age 60, while life expectancy at birth was about 60.* These figures have now diverged so that the retirement age is 65, but life expectancy is 78. If anything, the fully-paid retirement age should be increased to about 70, not decreased to 55.

* There are all sorts of arguments you can make based on the life expectancy distribution curve not being the same shape then as now. Viewed in terms most favorable to earlier retirement, a male who reached retirement in 1935 could expect to live another 15 years. A male who reaches retirement today can expect to live another 18 years. But even under that best-case viewpoint, the retirement age still has not kept pace with increases in life expectancy.

The only argument for lowering the retirement age to 55 is that productivity gains mean that people have to work less to satisfy their necessities. Unfortunately, most people aren't content with only having their basic necessities met in retirement. They want to buy an RV and go traveling, or vacation in the Bahamas, or watch their big screen HDTV. Things that were absolute luxuries in 1935. Couple that with increased competition for resources (primarily space for housing - the population is 2.5x what it was in 1935), and I suspect the productivity gains since 1935 are spent on increased expectations of what you can do once retired, rather than lowering the retirement age.

Car tires contacting the ground gives you two huge advantages: The car's motion is (assuming no skidding) restricted to a single axis determined by the direction the front wheels are pointing. And the car's orientation is physically coupled to the road (i.e. it more or less points in the direction it's traveling).

Once you start hovering, you lose these two and direction and orientation are no longer coupled to any part of the car. The car no longer moves forward in the direction the wheels are pointed. It's now free to move sideways, and can spin to point in a direction other than where it's moving. Skids are one of the most dangerous events which can happen in a car, and a good portion of design and maintenance is devoted to preventing them. I don't see why you'd want to design a car so that a "skid" becomes the norm instead of the exception.

The only way I can see it working is if the method of levitation somehow locks the car's orientation.

The problem they had to solve was how a weak field could offer so much protection, when numerous studies of long duration spaceflight have shown that only very powerful fields can act like radiation shields. [...] It turns out that this plasma is swept up by a weak magnetic field moving through space, creating a layer of higher density plasma. That's important because the separation of charge within this layer creates an electric field. And it is this field that deflects the high energy particles from the Sun.

Back in the days when they couldn't outfit a plane with hydraulic actuators, they'd use a servo tab instead. Without hydraulics, all the force to move a control surface had to come from the pilot, which became a problem when the larger control surfaces like the elevator required several hundred pounds of force to move it.

The servo tab was a small flap at the end of the control surface (usually the elevator). It would deflect the airflow at the tail end of the elevator, causing the elevator surface to move in the desired direction, causing the elevator to deflect air in the opposite direction of the servo tab, causing the plane to pitch. In effect, the pilot only has to move a small control surface; the effect of the wind on that small surface would move the larger control surface for him. The MD-80 is probably the most common aircraft people are familiar with which uses servo tabs (it uses minimal hydraulics).