NASA is very popular in certain portions of Florida, Texas, California, Maryland, Alabama, Utah... pretty much any state with a significant NASA facility. All those places have Congresscritters who will push for pretty much anything NASA wants to spend money on.

Individually they're not much, but collectively they can legislatively logroll remarkably well.

It is MUCH easier to get a CS master's degree part-time than a BS, and you can start on a CS MS from any BS degree.

Don't believe it? Neither did I, but the numbers don't lie: Costco's profits for last year and their revenue from membership fees were about the same amount of money. Quoting from the article:

Their annual membership fee revenue exceeds their net profit--which is to say that the actual business of selling stuff is operating at a loss. They're charging you an annual fee to buy stuff at or near cost. That's a model that works really well with their basically affluent customer base, and not incidentally, a model that allows you to worry a bit less about your cost of sales.

Maryland has joined the compact. I predict they will stay with it until the popular vote goes Republican one year.

Maryland is not remotely a battleground state - our presidential numbers are reliably Democratic + 10%. So sending our electors to vote for a Republican candidate because of a relatively obscure law/compact will obviously be understood by the voters...

NOT.

They used to matter when he ran Microsoft.

Granted, his biggest decisions were usually taken to catch up to the market, not lead it - witness Windows 95 and the "focus on the internet".

Also, his track record on predicting the future is lousy - witness Microsoft Bob and "The Road Ahead".

... having a measurable positive effect on the organism doing the eating.

If such an effect were large, it would be easy to find in, say, rat studies, and easily replicable. Studies like that would probably be easy to find with a casual web search of the literature. My google-fu is above average, and the last time I looked, all I found was this, which was inconclusive, funded by an organic food promotion group, and unreplicated.

So, I suspect any health benefit of organic food is likely very small.

Now that we know that there is a problem, and that the problem is not helped by changing the sex of the hirers, we have to minimize the bias by hiding the sex of the applicants during the application process for as long as possible.

There was a similar problem in hiring for orchestras. They started doing blind auditions (players behind a screen) and a lot of the hiring bias went away.

The biggest problem will be getting scientists to admit that this is a serious issue that won't go away without effort. This study needs to be replicated, a lot, and to survive serious peer review.

There are two basic ways you can measure employee performance:

* Input effort - stuff like time on the clock
* Output quality - customer satisfaction

Measures of input effort are usually much easier than output quality, mostly because management has to be able to evaluate output results - i.e. they have to be able to understand the jobs of their subordinates.

Any time you see management that primarily uses input effort measurement (especially if their spinal reflex response is to increase input effort measurement), you may conclude that they are turkeys, and you should get out from under them as soon as practical.

*sigh*... as usual, lawyers pretend to be precise and formal, while leaving enough wiggle room and ambiguity to preserve their jobs.

Any time I see a phrase like this in a legal setting, I cringe.

I realize that "formal proof" in law means "something that convinces a judge/jury", but there is a formal meaning in computer science for equivalence of algorithms. You can't prove two arbitrary algorithms equivalent, because that would enable a solution to the Halting Problem.

You can sometimes prove that two particular algorithms are functionally identical (e.g. different methods of sorting), but if their implementations differ (bubble/merge/heap sort) then that's a case that the law should permit.

Debate skills are almost orthogonal to logic/reasoning skills.

The purpose of science and peer review is to convince people doing science that propositions match the real world - that they are reproducible by knowledgeable practitioners.

The purpose of rhetoric, sophistry, and debate skills is to convince the majority of voters/jurors that propositions are right. No connection to the real world is needed.

I have no experience with laser printers by Lexmark. My inkjet experience with them has been uniformly bad.

Just wondering, has anyone else ever had a good experience with a Lexmark printer on a non-Windows machine?

Or had a Lexmark printer do, say, ten pages in a row without smudging or jamming?

Or is it just me?

(guessing from your use of "Yanks")

A bunch of us agree with you. Between the traumas of 9/11 and our self-inflicted over-reaction to it, it may take us a generation to dial our national paranoia back to appropriate levels, but we'll probably succeed.

While we're working on that, could you please look into fixing your libel laws? The whole "I'm suing because you told people something true" thing has got to go, really.

Thanks,
USA