The expression is "sold down the river". "Sold up the river" would be relatively good (given that you are a slave anyway). Conditions further south were worse for slaves.

NSA has dirt on all judges, unless there is one that is so clean that no dirt exists. Why do you think they do what they do?

It's the current that kills you, but I=V/R

Give most students a spindle of CDs today and they'll probably start checking the room number to make sure they didn't accidentally walk into an archeology class.

Cygwin is the only thing that made life tolerable while doing development work for companies that only allowed employees to run Windows. I don't think I'd call it an abomination, it's perfectly fine if all you need is a bash shell and the standard tools (find, grep, sed, etc). But I hope I never have to use it again, mostly because I hope to never be stuck on Windows again.

We used "frosh" at Caltech in 1989, but I believe it is widely used. Shorter and sounds more condescending, so win/win.

In any case, if they didn't accept the $10m to weaken security, what did they accept it for? (of course they haven't admitted or denied taking the $10m, instead saying "RSA never divulges details of customer engagements").

Some girls and some boys will definitely react the way you describe, but not all. I believe there are natural gender differences but they are re-enforced by society, so that the subset of girls who would prefer legos and tinkertoys get dolls instead. Of these a subset will fight their way out of the gender stereotypes to a STEM career, but certainly there are many that don't. Really what is needed is for parents to pay attention to what their child (of either gender) really wants and needs and help them broaden their perspective and experiences. Unfortunately it is not likely.

I get a similar problem with some of the older magsafe connectors and the newer Macs, but the problem is intermittent. Sometime it will charge the laptop and sometimes it will power the laptop but not charge it (the LEDs on the connector indicate the state, as well as the drop down from the battery icon on the menu bar). I'm not sure the exact problem but it clearly isn't DRM.

I'd prefer some 7 of 9 tail.

Which to me is clear evidence they did not use binary math, but base-10 or base-20.

Clearly you don't know any teenagers.

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." - Edsger W. Dijkstra

Not that I actually agree with Dijkstra on this. I started out on BASIC and became a good programmer despite it (emphasis on "despite") as did many other kids in my generation. But there are certainly better languages to start with. In 1980 people actually tried to write real programs in BASIC and it at least had the advantage that it was native on many home computers - now you would have to go out of your way to find it, so why use it?

Science classes should involve critical thinking, but unfortunately most don't. Rather than teaching science they teach a set of facts, handed down by authority, that you must memorize.

I agree that a general logic and critical thinking class would be good but perhaps very hard to implement. A coding class gives a good framework for this, and a very hands-on framework, which I think is best. Once you learn this you can generalize.

Although I cringe at thinking about how the public school system might water-down and corrupt a coding class.