Damn straight you should count yourself lucky.

There are seriously terrible things out there. Cancer. Parkinson's. MS. But do go on. Complain about paying more than your share, you always-healthy person, with your great genes, with your great personal character and intelligence that have kept you away from drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, with your even temperament that has shielded you from depression. Complain, with your good job, where you aren't exposed to toxins, which pays for your good house in your nice neighborhood, where gang violence is the farthest thing from your mind, where you have a great grocery store that enables your fully organic diet, where you have a great gym just up the road that you work out at five days a week.

The whole point of insurance is that we all get screwed a little, so that when someone gets really fucking boned, they don't get screwed sideways on top of it. Even a perfect person like you can fall off a bike or get hit by a car.

Of course, you're also right. We're all getting screwed way more than we should because we didn't have balls to say to hell with wall street and insist on a single-payer system.

Putting a gun in the locked cockpit seems basically reasonable. Maybe it could provide a last line of defense against terrorists who somehow manage to take over the cabin and pacify the passengers, and start working to bust down the door.

Giving guns to the cabin crew sounds like a terrible idea. Then, instead of having to try to sneak a weapon onto the plane (possibly getting caught, which could ruin any sort of 9/11 style simultaneous multi-plane conspiracy), the terrorists merely need to overpower a crew member to obtain a firearm.

If we're really worried about this sort of thing, well---the Air Force can have operators fly drones over Iraq from New Mexico. Can't we put some kind of emergency button in the cockpit that gives control of the plane to a remote operator, so if terrorists do storm the cockpit, the pilots can push the button to disable all local control of the plane?

Full disclosure: I don't own a firearm and don't really understand people who do.

In a related study, thinking about religion has been linked to abuse of parentheses.

God protects Lisp programmers, little children, and ships named Enterprise?

My excuse: web apps are way better to deploy than native apps, both for me and my users (computer engineers at my company).

• My users don't even have to think about running an installer; they just click on the link in the email I send them.
• When there's a bug, I just fix it and... behold, it's fixed! No bothering people to update, no worrying about old versions of the software doing something bad.
• All that time we didn't waste on installation, upgrading, dll hell, testing installers, etc, can be spent doing actually productive work, instead.

Native software is fast, sure, but deployment sucks for everyone. How many times a day are you being pestered to update this or that, right when you're in the middle of trying to look up something for or check your email. It's like sitting down for dinner with your family after a long day, just to be called by a telemarketer.

Uh, no. I own neither iPhone nor iPad nor iPod nor iAnything else, and detest using my boss's button-less Apple mouse (which incidentally she has set up to scroll in an inverted way---just to fuck with me, I'm pretty sure).

My daughter was 2 (well, 23 months old, to be precise) when I set up her computer. I started her off with a typical, full-sized Microsoft laser mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel. It was very confusing for her. I eventually ordered this mouse. It was a much better fit. FWIW, Amazon's reviewers overwhelmingly agree.

I'm sure she could handle a wheel-mouse now without trouble. But back then it made a big difference.

Mod parent up!

Qimo is great. It's a whole Linux distro geared toward young children, and includes Childsplay, GCompris, and TuxPaint.

I set it up an old P4 for my daughter when she turned 2. I remember sitting next to her and watching in awe as, over the course of 20 minutes of playing this "uncover the animal picture" game, she became proficient in using the mouse. Almost two years later, she is still playing very good, fun, appropriate, challenging games. She has always loved the painting program, which is really cool and has all kinds of fun things (e.g., draw with cats!). She opens programs by herself, chooses her own games, knows how to shut it down, etc.

Advice:

1. Get a one button mouse! You can find a small one geared towards a child's hand. It makes a world of difference when getting started to not have the confusion of two buttons and a scroll wheel.
2. Get some cheap speakers for it, since the games (and even the painting program) have lots of sounds.

And of course, make computer time a together activity. Sit next to her, actively watching, encouraging, explaining, and participating.

I don't understand this reasoning.

If the backend can't keep up with the decode rate, say because

• each CISC instruction is turning into a few RISC-equivalent micro-instructions, and
• CISC instructions have an edge w.r.t. memory density, so you can keep more of them in the icache and have fewer stalls waiting for the next instruction to come from RAM.

Then aren't you winning?

• You aren't stalled out trying to figure out what to do next.
• Your execution units are busy doing productive work.
• You can turn off the frontend fetch/decode stuff to save some power.

Obviously there has to be some balance. An anemic backend with an overpowered frontend will slow you down. But if the backend is reasonably powerful, it seems like you want to have it working as fast as it can, rather than idly waiting for the frontend to tell it what to do next.

Indeed.

Whatever folks think is gained from open source here is a lie. Why? Like it or not, you have no way to verify the open source code is what the machine is running.

Using computers for voting is just a disaster, open source or not.

Scantron-style forms can be processed very quickly, can't be subverted en masse, and can be verified by actual people. Using anything else just reeks of corruption.

I agree that blame doesn't lay with the schools.

Your counterpoint (if girls think this way then why don't boys) is so obvious that I'm surprised I hadn't considered it before.

I guess, well---when I was in high school, I was a socially-inept nerd who liked science-fiction and computer games. So, in my case, no, this perception of the field wouldn't have been any deterrent, as the dream of being popular had been fully crushed by the reality of American high-school education. :)

So maybe the real question, why aren't more high-school girls into... uh... whatever passes for star wars, chess club, dungeons and dragons, etc., these days. Maybe the answer to that question is the root cause we're looking for.

I wonder to what degree (if any) the cause might be related to the female perception of the males that inhabit the field.

In much of popular culture, the programmer seems to be that socially-inept, overweight nerd who lives in his parents' basement, covered in cheeto-dust, drinking mountain dew and playing computer games all day.

Should we be surprised if high-school- and college-aged girls, who presumably want to be popular and accepted by their peers, are not, on the average, eager to be associated with a profession/calling that is perceived in this way?