If you ask most employers, those skills come from a MBA not a physics degree. That's how the world works.

There is a very limited field of applications for physics, and most of this kind of work is actually done in countries like India and China where scientists are a dime a dozen.

I'm not saying a scientist in North America is doomed to be unemployed, far from it, but a degree in physics is like a degree in English lit, or art history, or religion studies: a passport to work in an unrelated field, at best. Art history people end up in HR, English lit in marketing or HR, and physics people in IT.

Unless they aim for a lifetime in academia, people who register in those dead end programs should instead get a head start and study in a field where they are likely to find employment. Spending thousands of dollars for a meaningless degree is only a way to scream at the potential employers that you have poor judgement.

So many options: teaching *physics, writing books used by *physics teachers, editing *physics books before they are sold to *physics teachers, and working for Elon Musk, following or followed by a stint at NASA. Real jacks of all trades, those *physics people.

Yes, we all get that in the Mad Men era it was all about white males (non-Jewish) and everything else was second-class. But things have evolved and it's not because of idiots fighting yesterday's battles.

Those people look at existing ratios and make the conclusion that the culture or leadership is somehow wrong. This is bullshit.

Why don't they look at the gender ratio at Curves or at the ABWA. Those places thrive on sexist policy and nobody says a thing, but gay bars catering to a specific subset of the gay community (bears/cubs) and old taverns for men only are the target of public outcry and lawsuits. It's the same with race; who would put "White-owned company" on their website? Total hypocrisy.

no citation to support your point?

When you say "we", who do you mean? Did you get elected as a spokesperson for all the idiots waiting in line at the Apple store when the company releases the same product over and over again, or are you just too insecure to make comments as an individual? Or is it both?

As for the secluded shack in the woods: I can't go back there, I sold it to a bunch of Apple fanbois who are convinced that the civilized world died with Steve Jobs. The market price for this kind of sack skyrocketed when the iPhone 5C was released.

Clearly you have never experienced an elevator ride in China. In some cases I'm sure that if passengers were to synchronize their breathing the ones in front would be crushed to death.

Put as many Gs as you want on that elevator, people won't move unless you put a coat of K-Y on the walls, in which case they will move as a team.

Of course I vote. And voting does influence the result of an election (to some extent). One gets to choose if government policy will be influenced by the agro/financial/insurance lobbies or by the energy/military lobbies. The good thing is that lobbyists are good at marketing, so instead of being shipped to a foreign country to take over their oil and destroy their infrastructure so American companies can get juicy reconstruction contracts, one is "fighting the war on terror", and instead of being asked to pay more taxes to finance a program that forces expensive insurance down the throat of small business owners, one is "contributing to an universal healthcare program".

That my friend is called Freedom, and if you disagree with it the FBI will kick down your door at night and drag your ass to a secret jail, and if you ever get the chance to call someone while in jail the discussion will be recorded by the NSA and later wikileaked by russian spies and crossdressers.

No. Google engineers call their products "beta" so users can't complain too loudly about bugs. That's like those people who spend hours cleaning their house before guests arrive and then say "please don't pay attention to the mess".

Then again, most of those Google products are free. Apple products, on the other hand, are not free, far from it; so it's amusing to see someone gloating about beta-testing overpriced products that look like KDE circa 2002 on their own time while the company is shoveling billions in offshore bank accounts.

Booo

You mean: those invited testers WERE paid nothing to download, test, and evaluate OS X betas.

Typically when a client wants me to test his product I'm getting paid. But I value my time and expertise (so do my clients), so YMMV.

A lot better than Evernote, and now it's free.

http://www.onenote.com/

This is a very important point. Hundreds of commits is not an indicator of quality, it's an indicator of risk. Unfortunately nowadays developers are obsessed with unit tests; regression tests are not sexy enough.

Odds are that the next major bug in OpenSSL won't be a problem with variables or memory allocation; it will be a loophole found in the interaction between methods updated by different teams.

Before "clarifying" something, make sure you understand it. "Shorting" is not a financial instrument. It simply means selling shares that you do not own. A financial instrument is something one can trade.

Options are a financial instrument because once you buy the right to buy or sell a share at a specific price (i.e an option) you can trade that right depending on how the share price fluctuates.

I'm not sure which operation is more "dangerous" (short selling a stock or buying put options). Options provide a bigger leverage but have no value past the strike time; the loss is however limited to whatever premium was paid to buy the option is one chooses not to exercise it. The risk in short selling is that you may end up having to buy the stock at a price that is much higher than you anticipated, so the worst case scenario is that you may have to keep that stock for a long time hoping that the price will go up again, or sell at a loss. In either case you need to have a good bankroll because most trading companies will require additional funds (or credit) to secure the position when the price of the underlying asset fluctuates wildly in a direction that does not favor you (otherwise they will liquidate).

What about people from the future time-traveling to give us exciting new patent-free technology? Is that more likely than aliens landing on Earth and handing over the keys to their spacecraft?

If it was possible to bet on THAT I would be interested. Who cares about drones.

You should post a screencast of you typing your comment in WordPerfect, with a small Rhodes electric piano music playing in the background. This would be a big hit with people who miss the series "Doogie Howser, MD".