Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992, but you don't hear a whole bunch of FUD over the fact that 90% of nurses are females. And when it comes right down to it, nurses are far more valuable to society than IT techs. Meanwhile, oil rig workers, about 95% male, make on average $99,175. Why no big push for women in that field?

You've won Slashdot for the day. Congratulations!

This Barbie actually does sound like some computer "engineers" I've known.

The big news to me isn't that they weren't able to invent the tech, but their estimate that even if their most optimistic scenario had come true w.r.t. clean energy tech that it still wouldn't be enough to avoid the "really bad" scenario w.r.t. climate change (if you trust Hansen's models).

This is theft, plain and simple, just like "civil" asset forfeiture.

FTA:

Ouch!

Thomas Massie is a tech guy with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering & a master's in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and founded SensAble. I'm sure he had to do quite a bit of coding in his time in school, and probably a bit while he was building his company as well.

According to your link:

It curtailed some domestic spying, but extended it in other areas, and also extended the PATRIOT Act. My guess is you would have criticized him if he voted in favor of it as well.

Faces change, but the policies continue to get worse. They'll get worse than they are now when the next Democrat or Republican takes over the White House. It might be worse in slightly different ways, but it will still be worse.

One tactic utility companies could use is to just change their pricing structure. Most already have a fee structure where the highest price/kWh is only paid for electricity purchased at the margins. The first kWh purchased may be drastically cheaper than the last, especially if you're a heavy user. So they could simply exaggerate that structure and make electricity "artificially" cheap for the majority of users and then gouge the heavy users on usage over some threshold.

Alternately they could move to a price structure where there's a fixed "fee" to simply be a customer, and then use the revenue from that fee to offset the price-per-kWh and make it artificially cheap.

It's quite shallow. Another app harvesting data from schoolkids. Privacy policy is vague. Teachers don't care because it's useful. Parents try to care but don't really. There's really nothing new here that deepens the discussion about the continuing erosion of student privacy.

Anyone really looking for a good read on that subject should turn back to the May Politico article highlighted earlier on Slashdot. Also interesting to note is how some companies are pledging to no longer mine student data, as well as companies that were notably absent from signing that pledge, including the one that promised to stop collecting student data last April.

It's one way. I should have been more specific. "Amount of moderately difficult work completed at a moderate-or-higher level of quality." Another might be, "Ability to complete extremely difficult work at a extremely high level of quality in non-infinite time." Someone who excels at the first might not excel at the second, though generally I'd expect there to be a lot of overlap.

I've been doing software dev. for about 15 years. I'll grant that the level of productivity between "the worst" and "the best" is at least 10x, if not more, because "the worst" are essentially producing nothing. Or, worse, have negative productivity in the sense they're creating stuff that is totally non-functional and will need to be re-written by someone else at a later date.

That said, the difference between "the best" and "the average" is probably not 10x. At least not if productivity is measured in "amount of output produced at some acceptable level of quality". Where "the best" guys excel is in being able to solve problems that average guy is probably never going to be able to solve (well) no matter how much time he's given. On the other hand, those sorts of problems come up less often than most people think.

If, after interviewing somewhere, I end up taking a job for which I'm a poor fit then the fault is mine and not the recruiter's. I view the recruiter's job as getting me interviews at places where I'm likely to be a good fit and where they're likely to be willing to compensate a level I'd be satisfied with.