People can always try to sue Google over this kind of discrimination, but they may not win. First of all, unless you are a person who was personally affected by this, what would likely happen is that the lawsuit would get thrown out, especially on appeal where higher courts often rule that you can't sue just because you don't like something if you're not personally affected by it. So it would require a male student to sue to get the ball rolling. Second there would have to be some kind of proof like a verifiable situation where a male student was refused assistance because the teacher only wanted to help females to get the reward. Third, and this may be most important of all, literally anything can happen in court. Nobody knows what juries or judges will do. The case might go before someone who isn't interested in this issue at all and feels that women have traditionally been discriminated against so this is OK or you might get a very conservative judge/jury who is just adamantly against this kind of "help" for anybody at all who would rule in favor of the boy. Then the losing party can appeal and the exact opposite verdict can happen on appeal and so on. Could take years to resolve it, maybe ultimately ending in a Supreme Court ruling. By the time it finally gets resolved, it may be too late (depending on the age of the student) for anything to be accomplished even if the boy wins. He may already be in college and have learned programming or moved on to some other area of study.

Well, the problem is that there are some people who do care and their influence is way out of whack with regards to their actual numbers. There are a small number of members of the US House and Senate who are offspring of Cuban refugees and they have a lot of influence. The younger generation of people who immigrated many years ago has little interest in continuing the embargo, but there are still enough of the old hardcore anti-Castro people in Florida that no president is willing to undo the embargo for fear of the next presidential election going against his party. Florida is a hotly contested state that gives a very thin majority to whoever wins it in the presidential elections. Florida has a lot of electoral votes. So if you piss off, say, 40 or 50 thousand voters who care a lot (maybe too much) about the Castro brothers and Cuba, you could lose the next presidential election. So the president never has the courage to drop the embargo as either he or his party's next candidate will face angry voters in the next presidential election and it could be enough to decide the race in favor of the other party. It's rather remarkable to see an entire country held hostage to the whims of a really small group of people over one issue, but that's exactly how it is here.

I agree with the post (just quoted the last part to save space), but I'd also point out that banks are going to have to overpay to get young people interested in learning this. You're trying to get new workers interested in what actually is dying technology. If one day your bank has an epiphany and decides to port everything to Linux, those trained young workers are likely to be out of a job and finding that the number of people who use that old technology is shrinking, not growing. Your bank could get bought out by a larger bank who uses more modern computers and the same problem occurs for the displaced younger workers who have skills that nobody wants.

It's a good guess. I'd also say that the Red Sox and A's make the short list of teams that have people in the front office who might see some value in this, although the A's are run on the cheap so it is a little hard to think they'd pay for this.

Within the US they definitely count the passengers. I flew between Canada and Asia last year and I don't remember if they counted or not, but on flights within the USA they definitely do count. There was a rather embarrassing incident where a minor without a ticket of any kind got on a plane in the US and nobody ever did anything to make sure he was in the right place or even had a ticket for the flight. I think now all the airlines want to make sure that kind of thing never happens again, because if a kid can do it, an adult with bad intentions may be able to do ti too.

The problem is not religion. Yes, there are some religion people who hate science, but they are on the fringe. There are some fundamentalist Christians who are very anti-evolution, but they do not reject science. I have a friend who works as a chemical engineer and he rejects evolution, but he certainly doesn't disbelieve the general principles of chemistry. In fact, his company is desperate to keep him that they basically let him take however much vacation he wants every year just to keep him happy and his company is one of the largest in its industry. Arguments against evolution denying are a whole other subject and not really the issue here.

There is a saying that "all politics in local" and in America that's really true. For my whole life Congress has had members, usually in the House of Representatives which is voted on in a district level in the individual states, who are just wildly out of step with the rest of the country. People who hold crazy beliefs sometimes get elected because they just happen to live in a part of the country that accepts those beliefs. Sometimes people get elected simply because of party affiliation. It may be that they are a stupid and horrible candidate, but at least they aren't a member of the other political party. I'd guess that maybe 70-80% of voters vote simply on party affiliation and for no other reason. Climate change denial plays big in the Republican Party right now as does religious belief, but the two things are not sets with 100% the same members in each. For example, Newt Gingrich is religious and has bona fide conservative credentials yet he certainly believes in climate change. Various members of Congress, particularly in the House, are just huge embarrassments but they keep going back because very few voters will ever consider voting for a member of what they consider to be "the other party", so if an idiot wins the nomination of his/her party in the primary, the regular election victory is almost assured. For most of my life I have lived in wildly uncompetitive districts for both parties where the winner of the primary never had to worry about his/her general election opponent because the voters would simply never vote in large numbers for the "other party" candidate.

I see a different possible reason for this than "bad totalitarian government gets scared of loss of control", but my sample size is small so I may be very wrong here. I know some Chinese citizens and they are unusually interested in the stock market and money making schemes. They don't really understand even a little bit how the stock market works, yet they remain convinced that it's easy to invest a pittance and come out rich. It may be simply that the government is tired of dealing with citizens who don't have even the faintest understanding of how markets work and they don't want to see a bunch of dummies investing their life savings into bitcoin and maybe going bust because I guarantee you that if that happens, the same people who lost their money would demand that the government make them whole.

It's even worse than that. There/their/they're confusion has been around a long time, but what just baffles me is that younger people today actually think that "prolly" is a real word. I talked to a relative who is in college right now and pointed out to him that "prolly" wasn't a real word and it was "probably" and he looked just shocked as he replied to me that he did not ever recall seeing the word "probably" in his life.

My guess is it's this and right now Amazon seems to be betting that people want what is basically a Roku with a whole lot less video options and a whole lot more game options. Seems like a strange bet to me and not what I would think as the people I know who have Roku (including me) aren't interested in the game part of it, which isn't much.

As an American, I can assure you that simply do not understand what you are talking about. While I have no idea whether any US agency cares any about government change in Brazil, I can tell you that Lula was no problem at all. The man was rational and competent and if he and the US had different ideas from time to time, at least there was some logic to what he was doing. Dilma Rousseff is a completely different story. Early on she came on with the same anti-US ranting and ravings that are quite popular in South America these days. Geez, I don't think I've ever seen anything more embarrassing from a national leader than her photo with Fidel where she looked like an aging rock groupie wanting to suck him off at the first chance she got. If the US is trying to support opposition to her presidency, well, that is a fight that she started. Most of South America seems obsessed right now with electing anybody who espouses anti-US slogans, even if they end up running their own countries into the ground. Hey, it doesn't matter if we don't have jobs as long as our president hates the US, right? You can ask Venezuela and Argentina how that is working out for them right now.

That crap gets rated as Insightful and gets 5 points? Wow. Tell you what. Name ONE, just one, UN resolution considered to be against North Korea that they have willingly obeyed. In fact, to be blunt, the whole reason that there are two Koreas instead of one unified and horribly backwards united Korean under Kim family despotism is because the UN Security Council authorized the use of force against North Korea's invasion when the Soviet Union infamously boycotted the meeting, only to find out the Security Council actually could take a vote without them there.

Wherever you get your degree, don't run up a fortune in debt to pay for it. It would be better to not get it at all then to run up, say, $30,000 or more of debt to pay off - in my opinion. I do agree with you that it probably really is harder and harder to get jobs without a 4 year degree. I've seen this happen to IT people I know who don't have 4 year degrees and get laid off.

And he forgot to call Obama a "socialist". Also some kind of shot at "Obamacare" is always called for in such matters.

Here's the truth about Beowufl. The poem sucks. Even if it's in a language you can read, it still sucks. When I was in college I read some of the great historical works of the past in Europe, some in translations, some in the original language (if I knew it), and Beowulf was by far the least interesting "classic" work I have ever read. The fact that Tolkien cared about it means nothing to me nor most people. Want proof that while this is of interest to the Tolkien fan boys, nobody else cares? Some years ago Robert Zemeckis, who is a directory I generally like, decided that everybody was just dying to see an adaptation of the film. It made about 60% of what it cost to make it. The truth is, most people don't care. The story sucks and few are interested in it.

And exactly how much, fan boys, do you think his translation is going to bring to the table any way? If it's vastly different than what came before it, then somebody blew it. Either Tolkien's is different because the people before him were really bad at translation and botched it, his is different because he is taking massive liberties with his translation and making assumptions that the original text may not actually support, or it's going to be barely different at all because there's just not that much difference between proper translations. I've done some translation work in my day and if done properly, there just shouldn't be all that much variation between different translations. I suppose Tolkien might use a word order better suited for modern readers or use less complicated words that convey the same meaning as previous translations, and I'd praise him for that, but such things should really be fairly minor versus previous translations.

One of the problems is that the number of people who are actually eager to work under these conditions is quite large. I've found that some people like startups because they cannot handle working for large companies at all. Also, I've found that some people who work for a startup that actually made it get very arrogant and decide that it succeeded because they were geniuses and any old company they join in the future simply cannot fail because they'll be part of it. It's been a little amusing to watch from a distance as some of these people have to keep looking for new jobs because the new startups they went to don't make it.