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Comment Shadow Brokers? Investigate Liara t'soni (Score 2) 117

Clearly, that Asari has been up to no good. I have a good lead by someone in the Cerberus Network that she should be investigate. You may not know her, but you would remember her mother. Matriarch Benezia sided with Saren, a rogue SPECTRE. We all remember what happened with the Citadel. #NeverForget.

Comment Re: Following Examples (Score 1) 747

I was encouraged by multiple counselors at both the high school and university level to go into literature. Their answer to your question was, "The great thing about a degree in literature is that you can do literally anything with it. It's great preparation for a law degree, so you could become a judge, or to teach, so you could become a professor. And since it teaches critical thinking skills, grad schools will be pursuing students like you if you want to go into math or physics or any other kind of science; you'll have a strong advantage because you'll be better-rounded with more thinking skills. It's the most flexible degree there is."

I didn't take them up on their advice, but I sure got a lot of it, and I'm sure other kids did as well.

Comment It's not the professor. It's the schools and (Score 5, Insightful) 87

departments. I used to be a prof at a large university. One of the reasons I left academics was that I got tired of fighting the battle about textbooks in courses that I was required to teach (faculty divvied up the 100/200 courses, everyone had to do some).

I started out as a starry-eyed young prof trying to help my students by putting alternate sources of inexpensive textbooks on syllabi. We're talking textbooks at $2 vs. $120 on the used market. Saving students a lot of dough. But that go no-noed.

So I pulled it off the syllabus and started just making verbal announcements. That also got no-noed.

So I started just requiring an office hours visit first week of semester and telling students in office hours. That also got no-noed.

So I stopped requiring the textbook and sent them to the library for optional textbook reading. That also got no-noed.

I had serious ethical qualms about forcing students—about half of whom really oughtn't find a way to "afford" it—to spend $hundreds on things that were $nearly free and being forbidden from making it $totally free by just sending them to the library.

Everyone must buy the book, I was told. There's departmental and institutional revenue at stake, I was told. Nevermind that first-year college students from underprivileged backgrounds whose entire extended families were pulling together to help them through were dropping $1k a semester on $50-75 worth of books from used booksellers.

It's just one factor in the decisions that led me out of academics, but it's a very concrete one. It felt like a slimy industry after a while, more about conning money out of people (students, taxpayers, donors and endowers) than caring about the topics at hand.

But yeah, don't blame the profs.

Comment 30 years of PC has done nothing to convince me (Score 0) 195

that there aren't fundamental differences between men and women and what they *like to do* with their time.

If you want to create a completely fair, team-oriented place to work where nobody falls through the cracks, hire a woman.

If you want to build a kick-ass video gaming rig from the ground up in the middle of a hot warzone, hire a man. The woman will tell you that if you want to do this, your priorities are misplaced, and will focus on saving lives, not optimizing gameplay between bullets.

Guess what? Tech on the open market basically amounts to building kick-ass video gaming rigs in the middle of a warzone.

Comment This. (Score 3, Insightful) 63

The basic note-taking functionality has gone backward. Harder to make notes, harder to find notes, harder to scroll through and read notes, harder to export notes.

A lot of other stuff that I don't care about has been added. Apparently a lot of people don't care about it.

You have a captive audience of millions with their data in your platform. Hard to screw that up, but Evernote did, and they continue to get worse.

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