You know some terrible teachers. First of all, teachers are required by law to engage in professional development. Usually they have to fulfill a certain number of credits, or their teaching certificate will not be renewed. Where I live it's about the equivalent of a semester of college. It is not paid for either, at least not in my state. Also, while lessons may get easier as teachers go along, you ignore the fact that teachers very rarely teach the same thing year after year, especially in smaller schools. Secondly you forget about grading, which is a huge task especially for teachers who have to grade a lot of writing. Consider a High School teacher can have anywhere from 100-150 students, just giving a light week of homework and in class assignments along with a test can be hundreds of pages of grading. Most teachers do work more then eight hours. After all while they get off early, they also have to be to school earlier then the average job. Here it's at 7:30, school ends at 3:30 and teachers are supposed to stay in their classroom until 4:00.

According to the census, the median income in Georgia was $49,347 between 2006-2010. That is the average of households with only High School education levels all the way to the PHD level, which drags it even lower. Whereas a teacher needs a Bachelor's degree and to make the high level of income you quote they need a PHD. Comparing average income of everyone to the average income of a profession that requires a college education is disingenuous. It would be more meaningful if you compared those with a college education to the average income of teachers.

I voted Sisko, even though for me it's something of a tie between Kirk, Picard and Sisko. But I figured Picard and Kirk would be over represented. Ultimately I don't like the question. Best is far too vague, which is part of the problem. I think the representation here is simple demographics of who watched what when and what was the most popular. If you change the question to something else then I think you would get a more interesting result. Like "Which Star Trek Captain would you rather have a beer with?" Or "Which Star Trek Captain would you want to enter a hopeless battle with." Or "Which Star Trek Captain would make the best bartender?"

So I have to click on a strange email and then follow an unknown link where I will be asked to download an .apk? Then I will have to go into settings and click on the option to allow me to install something that isn't in the Play Store, click through the warning that tells me that sideloading an app can lead to viruses and malware, and then install the .apk which then asks me if I'm cool with it accessing my contacts, internet and everything else? If you do all that, you're pretty determined to have problems. I imagine that those who know how to side load apps on their phone are smart enough to not randomly install apps from questionable sources. Or at least they should be smart enough to know that they have no one to blame but themselves if they fall for it.

I suppose it's easy to believe this doesn't happen in the US if you've lived somewhere urban your whole life. But out here in rural America, it's not uncommon to have to travel two or three hours to get treatment. There's a local clinic in the town that I live in, but if you need anything more complicated than having a broken bone set or some penicillin, you're going to have to travel to the nearest town an hour and a half away. If you have something serious like cancer then it might be time to look into relocating. Rural areas always have a more difficult time getting to medical care, especially with a country as spread out as the United States. It has nothing to do with universal health care or our privatized system and wouldn't necessarily become better or worse if we changed.

make apps good enough to pay for? I hear a lot about piracy on cell phones, I don't see a lot of evidence of it. I know a lot of people with android phones, I've never really seen any of them pirate an app, even those who regularly pirate software on their PC or whatever. Why? Because most apps aren't worth pirating. I have a handful of apps that I've paid for because they're valuable and unique enough for me to do so. Most I don't, because most apps are so simple, even if there is a good paid app available there is almost certainly a free app that is just as good. Sure I could pay for a nice alarm clock or twitter manager, but I could also download one of the hundreds that are available for free or are supported by ads. Adding a tirade about "nerds" just makes me think this guy maybe should have taken a few minutes to breath before writing this up. If you want me to take your opinion seriously, how about not insulting me throughout?

Exactly. The average phone user doesn't care about updates, they aren't even aware their phone is using an old OS. If you take my highly unscientific example of my family, there are a lot of Android users including my father and mother in law, four of my wife's brothers and sisters, my wife and my own sister. Out of that sample of nine people (including me), I am the only one who could tell you the difference between Gingerbread and Jelly Bean. Honestly most of them aren't aware of the latest features that have come out since they bought their phone and really don't care. Of course I care, and so I have a rooted Nexus with Jelly Bean. The people who care about updates and the latest OS buy Nexus or root. Or do both since Verizon has hampered the update of the latest Nexus.

Because it's time for me to upgrade my Windows computer again. I'm planning on doing it sometime at the beginning of next year. Previously, my first windows computer (that I actually owned while in college) came with Windows ME on it. The second computer I bought came with Windows Vista. So I'm just batting one thousand. On both of those computers I ended up shelling out money to upgrade to XP and 7 respectively, and I'm guessing in a couple years I'm going to be grabbing a copy of Windows 9 as well. Unless I can find a cheap copy of Windows 7 to install on my new computer before then.

I'm not so sure. I don't really see what Apple's end game is. Most of these patent claims take the phone or tablet off the market for a few weeks at the most. Like the Galaxy Nexus, where sales were forbidden for about a week and then the ban was lifted because google made changes. The sale of the Nexus didn't stop since most companies already had them in stock so at most it was a hiccup. And the claim against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is against a tablet that is obsolete and was never that popular to begin with. So what's the point? And there is a lot of risk, especially when they use strong arm tactics like this. They have a very real chance of alienating their consumers just like others have before them including Microsoft. And while this is obviously not evidence of a larger trend, I have to admit that for the last little while I've been planning on buying a new iPad, but won't be doing that anymore. I can't in good conscious support a company as litigious and anti-competitive as Apple has become. Of course one lost sale isn't going to hurt them, but if they continue down the path they're going, they risk it becoming a trend. And once the shine is off the apple (cough) it's very hard to get it back.

Holy false equivalency batman. That was a staggering example of logical fallacies. Yes, yes, a union negotiating with management for benefits like health care is exactly like someone being raped by a bunch of bullies. You're brilliant argument convinced me.

That's not exactly true. Since ICS has been released with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, there have only been a few major releases of phones. And while Motorola Razr did not come with ICS, they are slated to have it by the end of this month. HTC One, Incredible 4G and the newest Samsung Galaxy III come with ICS (and those are the major releases from those manufacturers in the seven months since ICS was released, they have really stopped saturating the market with phone after phone). Really only the Razr and it's various iterations have lagged behind on the ICS release. And in the next several months the HTC Rezound, Thunderbolt, Rhyme, the Motorola Razr, Droid 4 and Bionic are all scheduled to receive updates, not next year. I agree it's taking them far too long, but in the case of the Galaxy Nexus, which is supposed to be a pure Android experience and updated by Google, the update from 4.02 to 4.04 took months longer because of Verizon. In fact Google actually leaked a working version of the 4.04 update months before it was released on Verizon and most rooted phones were using it.

I really don't understand. While other manufacturers like HTC have been working to reduce the footprint of their UI over Android, Samsung wants to increase it? I have a Galaxy Nexus and I absolutely love it. But I wouldn't have bought it if it had included their old Touchwiz UI which generally was considered the worst out of the three major manufacturers. Vanilla ICS is a great experience and leaps leaps over previous versions. However the new UI on the Galaxy III looks even more intrusive and has pretty much generated nothing but mocking on Android fan sites. It seems as if Samsung is taking a step back. And while the Google/Motorola thing might be on their minds, Google has done nothing but signal that the deal is about patents and Motorola won't be favored. Most recently this has been signaled by the fact that they want to open the Nexus program to all manufacturers rather then doing what they've done in the past and just picking one.

Most real pirates don't download content for free. They spend money on their internet provider, often being forced to chose more expensive options for no cap. Many subscribe to so called storage lockers like rapidshare and others which have subscription based services usually starting around $10 a month. The reason? Legal options are terrible. This was driven home to me several nights ago. My wife wanted to see the last episode of a show that she had missed last week. I said that would be easy, fired up the network website, found the episode and started streaming it. The quality was terrible but watchable. However for some reason the commercial breaks were not synced right and about a minute after the commercials the show would freeze and then fast forward two minutes. Out of a twenty minute episode we maybe were able to watch fifteen minutes of it. And then were forced to watch another five minutes of adds. Frustrated, I looked for a pirated copy of the show online, downloaded a much better quality version and streamed it to my television. No commercials, no errors in the playback, higher quality, more convenient, and it took less then five minutes to download. It seems like every time I try the legal options the experience is terrible.

Population growth rates have nothing to do with porn and video games, however, since low population trends in first world countries have been happening since the 60s. It has everything to do with several complimenting influences. First of all first world countries have more access to education on sex and contraception, which allows people to make better decisions on when they want children. Also women have the ability to support themselves by getting an education and working and supporting themselves, allowing them to delay marriage and having children (but also reducing the number of fertile years a woman has where she is actively trying to create a family). If you're growing up in a country where the birthrate is high, like Nigeria for instance, you may have no access to contraception at all and you'll most likely be married before your legally considered an adult in most first world countries. The other thing that affects this is in first world countries having a lot of children is a liability. Children are expensive; education and medical expenses pile up when you have children, not to mention giving them all the clothes and toys they want. In poorer countries having children is a boon because you don't worry about the educational and medical expenses and you start to use those children early on to help support the family. Having them work on the farm from an early age or even sending them to factories to work, having a bunch of children to support the family makes a certain amount of economic sense. It has very little if nothing to do with porn or gaming.

While I've heard a lot about how NASA is undergoing drastic spending cuts, I haven't found any hard numbers for it. In fact, a cursory look at wikipedia and NASA's own published budget shows the opposite; NASA's current budget is actually historically above average. It is certainly higher then it was for most of the 1990s and 1980s. In fact according to wikipedia the average budget of NASA has been 15 billion, and yet it sits at around 17 billion today, actually increasing from 15 billion to 17 billion in 2007 and maintaining that level of spending for the foreseeable future. This seems to be backed up by NASA's own numbers (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/622643main_FY%2013%20Budget%20Presentation.pdf). So my question is, what are we really talking about here? What am I missing? They only way that NASA is getting less funding right now is if you take it as a percentage of Federal spending in general, but that's more a sign that Federal spending has ballooned the last ten years rather then NASA not being funded. Is there really a NASA budget crisis, and if so why are they having time operating despite ending the fairly expensive shuttle program and despite receiving more money then they have historically since the space race?