In the age of widescreen displays, why in the world do they want to waste more of my precious vertical viewing plane with pictures?

My company's switch to Office 2007 nearly a year ago is still bringing groans from my coworkers (who by the way are engineers in their 20-30s for the most part). We love new things, and we love improvements; we abhor inefficiency and "stupid pretty things". If we wanted eye candy, we'd get a Mac.

I guess I should read more about their "clear benefits", because we are obviously missing them!

A great policy where I work: max of 55hrs/week for all people working on test aircraft on flight status. They try to limit us to 10hrs/day so we can leave Saturdays open for flight testing, but often I hit my 55hr limit by Friday and get the whole weekend off!

Of course, 10hrs/day with a couple 12+'s thrown in there is still a hell of a lot of work (because I'm actually working during those hours) but it's much less than what I was working before the aircraft was on flight status.

Back in high school (~2001) I used to help out with this "Komputers-4-Kids" project sponsored by Junior Achievement.

Basically, we got a bunch of donated old computers (donated by companies, etc) and replaced all the malfunctioning parts until we had a nice group of working, cleaned, usable computers with freshly-installed OSes. Computers were given to low-income families/poor schools, and we volunteers got to learn tons about all the different types of hardware inside computers from that age.

The best part was that it was totally hands-off on the part of the people in charge. They just stacked piles of parts for us to wade through. My boyfriend, my brother, and I (a few other people here and there) organized all the parts and repairs ourselves. All the business end was taken care of, so it was just a nice nerdy Saturday hangout sorta thing.

My brother and I later volunteered at a nearby low-income school near our high school (the principle was a family friend) and completely redid their network/maintained the computer system, etc. They went from 10 computers using Win 95 to ~100 with Windows 2000 by the time I was a senior in high school. All that I learned from those days really helped me later in life--got me many well-paying side jobs and opened my eyes at a young age to the world of technology.

So guys, bring your sisters along to those nerdy volunteering things you find, because you never know... they just might really pick up on it like I did!

-What measures would you support on the state and/or federal level to enhance K-12 science, math, & engineering-geared education?
-Given that recently, the government stopped subsidizing student loans for graduate students... How would your administration help encourage research & continued education in colleges/universities (undergrad AND grad school)?
-Would your research initiatives refuse funding for programs such as stem-cell research that some religious groups find immoral?

And by the way: Don't think it's just minorities getting those need-based loans... my family & I paid for every bit of my engineering education via subsidized student loans + unsubsidized parent loans. There's no other way to pay for >$100k in 4 years.