Wow, that is a stretch. The claim that somehow all of the CS grads got wealthy 30 years ago during the "early days", but that the perception of opportunity got worse even during the dot-com boom and the more recent cloud/Web-2.0/buzzword-of-today boom -- a period where the money in technology got much larger -- demands some real evidence to support it.

Another oddity of your just-so story is that it suggests that women are proportionally much more attuned than men to selecting high-income jobs. Really? Where else might that be true? And why might it be true? If it's so, then why aren't there more women running hedge funds and Fortune 500 companies?

Stop trying so hard to avoid the possibility that there is something about the field of computing that is repelling women. I wouldn't pretend to have the answers, but I certainly think it's silly to excoriate (as the GP did) those who analyze the evidence of skewed enrollments and seek answers. My problem is with those who state, "Girls just don't like computers, so leave everything alone." I see no reason to accept that conclusion other than laziness in evaluating the problem.

Fact? Prove it.

Here's a counter: In the mid-80's, women earned more than 1/3rd of the CS degrees. Have women changed and become less interested in

Don't mistake the need to address the troubling demographics in CS with oversimplied assumptions that (for example) the numbers should all be perfectly proportional. I don't need the field to be 50% women, but that past evidence suggests that it should be at least 35%, as it once was.

Wait, what? If that's what you think Kuhn wrote, then you may need to go re-read the book.

His central claim was not that lone geniuses make leaps, but that leaps can rarely be attributed so clearly to a single individual, moment, or event. The Big Idea of that book is that the process of scientific advance is much messier, and much more contextually dependent, then we are lead to believe in popular accounts. Often the so-called "genius moments" are a critical step, but not easily or correctly identified as such until after the fact, making it hard to know *which* insight was really the critical one.

There's lots of dispute about Kuhn, but let's not make matters worse by incorrectly describing what he wrote.

It would be a good thing for academia to move away from predatory publishers like Elsevier and Wiley, and conduct all future publication through open access journals. However, even if this wonderful thing happens, those publishers remain a problem. Let's say that Elsevier goes out of business when researchers stop publishing with them and libraries stop ordering their materials. The citation chain still goes through a large number of already existing Elsevier publications. If Elsevier disappears, our heavily limiting copyright laws leave no mechanism to obtain these older papers. Some libraries gave up on paper versions of journals in recent years, so even they have neither duplicates nor access to the papers.

Part of solving the academic publishing problem needs to include changes to copyright law. Authors should be permitted to provide access to papers that their publisher no longer makes available. Libraries should be allowed to provide access to academic publications whose copyright holders have vanished. There needs to be some mechanism along these lines, or else Elsevier and their ilk will gouge the academic libraries even more severely.

At first, I accepted that the Affordable Care Act might be pushing the limits of the Commerce Clause. Then I came across the Militia Act of 1792, in which a bunch of Founding Fathers -- the ones who wrote the Commerce Clause -- compelled private citizens to purchase muskets and ammunition. From that precedent, any argument that the health insurance mandate exceeds the powers intended by the Framers goes poof.

You fail basic cost/benefit analytic thinking. It is not instructive to consider circumcisions and mastectomies as equivalent procedures. Consequently, mastectomies are performed only when a significant benefit is needed to outweigh the costs of such an invasive procedure. Circumcision is less invasive and has a low rate of complications; it is against those costs that each parent should weigh the benefits.

So reducing your odds of contracting STI's or penile cancer "antiquated, stupid fucking reasons"? How about medical conditions for uncircumcised penises (e.g., infections of the foreskin) that may require a circumcision later in life, thus requiring a more painful and protracted healing period? If circumcision were, as you assert, just a tradition or ritual, then yes, it would be a foolish and avoidable practice. However, the current research suggests a modest medical benefit from circumcision, even if you account for good hygiene and care. Like any medical procedure, it carries risks to be weighed against its benefits; that hardly, though, makes it "UN-NECESSARY".

Wow, what a horrible generalization based on nothing. In spite of the wonderful spaces that libraries provide -- not only the raw tools for being engrossed in reading, writing, and thinking, but also the inspiring environment of being surrounded by other people doing those exact things -- you're willing to broadly diminish the role of libraries because some locations provide insufficient support for the homeless.

Methinks you need to allow a little more complexity in your evaluations. Libraries are such wonderful places for the curious and creative. To claim that you want your "maker spaces" (what a horrid choice of words) to be kept semi-private so that you don't need to be uncomfortable or inconvenienced is selfish. Solve the problem properly: Look for ways to support the homeless in your community (public or private, whichever you think best for the purpose); then leave the libraries public so that anyone who is creative or inquisitive has a good place to visit.

There is a single and profound difference between banking and voting: anonymity. It is a property that is at odds with just about every other property you might want for a communications system. Voting is particularly vexing because (1) you need to validate identity so that only enrolled voters can participate, but (2) you need to guarantee that no voter can be tied to their vote. If you think about how polling stations are designed, these two tasks are clearly and obviously performed, yet decoupled. How do you guarantee that the computer system on the other end of the network is going to validate your identity, but then forget it when recording your vote?

There is no part of banking or finance that involves anonymity. That's why ATMs and then online banking were relatively easy to design and deploy, and why online voting is so damned hard.

The "think of the children" defense is perfectly applicable here. It is not just a superfluous use of children's issues to misdirect people from the real issue; here, patting-down children causes real harm, and draws people's attention to the primary issue itself. I agree that the groping of adults should be enough to stop this behavior on the part of the TSA, but the role that children play in this situation is different and compelling. As the GP pointed out, not only are these pat-downs useless when used on children, but they also monstrously undermine healthy efforts to teach children to protect their own bodies. The practice on adults is offensive and useless; on children it is perverse, reprehensible, and cruel.

Moreover, be practical: The hardest part of fixing this problem is getting the attention of beauracrats, which means getting the attention of the public and media for long enough for those beauracrats "care". Highlighting that children are being needlessly affected here, and that the TSA is removing children from their parents' control, are real problems that get the attention needed to fix the problem.

Moleskines are indeed nice, but I have found that the paper isn't as absorbent as I'd like it to be, which matters when using a fountain pen (my writing implement of choice). I also prefer a hardcover, since I'm not so easy on my notebooks.

Years ago, when cleaning out a great-uncle's house after he had died, my parents found a couple of blank National record books. After years of trying different notebook types, including Moleskine, these were exactly what I had always wanted. Good paper that is meant to last, hardcover protection, full-sized paper, pre-numbered pages, and just a good overall feel made them ideal for serious writing and note-taking. I could carry them along with books/laptop/papers, and they withstood the abuse over time. They're neither trendy nor cheap, but I strongly recommend giving them a try.

Such a convenient and unjustified answer: "Oh, there are so few women because they don't *want* to do computing! It's just that simple!"

How about some data: Science and engineering degrees granted to women

Female bachelor's degrees in CS peaked in the mid 1980's, and have steadily declined since. Almost every other field has been increasing the number of women who obtain science and engineering degrees, with the notable exception of math (holding steady) and computer science (steadily decreasing).

Nobody claims here that the split *should* be 50% of each gender. However, this data is evidence that the current split of 1:3 or 1:4 isn't natural either, unless you want to claim that women have fundamentally become *less* interesting in computing over the last 25 years. It isn't good enough to state, without justification, "Meh, girls just don't like computing." Not so long ago, more of them did.

That's a nice ideal, but it's impractical. What is my wife supposed to do if I get hit by a bus? She would need access to some of those accounts, and she can't possibly be expected to remember my passwords without any written aids. Storing them in some encrypted form that she can access preserves that information in a safe manner, and it allows me to use better, more diverse passwords.